it pains me to imagine what they might have done to me had we not given you the job.’
‘ADAM TYLER, right?’ a husky voice called from behind Adam.
Adam turned to find the lovely lady he had met half an hour before. He blinked. It was a delaying tactic. It gave him a moment to size up the opposition or the problem before he spoke. But whereas before the woman was all elegant nerves, now she was all big smiles and gorgeous dimples. And those were qualities in a woman that he had never seen as a problem.
‘That’s right,’ he said, many years of practice masking everything but nonchalance in his laconic voice.
‘Well, now, you see I got the job.’ She gave him a little curtsy before continuing. ‘And I was told that you were the man I needed to see.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘To get the dirt on our man of the hour.’
He stood up straight, his hands clasped behind his back, and watched as she shifted from one foot to the other, all but dancing on those high red shoes of hers. Then all of a sudden she stopped fidgeting, piercing him with a stare so sharp he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even blink. He just stood there and waited for the acute green gaze to give him a reprieve.
‘Adam Tyler,’ she repeated, her bright eyes flashing as the unexpectedly sharp mind behind them whirred to life. ‘Head of Marketing for Revolution Wireless?’
He watched her carefully as the cogs and wheels clicked in her mind. Revolution Wireless. Billionaire. Chris. She would have the whole deal figured out in no time. So much for them recruiting ignoramuses.
It slammed into his mind that nobody was meant to know anything about Chris. That was the whole point, the beauty of the idea, that Chris would be an unknown, just a guy meeting a girl. But suddenly that was all disintegrating before him.
And disintegration was just what Adam wanted.
Her gaze drifted away from him as, like a good girl, she put two and two together. ‘Chris Geyer. The name was familiar but I couldn’t place it before. He’s one of your partners, right?’
He decided to keep his mouth shut. Maybe the fates had put her here just for him. Maybe he didn’t need to convince Chris. She could be the spanner in the works all on her own.
‘So it’s not a joke,’ she said. ‘The Billionaire Bachelor is not some hook to get a bunch of poor girls all excited only to have the fake Persian rug whipped out from under them. The Billionaire Bachelor is the real deal.’
Adam cringed on the inside. If that was to be the title of the show, Chris was dead meat.
But instead of venting his infuriation with internal screams behind closed eyes, Adam paid close attention to the woman before him, anticipating the inevitable moment when those eyes of hers would skitter back his way, lit all the brighter by the glitter of dollar signs. He braced himself, willing her to get it over with. Willing her to show herself as nothing special, as one of the countless many.
Her glance landed upon him, their eyes clashed, and he took in a short anticipatory breath as he looked for the sly smile that would no doubt touch at the corner of that luscious mouth. The tension inside him grew by the second as he waited for her to feed his disenchantment with womankind.
But the moment never came. Instead of a sly smile, there was a furrowed brow and what he guessed were teeth biting at her inner cheek. She wasn’t looking at him as the answer to all her hopes and dreams, she was looking at him as though she felt sorry for him. And where he had been prepared to be disenchanted, instead he was stunned.
She finally collected herself and smiled, but her expression was infinitesimally cooler than when she had first burst from the inner room, all coltish legs and curtsies.
‘So, anyway,’ she said, her tone pleasant but no longer perky, almost as though she preferred to pretend the past two minutes hadn’t existed. ‘I have been told that the TV station has an account at a lovely little bistro around the corner and I was hoping that I could take you there for lunch.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said, gathering his wits after being befuddled by her strange response, ‘but I don’t think that’s in the rules of the game.’
Her confusion was evident. She took in a short breath as though ready to question his comment, before she obviously figured it out for herself, her eyes brightening again with the realisation.
‘Please! I am not a contestant! The last thing I want or need is some brazen, bawdy billionaire breathing down my neck. Funny, though. You’re the second man today to think that. What is it about me that screams bikinis and hot tubs, I wonder?’ She said it more to herself than to him, but he still took a brief moment to consider the image.
Her conservative outfit did little to hide the long, lean curves and those unbelievable red shoes did things to her legs and her posture that made his mind turn easily to bikinis and hot tubs.
She moved over to the couch and sat down, patting the seat beside her, beckoning him to join her.
If she wasn’t a possible love interest for Chris, then who was she? His interest stirred, he did as he was told, sidling over and sitting beside her, one leg hooking up to cross on top of the other and his arms reaching out to lie across the back of the long leather couch.
‘I should have done this better,’ she said, holding out a slim ringless hand. ‘I’m Cara Marlowe.’
He shook her hand, taking a moment to enjoy the crisp, cool contact. But he waited for her to talk. He found that another good tactic. Most people could not leave silence well alone and they were more likely to fill it with interesting information than if they were questioned directly.
‘I am going to be Chris’s stylist for the duration of the shoot. It will be my job to dress him.’
‘Dress him?’
‘Choose his outfits,’ she explained. She then reached out and touched his knee, her voice affecting the tones of a New York gossip show host. ‘Honey, if I had to actually dress the guy, I’d be asking for a lot more money!’
Adam glanced at her slim hand resting on his knee. It felt nice until it recoiled as though scorched, then moved to slap across her unruly mouth.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m a tad overexcited right now. First I get the job of a lifetime and then I meet a real live Australian Businessman of the Year. I would love to talk to you about that some time. Sorry. There I go again. Taking liberties with a practical stranger. My tongue tends to have a mind of its own when my adrenalin is off and running.’
He gave her a slight nod, though he was again quietly stunned. She knew about his award too? And she was obviously a heck of a lot more impressed with that than with his bank balance. In Adam’s long experience with women, this one was proving to be more unusual with every word that came from her lovely mouth.
She was an enigma wrapped in a very enticing dress. A girl with a good head on her shoulders, and a seriously charming face to boot. A woman with such a sexy, husky kick to her voice it could lure sailors to dash their ships upon mountains of rock, whose words spoke,
