Darius Hadley cut off her protest with a look that froze her in mid-sentence and seemed to go on for an eternity. Lethal eyes, a nose bred for looking down, a mouth made for sin... Finally, satisfied that he’d silenced her, his eyes seemed to shimmer, soften, warm to smoky charcoal and then, as she took half a step towards him, he nodded at Miles and walked out of the office, leaving the room ringing with his presence. Leaving her weak to the bone.
She put out a hand to grasp the back of the chair he’d been sitting in. It was still warm from his touch and the heat seemed to travel up her arm and spread through her limbs, creating little sparks throughout her body, igniting all the erogenous zones she was familiar with and quite a few that were entirely new.
Phew. Double phewy-phew...
‘He’s a bit tense, isn’t he?’ she said shakily. A sleek, dark Dobermann to Toby’s big, soft Labrador puppy—to be approached with caution rather than a hug. But the rewards if you won his trust...
Forget it! A man like that wasn’t a keeper. All you could hope for was to catch his attention for a moment. But what a moment—
‘With good reason,’ Miles said, interrupting a chain of thought that was going nowhere. Dark, brooding types had never been even close to the top of her list of appealing male stereotypes. Far too high-maintenance. Rude dark, brooding types had never figured.
A barrage of hoots from the street below distracted her, but there was no escape there. Apparently oblivious to the traffic, Darius Hadley was crossing the street and several people stopped to watch him stride down the road in the direction of Sloane Square. Most of them were women.
It wasn’t just her, then.
Without warning he stopped, swung round and looked up at the window where she was standing as if he’d known she’d be there. And she forgot to breathe.
‘Natasha!’
She jumped, blinked and when she looked again he’d gone and for a moment she was afraid that he was coming back. Hoped that he was coming back, but a moment later he reappeared further along the street and she turned her back on the window before he felt her eyes boring into the back of his head and turned again to catch her looking.
‘Have you spoken to the Chronicle?’ she asked; anything to distract herself.
‘The first thing I did when Mr Hadley’s solicitor contacted me early this morning was to call the Chronicle’s advertising manager.’ Miles walked across to his desk and removed a sheet of paper from a file and handed it to her. ‘He sent this over from his office. Hadley hasn’t seen it yet but it’s only a matter of time before his lawyer contacts them.’
It was a photocopied proof of the ad for Hadley Chase—exactly as she’d read it out—complete with a tick next to the ‘approved’ box and her signature scrawled across the bottom.
‘No, Miles. This is wrong.’ She looked up. ‘This isn’t what I signed.’
‘But you did write that,’ he insisted.
‘One or two of the phrases sound vaguely familiar,’ she admitted.
She sometimes wrote a mock advertisement describing a property in the worst possible light when she thought it would help the vendor to see the property through the eyes of a potential buyer. The grubby carpet in the hall, the children’s finger marks on the doors, the tired kitchen. Stuff that wouldn’t cost much to fix, but would make all the difference to the prospects of a sale.