by Ally Blake
Ready to ask, Like what exactly? Adam suddenly realised that this woman could be one of Chris’s dates. And his first uncensored thought was that Chris was a lucky guy. Adam shifted in his seat, suddenly feeling a mite uncomfortable in the woman’s sparkling presence.
Then he also remembered that none of the women was to know whom they were going to be meeting on the show. Just some guy, some poor slob hankering for a woman. Not his friend Chris; sweet guy and a billionaire.
But the funny thing was this woman seemed like a sweet girl too. A sweet girl with eyes that deserved a double take and a mouth that begged to be kissed.
Adam shook his head to clear the muddy thoughts. What did it matter that she was seriously attractive? He was only finding himself so quickly riveted by her because of any possible harm she might bring to Chris.
It was a defence mechanism. That was all.
Chris was too nice to know what was best for him and it was Adam’s job to look out for the guy. He owed him that much. If not everything.
The door to the offices beyond opened, and a young, hip television-exec type, with unironed clothes and too much gel in his hair, popped his head out.
‘Cara Marlowe?’
Adam’s lady friend stood up.
‘That’s me.’
‘Great,’ the guy said with an encouraging smile. ‘Come on through.’
The woman shot Adam a parting grin that included the sexy smile line once more. ‘Wish me luck.’
Luck meant that within days this fresh-faced, sweet and seriously compelling woman could be dating his best friend. And he found that all he could say was, ‘Go get ’em.’
Cara followed the young guy, whose name was Jeff, through a maze of corridors and cubicles to his office within the bowels of the top floor of the television station.
‘Take a seat,’ he ordered.
She did.
‘Coffee?’
‘Ah, no, thanks.’ With caffeine in her veins she’d be bouncing off the walls in no time.
‘I’m not so good as you,’ Jeff said, waving his empty mug at her. ‘I’ll be back in a sec.’
Cara sat upright on the plain simple chair as she waited for Jeff to return. She stared down at her red shoes, which glistened prettily back at her. And she winced. Jeff had walked ahead of her the whole time and she was sure he had not even glanced at her feet once.
But the guy in the foyer had. She was sure of that. In fact she was sure he had compiled an internal data file of every inch of her, so intense had been his gaze. It was all she had been able to do to keep her footing. New shoes or no new shoes. A guy like that would make any rational woman’s knees go weak without even trying.
He had dark wavy hair, intense blue eyes, a solid build, hands that looked as though they could play the piano and change a light bulb. He was a hunk and a half. She wondered briefly what he was doing there, waiting in the foyer where those involved with the new secret show had been told to wait.
What if he was the single guy? The one she might have to style? She pictured him in his immaculate suit with his glossy shoes and his expensive haircut. If he was the one, her job would be redundant. She would have nothing more to do than straighten his tie and run her hands through his hair just before the cameras rolled.
The thought of getting so up close and personal with that particular gentleman made her suddenly uncomfortable. She shifted in her seat, then gave a little laugh out loud. What need would a guy like that have to go on a dating show? He was gorgeous. The strong, silent type. She imagined a wave of horror rolling across those deep blue eyes at the mere suggestion.
An alarm went off somewhere in the building and Cara clicked back to the present and remembered she was meant to be preparing for the most important job interview of her life. That was what she should have been focussed on, not daydreaming about the exact shade of some stranger’s blue eyes. But of course she was only thinking about him so much because of the possible boost he could provide her financial status.
It was a survival mechanism. That was all.
Her focus cleared and she saw her red shoes still gleaming up at her. She had more important things to think about then and there than some chance acquaintance with Mr Handsome out there. She had to make a grand impression on Jeff.
She crossed her legs one way but the shoes were still hidden, so she crossed them the other way instead.
She hadn’t even heard Jeff return so as she swung her right leg over her left she connected fully with the poor guy’s upper thigh. His coffee-cup did a triple back somersault over his desk, trailing steaming milky coffee over everything in its path. The accompanying ‘Oof’ that sprang from Jeff’s mouth told her that the connection had not been a light one. She leapt to her feet, disentangling herself as she went.
‘Jeff, I am so sorry! Here, sit down, please.’
She manoeuvred Jeff into her chair, then reached over to place his tilted empty cup upright, as though it made any difference.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked, her attention zeroing in on the guy who held her financial stability in his hands. Hands which were currently stuffed between his legs.
‘Did I hurt you a great deal? What can I do to help?’
He took a few moments to gather his breath before he finally said, ‘When can you start?’
‘Start what?’ she asked, suddenly worried what she might be called upon to do to help.
‘The job. The gig. The show.’
‘I’m hired?’ Cara asked, her squeaky voice showcasing her scepticism.
‘That you are,’ Jeff promised, his breathing returning to normal.
‘Don’t you want to see my portfolio?’
‘No need. We’ve seen what you can do and you come highly recommended by those who’ve worked with you, including Maya Rampling of Fresh magazine, who seems to think you are, and I quote, “a gift from the heavens”, and whose help we will certainly need for marketing the show later on. And that’s enough for us.’
Cara spun about on the spot but had to right herself against the table when her dainty shoes threatened to give way beneath her.
