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www.millsandboon.co.uk
JESSICA HART was born in West Africa, and has suffered from itchy feet ever since, travelling and working around the world in a wide variety of interesting but very lowly jobs, all of which have provided inspiration on which to draw when it comes to the settings and plots of her stories. Now she lives a rather more settled existence in York, where she has been able to pursue her interest in history, although she still yearns sometimes for wider horizons. If you’d like to know more about Jessica, visit her website: www.jessicahart.co.uk.
CHAPTER ONE
LEX drummed his fingers on the table and tried to tell himself that the uneasy churning in his gut was due to one too many cups of coffee that morning. He was Alexander Gibson, Chief Executive of Gibson & Grieve, one of the most popular and prestigious supermarket chains in the country, and a man renowned for his cool detachment.
A man like him didn’t get nervous.
He wasn’t nervous, Lex insisted to himself. He had been sitting on this damned plane for over an hour now, and if he had to commit himself to flying at thirty thousand feet in little more than a tin can he’d just as soon get it over with, that was all.
See, he wasn’t nervous, he was impatient.
Lex scowled at the sleety rain streaking the cabin windows, and then stiffened as he caught sight of a limousine speeding across the tarmac towards the plane. His drumming fingers stilled and the churning that wasn’t nerves jerked his entrails into a knot so tight that it was suddenly hard to breathe.
She was here.
Very carefully, Lex flexed his fingers and set them flat on the table in front of him while he steadied his breathing.
He wasn’t nervous.
Lex Gibson was never nervous.
It was just that the steel band that had been locked around his chest for the past twelve years had been steadily tightening ever since he had heard that Romy was back in the country.
It had notched tighter when Phin had casually announced that he had offered her a job in Acquisitions.
And tighter still when Tim Banks, Director of Acquisitions, had rung that morning to explain that a family crisis meant that he would have to miss accompanying Lex on the most important deal of his life.
‘But I’ve arranged for Romy Morrison to go with you instead,’ Tim had said. ‘She’s been working with me on the negotiations, and has built up an excellent rapport with Willie Grant himself. I know how important this meeting is, Lex, and I wouldn’t suggest her unless I was sure she was the best. I’ve sent a car to pick her up, and she’ll be with you as soon as possible.’
And now here she was, and the steel band was clamped so painfully around his lungs that it hurt to breathe. Lex forced his attention back to the email he had been reading, but the screen kept blurring in front of his eyes. It would be fine. Romy was an employee, nothing more.
He wanted this deal with Grant more than he had ever wanted anything else and if Romy could help him persuade Grant to sign, that was all that mattered. The sooner she got on this plane, the sooner they could get the deal done.
He was impatient. That was all.
The car had barely stopped by the steps of the executive jet before Phil, the driver, was out and holding open the door for Romy.
‘Mr Gibson doesn’t like to be kept waiting,’ he had said anxiously, watching Romy run around the flat, frantically ticking off items on a mental list.
‘Nappies…travelling cot…high chair… oh, God, the car seat! Yes, I know he’s been waiting an hour already…I’m coming, I’m coming…’
Travelling with Freya was nerve-racking at the best of times, and Romy had been so flustered by the thought of coming face to face with Lex again that she had forgotten first the pushchair and then the changing mat, until Phil, forced to turn round and drive back to the flat twice, was beside himself.
He was clearly terrified of Lex. Almost everyone who worked for Gibson & Grieve found their chief executive intimidating, to say the least.
Romy wasn’t terrified, or even intimidated. But she was very nervous about coming face to face with him all the same. Sitting alone in the back of the limousine as they crawled through the rush-hour traffic, she had swung wildly between wondering what else she had left behind, and wondering what she would say when she saw Lex again.
What she would feel.
Best not to feel anything, Romy had decided. Lex clearly wanted nothing to do with her. He had made no effort to talk to her at Phin’s wedding, and not once in the six months she had been working for Gibson & Grieve had he found an excuse to speak to her.
