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A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperImpulse an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016
Copyright © Eve Devon 2016
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cover design by Cherie Chapman
Eve Devon asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
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and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007558476
Version 2016-03-30
For Lana and the oodles of joyful ‘Darth Daisy’ inspiration you supply and because one day you will be old enough to know what your ‘Mad Auntie Eve’ does for a living!
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Eve Devon
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
‘Wait – what? Did you just ask me to sell sex at the launch party for your lingerie line?’
Luke Jackson’s usually reserved tone had taken on a new, gruff edge that trickled over Sephy King’s senses, making her heartbeat spike alarmingly. As if her heart needed any more of a workout.
Standing on the newly constructed catwalk in the large ballroom of the King’s family estate, it turned out that T minus two weeks to the launch of her new lingerie collection, Seraphic, and with her stress levels higher than the Shard with the Cheese Grater building stuck on top of it, Sephy’s heart was skipping, dipping and nose-diving quite enough, thank you very much.
Lord, could this go more spectacularly wrong? She should never have attempted to ask him without first practising. She already found his rock-solid approach to their friendship way hotter than she should, without introducing words like ‘sex’ to their banter.
She flicked a look to Luke and saw that her friend had gone from slouching in one of the two hundred gilt-framed chairs surrounding the catwalk, to sitting up a little more straight and a lot more alert.
Damn. There was now no way to retract her garbled plea.
Sephy tried to remind herself that she was good at thinking on her feet. That she excelled at rolling with the punches. But this was Luke she had just made a fool of herself in front of and embarrassment was brought to her on a whiff of defeat that had her shoulders dipping a little.
Clearing her throat she went with a lame, ‘It’s not that I want you to sell,’ she paused and flapped a hand about, creating a new and interesting gesture to indicate the word ‘sex’, ‘specifically – it’s more, the idea of it.’
‘The idea of it?’ Luke’s eyebrows remained in the region of his hairline. ‘I thought you asked me over here to check out how well it was all coming together before getting around to asking me to hand out a few catalogues on the night?’
‘Actually, I have someone for that. What I’m asking for involves a more,’ she licked her lips and searched her head for a tactful phrase, ‘hands-on approach.’
‘Hands-on?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Okay. So, then, you’re going to have to be more explicit about the sex thing.’
Sephy blinked as Luke relaxed back against the chair he was sitting on, his arms stretching out to rest against the backs of the chairs either side of him in a pose that practically shouted, ‘and Honey, I’m all ears.’
She forbade herself to drop her gaze to where his olive-green tee now stretched across his impressively honed chest. Friends weren’t supposed to notice things like that and it was bad enough that the tips of her ears had grown hot at hearing the words ‘explicit’ and ‘sex’ coming out of his mouth. No way did she need her eyes getting in on his act.
And it had to be an act, didn’t it? How could Luke not be as mortified as she to be having this conversation? But as her eyes disobeyed her, and tracked back from their circuit around the vaulted-ceilinged room to land on his face, she caught the unmistakable edge of a grin creeping on to his expression.
Double-triple-quadruple damn.
This had to mean the dimples were about to make an appearance.
Sephy steeled herself for their impact.
Mortification wasn’t even on his radar, was it?
Figured.
Okay, so she was going to have to pull on her big-girl panties and get explicit.
She could do that, right?
She’d already had to employ her most fierce expression while using words of one syllable to get the printer to correct all the signage she wanted for the launch party. Then, in order to get the contractor to finish the catwalk ahead of schedule so that she could see how it all looked and make any changes to the layout in good time, she’d had to go from a winning smile and cajoling tone to being downright expletively explicit.
Neither experience had made Sephy feel great. She didn’t usually have to operate by getting all up in a person’s face. Usually all she had to do was smile. She tried one out for Luke, now.
Just ask him, her sister Nora had calmly advised her when Sephy had told her that she had figured out what would absolutely fix the problem she had with her advertising campaign.
Sephy wanted to roll her eyes as she remembered exactly how many times Nora had thought her sage ‘just ask him’ advice bore repeating. It was at least once every time Sephy tried to think what else she could do to get around the fact that the problem with her marketing campaign was now perfectly encapsulated in the sleek banners that draped down from the ceiling either side of the catwalk and against the walls of the room.
She glanced at the banners now, hoping against hope that what she’d see would somehow have changed.
