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CHAPTER ONE

‘MR CIPRIANI IS ready for you now.’

Katy Brennan looked up at the middle-aged, angular woman who had earlier met her in the foyer of Cipriani Head Office and ushered her to the directors’ floor, where she had now been waiting for over twenty minutes.

She didn’t want to feel nervous but she did. She had been summoned from her office in Shoreditch, where she worked as an IT specialist in a small team of four, and informed that Lucas Cipriani, the ultimate god to whom everyone answered, requested her presence.

She had no idea why he might want to talk to her, but she suspected that it concerned the complex job she was currently working on and, whilst she told herself that he probably only wanted to go through some of the finer details with her, she was still...nervous.

Katy stood up, wishing that she had had some kind of advance warning of this meeting, because if she had she would have dressed in something more in keeping with the über-plush surroundings in which she now found herself.

As it was, she was in her usual casual uniform of jeans and a tee-shirt, with her backpack and a lightweight bomber jacket, perfect for the cool spring weather, but utterly inappropriate for this high-tech, eight-storey glasshouse.

She took a deep breath and looked neither left nor right as she followed his PA along the carpeted corridor, past the hushed offices of executives and the many boardrooms where deals worth millions were closed, until the corridor ballooned out into a seating area. At the back of this was a closed eight-foot wooden door which was enough to send a chill through any person who had been arbitrarily summoned by the head of her company—a man whose ability to make deals and turn straw into gold was legendary.

Katy took a deep breath and stood back as his PA pushed open the door.

* * *

Staring absently through the floor-to-ceiling pane of reinforced glass that separated him from the streets below, Lucas Cipriani thought that this meeting was the last thing he needed to kick off the day.

But it could not be avoided. Security had been breached on the deal he had been working on for the past eight months, and this woman was going to have to take the consequences—pure and simple.

This was the deal of a lifetime and there was no way he was going to allow it to be jeopardised.

As his PA knocked and entered his office, Lucas slowly turned round, hand in trouser pocket, and looked at the woman whose job was a thing of the past, if only she knew it.

Eyes narrowed, it hit him that he really should catch up on the people who actually worked for him, because he hadn’t expected this. He’d expected a nerd with heavy spectacles and an earnest manner, whilst the girl in front of him looked less like a computer whizz-kid and more like a hippy. Her clothes were generic: faded jeans and a tee-shirt with the name of a band he had never heard of. Her shoes were masculine black boots, suitable for heavy-duty construction work. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder, and stuffed into the top of it was some kind of jacket, which she had clearly just removed. Her entire dress code contradicted every single thing he associated with a woman, but she had the sort of multi-coloured coppery hair that would have had artists queuing up to commit it to canvas, and an elfin face with enormous bright-green eyes that held his gaze for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom.

‘Miss Brennan.’ He strolled towards his desk as Vicky, his secretary, clicked the heavy door to his office shut behind her. ‘Sit, please.’

At the sound of that deep, dark, velvety voice, Katy started and realised that she had been holding her breath. When she had entered the office she’d thought that she more or less knew what to expect. She vaguely knew what her boss looked like because she had seen pictures of him in the company magazines that occasionally landed on her desk in Shoreditch, far away from the cutting-edge glass building that housed the great and the good in the company: from Lucas Cipriani, who sat at the very top like a god atop Mount Olympus, to his team of powerful executives who made sure that his empire ran without a hitch.

Those were people whose names appeared on letterheads and whose voices were occasionally heard down the end of phone lines, but who were never, ever seen. At least, not in Shoreditch, which was reserved for the small cogs in the machine.

But she still hadn’t expected this. Lucas Cipriani was, simply put, beautiful. There was no other word to describe him. It wasn’t just the arrangement of perfect features, or the burnished bronze of his skin, or even the dramatic masculinity of his physique: Lucas Cipriani’s good looks went far beyond the physical. He exuded a certain power and charisma that made the breath catch in your throat and scrambled your ability to think in straight lines.

Which was why Katy was here now, in his office, drawing a blank where her thoughts should be and with her mouth so dry that she wouldn’t have been able to say a word if she’d wanted to.

She vaguely recalled him saying something about sitting down, which she badly wanted to do, and she shuffled her way to the enormous leather chair that faced his desk and sank into it with some relief.

‘You’ve been working on the Chinese deal,’ Lucas stated without preamble.

