Kitabı oku: «Her Boss by Day...»

Table of Contents

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU WILL NOT get me into bed tonight. Tomorrow night isn’t looking good for you, either.’

In the huge bathroom mirror of the upmarket Saints restaurant in Surry Hills, Willa Moore-Fisher practised the phrase and shook her head in disgust. She was being too nice and her sleazy blind date didn’t deserve that much consideration. Obtuse to a fault, he might think that there was a chance of sleeping with her in the future. Which there wasn’t—ever. She’d rather gouge her eye out with a blunt twig.

‘I’d explain why I think you’re an arrogant jerk, but then your brain would explode from you trying to understand.’ Willa tested the words out loud.

And wasn’t that an image to make her smile? Ka-boom! She could just imagine that smirking, arrogant expression blown apart by the suitable application of high-impact explosives. There were, she decided, very few personal problems that couldn’t be solved by a little C4.

Willa imagined that the explosive would work really well on soon-to-be-ex-husbands too …

Maybe you should just go back in there and give him another chance, suggested nice Willa, doormat Willa. It might be that this disastrous date is your fault; if you were a little better at drawing him out, at asking the right questions, at being more interesting …

Wild Willa dropped doormat Willa with a snappy kick to her temple. That’s what you did for eight years, moron; you tried to bring the best out in Wayne, tried to change yourself so that he would change. And how did that work out for you?

‘Catch a freakin’ clue, dumbass.’ Willa pointed a finger at her reflection. ‘Find your balls, metaphorically speaking, tell him he’s wasting your time and get the hell out of here.’

Yeah, like you’d ever actually say that aloud, taunted wild Willa. You’re the world’s biggest wuss and you’d rather put up with someone’s crap than take the chance of making anyone mad at you.

Maybe some day she’d learn to stand up for herself.

Wild Willa just snorted her disbelief.

God, these voices in her head exhausted her.

‘So, is this talking to yourself something new or did you always do it and I didn’t notice?’

In the mirror Willa saw the slick blonde and admired her exquisitely cut and coloured short, smooth bob. Then she clocked the mischievous tawny-brown eyes and spun around in shock.

‘Amy? My God, Amy!’

‘Hey Willa.’

Amy walked towards her on spiked heels. Her shift dress showed off her curves and her make-up and salon-perfect hair were flawless. Willa scanned her face and there, in the tilt of her mouth and in the humour dancing in her eyes, she saw her best friend at eighteen—the mischievous flirt who, just by being Amy, had opened up a world of fun to her that summer so long ago.

‘Amy. My God … what are you doing here?’

Willa leaned in for a hug and was surprised by the fact that she didn’t want to let Amy go. Why had she ever let her go? Let her fade from her life? That summer in the Whitsundays, their core group of friends—Amy, Brodie, Scott, Chantal, her older brother Luke—had been her world and, like so much else, she’d given them up when she married Wayne.

Stupid girl.

‘Having dinner with my flatmate before we go clubbing,’ Amy replied, keeping hold of Willa’s hand. ‘But you—why are you talking to yourself?’

‘Short answer … an excruciatingly bad blind date that I am trying to get out of.’ Willa tipped her head to the bathroom window. ‘Do you think I’m skinny enough to slip through there?’

Amy looked her up and down. ‘Actually, you are far too skinny—and back up. What about Wayne? You married him, didn’t you?’

Willa lifted her ringless left hand. ‘About to be divorced. That was a … mistake.’

Hmm … a mistake. That was a major understatement, but she’d go with it.

Amy pursed her lips. ‘I’m sorry … God, Willa, so much time has passed. We need to catch up. Now.’

‘What about my date and your friend?’ Willa asked. She had already been in the bathroom for an inexcusably long time—she was being so rude.

So what? Wild Willa rolled her eyes.

‘Pfft … your date sounds like a moron and Jessica was exchanging hot looks with a guy across the room. She won’t miss me.’

