by Amy Andrews
He held out his hand. “The key?”
Addie, completely flummoxed by her reaction to him, bristled at his presumption that she’d just bend to his will. As no doubt everyone else did.
Well, not her.
Her gaze flicked to Margaret watching their byplay with that Mona Lisa smile on her lips again.
And maybe not Margaret.
She gave him a sweet smile and promptly ignored him, inspecting the locking mechanism. “Does everyone jump at your command, Mr. Montgomery?”
“Yes.”
Addie laughed. His response was so breathtakingly arrogant, there was no other way to react.
He frowned down at her and said, “Hurry. I’m very busy today.”
Addie, about to fit the key into the lock, paused and looked up at him. “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Montgomery. Maybe while I have you as a captive audience, so to speak, I should take advantage?”
He gave her a silky smile and Addie felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. “What’d you have in mind?”
She swallowed as the hard line of his mouth contradicted the two-octave drop in his voice. He knew damn well what she’d meant.
“Cat got your tongue?” he taunted softly as she flailed around for a pithy comeback.
Addie’s temper spiked as her brain came back online and she opened her mouth to blister him with her wit, but from behind her she heard the urgent ringing of a bell. She looked up as one of London’s many cyclist couriers flew around the corner with no thought to possible pedestrians, on a direct collision path with them. And then before she knew it, the evil tycoon had grabbed hold of her and was yanking her out of the way.
“Oh no!” Addie gasped, the key flying from her hand at the sudden jolt.
She toppled precariously as the courier called, “Sorry,” over his shoulder, continuing at his breakneck speed.
But it was too late. Being chained together the way they were complicated the situation, and as Addie scrambled for purchase, arms flailing, she reached for the only solid thing she could find.
Nathaniel Montgomery.
Chapter Two
“Mr. Montgomery? Mr. Montgomery!”
Addie wasn’t aware of the rumble of traffic around them as she looked down into his face from her position sprawled on top of him. Somehow he’d executed a mid-air turn, effectively cushioning their fall into the gutter. She wiggled, trying to get up, but it was hard going, shackled as they were, and she felt like a floundering fish.
Harder still to ignore were the firm, warm muscles pressing along the length of her. She was grateful when Margaret knelt beside them, lending her a hand.
Satisfied Addie was okay, she gave her boss’s shoulder a firm shake. “Sir?”
He moaned but didn’t open his eyes. She glanced at Addie. “I think he hit his head,” Addie said.
The woman nodded briskly. “I’ll ring an ambulance.”
Addie felt a hot spike of guilt at their predicament as she crouched beside him. She’d never forgive herself if he were injured. She looked into his face, relaxed for the first time since she’d met him. His sunglasses had become dislodged and she felt like she was finally looking at the real man.
He moaned and started to move his head, and she felt her pulse leap as the sense of dread lifted. “Mr. Montgomery?”
His eyelids fluttered and he lifted his free hand slowly, like he was dragging it through cold porridge, and rubbed his temple.
Finally, Addie found herself staring into the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. She’d figured they’d be black, like his heart, but she couldn’t have been more mistaken. She struggled to define them without tourist brochures springing to mind.
So this was what they meant by being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
“Thank God,” she said, relief coursing through her body. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
He looked at her two fingers held up like bunny ears for several seconds as if he’d just landed from another planet and had no idea what they were. Slowly, his puzzled look dissolved and his gaze become sharp and focused.
“Oh dear God,” he groaned. “You? But… Margaret?” he called.
He tried to sit but his face contorted in what Addie assumed was significant pain if the swear word he used was any indication. He fell back against the road.
“Shh,” Addie murmured, placing her hand on his chest. “She’s making a phone call. Don’t try to move. You might have broken something.”
“I don’t have time for goddamned broken bones!”
Margaret stalked two paces toward her boss. “Good, you’re back with us. Just calling an ambulance, sir.”
“I don’t need a bloody ambulance.”
“Yes, sir,” Margaret said as she gave the address to the emergency control center.
Addie glanced from one to the other. A large, annoyed man looking as though he was about to explode, and a cool, calm, and collected woman smiling benignly. Both, in their own way, seemingly immovable forces and yet, strangely, Addie sensed affection between them.
“Goddamn it, Margaret.” He kicked at the gutter with his good foot. “Get me out of these confounded handcuffs right now!”
Margaret raised an eyebrow. “I’ll go and locate the key, sir.”
Addie watched Margaret head in the direction the key had flown before turning her attention back to the man seething next to her. The very virile, very wealthy man with the devil mouth and tropical island eyes who was about to callously destroy something so precious to so many.
The man who’d just pulled her from imminent danger.
Nathaniel looked away from the pair of big, gray eyes staring at him, shifting slightly as the hardness of the road began to register.
“I’m sorry I fell on top of you,” Addie said. “One minute I was upright and then I was down and I think I probably winded you.”
He snorted. In the grand scheme of the frustrating and painful that had marked this hideous day, her landing on top of him had been nothing. “I doubt it. You weigh less than a sparrow.”
“I found it!” Margaret announced, brandishing a small silver key in her hand as she hurried back.
