and straight to Mitchell’s office. All six feet of him leaned, ankles crossed, on his desk-edge, his phone still in his hand, those blazing eyes fixed steadily on her. And, as it always did, his regard boiled her blood even as it heated less willing bits of her, too. And she realised that this was part of why she even bothered coming to work.
The daily zing she got from sparring with Prince Harry through the glass of his high-altitude corporate eyrie. Or on email. Or in team meetings.
Like a caffeine hit for her soul shooting straight through the numbness of the eight-till-six grind.
Reminding her that she was, in fact, still alive.
Part of his job involved telling her how to do hers. It wasn’t personal. So why was she making it that way? Yes, he was a pain and, no, he wasn’t the most supportive leader she’d ever had but it was hardly Mitchell’s fault that she’d cast him as her own personal defibrillator.
For the numb days.
Maybe she could work with him instead of against him and find a happy place again deep within the relentless wheel of corporate finance.
Maybe he’d make a better ally than enemy?
But, as she stared, something in the way she was regarding him—or the reluctant acceptance he could see in her, maybe—caused three little lines to appear between his brows and he pushed away from his desk slightly, one hand half reaching towards her.
Almost beseeching.
Her gaze dropped to her phone.
BEFORE THE ICE AGE RESUMES, DEAN!
Her fingers began trembling immediately and she eased the phone onto her desk before it slipped onto the plush carpet.
So much for allies …
Then, as she sat there, seething, the most brilliant idea bloomed to life in her mind.
So brilliant, she couldn’t for the life of her think why it hadn’t struck earlier. She’d wasted so much time and energy.
And all the time she could be doing this!
She pushed to her feet a little unsteadily, smoothing her pencil skirt demurely down her thighs, and lifted her gaze back up to Mitchell’s. Then she channelled every bit of Scarlett Johansson she could muster into the slow-motion glide over to his office and up the carpeted steps to the glass wall where he still stood, tense with irritation, and she stopped the toes of her strappy heels directly in front of his Italian leather. So they’d be touching if not for the glass divider.
She held his gaze the whole way.
Every person in the room watched her, not least Harry Mitchell, whose frustrated annoyance had been replaced by suspicious confusion. And something else. He’d watched her Scarlett-walk with incredibly satisfying interest.
Izzy wet her lips, knowing he was the only one who could see, and then leaned more closely into the glass and let her breath mist over on it.
Mitchell’s voice box lurched.
She lifted her index finger to her lips and sucked it gently into her mouth, then dragged it back out down her full, moist bottom lip.
His chest rose and fell. Blue eyes remained riveted on hers. Full of the usual heat. Full of new speculation and anticipation.
And she wrote seven letters backwards in the mist on the glass.
Just two words.
One of them bad. One of them very bad.
Mitchell’s smouldering gaze flickered down to the glass and then flared as he read her backwards statement.
‘I trust that is prosaic enough for you, sir,’ Izzy said without raising her voice.
His left brow arched high. No question that her latest written submission was unambiguous in its brevity. And no question that she was through at Broadmores regardless of whether she’d just quit.
Which she had.
She erased the misty evidence with her jacket sleeve and turned from all the sex simmering between them, ignoring the open-mouthed stares of her stunned colleagues, and crossed back to her desk on winged feet.
Three bits of scrunched-up paper tumbled out of her upended waste-paper basket and bounced across the floor only to be replaced with her phone, keys, hand lotion, still-nodding hedgehog and a photograph of herself, Tori and Poppy at school.
And then she just … walked out.
There was no ovation from her fellow downtrodden, and if anyone said goodbye she didn’t hear it through the furious rush of blood past her eardrums.
She stepped into the lift and turned to the front, giving her a direct view of Harry Mitchell, still standing, agape, in his glass fishbowl, staring at her with a complicated mix of creases on his face.
Disappointment—the kind she was used to from her parents.
Stunned disbelief—the kind reserved for anyone who stepped off the rooftop of their career as she just had.
Loss—the kind …
She frowned. The kind she felt right now, for something she couldn’t begin to understand, as the lift doors whispered shut on everything she’d thought she’d wanted from life.
‘WHAT AM I?’ Izzy murmured, wedging her shoulder and elbow in closer to the mirror propped up next to the tiny boxroom window to finish applying her mascara. ‘A flipping boy wizard?’
She wouldn’t mind a few magical skills if it meant she could just wave a wand to make herself beautiful in moments. Or her boobs bigger. Or her bank balance bigger. But the only part of the whole wizarding deal she had was the ‘tiny room under the stairs’ thing where, up until three days ago, she and her sibling flatmates had kept their miscellaneous junk.
Never mind that they were quite fancy stairs leading up to a delightful mezzanine floor she’d once adored. Never mind that it had, in fact, been an actual room before it was their boxroom. It was unquestionably tiny.
A poor girl’s room.
Bad enough that she’d had to ship most of her belongings to her parents’ council house back in Chorlton, but her impulsiveness had put everyone out because Poppy and Alex had to relocate their thirds of the overflow, too, and couldn’t move it into Izzy’s old room because that now needed to be let to meet the repayments.
Sigh. Her room … Her beautiful room.
Someone else’s soon.
She swapped the mascara to the other hand and tried for a better result from the left.
‘The price of freedom,’ she reminded herself aloud.
And