Amy stalked to the door, yanked it open and let out one of her high-pitched, loud and distinctive whistles. Willa wasn’t surprised when she soon saw a Saints waiter outside the door.

‘Is the small function room empty?’ Amy asked.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Good. Tell Guido that I’m using it for a while, and ask him to please bring me a bottle of that Burnt Tree Chardonnay I like and put it on my tab,’ ordered Amy, and with a luscious smile sent him on his way.

The kid, drooling, whirled away to do the goddess’s bidding. It seemed that Amy, always a good flirt, now had a PhD in getting men to jump through her hoops.

Amy turned back to Willa and shrugged at her astounded expression. ‘I hold a lot of work functions here. Guido owes me.’

Amy led Willa out of the bathroom, down a decorated passage and into a small function room that held a boardroom table at one end and a cluster of chairs at the other. She pulled Willa to the set of wingback chairs and gestured to her to sit.

‘It’s so good to see you, Willa,’ Amy said, taking the seat opposite her. ‘You look so … different. Classy … rich.’

Willa knew what she saw: it was the same face and body she looked at every day. She was still the same height, taller than most woman but skinnier than she’d been at eighteen. Thick, mocha and auburn shoulder-length hair, with a heavy fringe surrounding a pixie face dominated by silver-green eyes.

‘That’s because I am classy … and my husband—ex—whatever—is rich,’ Willa said, making a conscious effort to keep the bitterness from her voice but doubting that she’d succeeded. ‘Gym, designer clothes, best hairdresser in Sydney.’

Amy lightly touched her knee. ‘Was it awful … being married to him?’

Willa considered lying, thought about glossing over the truth, but then she saw the understanding and sympathy in Amy’s eyes and realised that while she wouldn’t tell Amy—tell anyone—the whole truth, she didn’t have to blatantly lie. She and Amy had been through too much for her to lie.

‘Not awful, no. Boring—absolutely. Wayne wanted a young, gorgeous trophy wife, and that’s what I’ve been for the past eight years.’

An eight-year marriage condensed into two sentences …

‘God, a trophy wife.’ Amy winced. ‘But you’re so damn bright … you always wanted to study accountancy, economics, business.’

‘Yeah, well, Wayne wanted beauty and acquiescence, not brains. I kept up with the markets, trends, but he’d didn’t like his wife talking business. I was supposed to be seen and not heard.’

‘I always thought that he was waste of space.’

At the knock on the door Amy got up to accept a bottle and glasses, thanked the waiter profusely and adeptly poured them both a glass.

Amy took a sip of her wine and took her seat again. ‘Why do I get the feeling that I’m getting the sanitised version here?’

Because she wasn’t a fool. ‘My dead marriage is a very boring topic, Amy.’

‘You were never boring, Willa. Quiet, maybe—intense, shy. Not boring. And I know that you probably gave Wayne-the-Pain a hundred and fifty per cent because the Willa I knew bent over backwards to make everyone happy. When you make a promise or a decision it takes a nuclear bomb to dislodge you.’

‘I’m not that bad,’ Willa protested, though she knew she was. She didn’t give up—or in—easily.

‘You hate going against your word.’ Amy sent her a strange, sad smile. ‘You were distraught that you had to ask Luke for help that night in the Whitsundays because I’d begged you not to.’

Willa bit her lip, still seeing Amy, battered and bloody, tears and crimson sand on her face. Her black and blue eye and her split cheek from fighting off Justin’s unwelcome advances on the beach. Sometimes she still saw her face in her dreams and woke up in a cold sweat.

‘I’m sorry, but I needed Luke to help me to help you.’

Amy looked into her wine glass. ‘I know … it’s okay. It was all a long time ago. How is Luke?’

There was an odd tremor in her voice which Willa instantly picked up. Amy and Luke had always had some sort of love-hate, weird reaction to each other that Willa could never quite put her finger on.

‘He’s fine … still single, still driven. He’s working on a massive hotel development in Singapore—the biggest of his career.’

Amy eventually raised her eyes to meet Willa’s. ‘Are you still in contact with the others from the resort? Brodie, Chantal, Scott?’