His PA handed the key to Addie, and through sheer willpower, Nathaniel kept his mouth shut as her trembling fingers fumbled with the lock for interminable seconds to the increasingly urgent sounds of the nearing siren. When he was finally free, he snatched his hand away and rubbed at his wrist.
The ambulance screeched to a halt, and before he knew it, two paramedics had leapt from the vehicle to tend to him. The woman who had shackled them together as a cheap publicity stunt was, thankfully, pushed to the fringes of the crowd of onlookers that had formed around them.
“Where does it hurt?” one of the paramedics asked.
“My left ankle. Thigh, too,” Nathaniel said.
“How’d it happen?” the paramedic asked as he took out his shears and cut right up the middle of Nathaniel’s very expensive trousers.
Hippie woman stepped forward and knelt beside the paramedics and Nathaniel almost groaned out loud. “It was all my fault,” she said. “There was this speeding bicycle…and he saved me from it…but he fell in the process.”
“I’m fine. I just need a hand up,” Nathaniel said, trying to sit again. He gasped as pain gripped his leg. “Maybe a couple of aspirin. But you can go now,” he said, looking pointedly at the woman.
She frowned. “No. I’m responsible for you getting hurt. I can’t possibly leave until I know everything’s going to be okay.”
“Really, it’s fine.”
“Mr. Montgomery, can you tell me what day of the week it is?” the other paramedic asked.
Nathaniel’s request got lost in a series of very annoying, very basic questions involving things like the time and year and who the prime minister was, as well as a small light being flashed in his eyes.
“Look, is this all entirely necessary? All I need is a hand up—”
“I’m afraid so,
Mr. Montgomery. We’re going to need to take you to the hospital for X-rays and observation. Do you have a preference which hospital?”
Nathaniel vaulted up this time, pain be damned. “No. No hospital. I don’t have time for this. I have a very important business deal I’m supposed to be closing in”—he stopped and squinted at his watch—“two hours.”
Margaret stepped in. “Wherever is closest will be fine, thank you, gentlemen.”
The paramedic nodded once. “That’ll be Wapping Central.”
Nathaniel glared at her. He may have been rich and successful, but when Margaret used that tone—the one she’d used to scold him as a child when he’d touched something he shouldn’t have in his father’s office—he knew better than to argue. Why was it that he could make heads of industry cower, but he couldn’t shift his damned PA when she’d set her mind to something?
…
“What happened?” Penny demanded, making her way through the dispersing crowd as the ambulance pulled away from the curb.
“I think Nathaniel Montgomery may just have saved my life,” Addie murmured and filled her friend in on the details.
“Serves him right if he’s broken something. I hope he has. I hope he’s strung up in traction for weeks. He might have a bit more appreciation for green space by then!”
Addie knew this battle cut particularly close to home for her friend, but she also knew wishing harm on someone else wouldn’t bring Penny’s sister Alice back. And having spent many weeks inside a hospital, Addie wouldn’t wish that on her worst enemy.
It was a surprise to realize that person was not Nathaniel Montgomery.
Addie couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t that different. It wasn’t that long ago she was all work, work, work. Not taking care of herself. Not listening to what her body was telling her.
Cancer had been her wake-up call. What would be his?
Addie tisked. “Now, now, that’s not very peace and love.”
Penny had embraced the hippie lifestyle with a vengeance since her sister’s death. Addie, on the other hand, had just wanted to live a happy, stress-free, centered life.
And then Nathaniel Montgomery had come along and dared to mess with her garden and here she was—a very reluctant activist.
Penny shrugged. “I relapse sometimes.”
Addie laughed. Her friend had been a tax assessor before her transformation. “Can I take the van to the hospital?”
“You’re going to visit him?”
Addie felt a spike of guilt at the indignation coloring Penny’s voice. “He’s hurt because of me, Penny…and…”
“And what?” Penny’s brows drew together. “You fancy him, don’t you?”
“No!” Addie shook her head, even as the memory of his muscles against her body rose in her mind. “I just want to check on him, that’s all.”
But it was more than that. She just didn’t know what, exactly.
She suffered Penny’s narrowed-gaze speculation as she handed over her keys.
…
Addie and Margaret stood aside as an orderly pushed the gurney carrying one evil tycoon back into the cubicle. The patient dwarfed the narrow trolley, his broad shoulders and chest—sans jacket, waistcoat, and tie—spanning the breadth easily.
Addie held her breath as his gaze settled on her. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I needed to see you were okay.”
He laid his head back against the pillow and shut his eyes. “I’m fine,” he muttered.
“Do they have the X-ray results yet, sir?”
He nodded. “Just a nasty sprain. They’re going to keep me for a few hours and then discharge me.”
Suddenly, he grabbed the metal bars as if he were about to fall. “Are you okay?” Addie asked, alarmed.
“Morphine’s spinning me out. I don’t know why they gave it to me in the first place. An aspirin would have been fine.”
“You were in quite a bit of pain,” she said.
