by Ally Blake
A man in a million...
There’s only one problem: he’s her boss!
Single mom Lucinda Starling has lost faith in love or happy-ever-afters. She must protect the important things: her young son and her job working for entrepreneur Angus Wolfe! Her commitmentphobe boss must never know she’s crazy about him! Until one evening at a conference he looks at her like she’s the only woman in the world… Dare she risk all and be tempted by Angus?
“You don’t need to do that, you know?” Angus said.
“What’s that?”
“Be my cheerleader. I’m a big boy. I can take a hit.”
“Yeah, you are,” she said. “Such a big boy.”
A slow smile spread across his face, even as his eyes narrowed. Even though he’d known more success than most men saw in a lifetime, that hunger still remained. It was a part of him. And when he switched it on, it always made Lucinda burn.
Then his gaze began to roam. Over her hair, over her cheeks, her jaw, pausing once more on her mouth, before traveling down the twist of a spaghetti strap, over the crisscross at her décolletage, her bare shoulders.
Lucinda’s heart picked up pace and the hairs at the back of her neck prickled.
He shouldn’t be looking at her that way.
And she shouldn’t be relishing the fact that he was.
Dear Reader,
I’ve always been a big fan of “working together” romances.
Partly because it gives me the chance to “try out” occupations I’ll never have the chance to enjoy.
As a kid, how adventurous an idea it seemed not to have a career, but to change jobs every year. I could be a taxi driver in Seville. Then a hairdresser in New York. A movie extra in Bollywood. A writer anywhere I pleased...
But I also love placing a hero and heroine into one another’s work space day after day after day, as it gives us a glimpse into what life might be like beyond the happily-ever-after.
For if two people can endure working together, they can survive anything!
On that score, having watched Lucinda and Angus banter and support, cajole and bolster, and employ absolute honesty as they negotiate their working lives side by side, I have not a single doubt that their happily-ever-after will be a blast.
Happy reading!
Love,
Ally xxx
AllyBlake.com
Crazy About Her Impossible Boss
Ally Blake
Australian author Ally Blake loves reading and strong coffee, porch swings and dappled sunshine, beautiful notebooks and soft, dark pencils. Her inquisitive, rambunctious, spectacular children are her exquisite delights. And she adores writing love stories so much she’d write them even if nobody else read them. No wonder, then, having sold over four million copies of her romance novels worldwide, Ally is living her bliss. Find out more about Ally’s books at allyblake.com.
Books by Ally Blake
Harlequin Romance
The Royals of Vallemont
Rescuing the Royal Runaway Bride
Amber and the Rogue Prince
Billionaire on Her Doorstep
Millionaire to the Rescue
Falling for the Rebel Heir
Hired: The Boss’s Bride
Dating the Rebel Tycoon
Millionaire Dad’s SOS
Hired by the Mysterious Millionaire
A Week with the Best Man
Harlequin KISS
The Rules of Engagement
Faking It to Making It
The Dance Off
Her Hottest Summer Yet
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
To Jamie, Merle and Ryan and the gorgeous staff at my “office,” aka Café Bliss. They know me by name, point out excitedly when my favourite booth is free, let me rent a table anytime for the price of a latte and a piece of cake. True patrons of the arts!
Praise for
Ally Blake
“Now I’m used to being entertained by Ally Blake’s wit, enjoying her young quirky heroines and drooling over her dark, brooding heroes. But this book stuck inside me somehow.”
—Goodreads on Millionaire Dad’s SOS
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM HIS CONVENIENT NEW YORK BRIDE BY ANDREA BOLTER
CHAPTER ONE
LUCINDA. PICK UP. Lucinda. Pick up. Lucinda. Pick up.
Lucinda’s fingers hovered over the keyboard keys right as the voice stopped, their ends tingling from typing ninety-plus words a minute.
She cocked an ear but couldn’t tell where the voice had come from.
From her desk—aka The Guard Tower Blocking All From Entrance Into Her Boss’s Sacred Space—she could see all the way from his corner office, down the hall past Reception to the lifts at the end, and there was no one nearby.
She went back to typing and...
Lucinda. Pick up. Lucinda. Pick up. Lucinda. Pick up.
With a huff, she lifted her fingers from the keys and zeroed in on the sound.
It was coming from her phone, which was lit up beseechingly by her elbow. Someone had added a new ringtone. The picture smiling back at her gave her a fair idea who was behind the deep, gravelly voice.
Biting her lips to suppress a scowl—or possibly a smile—Lucinda pressed the little red “end call” dot on the screen, flicking the call to voicemail. She was a busy woman. The man could wait.
Straightening her shoulders, Lucinda found her spot on the screen once more, pressed a quick finger to her earbud and picked up the trail of the conversation in her ear as Dahlia—Executive Assistant to the Head of Advertising at the Melbourne Ballet Company—continued her story about the man who’d stood her up for drinks the night before.