Willa shrugged. ‘Loosely, via social media and the very occasional e-mail. Chantal is still dancing, Scott is one of the city’s most brilliant young architects, and Brodie is the heart and soul of a company that runs luxury yacht tours down the Gold Coast. I haven’t seen them or socialised with them…. nothing has been the same since the week you and Brodie left.’

Happy to be off the subject of her dysfunctional marriage, Willa cast her mind back to that summer they’d spent in the Whitsundays, when a group of strangers had arrived at the very fancy Weeping Reef resort, ready and rocking to start a holiday season of working all day and having fun all night.

It still amazed her that the five of them—six if she included Luke—had clicked so well. They were such a mixed bag of personalities.

They’d laughed and loved and drunk and partied, and then laughed and loved and partied some more. They’d been really good at it, and the first two months of their summer holiday had flown past. Then their idyll had been shattered when two dreadful incidents had dumped a bucket of angst and recrimination and guilt over their magical interlude and ripped their clique apart.

And set Willa on a path that she now deeply regretted.

‘To go back a whole bunch of steps—we were talking about you and Wayne and what caused the split,’ Amy said, pulling her back to their conversation. She refilled their glasses and lifted an eyebrow.

‘Oh … that.’

‘Yes, that.’

How strange it was that after so long she and Amy could just fall into conversation as if it was yesterday … how strange and how right.

In the natural order of things they shouldn’t have been friends … Amy was bright and flirty and outgoing, and Willa was quiet and naïve and a lot less boisterous than her friend. She couldn’t just spill all the beans about her less than happy marriage—not even with Amy, so successful, confident, sophisticated. With Amy those qualities went deeper than her looks and clothes right into her psyche. Unlike Willa, whose confidence and sophistication was just a fabric layer deep.

‘I wanted to be something other than his pretty arm decoration. He didn’t see why being that wasn’t enough for me.’

‘It got ugly. I called him a balding, ageing git and he called me a shallow bimbo. The words “separation” and “divorce” emerged and we were both very happy with the idea.’

Amy closed her eyes in sympathy. ‘Sorry, Wills.’

Willa shrugged. ‘Eight months ago he booted me out of our apartment and into a waterfront mansion in Vaucluse—’

Amy whistled at the mention of the very upmarket Sydney suburb. ‘Why didn’t he move into the waterfront property?’

Willa smiled. ‘He hates water and open spaces. Anyway, he moved Young and Dumb into the apartment the afternoon I moved out. Now the divorce just needs its court date and I’ll be free!’

‘What are you going to do then?’

Willa shrugged. ‘Still working that out … I have a degree, but no experience, and—worse—no contacts. Money is not a problem, but time is. I battle to fill my day, and rattling around on my own in that mausoleum doesn’t help.’

She glanced at the Rolex on her wrist, a twenty-first birthday present from Wayne. It was boring enough living her life, she didn’t need to dissect it as well, so she attempted to change the subject.

‘We’ve been in here for about twenty minutes. Do you think my date from hell has got the hint?’

‘I told Guido to tell him that you weren’t interested.’

Amy shrugged at Willa’s quick, questioning look.

‘Hey, you wanted to make his brain explode. I thought I’d save you a prison sentence.’

‘True,’ Willa admitted as she stood up. ‘Okay, well … it was great seeing you but I suppose I should get home.’

‘To do more rattling?’ Amy shook her head. ‘Oh, hell, no. If I ever saw someone in need of a party it’s you. I’ve just signed a huge PR deal—’

‘You’re in PR? You’re far too self-effacing, modest and shy for PR, Ames,’ Willa said, her voice deceptively gentle.

Amy just laughed, and instantly catapulted Willa back the best part of a decade. It was a killer laugh—dirty as mud.

‘There’s that sarcastic mouth I used to love. Anyway, I’ve just signed a huge deal to launch a new franchise of sports shops selling clothes and equipment—my client is also setting up some hardcore men-only gyms—and a couple of my workmates and I are going out to celebrate. We’re taking my new client clubbing. And you are going to join us!’