But no. The models on them, while looking gorgeously every-woman, like she had insisted upon, all made her lingerie look…okay.
Just – okay.
Sephy’s head dropped to her chest.
She wanted – needed the artwork to scream ‘Crave Me’.
Because although she believed in her designs, what she really needed, above everything, was to sell her designs.
In two weeks’ time she needed to be able to look herself in the eye and know that she had given her absolute all to secure the best-possible start for her business and Nora’s whole grinning-like-a-Cheshire-cat thing that had accompanied every one of her ‘just ask hims’ had made Sephy want to sock her in both eyes.
Like it was that easy to ask someone to do some modelling for you.
Like it was that easy to ask Luke.
What she should have done was phone her brother Jared for another business opinion. He could probably have convinced her that all the doubts plaguing her over how non-effective the advertising campaign she’d signed off on was, were all simply down to nerves.
Jared, though, was weeks away from marrying his fiancée Amanda and displaying all the signs of being so in love she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d just grinned like a buffoon and offered up the same unhelpful advice as Nora.
Huh.
Now she came to think of it, Nora’s grinning was probably down to the fact that she had recently got engaged to Ethan Love.
Marriage.
Nuptials.
Weddings.
Sephy shuddered.
It was like some giant conspiracy.
She didn’t begrudge Jared and Nora finding their soul-mates, but she much preferred it when her brother and sister had been completely focused on their businesses. What she wouldn’t do now to go back and spend halcyon days soaking up their knowledge.
Not that she’d had the slightest interest in running a business then. She’d had other priorities. Namely: raising her daughter, Daisy.
Sephy felt a cramp forming in her shoulders and as her hands came up to knead the tight muscle and encourage them to decamp from the vicinity of her ears, she sighed.
Could she really do this?
Could she still devote the time and attention her precocious five-year-old needed, and make Seraphic a success?
Of course she could, she repeated to herself. She’d had clients come to her for couture lingerie for the past six months and she’d managed. She could step it up and expand.
She could.
She had to.
‘Hey, not to pressure you,’ Luke chimed in helpfully, ‘but how much longer are you planning on stalling explaining how I fit into this sex-plan thing of yours, because don’t you need to go pick Daisy up in an hour or so?’
‘It would only be your hands,’ Sephy blurted out.
Luke lifted his hands for inspection and as he held them up, Sephy sucked on her bottom lip.
Last night, in a mind-blowing turn of events, Sephy had learned that Luke Jackson had the most amazing, incredible, beautiful hands.
The discovery had taken place in her living room. A room she’d walked into every day for the last five years. But when she had entered her living room last night, it was to find Luke holding up one of her scarlet satin bras. Instead of looking bashful that he’d been caught trying to put it back into the bag it had fallen out of, Luke had looked…hot and maybe a little bit bothered.
To be fair, Sephy probably could have explained that she had stashed some of her more colourful bras into her bag to bring over here and see if a splash of colour might be the missing ingredient in the banners.
But she had been too busy zeroing in on the way his hands had held the bra, making it look like one of the sexiest garments she had ever designed.
Snapshot after snapshot had flooded her imagination.
Male hands on a female body, highlighting and showcasing the lingerie the model was wearing.
Luke’s hands.
‘I’m going to need more information,’ Luke said, his deep, rough voice exuding patience.
Dark-brown eyes met his moss-green ones.
‘More?’ Really, was it so difficult to understand? ‘I’m talking a few photographs of your hands…and your torso. Sans shirt.’ That last bit had totally been said under her breath because her eyes had taken another peek at the way that soft cotton pulled across hard muscle and more images had flooded her brain so that she was suddenly one-hundred-per-cent sure that what would make her collection fly off the shelf was if Luke’s upper body…his upper naked body was also somehow in the photos.
In desperation she looked around for her usually ever-present coffee. She needed a drink. Stat.
The next thing she knew Luke was fishing his phone out of his pocket.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘I’m making a doctor’s appointment,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘because one of us definitely needs some help. Either my ears need syringing or you really did ask me to take off my clothes so that you could use my body to sell sex at the opening of your lingerie line – in which case it’s you who needs the help.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to ask you for, idiot – some help.’ He knew she wasn’t any good at this; couldn’t he at least cut her a little slack?
