Behind the Billionaire's Guarded Heart

by Leah Ashton

  Hugh didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’d love photos of me like this with my mum. In fact I have more photos of me as a kid with my dad—again, because Mum was the photographer. And I don’t even like him. But I love my mum.’ She knew she was rambling, but didn’t stop. ‘So it’s all backwards, really.’

  ‘You don’t like your dad?’ Hugh asked.

  April blinked. ‘No. He left when I was five. I hardly saw him, growing up, and I have nothing to do with him now.’

  Hugh nodded. ‘My father did something similar,’ he said. ‘I never saw him again.’

  He didn’t elaborate further.

  ‘That sucks,’ she said.

  His lips quirked. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But your mum obviously loved you?’

  She could see his jaw tense—but then relax. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She did.’

  ‘That’s why she took all these photos.’

  The tension was instantly back. ‘The number of photos my mother took—and, trust me, within this house there are thousands—is not a reflection of how much she loved me, April. I’d still know she loved me if she hadn’t taken even one. They’re just things.’

  April shook her head vigorously. ‘No. They’re not. They’re memories. They’re irreplaceable. What if you ever have kids? Won’t you want to—?’

  ‘I’m never having kids. And that is definitely none of your business.’

  She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand any of this.

  But he’d turned, retrieved the box from the floor. He faced her again, gesturing with the box for April to dump the photos inside.

  But she couldn’t. She could not.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked, still holding the photos tight.

  For the first time the steady, unreadable gaze he’d trained on her began to slip. In his gaze—just briefly—there flashed emotion. Flashed pain.

  ‘I don’t have to explain anything to you, Ms Spencer. All I want is for you to empty this house. That’s it. Empty the house. I don’t require any commentary or concern or—’

  ‘You want an empty house?’ April interrupted, grasping forcefully on to a faint possibility.

  He sighed with exasperation. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well, then,’ she said, with a smile she could tell surprised him. ‘I can work with that.’

  ‘Work with what?’ His expression was wary.

  ‘Getting this stuff out of your mother’s house.’ A pause. ‘Just not into a skip.’

  ‘A storage unit solves nothing. This isn’t about relocating the hoard. I want it gone.’

  Again she smiled, still disbelieving, and now she was certain she was right. ‘You’re the CEO of an international software company, right?’ she said.

  His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t respond.

  ‘So why didn’t you think to just scan all this? You could even put it all in the cloud, so you don’t even have a physical hard drive or anything left behind. It would be all gone, the house would be empty, and...’

  And you won’t do something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.

  But she didn’t say that. Instinctively she knew she couldn’t. She couldn’t give him something to argue with—that he could refute with, You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.

  Which would be true. Or should be true. But it wasn’t. And, no matter how weird that was, and how little she knew about this man, she was certain she was right.

  When she looked at Hugh Bennell—or at least when he really looked at her, and didn’t obscure himself behind that indecipherable gaze—she saw so much emotion. So much...more. More than she’d see if he didn’t care.

  She was sure there were people out there who truly didn’t care about photos and old school report cards and badly drawn houses with the sun a quarter crescent in the corner.

  But one of those people was definitely not standing before her.

  His gaze wasn’t shuttered now. In fact she could sense he was formulating all matter of responses from disdain, to anger, to plans for her immediate dismissal.

  As every second ticked by April began to realise that she was about to be fired.

  But that was okay. At least she’d—

  ‘That is a possibility,’ he said suddenly. As if he was as surprised by his words as she was.

  April grabbed on to them before he could change his mind. ‘Awesome! I can even do it for you—it won’t add much time...especially if you can get one of those scanners you can just feed a whole heap of stuff into at once. And maybe I can take photos of other stuff? Like if I find—’

  ‘I’ll organise the equipment you need.’

  He stepped around April, carrying the box back into the foyer. He dropped it onto the bottom step and April added the pile of photos on top.

  She wanted to say something, but couldn’t work out what.

  ‘Hugh—’

  ‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘You should go home. See you tomorrow.’

  Then, just like that, he left.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Hugh set up the scanner on the marble kitchen benchtop.

  April was just finishing up the second reception room. He could hear the sound of the radio station she listened to above the rustle and thud of items being sorted.

  When he’d interrupted her earlier to announce his presence she’d been singing—rather badly—to a song that he remembered being popular when he was back at high school.

  She’d blushed when she’d seen him. The pinkening of her cheeks had been subtle—but then, he’d been looking for it, familiar now with the way she seemed to react to him.

  He reacted too. As he always did around her. Even when she’d been standing before him, hands on hips, acting as self-designated saviour of old photos, evidence of his lack of artistic ability and irrelevant school reports.

  Even then—as he’d struggled with the reality that the distance down that hallway to the skip had been traversed on feet that had felt weighted to the ground with lead—and hated himself for it—he’d reacted to her.

  He’d reacted to the shape of her lips, to the way she managed to look so appealing while her hair escaped from its knot atop her head, and to the shape of her waist and hip as she leant against that broom...

  And then he’d reacted to her imperious words, admiring her assertiveness even as he’d briefly hated her for delaying him. He’d needed to get that stuff out of the house. Quickly. Immediately. Before he succumbed to inertia like with the other box, which—while no longer on his coffee table—still taunted him from the back of the cupboard in his otherwise spotless spare room.

  But then he had succumbed to April’s alternative. At least temporarily.

  If it keeps a good employee happy, then what’s the problem? I can just delete it all once she finishes.

  That was the conclusion he’d decided he’d come to.

  He finished hooking up the scanner to the laptop he’d previously provided for April, then waited as the software was installed.

  Footsteps drew his gaze away from the laptop screen.

  April stood across from the kitchen bench, smiling again. Sans blush.

  She looked confident and capable and in control—as she always did in all but those moments between them he refused to let himself think about.

  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 wh
en 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.’

  He slid off his stool, then walked around to the other side of the kitchen bench. She watched as he filled the kettle, then plonked it without much care onto its base. But he didn’t flick the lever that would turn it on.

  He grabbed Apri
l’s mug from the sink, and another from the overhead cupboard, then put both cups side by side, near the stone-cold kettle.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked. She could only guess at whatever was swirling about in his brain. His attention was seemingly focused on the marble swirls of the benchtop.

  His head shot up and their gazes locked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cool,’ April said with a shrug. ‘I don’t need to know.’

  Although she realised she wanted to know. Really wanted to.

  April slid off her stool, too. She skirted around the bench, terribly aware of Hugh’s gaze following her. She didn’t quite meet his gaze. She couldn’t. Even as thoughts of discovering what was really going on in Hugh’s head zipped through her mind, other thoughts distracted her. About discovering how Hugh might feel if his lovely, strong body—hot as hell, even in jeans and jumper—was pressed against hers. If, say, he kissed her against the pantry door just beside him...

  Stop.

  This was Ivy and Mila’s influence, scrambling her common sense. It wasn’t how she really felt. She’d never felt like this.

  She reached past him, incredibly careful not to brush against him, and switched on the kettle.

  She sensed rather than saw him smile—her gaze was on the kettle, not him.

  ‘Let me help you,’ she said. ‘Stop trying to convince yourself you want something you don’t actually want. At all. Stop pretending.’

  Too late, she realised the error of her ‘help him with the kettle the way she’d help him with his stuff’ metaphor. She’d ended up less than a foot away from him.

  Or maybe it hadn’t been an error at all.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was deep. Velvety.

  April looked up and their gazes locked.

  It was like the stripy blouse moment all over again. But more, even.