‘Uh, I don’t think so …’

‘I do! My client’s name is Rob, he’s gorgeous and gruff—but not my type, unfortunately.’ Amy led her out of the pretty function room and back towards the main dining area. ‘He might be yours.’

Willa scoffed. ‘If he’s like any of the men I’ve recently come into contact with he’ll need a hug … around the neck … with a rope.’

‘Am really loving this whole bloodthirsty serial killer vibe you’ve got going.’ Amy shot her a grin. ‘I sense sexual frustration.’

Willa grinned at her. ‘I sense that I am going to kick you soon.’

Amy tucked her arm into Willa’s as they walked towards the exit. ‘Oh, yeah … the girls are back in town. And it seems like I am going to have to teach you how to party … to cut loose.’

‘Again.’

Rob Hanson looked at the sharply dressed partygoers dutifully lining up outside Fox, waiting in anxious anticipation to get into the popular club, and shook his head. Pulling on a pair of Levi’s and a button-down white shirt with its sleeves rolled up was about as dressed up as he got … besides, it wasn’t what you looked like that got you into a club—unless you were female and had a great cleavage, blonde hair down to your waist and legs up to your neck—it was attitude …

And he had lots of it.

Rob caught the eye of a bouncer, jerked his head and received a quick nod to go in, bypassing the queue. He slipped a bill into the guy’s hand in a slick movement as the rope was lifted and cursed when his mobile vibrated in his pocket. Stepping back from the door, he shoved his finger in his ear and answered the call.

‘Rob, it’s Gail.’

‘Hey, Snail.’ At twenty-two, his sister was ten years younger than him and the best thing in his life. ‘What’s up?’

‘Not much—just checking in,’ Gail replied. ‘Whatcha doing?’

‘About to go into a club.’

‘Have you met anyone yet?’ Gail demanded.

‘I haven’t even been here two days!’ he protested.

‘My man-about-town bachelor brother is slacking,’ Gail teased and he rolled his eyes.

‘I won’t have the time in Sydney and I don’t have the inclination,’ Rob retorted.

Gail’s laugh tickled his ear. ‘Did the screaming match with Saskia put you off? Judging by the way she flounced out of here, she obviously didn’t take it well when you told her that she’d hit her expiry date?’

‘Jeez, Gail! Her expiry date?’

‘I call it like I see it. You never go over the three-month-fling mark and she was due.’

Not as obsessed with the time-frames of his dates as his sister, Rob counted back. Yeah, it was nearly dead on three months. He’d started getting twitchy as Saskia started making noises about ‘formalising’ their relationship, dropping comments about needing cupboard space in his bedroom. She had left a box of tampons in his bathroom cabinet and he’d realised that it was time to bail. She wasn’t someone he wanted around long-term …

He’d never met anyone he wanted around long-term.

‘One day you’re going to meet someone who blows your socks off,’ Gail warned him.

He doubted it. Remembering that the best way to get Gail off the subject of his love-life was to comment on hers, he said: ‘Are you still dating the tattoo artist? Does he make enough money to take you to the movies occasionally?’

Gail sighed. ‘Well-played. Deflect and distract.’

‘I try. Don’t do anything stupid with this one, okay, honey?’

After witnessing the best and worst of love, he and Gail approached relationships from opposite directions. She thought that true love and happily-ever-after was just around the corner, and he knew that there was only one person he could ever fully depend on and that was himself.

He and Gail adored each other, but they didn’t understand the other’s choices when it came to the opposite sex.

‘How long are you going to be in Sydney?’ Gail asked. ‘This house is like a morgue without you.’

‘A month … six weeks,’ Rob replied. ‘Do not let Mr Body Art move in while I’m gone.’

Gail laughed again. ‘I’ll just move into his place … Bye—love you!’

Rob looked at his dead phone and shook his head. He was convinced that Gail only called him to wind him up and raise his blood pressure. That, he supposed, was a younger sister’s job.