‘I’m thinking the kind of help you need comes more under the heading of–’
‘Hey,’ Sephy cocked a hip in indignation, ‘if you’re sitting there thinking this is a “men-in- white-coats job”, then it’s on you to help me sort out childcare.’
Luke’s head snapped up from his phone. ‘I’m sorry, but did you ask me for help. Again. As in twice in one day? Once for,’ Luke paused and gave his head a quick shake, as if even his massive brain couldn’t quite compute what she was asking him to do. ‘And then, again, just now?’
‘Oh, forget it,’ Sephy said, walking to the edge of the catwalk and hopping down. Normally she could stand a little being laughed at. She had learnt that getting over herself allowed her to concentrate on making sure Daisy’s needs came first. But, honestly, if she had known starting a business was going to turn her inside out like this…
She still would have done it, she thought on an inward sigh. She didn’t have any other choice. Waiting until she finished her degree in fashion and then trying to get an internship somewhere wasn’t going to cut it. Not now she needed funds for her and Daisy to live on.
Marching towards the heavy wooden double doors of the ballroom, she heard the scrape of a chair being pushed back.
‘Hey, wait up.’
‘Look, it was a dumb idea,’ Sephy said, shoving her long hair behind her ears before reaching out to grab the door handle. ‘Way too left-field.’ She tried out a light laugh to show it was no big deal, but when Luke didn’t murmur in acknowledgement, she added, ‘Put it down to me being so tired I can hardly think straight.’
When he stepped up behind her she nearly let out a squeal. They didn’t do getting in each other’s personal body space. But then, maybe the part where she tried asking him to pose semi-nude and model for her kind of switched things up.
‘Look, left field or not, at least explain why for me,’ Luke said, his voice now gentle and she hated that she had brought that out in him. She could not remember the last time someone had felt the need to treat her with kid gloves.
‘Come on, what’s the worst that could happen?’ he added.
Sephy swallowed and continued to stare at the century-old patina on the oak doors in front of her.
What was the worst that could happen?
The worst that could happen was that he would see her as needy.
As less than she wanted to be.
Then he would say ‘no’ anyway and it would be always there between them. She didn’t have time to then be worrying if he’d said ‘no’ because she had finally crossed that invisible line she’d so carefully carved into the sand between them.
‘Why is it you Kings have such a problem with asking for help?’ Luke said, stepping back and showing the first sign of impatience with her.
‘Just lucky, I guess,’ Sephy whispered and turned around to face him, still feeling that the only way to save her ad campaign was to have a proper shot at asking Luke to model for her.
‘Cursed, more like,’ Luke muttered and shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans.
He was right.
It was a curse of sorts.
The competitive streak that ran through the Kings bordered on the ridiculous. The fact that she and her siblings never wanted to appear like they couldn’t achieve whatever they set out to achieve was arrogant beyond belief, and the blame lay squarely at the feet of their father, Jeremy King.
Bracing automatically, she felt the wave of grief rise up to take a hefty swipe at her. The emotional maelstrom her father’s death had brought was in such opposition to the studied passivity she had strived for while he was alive that sometimes she wondered if he was up there just to punish her.
But because life was better when she wasn’t feeling angry or negative, she deliberately stepped away from her thoughts and concentrated on her current problem instead.
The difficulty in asking Luke for help really had little to do with wanting to achieve things herself and everything to do with how good he was at helping.
There was this remarkable generosity within him and Sephy was finding it harder and harder to keep the score of who helped who balanced.
He had already helped her develop a storefront for her website and made sure it could handle the extra traffic she hoped for. Now here she was, two weeks to the launch of Seraphic and he’d had to go and inspire her to come up with the perfect solution to her latest problem.
Trying to gather up her thoughts she side-stepped Luke, chose a chair at random, sat down and stared up at the banners.
‘What do you see when you look at these?’ she asked, gesturing to them.
Luke walked up to her and sat down on the chair next to hers, his head tipped up to the life-sized models staring back down at him.
‘I see underwear models.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Surely that’s the point,’ he said.
‘No. That is so not the point.’ Frustrated, Sephy twisted in her seat to look at him while she tried to explain. ‘I need you to see “I want you”.’
Luke went absolutely still.
The ballroom felt like it had shrunk to the size of a steam-room for two, and suddenly Sephy really wanted to play with her hair, or lick her lips, or meet Luke’s quiet and intense gaze with one of her own.