As Lucinda listened, mmm-ing in all the right places, she continued to type a bullet-point list of the day’s top business-related headlines—trending brands, celebrity gaffes and wins, as well as a few choice titbits she thought might be relevant to her boss—a ritual she’d begun when she’d first landed a job at the Big Picture Group six-and-a-half years earlier.
Then her mobile started ringing again, the tone deep, resonant and insistent. Male. Lucinda. Pick up. Lucinda. Pick up. Lucinda. Pick up.
Lucinda did not pick up. She opened a drawer, tossed the phone inside, covered it in a pile of miscellaneous paper and shut the drawer once more.
Then into her mouthpiece she said, “Dahlia, you are a rare gem. Find a man who sees your worth. One who looks you in the eye. Who listens when you speak. Who shows up when he says he will. Find a grown-up. Do not waste another moment settling for anything less. You’ll thank me.”
Dahlia thanked her profusely and rang off. But not before promising to send Lucinda a dozen A-circle tickets to opening night of the Melbourne Ballet’s next show. Lucinda didn’t bite back that smile. She already had a couple of clients lined up who’d love her for ever for those tickets.
Though she did wonder—if only briefly—whether she was, in fact, the best possible person Dahlia, or anyone, could turn to for dating advice. At least she hadn’t given Dahlia any advice she wouldn’t follow herself.
“
Probably why you’ve been single for so long,” she muttered, before getting back to work.
Until her phone started up again. Lucinda. Pick up. Lucinda. Pick up. Lucinda. Pick up. Only muffled. By paper. And a closed drawer.
Lucinda slowly typed the last bullet point, saved the file and sent it flying through the ether to her boss’s computer, before turning on her chair to face the man himself.
Angus Wolfe, one of the top branding specialists in town, if not the country, sat on the other side of a wall of diffused, smoky glass that separated him from the rest of the world.
He leant back in his big leather chair, feet up on the decadently deep windowsill, face in profile as he looked out over the stunning view of the Melbourne skyline. The dying sun sparkled and glinted off the staggering shards of chrome and glass beyond but Lucinda only had eyes for the mobile phone pressed to his ear.
When the drawer began to vibrate a moment before her phone rang, she whipped it open, grabbed her phone and again pressed the little red “end call” dot. She then shoved back her chair, stalked to the discreet glass door that was hers and hers alone, opened it with a satisfying swish and strode across the acre of soft grey carpet to her boss’s desk.
There was no way he wasn’t fully aware she stood behind him. The man’s ability to read a room was legendary. He noticed changes in temperature, pulse, breathing and tone of voice the way other people noticed being kicked in the shin.
Yet still she took a selfish moment to drink him in before officially making herself known.
For Angus Wolfe’s profile was a study in staggering male beauty.
The man was all chiselled angles. Sharp jaw, close-shaven. Hair darkly curling and a mite over-long. The reading glasses he refused to admit he needed to wear did nothing to soften the impact of the most formidable pair of dark-hazel eyes that had ever been seen.
Even the tendons in his neck were a sight to behold.
Then he shifted. Slowly. Like a big cat stretching in the sun. The lines of his charcoal suit moved with him, cut as they were to make the most of his...everything. Each one cost more than she’d spent on her car. She knew. She paid his bills.
Then she spotted his socks. Peeking out from the top of his custom-made dress shoes was the merest hint of a wolf motif. She’d given him those socks for Christmas.
Her heart gave a little flutter, releasing a gossamer thread of lust that wafted from throat to belly to places less mentionable.
She squished the thing. Fast.
Angus Wolfe might be able to read a room, but if anyone dared claim that Lucinda Starling—his long-time executive assistant, his right-hand woman, his not-so-secret weapon—was a teeny, tiny little bit in love with him, he’d have laughed till he split a kidney.
Either she kept her cards closer to her chest than she realised or he had a blind spot when it came to her. The fact that he had no clue was a gift. And she planned to keep it that way.
For the sake of her job. Her self-respect. Her mental health.
When her phone went off in her hand—Lucinda. Pick up—she flinched.
Then she pulled herself together. She held her phone at arm’s length and said, “Really?”
A beat slunk by before Angus turned in his chair, mouth kicked to one side in the kind of half-smile that always meant trouble.
“When did you even get access to my phone?” she asked.
He tapped the side of his nose. “I have ways,” he said, his voice deeper in person than in the recording, the words unhurried, the effect magnetic. “Ways and means.”
“So they say,” she sassed.
No one else would have noticed Angus’s pause. The infinitesimal shift in his eyes. But Lucinda noticed it all. It was her job to do so. It was what made her so good at getting him what he needed before he even knew he needed it.
It was also why she mentally kicked herself for the flirty bass note in her voice.
Their relationship, as it was, was a finely tuned, perfectly balanced thing. There was sass, and plenty of it. And banter. There was also brutal honesty. And respect. A little flirtation was within the rules. Part of the game. For they worked really long hours and had to do what they had to do to keep it fun. It took work to keep the balance right. Work to make sure the guy had no clue how she felt about him.