Perhaps she could have found an excuse to talk to him, Romy acknowledged, but what could she have said?
I’ve never forgotten you.
Sometimes I think about your mouth, and it feels as if you’ve laid a warm hand on my back, making me clench and shiver.
Have you ever thought about me?
No, she definitely couldn’t have asked that.
It was all so long ago now. Twelve years ago. Romy looked out of the window and sighed. She was thirty now, and a mother, and Lex was her boss, not her lover. You didn’t worry about how you felt about your boss. You just did your job.
So that was what she would do.
Romy glanced doubtfully down at her daughter. It wasn’t going to be easy to be coolly professional with Freya in tow, but she would manage it.
Somehow.
Phil already had the boot open and was starting to unload all Freya’s stuff, while the pilot, spotting their arrival, set the engines whining impatiently. The message was clear: Alexander Gibson was waiting to go.
Cravenly, Romy wished she could stay in the car, but then she remembered the desperation in Tim’s voice.
‘Please, Romy,’ he had begged. ‘Sam needs me, but Lex has got to have someone from the team with him when he meets Grant, too. If we let him down on this one, I don’t know what he’ll do, but it won’t be pleasant.’
No one else would do, Tim had said, and in the end Romy had given in. She owed Tim too much to let him down when he needed her most. So she scrambled awkwardly out of the car, Freya in one arm and her laptop in the other, and, putting her head down against the rain, she ran up the steps to the plane.
A flight attendant wearing a badge that read ‘Nicola’ was waiting to greet her at the cabin door, and, in the face of her perfectly groomed appearance, Romy found herself hesitating. It had been such a rush to get ready that she hadn’t had time to wash her hair, put on any make-up, or do more than throw on some clothes, and now she was going to have to face Lex looking a complete mess.
Too bad, she told herself, lifting her chin. He was lucky she was here at all.
Taking a deep breath, she smiled in response to Nicola’s greeting, hoisted Freya higher on her hip and ducked into the cabin.
The plane was narrow but luxuriously fitted-out. It had squashy leather seats, a plush carpet, glossy wooden trim everywhere. But Romy didn’t notice any of it.
Lex sat, halfway down the cabin, a laptop open on the table in front of him, looking up over his glasses, and as their eyes met it seemed to Romy that everything stilled. Behind her, Phil and Nicola had paused, while the sounds of the airport faded abruptly, until the whine of the engines, the rumble and scream of planes taking off and landing, the crackle of the radio as the pilot checked in with the control tower, were all strangely muted and there was only the warm weight of Freya in her arms and the man whose pale grey eyes set her heart thudding painfully in her throat.
‘Hello, Lex,’ she managed, hoping that he would blame her dash up the steps for the breathless note in her voice.
‘Romy.’
Lex didn’t even see the baby at first. His first reaction was one of relief, so sharp it was almost painful. She wasn’t as beautiful as he’d remembered. Oh, it was unmistakably Romy, with that tumble of dark hair and those huge dark eyes, but the enchanting, passionate girl he’d fallen so disastrously in love with had gone. The years had blurred the pure lines of her face and faded the once gorgeous bloom of youth and she was just a dishevelled young woman with a tired face and a baby in her arms.
Thank God, thought Lex, feeling the band around his heart ease very slightly.
There was a beat, and then his mind caught up with his eyes, in a double take so startled that it would have been comical if Lex had felt anything like laughing, which he didn’t.
With a what in her arms? A baby?
Romy’s baby. Another man’s baby. The steel band contracted once more.
His brows snapped together. ‘What,’ he demanded, ‘is that baby doing here?’
‘This is Freya.’ Romy put up her chin at his tone. Was that really all he had to say, after twelve years?
She was furious. With Lex, for daring to sit there, looking like that. Looking as if he had never kissed her, as if he had never made her senses snarl with the touch of his hand. As if he had never loved her.
With herself, for being so bitterly disappointed.