She waited for him to respond, but he lay there with his eyes closed for a few seconds before cracking open an eyelid and turning the full blast of his blue eyes on her. She felt as if he’d just pierced her with a laser beam. “You can go now,” he said with a slight slur.
Addie smiled nervously. Things had crystallized on her way to the hospital, and she couldn’t help but think that her path had crossed with his for a reason. She wasn’t leaving until she’d tried to communicate that. “Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘paying it forward’?” she asked. “Margaret and I have just been chatting about it.”
He rolled his head to look at his PA. “This does not sound good.”
“Oh, you’re going to love it, sir,” Margaret said, her lips twitching as she nodded at Addie to continue.
“Well, it’s just like in the movie—”
Nathaniel frowned like he was having difficulty keeping up. “What movie?”
“There was a movie called Pay It Forward,” she explained.
“I haven’t heard of it.”
Addie blinked. “You haven’t?”
“I don’t watch movies. I have a job. I work sixteen-hour days and average four hours’ sleep a night. There is no time for frivolous pursuits like going to the goddamned movies.”
Addie sighed. Of course he didn’t go to the movies. He was too busy working on his first heart attack.
Nathaniel heard her sigh and saw genuine pity clouding her gray eyes.
She felt sorry for him.
A hippie chick who looked like she bought her clothes at Oxfam and a puff of wind could blow her over? He was a multimillionaire property developer. He’d dined with royalty, a number of world leaders, and several supermodels. He owned a house in the Caribbean.
And he was close, so close, to reaching the magic billion-pound goal he’d set for himself at nineteen to fulfill his promise to his father—the St. Agnes project would see to that.
His life was not lacking in anything.
But she was looking at him like he knew nothing. Like she held the meaning of life and he was totally clueless.
She reminded him of his mother.
He clenched his jaw. His temple throbbed and he ignored it. “Why don’t you just cut to the chase?”
Addie shrugged. “Look, I know it might sound crazy but it’s simple, really. You saved my life, so I owe you.”
Nathaniel shot her an exasperated look. “It was a cyclist, for crying out loud. Not a goddamned lorry!”
“So? What if I’d smacked my head on the gutter and burst a blood vessel in my brain or broken my neck? What if the impact had snapped my spine in two and left me paralyzed? What if any of that had happened to you? You got hurt today helping me and even though you obviously don’t give a fig about a two-hundred-year-old walled garden, you put yourself in the line of danger for me, so…I owe you.”
Nathaniel head spun. The fact that she was genuine was obvious and confronting all at once. He wasn’t used to seeing that in his line of work.
The people he dealt with on a daily basis didn’t think twice about manipulating and outsmarting their business rivals or hiding behind whatever legalities and subterfuge they could. It was strangely refreshing to see such selflessness.
Even if it was pie-in-the-sky.
“Listen…what did you say your name was?”
She cleared her throat. “Addie. Addie Collins.”
“Addie,” he said patiently, whatever in hell kind of name that was. “I understand that you actually believe in this stuff, but I don’t. So…” He waved his hand, magician-like. “Go in peace.”
The woman called Addie shook her head and gave him a sad smile. “It doesn’t work like that, Mr. Montgomery. The universe helped me out once before, and now it’s my turn to pay it forward. Whether you want it or not.”
Nathaniel suddenly felt as if he’d been plonked into an I Dream of Jeannie episode.
A thought popped into his head and he smiled. “Okay. Fine. I have the perfect
thing. You want to pay me back? Call off your protest campaign.”
She frowned. “You don’t get this at all, do you?”
Of course he didn’t bloody get it. It was just plain kooky as far as he was concerned. Her hair beads clicked and Nathaniel found himself wondering what it looked like out of all of those ridiculous plaits. Part of him wanted to reach out and feel the intricate weaving, follow the tight rows with the pads of his fingers.
Dear God, let it be the morphine.
“It’s bigger than that,” she continued. “More self-sacrificing. Like giving you my kidney. Or my life savings. Or bailing you out of jail—”
“I don’t need a kidney, I’m richer than God, and if I ever need bailing out of jail”—which he probably would if she decided to keep torturing him and he gave in to the urge to murder her—“I have a very good, very expensive lawyer. A whole team of them, actually.”
Her smile looked welded to her face as she said, “Maybe you just need saving from yourself?”
Nathaniel, at the end of his tether, was about to threaten her with a restraining order when his phone rang. Margaret picked it up on the second ring. “Hi, Delphine. Yes, he’s back from X-ray.” She passed him the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”
Nathaniel grimaced. “Hello, Mother.”
“Nate, darling, how are you? Be a dear and put me on speaker. I want Margaret listening in so you won’t be able to lie to me.”
Nathaniel chuckled despite his situation. He pressed the speaker button, motioning Margaret to stay close.
“Now, you will be coming on Sat’day still, won’t you?”
Nathaniel looked at his banged-up leg. He finally had an out for his grandmother’s eightieth birthday bash. A legitimate one. He glanced at Margaret, who narrowed her eyes and gave him a stern shake of her head.
“Well, I’m not sure if I’ll be up to—”
Margaret pursed her lips. “He’ll be there.”