Rob looked at his watch … ten p.m. here, and that meant it would be around two in the afternoon back home. Snail was home from her morning classes at uni and she was bored—and a great way to relieve that boredom was to take pot-shots at his love-life.

Revenge, Rob decided as he stepped into the heaving club, would be sweet and designed to embarrass her to the max. Because that was what his job as her older brother was.

Slapped in the face with the noise and smell of the club—alcohol and perfume and sweat mixed together in an almost palpable fug—he immediately asked himself what he was doing. Apart from the fact that he was still exhausted from the long flight from Johannesburg the day before yesterday—he really had to learn to sleep on planes—and the fact that he’d been working sixteen-hour days for months, he also hated clubs and clubbing.

Too loud, too packed, girls too obvious and generally far too young and too eager. Call him old-fashioned but he liked to do a little work before a piece of tail fell into his lap. And, really, at thirty-two, dating kids his sister’s age or younger made him feel like a dirty old man.

Rob brushed off a hand on his behind and ignored a proposition from his left as he scanned the bar. He’d find his new firecracker of a PR person, make his excuses and then head back to the flat he’d rented and fall face-down onto the bed.

Rob ran a hand over his short dark brown curls and squinted into the low light of the club. Finding Amy in this madhouse was going to be a nightmare, he thought as his mobile vibrated in his pocket. Or not, he thought, looking at the text message.

At the entrance, hook a left and head towards the back of the club. Table in the back corner.

God bless technology. Rob smiled, shoved his mobile back into the pocket of his jeans and took her directions.

Ah, a table full of women … not too young, thank God, but obviously, judging by the bottles and glasses on the table, well on their way to being cabbaged. Shoot me now, he thought. Half an hour, one beer, and he was out of there.

At least they were gorgeous women, admittedly. Amy, confident and glossy, led the pack. There was her colleague—he couldn’t remember her name—and her assistant. Couldn’t remember her name either. The other two women he didn’t recognise at all. He dismissed the tomboy blonde who, he saw when he looked over his shoulder, was swapping some major eye contact with some dude at the bar, and focussed on the woman with mahogany hair tucked into the corner of the table, a cocktail glass in her hand. She had a wide-eyed, Audrey Hepburn waif look to her that instantly made a man regress to being a caveman.

You woman, I protect you. Lie down and I make you happy. Grunt. Grunt.

He’d known a lot of women—sue him … he was in his thirties and had been consistently single all his life—so he was old enough and wise enough to realise that waifs and strays, romantics and women who seemed helpless and hopeless, normally ended up tearing strips off him.

Women, as he’d learnt, were seldom what they portrayed themselves to be. Scrap that. People mostly weren’t who they said they were.

Amy sprang to her feet. ‘Rob—yay, you’re here!’

Yeah. Yay.

‘You know Bella and Kara, my colleagues—’ their names went in one ear and out of the other ‘—the creature ignoring you for the rock star wannabe at the bar is my flatmate Jessica—oi! Jessica! This is Rob.’

The blonde whipped her head around, flashed him a smile. ‘Hey, Rob.’

Quick eye contact and a super-fast scan to determine whether she found him attractive. She hesitated, suggesting that she did, but then her eyes slid back to the bar. Rob smiled inwardly. Someone, if he played his cards right, was getting lucky tonight.

Amy touched his wrist to get his attention. ‘And this is my old, old friend Willa. Willa, this is Rob Hanson.’

‘You make me sound like a crone with all the olds, Ames,’ Willa complained good-naturedly, before lifting amazing silver-shot-with-green eyes to his. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi back.’

Rob took the open seat next to her and eyed the full beer bottle on the table, icy cold. It was his favourite brand.

He cocked an eyebrow at Amy. ‘That for me?’