What had she expected, after all? That he would sweep her back into his arms? That the heat would still crackle between them, after twelve long years?
Fool.
‘I explained to Tim that I would have to bring her with me,’ she said in a voice quite as cold as Lex’s. She could do remote and chilly just as well as he could. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’
‘What?’
‘Tim said he would clear it with Willie Grant’s people.’
Lex wasn’t listening. Behind Romy, he could see the driver unloading pushchairs and carry cots and God only knew what else into the cabin. ‘What the hell is going on? You,’ he snapped at Phil, who froze guiltily. ‘Take all that stuff off right now!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Romy clearly, advancing down the cabin towards Lex. ‘Freya needs all that.’
Lex snatched off his glasses. ‘For God’s sake, Romy, you’re not seriously proposing to bring a baby along on a business trip?’
‘I don’t have a choice. I told Tim all this, and he assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem.’
‘No problem?’ he echoed in disbelief. ‘We’re on the verge of negotiating a major deal with a difficult client and you don’t think it’s a problem to turn up with a baby in tow? We’ll look totally unprofessional! It’s out of the question,’ he said with finality.
Romy was strongly tempted to turn on her heel and walk out, but if she did that, what would happen to Tim, and the deal the whole team had worked so hard on?
Drawing a breath, she struggled to keep her temper under control. ‘I was under the impression that you wanted someone from Acquisitions to accompany you?’
‘I do want you,’ said Lex, and for one horrible moment the words seemed to jangle in the air, a bitter parody of the ones he had once murmured against her skin.
I love you. I want you. I need you.
He folded the glasses he wore when working at a computer and put them in the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘I just don’t want a baby.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Romy, ‘but you can’t have me without her. What do you want me to do, leave her on the tarmac?’
Lex scowled. ‘Haven’t you got…I don’t know…childcare or something? What do you do when you’re at work? Or is Acquisitions doubling as a nursery these days?’
Romy set her teeth at the sardonic note in his voice. ‘She goes to the crèche at the office.’
‘There’s a crèche?’
‘Yes, there’s a crèche,’ she said, holding onto her temper with difficulty.
‘One of Phin’s projects, I suppose.’ Lex looked disapproving. His brother had reluctantly joined the company after their father’s stroke, and Lex had put him in charge of staff development. It was meant to be a token position, but he was always coming across initiatives in unlikely places nowadays.
‘I believe so,’ said Romy in a cool voice. ‘It’s one of the reasons Gibson & Grieve is such a popular place to work.’
‘Well, then, why can’t the baby go there?’
‘Because we’re going to be away overnight, and the crèche closes at six. I don’t know anyone else I can leave her with, especially not at this short notice. Tim only rang a couple of hours ago. I explained all this.’
Freya was getting heavy, and Romy shifted her to the other hip as she glared at Lex in frustration. Part of her was almost glad to find Lex so unreasonable. It made it easier to pretend that he was just a difficult boss.
Easier to forget how warm his hands had been, how sure his lips. How a rare smile would illuminate that austere face and warm the cool grey eyes.
‘I don’t think you quite realise how difficult it has been for me to get here this morning,’ she went on crisply. ‘I’m here because Tim seemed to think that it was important, but if you’d rather go on your own, that’s fine by me.’
A muscle was working in Lex’s cheek. ‘It is important. I need someone who’s up to speed on the details of the acquisition.’
‘Then perhaps you would prefer to rearrange?’ she suggested, and Lex made an irritable gesture.
‘No, we’re going today. I understand from Tim that Grant’s not that keen on the deal, and it’s taken long enough to get him to see me. If we start messing around and changing dates, it could jeopardise the whole deal and I don’t want to do that. We’ve been working on this too long to throw it away now.’
Romy said nothing.
Lex glared at her. There was only one choice, and they both knew it.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, bring all that stuff back,’ he snapped at Phil, who exchanged a look with Nicola and went back down the steps into the rain to collect everything that he’d just stashed back in the boot of the car. ‘Tell the pilot we’re ready to go as soon as you’re clear. We’ve wasted enough time this morning.’