‘Yes.’ She could talk about work, she could answer any question he might have, but she was unsettled by a dark, brooding, in-your-face sensuality she hadn’t expected, and when she spoke her voice was jerky and nervous. ‘I’ve been working on the legal side of the deal, dedicating all the details to a programme that will enable instant access to whatever is required, without having to sift through reams of documentation. I hope there isn’t a problem. I’m running ahead of schedule, in actual fact. I’ll be honest with you, Mr Cipriani, it’s one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on. Complex, but really challenging.’

She cleared her throat and hazarded a smile, which was met with stony silence, and her already frayed nerves took a further battering. Stunning dark eyes, fringed with inky black, luxuriant lashes, pierced through the thin veneer of her self-confidence, leaving her breathless and red-faced.

Lucas positioned himself at his desk, an enormous chrome-and-glass affair that housed a computer with an over-sized screen, a metallic lamp and a small, very artfully designed bank of clocks that made sure he knew, at any given moment, what time it was in all the major cities in which his companies were located.

He lowered his eyes now and, saying nothing, swivelled his computer so that it was facing her.

‘Recognise that man?’

Katy blanched. Her mouth fell open as she found herself staring at Duncan Powell, the guy she had fallen for three years previously. Floppy blond hair, blue eyes that crinkled when he grinned and boyish charm had combined to hook an innocent young girl barely out of her teens.

She had not expected this. Not in a million years. Confused, flustered and with a thousand alarm bells suddenly ringing in her head, Katy fixed bewildered green eyes on Lucas.

‘I don’t understand...’

‘I’m not asking you to understand. I’m asking you whether you know this man.’

‘Y-yes,’ she stammered. ‘I... Well, I knew him a few years ago...’

‘And it would seem that you bypassed certain security systems and discovered that he is, these days, employed by the Chinese company I am in the process of finalising a deal with. Correct? No, don’t bother answering that. I have a series of alerts on my computer and what I’m saying does not require verification.’

She felt dazed. Katy’s thoughts had zoomed back in time to her disastrous relationship with Duncan.

She’d met him shortly after she had returned home to her parents’ house in Yorkshire. Torn between staying where she was and facing the big, brave world of London, where the lights were bright and the job prospects were decidedly better, she had taken up a temporary post as an assistant teacher at one of the local schools to give herself some thinking time and to plan a strategy.

Duncan had worked at the bank on the high street, a stone’s throw from the primary school.

In fairness, it had not been love at first sight. She had always liked a quirky guy; Duncan had been just the opposite. A snappy dresser, he had homed in on her with the single-minded focus of a heat-seeking missile with a pre-set target. Before she’d even decided whether she liked him or not, they had had coffee, then a meal, and then they were going out.

He’d been persistent and funny, and she’d started rethinking her London agenda when the whole thing had fallen apart because she’d discovered that the man who had stolen her heart wasn’t the honest, sincere, single guy he had made himself out to be.

Nor had he even been a permanent resident in the little village where her parents lived. He’d been there on a one-year secondment, which was a minor detail he had cleverly kept under wraps. He had a wife and twin daughters keeping the fires warm in the house in Milton Keynes he shared with them.

She had been a diversion and, once she had discovered the truth about him, he had shrugged and held his hands up in rueful surrender and she had known, in a flash of pure gut instinct, that he had done that because she had refused to sleep with him. Duncan Powell had planned to have fun on his year out and, whilst he had been content to chase her for a few months, he hadn’t been prepared to take the chase to a church and up an aisle, because he had been a fully committed family man.

‘I don’t understand.’ Katy looked away from the reminder of her steep learning curve staring out at her from Lucas’s computer screen. ‘So Duncan works for their company. I honestly didn’t go hunting for that information.’ Although, she had done some basic background checks, just out of sheer curiosity, to see whether it was the same creep once she’d stumbled upon him. A couple of clicks of a button was all it had taken to confirm her suspicion.

Lucas leaned forward, his body language darkly, dangerously menacing. ‘That’s as may be,’ he told her, ‘but it does present certain problems.’

With cool, clear precision he presented those certain problems to her and she listened to him in ever-increasing alarm. A deal done in complete secrecy...a family company rooted in strong values of tradition...a variable stock market that hinged on nothing being leaked and the threat her connection to Duncan posed at a delicate time in the negotiations.

Katy was brilliant with computers, but the mysteries of high finance were lost on her. The race for money had never interested her. From an early age, her parents had impressed upon her the importance of recognising value in the things that money couldn’t buy. Her father was a parish priest and both her parents lived a life that was rooted in the fundamental importance of putting the needs of other people first. Katy didn’t care who earned what or how much money anyone had. She had been brought up with a different set of values. For better or for worse, she occasionally thought.

