to his office and caught the last floral notes of Naomi Johnson. His mind made up, Sev picked up his phone.
Naomi was just checking hers when it rang and, given her recent text to her father, naturally she assumed it was him. He’d actually seemed impressed when Naomi had told him about the interview with Sevastyan. Maybe he was ringing to find out how it had gone?
‘Hi, Dad, I was just—’
Her voice was all gushing and needy and not one she’d used on him, Sev thought. ‘It’s not your father. This is Sev.’
‘Oh.’
He heard the sag of disappointment in her voice, which was a first for Sev—women were usually falling over themselves to get a call from him. ‘Your boss.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Ha!’ Sev said. ‘We’ll have to work on that one. Congratulations, Naomi, you’ve got the job.’
Naomi stood in the foyer and knew that she should end the call.
Simply hang up and get the hell out of there.
‘I thought that I’d made it clear—’ Naomi attempted, but Sev interrupted her.
‘How about I sweeten the deal with quarterly trips home to the UK? I’m actually going there in November for a private visit. You can have a couple of weeks off. I’m sure your fiancé will be pleased to see you.’
Naomi swallowed but then frowned at his next question.
‘Why didn’t he come with you?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘To New York?’ Sev said. ‘Why did you come alone?’
‘We trust each other...’ Her voice was shrill because, bizarrely, at this very moment, Naomi didn’t trust herself.
‘I wasn’t talking about trust, I’m just curious why he didn’t come.’
Oh, he was like a shower of needles, getting into her skin. His question was one that Naomi had asked herself several times.
‘He has an important job.’
‘So do I,’ Sev said, then he decided it didn’t matter. A fiancé, and an absent one at that, was completely irrelevant to him so he deleted her fiancé from the file in his mind named Naomi Johnson.
Irrelevant.
‘Come and work for me, Naomi,’ Sev said, and Naomi closed her eyes and then opened them but she still felt giddy.
Breathless and dizzy just at the sound of his deep voice.
‘Do we have a deal?’ Sev asked.
She was playing with fire, Naomi knew, but then again it was an internal one, and she doubted whether a man as suave as Sevastyan was, at this moment, self-combusting at the thought of her.
It was just a matter of keeping her private feelings in check and, Naomi knew, she was extremely good at that.
She’d been doing that for most of her twenty-five years after all.
She thought of telling her father that she’d scored such a prestigious job, that maybe, finally, she might see a flare of approval in his eyes.
It might be the new start they needed.
‘Naomi,’ Sev pushed. ‘Do we have a deal or not?’
‘We do,’ Naomi croaked. ‘When would I start?’
She hoped that he’d say a month, or even in two weeks’ time.
Or Monday.
She just wanted a little space to clear her head before she faced him again but then came the deep of his voice.
‘Turn around and get back in the elevator,’ Sev replied, and then, like some expert quizmaster, he hit the stopwatch on her life. ‘Your time with me starts now.’
NAOMI WOKE UP lying in a very warm, comfortable bed. She just stared out into the darkness and waited for dawn with butterflies dancing in her chest.
Last night she had called Andrew and had told him that they were over.
As expected, he hadn’t taken it well at all.
But, then, he hadn’t taken her coming to New York to spend time with her father well either. In fact, they had broken up the night before Naomi had flown out. The next morning he had turned up at Heathrow with an engagement ring, telling her that he would wait.
Now she didn’t look back at that time with tenderness. She had been sideswiped, Naomi knew. It had taken these months apart to see that she had said yes under pressure and that she didn’t need him to magnanimously grant her a year’s leave of absence.
It was done and while she should feel relief and did, Naomi wasn’t thinking about Andrew any more.
Instead the butterflies had turned into a flock of sparrows and she felt sick with dread at another difficult conversation she would be having at some point today.
With Sev.
Of course, Andrew had asked her if there was someone else and Naomi had hesitated for a beat too long before answering him.
No, there was no one else, she had told him, and that was the truth.
Sort of.
Naomi had been working for Sev for three months now and, yes, he’d tried it on a couple of times.
Once when they had been stuck in his jet for hours on a runway in Mali and he’d put down the book he always read on take-off and had suggested she might want to go for a lie-down.
With him on top.
Or she could be on top.
He was generous like that, he’d told her.
Another time had been in Helsinki when he’d come to her hotel suite to bring her up to date on a business meeting and to tell her that he’d changed his security code. Naomi had been making notes when Sev had declared himself permanently cured of his yen for blondes.
And had suggested bed.
Of course Naomi told him that, as flattered as she was by his offer, not only was she engaged, she would never get involved with her boss.
He was the least romantic person she had ever met.
And Naomi was completely in lust with him.
For all she had been told how cold he was, Sev didn’t seem that around her.
Despite dumping Andrew,
