kisses.
For a moment, the icy horror of humiliation froze her. Froze her with her lips still whisper close to his skin.
‘No. I can’t do this. I—’
What was he saying? Eleanor could barely hear him, overcome by her own voice in her head.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
How could she have really believed that Jake could love her? Why? Why on earth would he?
She wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t super smart like him.
She didn’t wear the right clothes like the popular girls. She didn’t know how to flirt, or to kiss a guy. Obviously.
She had to go. She should never have come.
Without a word she stepped around him, climbed onto his bed and halfway out of the window before she registered he hadn’t said a word.
Wow. She’d actually thought he’d tell her to stop. To stay.
She looked over her shoulder as her legs dangled outside, her skirt all rucked up around her waist—but she didn’t care. As if Jake would even notice.
Jake was watching her. His gaze was full of … what?
Regret?
No. Now she was just being delusional. She knew what it was.
Pity. Definitely.
And she had no interest in staying around for that.
So she jumped to the ground, and walked—even though she badly wanted to run—back to her house. Without a backward glance.
Later, as she stared at her ceiling, incapable of any more tears, she managed to unearth one single positive out of the whole horrible mess.
This was another one of her mum’s ideas—the absolute belief that something good could be found in absolutely anything. She was pretty sure even her mum would’ve been stumped as far as finding a positive in having her ripped away from Eleanor far too soon—but this thing with Jake? Yes—there was a positive.
She’d never have to see him again.
CHAPTER ONE
Sydney, New South Wales Today
IT WAS AN ambush. Plain and simple.
Jake Donner knew it. Every one of the board members who currently watched him with matching unreadable expressions knew it, too.
How long had this been planned? Hours? Days? Weeks?
‘No.’
Jake figured that was pretty much all that needed to be said.
‘There’s no other option, Jake.’ This came from Cynthia George, a silver-haired, retired chief executive of one of Australia’s major banks who now spent her spare time on a handful of corporate boards across Sydney. As she studied him with what could only be described as a steely expression, Jake was reminded why he was so keen to appoint her to this board.
Intimidating just began to cover it. Pretty damn scary was closer.
But still, he shrugged. ‘Find another one.’
Jake forced his body to fall back into the soft leather of his high-backed chair, attempting a fair facsimile of casual nonchalance. But his muscles were tense, and he found himself fighting the instinct to leap up and pace around the edge of the Armada Software boardroom.
This was not representative of his usual board meeting experience. Usually, the time was spent paying careful attention during the topics that interested him, zoning out during those that didn’t, and occasionally congratulating himself on his decision a few years back to extract himself from this excruciatingly boring world of the business he’d founded. Now he had a twenty-eight per cent share of the company, an up-and-coming CEO—also currently studying him across the streaky marri surface of the boardroom table—and a board made up of Sydney’s corporate elite—nearly all financially invested in Armada. All this added up to the perfect excuse to pay as minimal attention as possible to the day-to-day operations of the company and instead let the experts worry about it while he did what he was actually good at: coding software.
Up until about a minute ago, this arrangement had been operating flawlessly.
Across the table, the chief financial officer pushed a paper-clipped sheaf of papers in his direction, the pages fanning out slightly as they slowed to a stop.
‘Here’s an option, Jake. We reduce our FTE by twenty per cent.’
Full-time employees. In an organisation of over two thousand in this skyscraper alone, that was a heck of a lot of people.
‘Cutting staff is a last resort.’
The CFO nodded. ‘Agreed.’ He gestured at the LCD screen at the head of the table and the final presentation slide it still displayed. ‘Hence the board’s proposal.’
Jake didn’t even bother to look at the figures and multicoloured graphs before him. He was familiar with them all. He might slouch about in his chair and say very little at these meetings, but he read every single board document in detail.
Sales were down. Costs were up. Australia might have weathered the Global Financial Crisis better than most of the world, but Armada had not emerged unscathed.
The facts were inarguable.
But the proposed solution?
Definitely worth arguing about.
‘I’m confident that the release of Armada’s first smart phone will significantly increase revenue,’ Jake said, and he was. Just not as confident as he’d been last night when he’d absorbed the surprising financial report. He’d expected the board to have a typically brilliant solution to what he’d been sure was a temporary problem. But their unease was unsettling. Their solution impossible.
Jake Donner—as the new face of Armada? Nope. Wasn’t going to happen.
‘There’s no need for something so drastic,’ he said.
Cynthia smiled without humour. ‘A few TV and radio appearances, a conference keynote address and a couple of interviews is hardly drastic, Jake. Armada needs a public face, and you’re it.’
He shook his head. ‘For a decade the quality of our products has spoken for itself. I seriously doubt wheeling out some computer geek is going to help anything.’
She snorted, an incongruous sound in the perfectly silent room. ‘Computer geek? Try infamous multimillionaire recluse. Number two in Headline magazine’s list of Australia’s most intriguing people. Number one in Lipstick’s most eligible bachelors. The increased publicity for the new phone will be immeasurable should you be the face of the product.’
Jake sank even further into his chair, stretching his long jean-clad legs out beneath the table. He didn’t
