to dislodge the shoe she had just managed to superglue to her hand. This was so not happening.
‘Okay. It’s okay. Breathe,’ she instructed with an edge of panic when it became apparent she was going to do herself a serious injury if she continued to wang her arm about so insanely.
She counted to ten.
Then, calmly and without any sense of drama, lest the shoe somehow suspected she was going to try and wrench it free again, she placed her free hand on top of the harbinger of doom and pulled. Gently at first, then harder, as tears of frustration pooled at the outer rims of her eyes.
‘Damn it, budge, why don’t you?’ Desperate, she glanced around the private bathroom that connected to her office, looking for something to prise it off with. This was what she got for trying to be clever and fix her beloved shoes; the ones with the magical confidence-boosting properties, on the morning of her eight a.m. breakfast meeting with Eleanor Moorfield—designer of the shoe now attached to her hand—instead of the night before, where it had been clearly scheduled on her To Do list. But last night, after getting in late from a day of meetings, followed by an uncomfortable visit with her sister, Sephy, she had bypassed the shoe-fixing in favour of a large glass of red and some sleep.
‘A-hah,’ she exclaimed in a light-bulb moment. One-handed she upended the contents of her bag and rummaged for a nail file. Locating one and holding it aloft triumphantly, she smiled at her genius in the mirror, before trying to slide the file between the sole of the stiletto and the palm of her hand.
No deal.
A trickle of hysteria bubbled its way to the surface.
It was now one hour and fifteen minutes before she was due to deliver the pitch of her life. She’d been working on the presentation for six weeks. Six weeks of silly hours. Six weeks of devising, developing, practising and polishing. She had it on super-secret authority that Eleanor Moorfield, ex-model turned award-winning shoe designer, was looking to relocate her headquarters from Italy back to England. The Moorfield brand was right up there with Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, and all the other ‘have to have’ shoes women salivated over. Securing a contract to provide business premises for the Moorfield headquarters, shop units and manufacturing set-up would be a real coup for the King Property Corporation. Not to mention prove to herself that she hadn’t lost her touch. That she still had what it took to get out there and get the business in.
On her own. Without help.
KPC had been, and always would be, her life.
By the time her father had retired and she’d stepped up as CEO, KPC had over three hundred commercial buildings it owned and leased out and Nora’s first challenge had been to secure the company’s future against an economic downturn. Confidence had come from her passion for KPC, her unwavering dedication, and the knowledge that she could always get guidance from her father if needed.
But when her father suffered a major health crisis she’d been forced to approach her brother Jared in New York, and persuade him to return to the family he hadn’t been part of for ten years and the company he had declined to run—the company she loved, for help.
She had always known her brother’s expertise was on loan and ever since Jared had returned to his own life in New York, she had been working to implement the changes he had helped come up with. Changes that would add to KPC’s portfolio of property services and ensure the family-run company would recover from its dip and go from strength to strength.
Her confidence had taken a battering, though.
So get the Moorfield contract and hopefully she’d stop second-guessing every decision she made since the death of her father seven months ago and then Jared’s return to New York. Get the contract and she’d have so much work she wouldn’t have time to second-guess every decision she made.
She wanted desperately to land the account. For herself. For her father. Okay, mostly for her father. For the faith he had placed in her.
Blowing a strand of straight black hair out of her eyes she swung back to face herself in the bathroom mirror. It had all been going so well. All she’d had left to do was go through the pitch one last time before quickly repairing the spot where the sole had parted from the leather upper on her shoe. Nora sniffed dejectedly. Possibly she shouldn’t have been wearing this pair so much lately, but they made her feel so in control and can-do when she had them on, and today, especially, she’d wanted to show she loved the Moorfield brand. That she owned the vintage editions as well as the latest designs. She should have stuck with the perfectly serviceable but non-Moorfield stilettos she was wearing, or concentrated on doing one thing at a time, like any other normal professional.
Oh, a sudden brainwave had her rushing towards the door back into her office. Opening it she looked left and then right. What for, she wasn’t quite sure, but with perspective now dangling precariously, it felt like the right thing to do. Then, dashing across her office, stopping briefly to grab the large tote bag she had used to transport some of her files that morning, she encased her ‘predicament’ inside the bag, dragged the straps over her shoulder, and fought one-handed to set free some of her trapped hair.
Finally composed, she wished with all her might that salvation was about to take the form of her assistant Fern, who, if luck was on her side, would turn out to secretly be some sort of shoe surgeon.
Pushing open the door to the reception area, which housed Fern’s desk, she squeaked, ‘Fern? Two words: Help, Emergency,’ and then came to an abrupt halt as she spied a tall, gorgeous—if she was absolutely forced to form a fleeting impression—man, dressed in jeans and a charcoal-grey duffel coat, standing beside Fern’s desk. ‘Oh.’
Okay. This was most definitely not her five-foot-and-half-an-inch assistant, Fern. This was a well over six foot tall tree of a man, making five-foot-ten-inch Nora feel unexpectedly petite as she hovered uncertainly in her office doorway.
‘Technically that’s three words,’ claimed the man, turning from where he’d been staring at a portrait of her father to look over at her.
‘Three words?’ Nora blinked. She didn’t have time for a maths lesson. She needed help. She needed a miracle. She needed…a knight in shining armour strong enough to separate her shoe from her hand? Not that she could afford to be fussy. If the hand had to come too, so be it.
‘Mmmn. “Oh” being the third,’ he explained, shoving his hands casually into his coat pockets.
Somehow, despite a warm smile that induced a quite unnecessary, in her humble opinion, heart-skipping-a-beat moment, Nora felt sure actual knights didn’t come equipped with a mean streak in pedantry. She went to finger-quote and realised she couldn’t. Pushing the straps of the oversized carrier bag over her shoulder, nerves jangling on their very last nerve, she rose to the bait. ‘Technically, who are you, the Word-Count Police?’
No reaction. Well, if you discounted the slow sexy amused lift to his grin. Which, she decided, she really must.
Was this the famous boyfriend, then? Maybe he’d dropped Fern off and was waiting around to say goodbye when she came back from wherever it was she was. She looked around and finding the reception area empty, realised that Fern was probably getting the coffees in. She thought about her usual vanilla latte and, with hand clamped to her shoe, couldn’t help thinking she was going to need something stronger.
Of its own accord, Nora’s gaze swung back to Mr Office Imposter. He was definitely noteworthy. If you went for the whole twinkly blue-eyed, full wide smile, chiselled