‘So, are you ours for the having?’
‘I am all yours, Jeff. You can have me now.’
The young guy glanced up at her with the beginnings of a smile on his face. Cara snapped her mouth shut and waited for the perfectly reasonable response to her unfortunate phrasing, but instead his kind glance hit the floor once more. He shook his head.
‘Those are some shoes you’re wearing there, Ms Marlowe. And it pains me to imagine what they might have done to me had we not given you the job.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘ADAM TYLER, right?’ a husky voice called from behind Adam.
Adam turned to find the lovely lady he had met half an hour before. He blinked. It was a delaying tactic. It gave him a moment to size up the opposition or the problem before he spoke. But whereas before the woman was all elegant nerves, now she was all big smiles and gorgeous dimples. And those were qualities in a woman that he had never seen as a problem.
‘That’s right,’ he said, many years of practice masking everything but nonchalance in his laconic voice.
‘Well, now, you see I got the job.’ She gave him a little curtsy before continuing. ‘And I was told that you were the man I needed to see.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘To get the dirt on our man of the hour.’
He stood up straight, his hands clasped behind his back, and watched as she shifted from one foot to the other, all but dancing on those high red shoes of hers. Then all of a sudden she stopped fidgeting, piercing him with a stare so sharp he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even blink. He just stood there and waited for the acute green gaze to give him a reprieve.
‘Adam Tyler,’ she repeated, her bright eyes flashing as the unexpectedly sharp mind behind them whirred to life. ‘Head of Marketing for Revolution Wireless?’
He watched her carefully as the cogs and wheels clicked in her mind. Revolu
tion Wireless. Billionaire. Chris. She would have the whole deal figured out in no time. So much for them recruiting ignoramuses.
It slammed into his mind that nobody was meant to know anything about Chris. That was the whole point, the beauty of the idea, that Chris would be an unknown, just a guy meeting a girl. But suddenly that was all disintegrating before him.
And disintegration was just what Adam wanted.
Her gaze drifted away from him as, like a good girl, she put two and two together. ‘Chris Geyer. The name was familiar but I couldn’t place it before. He’s one of your partners, right?’
He decided to keep his mouth shut. Maybe the fates had put her here just for him. Maybe he didn’t need to convince Chris. She could be the spanner in the works all on her own.
‘So it’s not a joke,’ she said. ‘The Billionaire Bachelor is not some hook to get a bunch of poor girls all excited only to have the fake Persian rug whipped out from under them. The Billionaire Bachelor is the real deal.’
Adam cringed on the inside. If that was to be the title of the show, Chris was dead meat.
But instead of venting his infuriation with internal screams behind closed eyes, Adam paid close attention to the woman before him, anticipating the inevitable moment when those eyes of hers would skitter back his way, lit all the brighter by the glitter of dollar signs. He braced himself, willing her to get it over with. Willing her to show herself as nothing special, as one of the countless many.
Her glance landed upon him, their eyes clashed, and he took in a short anticipatory breath as he looked for the sly smile that would no doubt touch at the corner of that luscious mouth. The tension inside him grew by the second as he waited for her to feed his disenchantment with womankind.
But the moment never came. Instead of a sly smile, there was a furrowed brow and what he guessed were teeth biting at her inner cheek. She wasn’t looking at him as the answer to all her hopes and dreams, she was looking at him as though she felt sorry for him. And where he had been prepared to be disenchanted, instead he was stunned.
She finally collected herself and smiled, but her expression was infinitesimally cooler than when she had first burst from the inner room, all coltish legs and curtsies.
‘So, anyway,’ she said, her tone pleasant but no longer perky, almost as though she preferred to pretend the past two minutes hadn’t existed. ‘I have been told that the TV station has an account at a lovely little bistro around the corner and I was hoping that I could take you there for lunch.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said, gathering his wits after being befuddled by her strange response, ‘but I don’t think that’s in the rules of the game.’
Her confusion was evident. She took in a short breath as though ready to question his comment, before she obviously figured it out for herself, her eyes brightening again with the realisation.
‘Please! I am not a contestant! The last thing I want or need is some brazen, bawdy billionaire breathing down my neck. Funny, though. You’re the second man today to think that. What is it about me that screams bikinis and hot tubs, I wonder?’ She said it more to herself than to him, but he still took a brief moment to consider the image.
Her conservative outfit did little to hide the long, lean curves and those unbelievable red shoes did things to her legs and her posture that made his mind turn easily to bikinis and hot tubs.
She moved over to the couch and sat down, patting the seat beside her, beckoning him to join her.
If she wasn’t a possible love interest for Chris, then who was she? His interest stirred, he did as he was told, sidling over and sitting beside her, one leg hooking up to cross on top of the other and his arms reaching out to lie across the back of the long leather couch.
‘I should have done this better,’ she said, holding out a slim ringless hand. ‘I’m Cara Marlowe.’
He shook her hand, taking a moment to enjoy the crisp, cool contact. But he waited for her to talk. He found that another good tactic. Most people could not leave silence well alone and they were more likely to fill it with interesting information than if they were questioned directly.
