Annie O'Neil - One Night...With Her Boss

She rubbed a numbing agent on Chris’s forehead, quickly put in the stiches and gave him another run through the concussion exam. She wasn’t one hundred percent convinced—not enough to prove to Aidan, anyway—so told him he’d have to sit out the rest of the game, and then she’d do the tests again.

“Safety first!” she quipped with a Doris Day grin. Or at least that was the look she was going for. Chris stuck his tongue out at her in response. Child …

Maybe coming here had been a mistake. Already she was getting attached to these big old lugheads, and that hadn’t been part of the plan. Not by a long shot. Nor had sleeping with her new boss, but it seemed that had happened, too. This was all going swimmingly!

Aidan Tate was The Suit.

Who would’ve believed it?

She’d been a secret admirer of his expertise for years. He’d sounded so caring and professional in the medical journals he was regularly published in. And he’d been oh, so very tender and attentive at three, four and five in the morning, when neither of them had felt the need to sleep. Humph! Double -humph!

She grabbed her phone from her coat pocket and did what she always did when things started to get emotional. She bashed out a message to her former mentor from dance school.

What’s the protocol on breaking my contract?

Her mentor had been wise and sage, had had hair like Einstein and—also like Einstein—he had known everything. At least about her. The one person on the planet who had. He’d helped her move on. Just as she had when her mum had died. Just as she had when she had learned she would never dance again.

Then she deleted it. He was gone now—some ten years ago—and she wasn’t a quitter. Never had been. Except when life had forced her to … to alter her course. That was how she preferred to see things. Taking matters into her own hands.

She took her cap off and ran her hand through her hair. Platitudes. Handy when you needed them, trite when you didn’t.

She tried to focus on the stands, the players, the flashing billboards—anything to keep her eyes from the unmoving figure of Aidan Tate. But no matter where she looked her internal camera kept imposing Aidan everywhere. On the big screens, on the looping advertising banners encircling the pitch … even the close-ups of the players showed those flashing dark eyes and that thick black hair she’d so enjoyed running her fingers through as she— ahem —had behaved distinctly unlike her old self.

Aidan had quite obviously been behaving out of character, as well. Caring and studious? Ha! Cranky control freak was more like it. It appeared looks weren’t the only things that could be deceiving.

She tipped her head back and forth in the hope that some answers might fall out. If she’d learned anything in the past few years, it was that most situations were definitely not what they seemed to be. She needed to get out of there.

She watched as the players hurled themselves around the field.

No.

She didn’t.

She owed it to these guys to stick around.

She’d made an oath. An oath to protect and care for her patients. And there they were—all cauliflower ears, biceps bulging, thigh muscles like logs, all gussied up in their unmistakable red-and-black uniforms. The North Stars.

As the cool air swirled around her play intensified and the crowd audibly kept pace with the action. She couldn’t have felt further away from home. Not that she had one to go back to anyhow. Which was the whole point, wasn’t it? Being here. Now.

The past is where it belongs , she reminded herself. You’re safe here .

Ali couldn’t help letting a burble of giggles escape her lips. Safe here? On the sidelines of one of Britain’s most brutal games?

That’d be about right.

SWITCHING ON THE overhead lights to her warehouse loft flat, Ali felt the adrenaline from the day’s match drain away. The adrenaline from finding out The Suit was her new boss …? That little nugget was keeping her pulse-rate a bit high.

She kicked off her shoes. They landed one by one with a satisfying thunk-thunk on the far side of the flat. She was giving “bachelorette pad messy” a whirl, and it was fun. More fun than watching Aidan sort out the day’s steady stream of cuts, abrasions and strained muscles. She thought she’d earned some Brownie points with her treatment of Chris’s cut, but he’d hardly let her so much as swab a skinned knee after that. So much for earning her keep …

Her stores of controlled breathing, counting to ten and biting her tongue had pretty much been exhausted by the time the final whistle had blown.

Where was the amazing physician she’d heard about, who took new doctors under his wing and single-handedly teased new and seemingly unreachable skills out of them? Where was the volunteer coach lauded as a hero to a rugby squad of twelve-year-old girls? Who had stolen the doctor every medical journal in Britain couldn’t praise enough and replaced him with Generalissimo Grumpy-head? What was the point of being here if she wasn’t going to learn anything?

She leaned against the closed door, well aware that her body was virtually vibrating with all the things she had learned from him—just nothing she could use in the workplace.

But honestly! Who in their right mind would turn down a guy who looked as if he could fix your car, fend off a swath of marauding invaders and pose for one of those posters of sexy guys holding tires in a garage, wearing not much more than a scrappy old pair of jeans? Scrappy jeans just slipping off his hips … right where the little notchy muscle definition bits met …

Nooooooo! Not the way this thought process was meant to go.

She felt herself soften. A little. He couldn’t be that much of a control freak. She had just worked two weeks on her own while he’d been off swanning around in the Pacific, or wherever it was they said he’d gone. Maybe it was all part of some unknown test he set for his minions. Prove thyself—then watch and learn.

Geniuses were supposed to be arrogant, condescending, haughty and superior—but from what she’d read this guy had sounded as if he had heart. That would need some excavating. Not to mention his inability to give her a go. He should be thanking his lucky stars she had come up here at all! She had her own reams of kudos, accrued over a lifetime of—well, of avoiding everything one did in life but work.

Bah! None of this was helping.

She padded across the worn Oriental rug sprawled across the aged wood floors. It was the only thing she’d brought from her “old life” in London, and it matched the vintage feel of the building perfectly. The floor-to-ceiling windows were her favorite feature of the loft. A classic accent from the building’s heyday as a thread factory. If she was really honest she could very easily fall in love with the place. An enormous loft penthouse with an enviable view overlooking the River Teal versus her two-up, two-down with a view across the street? It’d be pretty easy to get used to this.

Not that the flat was her new home . It was an investment. She didn’t put down roots. She made investments. Easier to leave that way.

Ali slipped her keys into a red-lacquered bowl she’d found at a charity shop—the only decorative touch to her kitchen island—and pulled open the door to her enormous American-style refrigerator. The pickings were pretty sparse. The remains of a triangle of cheddar, an out of date ready-to-bake baguette and some just-about-to-wilt salad greens were the only inhabitants of the shelves. It was hardly the food of champions.