‘Sure.’ Amy pushed the bottle and glass across the table. Ignoring the glass and picking up the bottle, he lifted it to his lips and allowed the liquid to slide down his throat. One beer, half an hour and he’d leave …

‘Rob owns a chain of sports equipment and clothing stores in South Africa, Willa. And some gyms. He’s looking for franchisees to open branches of the stores everywhere, and the gyms will be here in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne initially.’

‘Brave …’ Willa murmured. ‘Especially the gym part, since the marketplace is dominated by Just Fit. And Just Fit has gone on an acquisition drive to buy up the rats and mice gyms that aren’t allowing them marketplace domination.’

Rob lowered his bottle and sent her a long look. Then he lifted his eyebrows at Amy, who just laughed.

‘She’s not just a pretty face,’ she said.

Intriguing …

And she wasn’t done. ‘It takes a set of brass balls to take on two competitors, firmly established and synonymous with Australian health and fitness, one of which is about to list on the ASX. I intend to buy some of their shares when they go public in …’ Smarty-Pants squinted at her watch ‘… six weeks’ time.’

Rob just stared at her as she rested her chin in the palm of her hand and gave Amy a puppy-dog look. ‘I want a set of brass balls, Ames. How do I acquire my own?’

Amy threw back her head and laughed. ‘Wills, how many of those Screaming Orgasms have you had?’

Willa slid her eyes to the row of cocktail glasses in front of her and counted them off. ‘Not enough real ones and four fake ones.’

Willa and Amy exchanged a long look before they both bellowed with laughter.

Oh, jeez—drunk girl humour. About orgasms. Shoot him now. But he had to admit it wasn’t fake girl laughter but a real, joyous exchange of humour between two friends who understood each other’s subtext. Their laughter made him smile.

‘So how long have you been friends?’ he asked, picking at the corner of his beer label with a short, blunt fingernail.

He hoped that his question would distract them from further Screaming Orgasm humour—especially since, A. He hadn’t had one recently, and B. He’d just decided to stay for another beer, another half-hour.

‘Eight, nearly nine years—with far too many lost years in between,’ Willa replied.

Seeing the confusion on his face, she placed her hand on his bare forearm and—whoa! What the hell …? Lust and attraction shot up his arm and exploded in his brain. He went stock-still and tried to work through his reaction. He’d never, since the time he’d found out that girls had fun things he liked to play with, had such a rocketing blood from his head reaction to the simple touch of fingers on his skin.

He looked at her again and realised that she wasn’t just pretty—she was damn sexy. High cheekbones, a pouty mouth and those amazing siren eyes. He allowed his own eyes the pleasure of skimming over smooth shoulders, smallish breasts and that too thin but utterly feminine body.

He tipped his head slightly to the side and saw that her sage-green sleeveless dress disappeared under the table. He needed to see more. On the pretext of bending sideways to scratch his foot, he looked under the table. The dress ended mid-thigh and, holy Moses, those legs were long and toned. Since one nude heel had dropped off a slim foot, he saw that her toes were tipped in tropical orange polish.

Hot, hot.

‘… and then Amy left the Whitsundays—’

Rob blinked as he lifted his head and came back to the conversation. He was both amused and irritated with himself. He never went on mental walkabouts—and especially not over women.

‘You’re going to have to back up, Wills. Rob didn’t hear a damn thing,’ Amy drawled, lifting her beer bottle to her lips and raising a knowing eyebrow in his direction.

Rob felt an urge to pull out his tongue at her, which he manfully suppressed. He quickly rewound and took a stab in the dark. ‘So, have you kept in contact with your other mates from those days?’

‘Well, I talk to Luke my brother all the time. He was the resort manager.’

Amy sat up straighter and leaned forward. Hmm, Rob thought, interesting reaction to the mention of his name. Something churning there.

‘We barely talk nowadays, but I have all their e-mail addresses, and I’m friends with them on social media,’ Willa answered, her lips around a purple straw.

Rob, forcing the mental picture of what he’d really like to see those lips wrapped around from his mind, thought that there was no way he could go so long without connecting with his own tight circle of friends.

‘You all should get together some time—catch up.’