Catherine Mann - Desired By The Boss

Again, questions flickered in his brain. Who was she, really? How had she ended up working here?

But that didn’t matter. Their relationship was purely professional.

Really?

He mentally shook his head.

It was.

Belatedly he realised she was holding those damn photos.

‘Shall we get started?’ she asked.

This was when he should go. From her CV, he knew April was computer savvy—she’d work it out.

Instead, he held out his hand. ‘Here, let me show you.’

They sat together, side by side at the kitchen bench, on pale wooden bar stools, scanning the photographs together.

They’d quickly fallen into a rhythm—Hugh fed the photos through the scanner and then April saved and filed them.

Initially she’d attempted to categorise the photos, but Hugh wouldn’t have any of that. So April simply checked the quality of the scan, deleted any duplicates and saved them into one big messy folder.

Based on the decor of his flat, April would bet that Hugh usually carefully curated his digital photos. He’d give them meaningful file names, he’d file them into sensibly organised folders, and he’d never keep anything blurry or any accidental photos of the sky.

But she got why he wasn’t doing that today: he was telling himself he was just going to delete them all one day, anyway.

Was it weird that she could read an almost-stranger so easily? Especially when he was so deliberately attempting to reveal nothing.

Possibly.

Or possibly she was just spending too much time with young backpackers she had nothing in common with, pallets of groceries that needed to be stacked and walls of cardboard boxes? And now she was just constructing a connection with this man because in London she had no connections, and she wasn’t very good at dealing with that?

That seemed more likely.

But, even so, she liked sitting this close to him. Liked the way their shoulders occasionally bumped, when they’d both act as if nothing had happened.

Or at least April did.

What was the reason she’d given her sisters for not...doing anything with Hugh?

Ah. That was right. She was still technically married.

And what would she do anyway? She’d had one boyfriend. Ever. She’d kissed one boy—slept with one man. Evan. That was it. Plus, Evan had pursued her. In the way of high school kids. With rumours that had spread through English Lit that Evan liked April. Like, liked, liked her.

She was ill-equipped to pursue a darkly handsome, intriguing, damaged man.

But what if she turned to him? Right now? And said his name? Softly...the way she really wanted too? And what if he kissed her? How would his lips feel against hers? What would it be like to kiss another man? To be pressed up tight against another man...?

‘April?’

She jumped, making her bar stool wobble.

‘You okay?’

She put her hands on the benchtop to steady herself. ‘Yes, of course.’

He looked at her curiously. Not anything like the way he had that day of the stripy top.

Another of those damn blushes heated her cheeks. It was ridiculous—she was never normally one to blush.

‘In my first day-at-school photos, from Year One, I’m always with my sisters. I’m the middle child. That means I’m supposed to have issues, right?’

She was rambling—needing to fill the tense silence. In addition to never blushing, she never rambled. She had sparkling, meaningless conversation down to an art—she’d been to enough charity functions/opening nights/award galas to learn how to speak to anyone. Intelligently, even.

Not with Hugh.

‘My big sister is a typical first child. Such an over-achiever. I get exhausted just thinking about all she does. Although my baby sister has never really felt like the baby. She’s kind of wise beyond her years—she always has been. But that fits with something I read about third-born children—they’re supposed to be risk-takers, and creative, which totally fits her.’

She paused, but couldn’t stop.

‘You know what middle children are supposed to be? Like, their defining characteristic? Peacemakers. I mean, come on? How boring is that?’

She was staring at the laptop screen and all the photos of cherubic child-sized Hugh.

‘You’re not boring,’ he said.

April blinked, hardly believing he’d been paying attention.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She rotated the latest photo on the screen and dragged it over to the folder she’d created.

‘I can see the peacemaker thing, too. Just not when it comes to my old school photos.’

April grinned. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Especially when I wish I had photos like this. My mum worked really hard when we were growing up. She was often already at work when it was time for us to go to school.’

‘What did she do?’ Hugh asked.

She swallowed. ‘She worked in an office in the city,’ she said vaguely. As CEO of Australia’s largest mining company. The words remained unsaid.

Thankfully, Hugh just nodded. ‘My mum had lots of different jobs when I was growing up. We didn’t have a lot of money, so she often juggled a couple of jobs—you know, waitressing, receptionist...she even stacked shelves at a supermarket for a while, when I was old enough to be alone for a few hours at night.’

This was the longest conversation they’d ever had.

‘I do that!’ April exclaimed. ‘After I get home from this job.’

‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Why?’

April shrugged. ‘So I can get out of the awful shared house I live in in Shoreditch.’

His gaze flicked over her—ever so quickly. April ignored the way her body shivered.

‘Aren’t you a bit old to live in a shared house?’

She narrowed her eyes in mock affront. ‘Well, yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m thirty-two. But I made some dumb decisions with a credit card and I need to pay it off.’

She was choosing her words carefully, keen to keep everything she told him truthful, even if she wasn’t being truly honest with him.

But then, her family’s billions really shouldn’t be relevant. That, after all, was the whole point of this London ‘adventure’. Even if it had made a dodgy flatshare detour.

‘What kind of dumb decisions?’ he asked.

The question surprised her. She hadn’t expected him to be interested. ‘Clothes. Eating out. Rent I couldn’t afford. No job. That kind of thing.’

He nodded. ‘When I first moved out of home I rented this ridiculous place in Camden. It was way bigger than what a brand-new graduate needed, and my mum thought I was nuts.’

‘So you racked up lots of debt, too?’

‘No. I’d just sold a piece of software I’d developed for detecting plagiarism in uni assignments for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, so the rent wasn’t a problem,’ Hugh replied. ‘But I did move out because all that space was really echoey.’

April laughed out loud.

‘And—let me guess—you didn’t move into a shared house?’

His lips quirked upwards. ‘No. I can’t think of anything worse.’

‘You do realise your story has nothing in common with mine, right?’

He shrugged. ‘Hey, we both made poor housing choices.’

‘Nope. No comparison. One of my housemates inexplicably collects every hair that falls out of her head in the shower. Like, in a little container that she leaves on the windowsill. I...’

‘I’ll pay off all your credit card debt if you stop your sentimental junk crusade.’

It wasn’t a throwaway line. He said it with deadly seriousness.

April tilted her head as she studied him. ‘I know—and you know—that if you really wanted this stuff gone it would already be gone. Some random Aussie girl nagging you about it wouldn’t make any difference.’