Lucinda feigned resignation as she cocked a hip and waggled her phone in his general direction in order to deflect his attention. “Were you calling for a reason or were you just bored? Because I have plenty of admin I can sling your way if you’re looking for something to do.”
Angus blinked, breathed deeply through his nose and dragged his chair closer to his desk. “Thank you, but no. I wanted you.”
“I was busy,” she said, even while his words skipped and tripped through the unguarded parts of her subconscious.
“Doing what?”
She moved around behind his desk, turned the sleek monitor to face her and called up the screen that mirrored her own, where a bright-yellow computer-generated sticky note said, Read me.
Angus rubbed a single finger across the crease below his bottom lip. Lucinda tried not to stare at his mouth, she really did—but there she was, staring, as his face split into a grin. “Anyway, now I have you, sit.”
His voice had dropped. A fraction. Enough.
She glanced up at his eyes. Imagined a bookshop full of self-help books taking her to task for allowing herself even a brief moment of fantasy.
Gritting her teeth, Lucinda walked back round his desk, taking the time to change her ringtone to something less likely to make the hairs on the back of her neck flutter and tickle. Where was a funeral dirge when you needed one?
She pulled up her chair, the rose-pink velvet tub chair he’d bought her for Christmas. The fact he let her keep it in his office, the absolute best part of the gift.
She sat then pulled out the notebook and pencil she’d grabbed without thinking when she’d picked up her phone. She scratched the pencil a few times to warm it up and settled in preparation for Angus’s labyrinthine mind to shift, sway and touch on more bright ideas than any one person had the right to keep in their head.
“Ready?” he asked, that slight lift on one side of his mouth.
“Always.”
Angus clapped and like that he was in work mode. One hundred and ten percent. “Right. The Remède account.”
For the next ten minutes, Angus went on a wild and woolly stream of consciousness about the rebranding of the Remède cosmetics company, once upon a time a global force, now attempting a last-ditch about-turn in its fortunes before it sank.
It didn’t matter if it was a lipstick maker, a political party or a department-store chain. Angus knew what made people connect with a product. What made them want.
Angus jumped from thought to idea, from grand plan to fine detail. Pausing rarely, never forewarning the shifts. Using Lucinda as a sounding board, a mental stress ball, a repository for the pyrotechnics that had built up inside his brilliant head throughout the long working day.
And Lucinda wrote. The adrenaline high of keeping up with Angus’s mental gymnastics was cushioned by the tactile bliss of a dime-a-dozen 2B pencil tip gliding over quality note paper.
“And...?” she said, her voice a tad breathless, when he’d gone quiet for longer than a second.
“And we’re done.”
“Super.”
She figured it would take about another half an hour to pour the notes from the page into the right files and to-do lists and then she could head home.
“Plans tonight?” Angus asked.
“Not much.” Beyond the funny smell coming from the laundry that she’d promised herself she’d investigate.
Not that Angus would understand. His apartment was a sleek, temperature-controlled monument to earning big bucks.
While her cottage was...
in need of a lot of TLC. But it was hers. Which made it wonderful.
“You?” she asked.
Again the small smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth. It told of fine dining, decadently expensive wine, all while looking across the table at a beautiful woman.
She rolled her eyes.
A well-timed reminder of the many ways in which she and Angus might as well have been different species.
He could survive on the barest amount sleep per night, and often did, while if she didn’t get a solid seven in a row she woke up looking and feeling part-witch.
He had a kitchen he never used and didn’t need, considering he ate out every night, while she budgeted.
She could count on one hand the number of times he’d mentioned his family in six and a half years. While he knew everything there was to know about hers and they were more important to her than breath.
Her life was...slower. More structured. A daily routine of shopping lists stuck to the fridge door and juggling responsibilities. He said tomato, she said... Well, she said tomato as well.
The point was, at work they fit like custom-made kid gloves but their paths divided the moment they left the office.
On that note... When she reached the glass door at the boundary of his office, she stopped. Clicked her fingers. “Oh!” she said, as if she hadn’t been trying to find a way to bring up something all day long. “I have some leave saved up. Enough that Fitz and his HR army are getting twitchy. I’ve checked the calendar, and there’s nothing pressing, so I’m taking this weekend off.”
“Off?” he asked. “Or off-off?”
She had weekends off anyway, but working for Angus ensured that meant very little. The man never stopped working. He was a hustler at heart and the hustle knew no clock. And, as she was basically his computer, his sounding board and his answering machine, if he needed to get it out, she was the one who caught it.
“Off-off,” she said, taking a small step towards her door. “Friday through Sunday.”
“Why?” he asked, pulling himself to standing and stretching his arms over his head. His white business shirt clung to the acres of muscle and might, one button straining so far she caught a glimpse of taut, tanned skin.
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