‘I am going to be Chris’s stylist for the duration of the shoot. It will be my job to dress him.’
‘Dress him?’
‘Choose his outfits,’ she explained. She then reached out and touched his knee, her voice affecting the tones of a New York gossip show host. ‘Honey, if I had to actually dress the guy, I’d be asking for a lot more money!’
Adam glanced at her slim hand resting on his knee. It felt nice until it recoiled as though scorched, then moved to slap across her unruly mouth.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m a tad overexcited right now. First I get the job of a lifetime and then I meet a real live Australian Businessman of the Year. I would love to talk to you about that some time. Sorry. There I go again. Taking liberties with a practical stranger. My tongue tends to have a mind of its own when my adrenalin is off and running.’
He gave her a slight nod, though he was again quietly stunned. She knew about his award too? And she was obviously a heck of a lot more impressed with that than with his bank balance. In Adam’s long experience with women, this one was proving to be more unusual with every word that came from her lovely mouth.
She was an enigma wrapped in a very enticing dress. A girl with a good head on her shoulders, and a seriously charming face to boot. A woman with such a sexy, husky kick to her voice it could lure sailors to dash their ships upon mountains of rock, whose words spoke, not of the expected sly seduction, but of exuberant enthusiasm for her job.
No matter whom Chris was destined to date on the show, it seemed he would have at least one socially aware woman on set with whom to shoot the breeze. Struck curiously dumb by the thought, Adam once more decided it best to let her do the talking.
And she did.
‘So, since they will have your friend Chris tied up for the next couple of hours, let’s get out of here and have a natter.’
Even despite becoming lost in those expressive eyes, he somehow managed to pick out the pertinent information. A couple of hours until he saw Chris again? If he had to sit in the dull room for a second longer he would explode even if he was in the company of such an engaging woman.
Secondly, Adam knew when a golden opportunity landed in his lap. He couldn’t hide the smile that began to warm him from the inside out. She was to be Chris’s stylist. Thoughts of Chris in bizarre golfing outfits or excessive amounts of tartan wove their way through his devious mind. If he couldn’t convince Chris he was doing the wrong thing, here was the perfect opportunity to interrupt the process from an entirely unrelated angle.
‘It seems that you and I are destined to have a lunch date.’
‘Excellent,’ she said.
Adam stood, holding out an elbow in invitation. ‘Well, then, Ms Marlowe, shall we?’
‘Only if you call me Cara,’ she said, standing, placing a hand lightly in the crook of his offered arm. Her beguiling smile giving him a third reason to accept the lunch offer with increasing pleasure.
Cara watched Adam from the corner of her eye as she perused the large menu in the lovely little bistro around the corner.
I am having lunch with Adam Tyler, she thought, knowing she would rather be picking his brains about his business practices than about his friend.
As a connoisseur of stories about locals made good, she knew the highlights of his career as reported inside and outside of the business pages. Inside were tales of a marketing guru, part-owner of the fastest growing company in Australia. Awards and plaudits followed in his wake like tin cans clattering along behind a wedding car. Outside the business pages he was more well known for being a playboy-billionaire type, not quite hip enough to make it onto the cover of any of the supermarket gossip magazines, but certainly fascinating enough to grace their social pages time and again.
No wonder too. In the flesh he was pretty darned gorgeous. He oozed manliness, from the woodsy scent of h
is aftershave, to the easy way he wore his suits. From the practised nonchalance of every effortless movement, to the fact that that very nonchalance could not cover up the fact that his mind did not miss a beat behind those fierce, hooded eyes. Beneath the cool exterior beat the pulse of a brilliant, shrewd, powerful man to whom success on every front would have come all too easily.
And all she’d been able to do was go goo-goo and paw him and talk about bikinis and hot tubs. It was not exactly the impression she would have hoped to make on someone whose business acumen she greatly admired.
She found him looking her way, his eyes faintly questioning, and she knew she had been caught staring. She shot him a big cheesy grin, then went back to flicking through the menu.
The last thing she wanted was to be turning all gooey over some guy with money. And a billionaire? That was entirely out of the question. Money meant power. Money meant control. And Cara was not about to give any of her hard-earned power and control away.
Especially to one who, above and beyond the whole gorgeous, blue-eyed, strapping, silent man thing, was so obviously involved in The Billionaire Bachelor project against his will. He was trouble in a three-piece suit. No doubt about it.
‘You made up your mind?’ Adam asked.
‘You bet I have,’ she said, her voice deep with determination.
Then after a few seconds of ensuing silence she looked up to find the waiter smiling blandly at her. She quickly picked the first thing that came into focus to cover up the fact that she’d had no idea Adam had been asking about the meal.
‘So how does this all work?’ Adam asked once they had settled and begun their starters.
Cara opened her mouth to answer but then Jeff’s smiling face popped into her mind. ‘Tell a soul a thing and you will be out on your backside,’ he had said. ‘Great recommendations or not.’
‘Sorry,’ Cara said, ‘I’m not sure what I can really tell you. My contract has confidentiality clauses up the wazoo.’
‘You’ve already given away the title of the show.’
