dad’ll hate him.’
Meg turned on her. ‘So?’
Rylie said, ‘She has a point. You don’t have to limit your dating schedule to charming, skint, ambitionless, undemanding men to get back at Daddy.’
Meg’s right eyebrow tweaked to a point. ‘I actually prefer to spend time with men who don’t consider bragging about that day’s corporate buyout fit for pillow talk, thank you very much. I get enough of that around the family dinner table to find it in any way an aphrodisiac. The only way my father comes into it is that at least men not on their way up the corporate ladder never try to get to him through me.’
Tabitha mirrored her expression. ‘Whatever you say.’
Meg poked a face, then looked decidedly back to the front of the group.
What she didn’t say was that the men she favoured also weren’t the types to press for any kind of commitment. They weren’t in any rush to start families of their own. One less pressure to concern herself with.
Besides, it had been a long time since she’d bothered doing anything extreme in order to get through to the big man herself. What was the point? It had never worked anyway.
Rylie pushed in tighter, her voice a secretive stage whisper. ‘It has to be him. Zach Jones. He’s notoriously impossible to pin down. He’s one of those ungettable interviews that would take a girl like me out of Sunday morning fluff TV into the big leagues. I wonder what he’s doing here rather than flitting around the world buying up great wads of prime real estate like it’s going out of fashion? I smell a scoop.’
Meg shook her escaping curls from her cheeks and peeked out of the corner of her eye one more time.
He’d tilted his head up ever so slightly. Sunkissed skin was smoothed over the most immaculately masculine bone structure Meg had ever seen. The shadow of three-day growth covered a jaw that just begged to be stroked. And his lips were so perfectly carved she struggled to take her eyes off them.
All that perfection somehow managed to pale in comparison when she finally saw his eyes.
They were locked on hers.
Dark, dangerous eyes, too far away for her to make out the colour, but she had the feeling she could have doubled the distance between them and still been hit by the thwack of awareness behind them.
She sucked in a breath, thick with tropical humidity that caught in her throat. And a trickle of what was most definitely sweat ran down her neck and between her breasts.
Zach Jones.
His name buzzed about inside her head in her father’s most frosty voice as he flapped the Financial Times in a way that meant he was not happy. ‘He got too big, too quick. Stubborn fool is overreaching. One of these days he’ll land flat on his face. Mark my words.’
Meg didn’t know about overreaching, but she did know that her father didn’t give a damn about anyone below a certain level of accomplishment—client, competitor, offspring…
She swallowed.
There was no flirtation in Zach Jones’s gaze. No measure of awe about who she was. Just copious amounts of brooding intensity centred in those unfathomable dark eyes. Despite it all, the backs of her knees began to quiver.
He blinked. And rolled his shoulders. The first sign he wasn’t as nervelessly blasé as he was making out.
The very thought made way for an unimpeded rush of sexual attraction to slide through her, like a waterfall breaking through a dam of knotted foliage that had held it back a decade.
The ferocity of her reaction had her literally taking a step back. The blister on her heel popped, again. A hiss of pain slid through her teeth as she hopped madly on her good foot.
The man took a step towards her, a hand appearing to flicker in her direction. The tension curling inside her ratcheted up a notch and a half and she knew her sudden breathlessness had far less to do with her stinging foot, and more to do with the stranger in her midst.
Thankfully she caught her balance all on her own, and the man unclenched from his ready-to-pounce position.
She spun back to face front. ‘When are we going to start running, for Pete’s sake?’ she whispered through her teeth.
Rylie reached out and pinched her hot pink cheek. ‘Look who’s suddenly Miss Eager Exerciser.’
‘You bet,’ she said, shuffling from one foot to the other as though she had ants in her pants. ‘Bring on the lactic-acid burn!’ Better that than having to endure the feel of the man’s burning eyes on her back.
She shook out her hands, attempting to shake off the fidgets. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been rebuffed before. It came with the celebrity package as much as being excessively adored. It just thankfully generally happened from afar. By strangers. Whom she didn’t have to look in the eye and pretend it didn’t sting.
‘Meg, he’s coming over!’ Tabitha said so loud those straggling nearby must have heard.
‘We’ll leave you to it, then,’ Rylie said cheerily. ‘I’m counting on you to get me the exclusive!’
‘No, no, no!’ Meg begged.
But it was too late, they were off—Rylie the runner, and Tabitha the gym junkie. There was no way Meg was keeping up with them, even with the amount of adrenalin pouring through her body as she stood all alone in the middle of the dirt track, Zach Jones making a beeline her way.
CHAPTER TWO
MEG jogged for almost five minutes before pulling up to a walk. By then she was already wishing she’d brought a better bra, a hairband and a scooter.
The rest of the stragglers passed her by, including the wellness facilitator who had been bringing up the rear.
All bar one.
She could feel a male presence tucked in behind her. She could hear the heavy pad of his large feet on the compacted dirt path. Dragging in deep, unfit breaths, she caught his scent on the hot summer breeze—expensive, subtle, and wholly masculine.
All this from a man who’d managed to get under her skin in half a second flat. A man who’d rejected her come-hither smile in even less time. Sheesh. The sooner she found out what he was after and got rid of him, the better.
She said, ‘Are we there yet?’ just loud enough he could have no doubt she was talking to him.
‘Do a U-turn and ask me again,’ a deep voice rumbled beside her. A voice that matched the rest of him so perfectly that if she wasn’t gleaming with perspiration from the effect of it she deserved some kind of medal in self-control.
Meg pinched her side with the hopes of fending off an oncoming stitch and the slow burn of attraction that was infusing her in one fell swoop, and turned.
At a distance Zach Jones was something. Up close and personal he was too beautiful for words. Her breath shot from her in a discombobulated whoomph.
She concentrated