Wow. Okay. Of all the Freudian slip-ups, in all the world…
Dragging in a breath she tore her gaze away to face forward again and said, ‘I mean, if you were a woman looking at this banner,’ she opened her mouth to force in a little more oxygen, ‘nothing about this advert makes you drool or reach for your credit card, does it?’
For a moment, Sephy thought Luke wasn’t going to move, but then slowly he turned his head to look back at the banners.
‘Try to think about it from a female’s perspective,’ she urged. ‘And then think about all the other designer labels out there who sell lingerie.’
‘Okay,’ Luke conceded. ‘Maybe they don’t stand out as much as some of the big names, but those big names have a budget a quadrillion times larger than yours.’
‘You’re right about budget and I’m not looking to compete in that way yet, but tell me you don’t see that I could have made more of an impact with these banners.’
Luke frowned. ‘When the live models come down the catwalk–’
‘That’ll help, sure,’ she said, cutting him off. ‘But the guest list Nora helped me come up with would make London Fashion Week weep with jealousy and I need every single guest to be wowed from the moment they walk in.’
‘So where does sex come into play?’ Luke asked and Sephy tried not to blow her second chance by getting caught up in a game of how many times she could get him to say ‘sex’ and survive it.
‘You have to understand that achieving sales starts way before a buyer even gets their hands on the product. It starts with selling an experience. The most effective way to do that is to either tap into the lifestyle they already live and make the buyer associate your product with it, or, provide a snapshot of a lifestyle they want to aspire to. A lifestyle that they’ll fantasise about so much that they’ll buy my lingerie to get a step closer to it.’
Luke let out a low whistle. ‘You know, any lack of confidence you had about your ability to understand business and marketing is a crock. You have this stuff nailed.’
Sephy felt his quiet compliment warm her through. ‘Um, thank you.’
Luke shrugged like he was simply speaking the truth and cocked his head to the banners again. ‘So what is it you want these banners to sell to the women seeing them?’
‘Yeah, so, um…sex.’
‘O-kay.’
‘That’s putting it too basically.’ How could she explain that last night when she had seen him holding her bra it was as if the bra was saying ‘You want to buy me so that a guy with hands like the one holding me can take me off you,’ without, you know, having to actually say that to him?
‘Sex can be basic all the way through to advanced,’ Luke said drily, ‘I’m pretty sure I understand all the levels.’
Sephy’s stomach bounced up to meet her heart. ‘I know you do. I mean,’ she licked her lips and went for broke. ‘I can see that you could sell … that experience. That’s why, and here comes the left-field part, I really need you to be in these shots with the models.’
Silence while Luke’s eyes sought out, and then searched, hers.
Then, finally, ‘Look, I’m flattered that you feel that these,’ Luke held out his hands, ‘and this,’ he said, pointing to his upper body, ‘fit the bill, but this isn’t something you fix on the cheap. You need to hire a professional male model.’
Sephy winced. ‘I don’t have the money to do that.’
‘I’ll give you the money.’
Damn it, she didn’t want him to think this was some long-winded game of getting him to help her out with money. If she hadn’t accepted any from her brother or sister, there was absolutely, positively, no way, she was going to take it from Luke.
‘I don’t want your money, I want you.’
Luke’s square jaw went into granite mode and Sephy decided that what would help is if she quit saying she wanted him like that. It would definitely help her, because maybe deep, deep, deepest-down she could acknowledge wanting Luke, but she was never going to bring that up to a level where Luke gained first-hand knowledge of how rubbish she was at romantic entanglements. She valued the relationship they had too much.
‘All you’d need to do,’ she said, aiming for a no-big-deal tone as she steered determinedly away from a suggestion of ‘them’, ‘is stand behind the model and maybe put your hands on her hips, or something.’
‘You really think me simply standing shirtless with my hands on her body is going to sex up your lingerie shoot?’
Sephy swallowed. ‘Yes.’
Luke looked at her like she had lost it. Was it possible he spent so much time on his computer as creative director of his Zombie Freedom Fighter games that he had forgotten what he looked like?
‘Please don’t be insulted or freaked out,’ she begged. ‘Please, just think about it. I really don’t have time to source a professional model and Nora has a photographer lined up who will do the work ASAP at cost, to add to their portfolio of work.’
Sephy could feel herself coming very close to batting her eyelashes or laying a hand on his and letting it linger, but she would absolutely not use her femininity to get this from him.