‘I don’t care about any of that,’ she said unevenly, when there was a brief lull in his cold tabulation of her transgressions. It seemed a good moment to set him straight because she was beginning to have a nasty feeling that he was circling her like a predator, preparing to attack.

Was he going to sack her? She would survive. The bottom line was that that was the very worst he could do. He wasn’t some kind of mediaeval war lord who could have her hung, drawn and quartered because she’d disobeyed him.

‘Whether you care about a deal that isn’t going to impact on you or not is immaterial. Either by design or incompetence, you’re now in possession of information that could unravel nearly a year and a half of intense negotiation.’

‘To start with, I’m obviously very sorry about what happened. It’s been a very complex job and, if I accidentally happened upon information I shouldn’t have, then I apologise. I didn’t mean to. In fact, I’m not at all interested in your deal, Mr Cipriani. You gave me a job to do and I was doing it to the best of my ability.’

‘Which clearly wasn’t up to the promised standard, because an error of the magnitude of the one you made is inexcusable.’

‘But that’s not fair!’

‘Remind me to give you a life lesson about what’s fair and what isn’t. I’m not interested in your excuses, Miss Brennan. I’m interested in working out a solution to bypass the headache you created.’

Katy’s mind had stung at his criticism of her ability. She was good at what she did. Brilliant, even. To have her competence called into question attacked the very heart of her.

‘If you look at the quality of what I’ve done, sir, you’ll find that I’ve done an excellent job. I realise that I may have stumbled upon information that should have not been available to me, but you have my word that anything I’ve uncovered stays right here with me.’

‘And I’m to believe you because...?’

‘Because I’m telling you the truth!’

‘I’m sorry to drag you into the world of reality, Miss Brennan, but taking things at face value, including other people’s sincerely meant promises, is something I don’t do.’ He leaned back into his chair and looked at her.

Without trying, Lucas was capable of exuding the sort of lethal cool that made grown men quake in their shoes. A chit of a girl who was destined for the scrapheap should have been a breeze but for some reason he was finding some of his formidable focus diluted by her arresting good looks.

He went for tall, career-driven brunettes who were rarely seen without their armour of high-end designer suits and killer heels. He enjoyed the back and forth of intellectual repartee and had oftentimes found himself embroiled in heated debates about work-related issues.

His women knew the difference between a bear market and a bull market and would have sneered at anyone who didn’t.

They were alpha females and that was the way he liked it.

He had seen the damage caused to rich men by airheads and bimbos. His fun-loving, amiable father had had ten good years of marriage to Lucas’s mother and then, when Annabel Cipriani had died, he had promptly lost himself in a succession of stunningly sexy blondes, intelligence not a prerequisite.

He had been taken to the cleaners three times and it was a miracle that any family money, of which there had been a considerable sum at the starting block, had been left in the coffers.

But far worse than the nuisance of having his bank accounts bled by rapacious gold-diggers was the hope his father stupidly had always invested in the women he ended up marrying. Hope that they would be there for him, would somehow give him the emotional support he had had with his first wife. He had been looking for love and that weakness had opened him up to being used over and over again.

Lucas had absorbed all this from the side lines and had learned the necessary lessons: avoid emotional investment and you’d never end up getting hurt. Indeed, bimbos he could handle, though they repulsed him. At least they were a known quantity. What he really didn’t do were women who demanded anything from him he knew he was incapable of giving, which was why he always went for women as emotionally and financially independent as him. They obeyed the same rules that he did and were as dismissive of emotional, overblown scenes as he was.

The fact was that, if you didn’t let anyone in, then you were protected from disappointment, and not just the superficial disappointment of discovering that some replaceable woman was more interested in your bank account than she was in you.

He had learned more valuable lessons about the sort of weaknesses that could permanently scar and so he had locked his heart away and thrown away the key and, in truth, he had never had a moment’s doubt that he had done the right thing.

‘Are you still in contact with the man?’ he murmured, watching her like a hawk.

‘No! I am not!’ Heated colour made her face burn. She found that she was gripping the arms of the chair for dear life, her whole body rigid with affront that he would even ask her such a personal question. ‘Are you going to sack me, Mr Cipriani? Because, if you are, then perhaps you could just get on with it.’

Her temples were beginning to throb painfully. Of course she was going to be sacked. This wasn’t going to be a ticking off before being dismissed back to Shoreditch to resume her duties as normal, nor was she simply going to be removed from the task at which inadvertently she had blundered.

She had been hauled in here like a common criminal so that she could be fired. No one-month’s notice, no final warning, and there was no way that she could even consider a plea of unfair dismissal. She would be left without her main source of income and that was something she would just have to deal with.