Annoyed, he smacked the lid of his computer down and directed another irritable look at Romy. ‘You’d better sit down,’ he said, pointing at the seat opposite him. ‘And the baby.’
‘Freya,’ said Romy, not moving.
‘What?’
‘Her name’s Freya.’
Her chin was up, and the dark eyes looked directly back into his.
And Lex felt the world shift around him, just as it had done all those years ago. She was closer now, close enough for him to see the fine lines starring her eyes, and he struggled to hold onto his conviction that she was just tired and untidy and nothing special.
But his gaze kept catching on the lovely curve of her mouth, and when he looked back at her he had the horribly familiar sensation of falling into those eyes. Lex had never understood how so rich and dark a brown could be so luminous. He wasn’t a fanciful man, but it had always seemed to him as if light glowed in their depths, warming and beckoning.
How could he have thought for a moment that she wasn’t as beautiful as ever?
Twelve years ago, he had fallen into those eyes, heedless of the consequences. He had lowered his guard and made himself vulnerable, and there was no way he was going through that again.
Lex willed himself not to look away, but he had himself back under control. He could do this. All he had to do was think about the deal. That was all that mattered now, and the fact was that he needed Romy. Without Tim Banks, she was his connection to Willie Grant, and he wouldn’t put it past her to take the wretched baby and walk off the plane. She always had been stubborn.
‘Very well,’ he said tightly. ‘You and Freya had better sit down.’
‘Thank you,’ said Romy, and sat down opposite him, calmly buckling her seat belt and settling the baby—Freya—on her lap.
Lex’s jaw worked as he regarded her with a kind of baffled resentment. She was mighty cool considering that he was Chief Executive and she was just a temporary employee, and a far from senior one at that.
This was all Phin’s fault.
Twelve years. That was how long he had spent trying to forget Romy, and the moment he laid eyes on her again he knew he had been wasting his time. He’d known she was back in the country. He’d known she had a baby. His mother had heard it from Romy’s mother and had sucked in her breath disapprovingly at the thought of her god-daughter as a single mother.
‘Well, that’ll bring Romy home,’ she had said.
And it had.
He had even known Romy would be at Phin’s wedding. He’d thought he had braced himself to meet her again, but when the organ had struck up and he had turned with Phin to watch Summer walking up the aisle, all he had seen was Romy, sitting several rows behind, and his heart had crumpled at the sight of her. Romy, with her dark, beautiful eyes and the mouth that had haunted his memory for so many years. Romy, who had loved another man and had a baby to show for it.
Lex had avoided her at the reception, and despised himself for it. He was Chief Executive of the fastest-growing supermarket chain in England and Wales. He didn’t care about anything but the success of Gibson & Grieve. He had no trouble finding a woman if he wanted one. So he should have been able to greet Romy casually and show her that he realised her decision had been the right one.
Because of course it was. She had been far too young to marry. He was eight years older than her, much too serious to manage all that passion and spirit. He would have crushed her, or she would have crushed him, and left him anyway. The only sensible part of the whole affair was their pact to tell no one else.
So there should have been no problem about meeting her again. But every time he told himself he would go over and say hello there had been someone with her and she had been laughing and waving her arms around so that the collection of bangles she always wore chinked against each other. Or she had been lifting her hand to push the hair away from her neck and he had been gripped by the memory of how soft and silky it had felt twined around his fingers.
And with that memory had come a flood of others that he had failed to forget: the scent of her skin, the husky laugh, the curve of her shoulder and pulse that beat in the base of her throat. That stubborn tilt of her jaw. That smile, the way she had pulled him down to her and made the world go away.
And then Phin was there, clapping him on the shoulder, telling him, almost as an aside, that he had offered Romy a job in Acquisitions.
‘What? Why?’
‘Because she needs a job,’ his brother told him. ‘She’s got a baby to support, and she’s having trouble finding work. She’s been working overseas and it’s hard to get a job when you’ve got a CV that’s quite as varied as hers.’
