He was already walking towards the door and Ellie tripped behind him, stuffing her files into the briefcase and balancing the tablet and her coat in her free hand.
Unsurprisingly, she thought sourly, the man had not offered to carry anything for her. She was grateful that she was being given a second chance to prove herself but, if he wanted to bring her round to promoting the concept of a resort where people were invited to pay a fortune so that they could hook up with similarly rich people for meaningless sex, then he was barking up the wrong tree.
Meaningless sex wasn’t her thing. She could still remember the swinging parties her parents had had, the concept of free love which they had never hidden from her. Once, when she’d been eight or nine, she had burst into the kitchen for a glass of water only to find her mother wrapped round a fellow hippy houseguest. After that, she had had the talk about the birds and the bees—except, unlike most ‘birds and bees’ talks delivered by well-intentioned, responsible parents, hers had been liberally promoting the joys of experimental sex and the positives of being adventurous.
There was a lift that went directly from the gym, straight up to Niccolo’s suite of offices on the top floor of the building. She could have been a piece of office furniture for all the attention he paid to her on the way. He worked on his phone, indolently leaning against the brushed metal panel, one hundred percent focused on whatever he was doing.
Even when the lift doors purred open, he barely raised his eyes from whatever was garnering his attention. His hair had more or less dried and he had raked his fingers through it, giving it an approximation of neatness. Gone was the raw, primal male heaving his impossible load of weights and in its place was the urbane and sophisticated billionaire who could have whatever he wanted at the click of his imperious fingers, although...
Her gaze skittered surreptitiously to him and she shivered because, suit or no suit, there was still something darkly, dangerously and thrillingly intimidating about him. She stiffened at the fanciful turn of her thoughts. She wasn’t a Victorian maiden and he wasn’t a swash-buckling male. She was an efficient and ambitious partner in an up-and-coming advertising agency and he was a potential client who had the capacity to put their business on the map. She’d worked hard for this opportunity and she wasn’t going to squander it.
Ellie barely noticed the plush surroundings as they disembarked on the top floor. There was a hush in the huge open space, where smoked-glass partitions and cleverly positioned plants formed barriers between some of the walnut-and-chrome desks. It was the hush of people working hard to make the billions that kept Niccolo’s sprawling company at the top of the pecking order.
His offices were at the end of a thickly carpeted corridor and he only paused when he entered an outer room where a middle-aged woman was busily doing something on her computer.
‘No interruptions for the next hour,’ Niccolo said, sweeping past to push open his office door, then standing aside for Ellie to brush past him. ‘I’ll be busy.’ He turned to his secretary and Ellie could detect the wicked grin in his voice. ‘Ms Wilson, who’s going to try and convince me that sex doesn’t sell.’
Ellie knew when she was being goaded and, much as she didn’t like it, discretion was the better part of valour. And who knew? Maybe she would be able to make him see that sex wasn’t the be all and end all when it came to selling an image of fun.
‘So.’ Niccolo waved to one of chairs clustered around a low wooden table. His office wasn’t so much one room as several rooms laid out in the manner of a very expensive, very open-plan studio apartment. There was a sitting area, a dining area and a bar area. All that was missing was a bedroom, although the deep three-seater sofa against the grey wall...
Ellie sat. The chairs were low and deep. They were designed to encourage relaxation but, since the last thing she felt was relaxed, she perched uncomfortably on the edge of one and placed her tablet on the table in front of her.
Niccolo sprawled in the chair facing her.
‘You were going to try and win this contract,’ he drawled, settling into the chair and loosely linking his fingers on his washboard-hard stomach. ‘By showing me what you can do when sex on the beach meets sunsets in paradise.’ He grinned. ‘So, lose the landscaped garden appeal, and the locally sourced fruit-and-veg slideshow, and show me how you can get on board with love at first sight and adventures between the sheets.’
In that very instant, Ellie knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was almost no chance Niccolo was going to use her agency to promote his venture.
Her time should have been up but he found her entertaining. She could hear the thread of amusement in his voice and she could see it reflected in the lazy speculation behind his dark eyes.
He owned the company and he could do exactly what he wanted and, if he wanted to toy with her, then there was no one to stop him.
She wasn’t the sort of woman he was accustomed to meeting and that was the long and short of it. He might genuinely be interested in her input, because it would be so contrary to the rest of the pitches he had heard, but in the end the job would go to the agency that fell in line with his fun-in-the-sun, hit-and-run version of love.
‘I don’t think I’m the right person for the job, Mr Rossi,’ Ellie said politely. ‘I’ve had a very high success rate with all the other contracts I’ve been given. I did truly believe that the best approach when it came to advertising your hotel would be to promote it as something classy and unique, with much more on offer than any more downmarket resorts that specifically appeal to singles, but I can see that you’re not really on board with that concept.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m curious because—and correct me if I’m wrong here—you’re in the service industry and yet you’re allowing your own personal prejudices to get in the way. I’m finding it hard to believe that a woman in her twenties, which is what I’m assuming you are, can be so morally upright that she digs her heels in at the thought of promoting a hotel where single people can have a bit of fun in agreeable surroundings.’
Ellie met his eyes without flinching. ‘I do think that romance can blossom in the sort of setting your hotel will provide, and I really do feel that that’s an important aspect that should be promoted, but I just don’t think I would be very good at producing an advertising campaign that focuses on people bed-hopping for two weeks.’
‘You make it sound as though sex is something distasteful.’ Niccolo was intrigued. She was so different from any other woman he had ever met that she could have come from another planet.
She was leaning towards him, hands gripping the sides of the chair. She had removed the frightful coat, although the jacket underneath was still firmly in place. Even so, he could still make out the white blouse and under it the shadowy silhouette of her jutting breasts.
His breathing slowed. His long lashes veiled his expression but there was a sudden stillness about him that betrayed a momentary lapse of control. The throb in his loins heralded a desire that was rock-hard and shocking because it was the last thing he’d expected. He shifted, sitting upright to try and release some of the painful pressure.
Any other woman might have tuned in to the shift in atmosphere, the crackle of electricity in the air, the tension that had settled between them, as taut as a piece of elastic pulled to breaking point.
Ms Eleanor Wilson didn’t. She was staring at him with wide-eyed earnestness. She