And the guy sitting in front of her having fun being judge, jury and executioner didn’t give a hoot as to whether she was telling the truth or not, or whether her life would be affected by an abrupt sacking or not.

‘Regrettably, it’s not quite so straightforward—’

‘Why not?’ Katy interrupted feverishly. ‘You obviously don’t believe a word I’ve told you and I know I certainly wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the project again. If you just wanted me off it, you would have probably told Tim, my manager, and let him pass the message on to me. The fact that I’ve been summoned here tells me that you’re going to give me the boot, but not before you make sure I know why. Will you at the very least give me a reference, Mr Cipriani? I’ve worked extremely hard for your company for the past year and a half and I’ve had nothing but glowing reports on the work I’ve done. I think I deserve some credit for that.’

Lucas marvelled that she could think, for a minute, that he had so much time on his hands that he would personally call her in just to sack her. She was looking at him with an urgent expression, her green eyes defiant.

Again distracted, he found himself saying, ‘I noticed on your file that you only work two days a week for my company. Why is that?’

‘Sorry?’ Katy’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

‘It’s unusual for someone of your age to be a part-time employee. That’s generally the domain of women with children of school age who want to earn a little money but can’t afford the demands of a full-time job.’

‘I... I have another job,’ she admitted, wondering where this was heading and whether she needed to be on her guard. ‘I work as an IT teacher at one of the secondary schools near where I live.’

Lucas was reluctantly fascinated by the ebb and flow of colour that stained her cheeks. Her face was as transparent as glass and that in itself was an unusual enough quality to hold his attention. The tough career women he dated knew how to school their expressions because, the higher up the ladder they climbed, the faster they learned that blushing like virginal maidens did nothing when it came to career advancement.

‘Can’t pay well,’ he murmured.

‘That’s not the point!’

Lucas had turned his attention to his computer and was very quickly pulling up the file he had on her, which he had only briefly scanned before he had scheduled his meeting with her. The list of favourable references was impressively long.

‘So,’ he mused, sitting back and giving her his undivided attention. ‘You work for me for the pay and you work as a teacher for the enjoyment.’

‘That’s right.’ She was disconcerted at how quickly he had reached the right conclusions.

‘So the loss of your job at my company would presumably have a serious impact on your finances.’

‘I would find another job to take its place.’

‘Look around the market, Miss Brennan. Well paid part-time work is thin on the ground. I make it my duty to pay my employees over the odds. I find that tends to engender commitment and loyalty to the company. You’d be hard pressed to find the equivalent anywhere in London.’

Lucas had planned on a simple solution to this unexpected problem. Now, he was pressed to find out a bit more about her. As a part-time worker, it seemed she contributed beyond the call of duty, and both the people she answered to within the company and external clients couldn’t praise her enough. She’d pleaded her innocence, and he wasn’t gullible enough to wipe the slate clean, but a more detailed hearing might be in order. His initial impressions weren’t of a thief who might be attracted to the lure of insider trading but, on the other hand, someone with a part-time job might find it irresistible to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity, and Duncan Powell represented that unexpected opportunity.

‘Money doesn’t mean that much to me, Mr Cipriani.’ Katy was confused as to how a man whose values were so different from hers could make her go hot and cold and draw her attention in a way that left her feeling helpless and exposed. She was finding it hard to string simple sentences together. ‘I have a place to myself but, if I had to share with other people, then it wouldn’t be the end of the world.’

The thought of sharing space with a bunch of strangers was only slightly less appalling to Lucas than incarceration with the key thrown away.

Besides, how much did she mean that? he wondered with grim practicality, dark eyes drifting over her full, stubborn mouth and challenging angle of her head. What had been behind that situation with Powell, a married man? It wasn’t often that Lucas found himself questioning his own judgements but in this instance he did wonder whether it was just a simple tale of a woman who had been prepared to overlook the fact that her lover was a married man because of the financial benefits he could bring to the table. Although, he’d seen enough of that to know that it was the oldest story in the world.

Maybe he would test the waters and see what came out in the wash. If this had been a case of hire and fire, then she would have been clearing out her desk eighteen hours ago, but it wasn’t, because he couldn’t sack her just yet, and it paid to know your quarry. He would not allow any misjudgements to wreck his deal.

‘You never thought about packing in the teaching and taking up the job at my company full time?’

‘No.’ The silence stretched between them while Katy frantically tried to work out where this sudden interest was leading. ‘Some people aren’t motivated by money.’ She finally broke the silence because she was beginning to perspire with discomfort. ‘I wasn’t raised to put any value on material things.’