Lex managed to part his lips and form a sentence. ‘She should have thought about that before she drifted around the world.’
‘You put me in charge of staff development,’ Phin reminded him unfairly. ‘I think Gibson & Grieve needs people with Romy’s kind of experience. She was telling me about a diving centre she’s been running in Indonesia: she’s got all sorts of skills that we can use.’
‘Phin, are you sure this is a good idea?’
‘Look, it’s just a temporary job, replacing Tim Banks’s assistant while she’s on maternity leave. I think Romy will be good at it, and it’ll give her the experience she needs to find a permanent job. It’s a win-win situation.’
Lex hadn’t been able to object any further, or Phin would have wondered why he was so reluctant to have Romy working for Gibson & Grieve. His brother might seem the most easygoing of men, but Lex was discovering that he was far more perceptive than he seemed.
‘Fine,’ he had said with shrug, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. ‘It’s your call.’
But Phin wasn’t the one who braced himself every day in case he saw her. Who looked up every time the door opened in case it was her. Who had to walk around with a fist squeezed around his heart, just knowing that she was near.
Everything had felt tight for six months now. His head, his eyes, his heart, his chest. Usually, work was a refuge, but not now, not when Romy could appear at any moment.
So he had seized on the chance of two days away in the Highlands, finalising the deal that would garner Gibson & Grieve a foothold in Scotland at long last. It was something his father had long tried to set up, and Lex, who had spent his life trying to prove that he could run Gibson & Grieve even better than his father, was determined to seal this one and take the company in a new direction that was all his own.
Lex had planned it to be just him and Tim. No entourage, no fuss. Willie Grant, of Grant’s Supersavers, was by all accounts a recluse and an eccentric. The last thing Lex wanted was to alienate him by arriving with a lot of unnecessary people. Tim had warned him that Willie was a straight talker, and he wanted to do this face to face. Lex was fine with that. He was a straight talker too.
But now Romy was sitting opposite him instead.
With her baby.
At the front of the cabin, Nicola was hurriedly stowing away the extraordinary amount of equipment Romy had seen fit to bring with her. The door had closed after the driver, who had escaped gratefully down the steps, and the pilot was already taxiing, anxious to make up for lost time.
Lex wrenched his mind back from the past and looked at his watch. Two and a half hours behind schedule, and they still had a fair drive after they got to Inverness. Willie Grant lived in a castle in the wilds of Sutherland, in the far north west of Scotland, and God only knew how long it would take to get there. Summer, his PA, would ring and explain the delay, but Lex hated being late.
He hated it when events were out of his control, like this morning. The way they always seemed to be whenever Romy was around.
His life was spent keeping a close guard on himself and his surroundings. Only once had he let it drop, in Paris twelve years ago, when he had lost his head and begged Romy to marry him. Lex had never made that mistake again.
The plane was turning at the end of the runway, and the engines revved until they were screaming with frustration. Then the pilot set them hurtling down the runway.
Lex resisted the temptation to close his eyes and grip the seat arms. He knew his fear was irrational, but he hated being dependent on a pilot. It wasn’t the speed that bothered him, or even the thought of crashing. It was putting himself completely in someone else’s control.
Romy loved take-off. He remembered how her eyes had shone as the seats pushed into their backs and the power and the speed lifted the plane into the air. Lex hadn’t said anything, but she had taken his hand and held it all the way to Paris.
Did she remember?
Lex’s face was set with the effort of keeping his gaze on the window, but it was as if his eyes had a will of their own. Like a compass needle being dragged to true north, they kept turning to Romy in spite of the stern message his brain was sending.
The baby, he saw, was looking as doubtful about the whole business as he felt. When the plane lifted off the tarmac and Lex’s stomach dropped, she opened her mouth to wail, but Romy bounced her on her lap, distracting her from the pressure in her ears until she was gurgling with laughter.