lava. Her thoughts had suddenly become scrambled and a deep fog had settled over her brain. The man was beauty in motion, his body slick, his slightly long, dark hair damp with sweat.
Eyes as dark as night registered her as she stood in front of him, clutching her briefcase for dear life, and fit to explode from the heat in the sensible coat which she hadn’t thought to remove.
He had the lushest lashes she had ever seen on a man, long, thick and fringing eyes that were, just for a few seconds, veiled of all expression.
His features were chiselled to perfection. She knew that he was part-Italian but, unless one was standing right in front of him, it was hard to tell from a picture just how exotic that ancient thread of ancestry was. He wasn’t just your typical tall, dark and good-looking guy. He was a one-of-a-kind dangerously tall, dark and good-looking guy. He oozed the sort of blatant, uncompromising sex appeal that made women walk into lamp posts.
‘Eleanor Wilson.’ Ellie rushed into frantically confused speech, thoroughly disconcerted by the effect he was having on her and not caring for it at all. ‘Ms.’
The veiled expression cleared and his dark, dark eyes connected with hers with a hint of amusement.
‘Ms Eleanor Wilson,’ he drawled, reaching down for a towel she hadn’t noticed and wiping his face before slinging it over his shoulders. He looked at her from her head down, then back up again, then he made an elaborate show of peering around her. ‘Where are the rest of you?’
‘Just me, I’m afraid. Stephen Prost, my business partner, is dealing with a personal emergency at the moment. I hope you won’t mind me saying, but I wasn’t expecting to have to discuss my pitch in a gym. Would we be able to find a seat somewhere?’ She looked around her and failed to see anywhere that could remotely work for her to show him what she had brought with her unless she opted for doing her spiel on the treadmill.
Annoyance flared. How hard was it to stick to the rule book? He had made an appointment, and surely he could at the very least have the courtesy to honour the commitment he had made?
She pursed her lips, bristling. Rules and regulations were in place for a reason. The work place and life in general only operated smoothly if all parties concerned took time out to respect one another.
‘You should take the coat off,’ Niccolo said gently. ‘You must be very hot.’
‘I hadn’t expected to be in a gym,’ Ellie repeated with a tight smile.
‘And so now you are.’ Niccolo shrugged. ‘You have to roll with the punches. Follow me.’ He spun round and began walking towards the back of the gym.
Changing rooms. He was heading to the changing rooms. She could see a concealed door. Ellie cast a desperate glance behind her to the door through which she had come, while her legs propelled her behind him, towards a scenario that took her so far out of her comfort zone that she felt faint.
Ellie behaved by the rules and she believed in them. It was just the way she was. She liked them. She liked the sense of order they conferred. She had lived a peripatetic life with her wandering, nomadic, hippy parents. She had spent a childhood that had spanned the continents, from India as a toddler, through Australia with a brief stint in New Zealand, before returning to Europe via Ibiza, Greece and Spain. She had barely seen the inside of any schools because nothing as dull and as institutional as a school had been allowed to cloud the endlessly blue horizons of her free-spirited parents. Routine had been their enemy and she had become the unwitting victim of their scatty, idealised belief system.
For Ellie, being on the move had fostered a deeply ingrained desire for stability.
By the time her feet had hit the ground at fourteen, and her parents had ruefully accepted that their thirst to see every corner of the globe had been sufficiently quenched, Ellie had thrown herself into the joy of going nowhere with a passion that had almost been physical.
She was a stickler for detail but with a creative streak that had been passed down from her arty parents. That combination had won her her first job at a major advertising agency and, from there, she had been invited to take a chance and team up with Stephen and Adam, both ambitious CEOs at the same firm, to form their fledgling agency. It was the biggest risk she had ever taken, and she had taken it after careful consideration, because she had felt confident about their prospects at capturing a niche but significant market with a media-savvy audience. Everything she did was done with consideration, with nothing left to chance. Like the portfolio she was clutching. A portfolio that should have been displayed in the sanitised confines of a designated office space. With the whiteboard. And no treadmills or punch bags in sight.
She eyed Niccolo’s muscled torso as his T-shirt clung to it, the length of his legs, the strength of his arms, the powerful ripple of muscle and sinew, and she shivered. Here was a man who scorned rules and regulations, and now she wondered just how she was supposed to form any sort of rapport with a man who thought nothing of conducting a meeting in a gym. In the world of advertising, rapport was top dog.
Worse. He was now going to conduct his meeting in the changing rooms of a gym.
He opened the door and she shrieked to a stop, nerves all over the place, fingers grasping the briefcase until her knuckles were white.
Niccolo turned around, both hands on the ends of the towel looped over his shoulders.
Under normal circumstances, this was not the venue he would have chosen to conduct a meeting, but he had reached his office later than normal. Eight instead of his usual six.
He had also not been in the best of moods. His last lover had embarked on on a kiss-and-tell rampage in the press after he had broken off their relationship, and his mother and three sisters had seen fit to link arms in a united front, their mission being to subject him to full-frontal verbal assault on his colourful love life.
Where he had gone to see his mother for dinner at her exquisite cottage near Oxford, expecting some light chat and the usually excellent food her private chef was summoned to provide whenever there were guests, he had instead found himself in the company of not just his mother but his three sisters.
Each of whom had very strong opinions on the sort of women he dated.
He had consequently overslept, and the only thing he had wanted to do when he’d reached his office was to work off some of his stress in the company of a punch bag and a gruelling set of weights.
And, in fairness, he hadn’t expected a woman. And certainly not a woman who looked as though she sucked on lemons for fun.
Right now, she was staring at him with a mixture of disapproval and consternation.
Her coat was still on and her brown hair was neatly scraped back into a bun. A pair of heavy spectacles would have transformed her into the archetypal school mistress.
Although, he had to concede, her eyes were a rather interesting shade of hazel and her mouth, dragged into an unforgiving thin line at the moment, could be quite attractive, because her lips were full and pink.
‘You’ve stopped,’ he said politely. ‘Why have you stopped?’
‘I’m afraid I really don’t think it appropriate for me to have a business meeting with you in a changing room.’
‘Oh, dear. As you can see, I’m currently not in my suit, and after an hour and a half in this place I really need to get out of my sweaty gear.’
