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She dragged in a deep breath and tore her gaze from his, dropping it pointedly to the hand still grasping her arm. He softened his grip, rubbing his thumb along the underside of her wrist, finding the beat of her pulse, exulting in its rapid drumming.
She was excited, too.
Or was it fear?
‘I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr Cartwright,’ she said in a stilted little voice. Her beautifully feminine breasts lifted as she filled her lungs again. Her eyes met his in a plea that held a vulnerability he hadn’t seen before in her. ‘Please let me go.’
It made him feel like a cad for holding her against her will, yet he couldn’t bring himself to let her go. ‘You said we have nothing in common. I think we do, Daisy Donahue.’
She shook her head, agitation flickering into definite fear as she was distracted by something behind him.
‘Ah, Dee-Dee,’ came the smarmy voice of Lynda Twiggley who was obviously about to insinuate herself into the situation.
‘Miss Twiggley,’ she said in a shaky subservient tone as the woman stepped forward to part them.
It enfuriated Ethan that Daisy should feel it necessary to kowtow to her snaky employer. She was a natural-born fighter. It was wrong for her to be in this position.
‘Catering needs a prompt to get the coffee moving.’
It was a dismissive command.
Daisy tried to pull her arm free, anxious to avoid any more displeasure being heaped on her head.
Ethan tightened his grip, determined on keeping her with him.
‘Daisy has already done that,’ he coldly told the Twiggley who turned an ingratiating smile to him.
‘Then she can do it again,’ was the unbending reply.
Unreasonable, demanding bitch!
Ethan lost his cool. ‘Miss Twiggley…’ grated out from between gnashing teeth.
She fluttered her exquisitely painted fingernails and her false eyelashes at him. ‘Oh, do make it Lynda, please…’
It revolted him. Words shot out of his mouth in a stream of searing contempt without any thought to their consequences.
‘I think it’s time you stopped treating your PA like a slave who doesn’t warrant any consideration or courtesy.’
Her mouth gaped open in shock.
He felt a shudder run up Daisy’s arm.
The ensuing silence was impregnated with the hairprickling sense that a bomb had just gone off. Ethan revelled in its intensity. He was so off his coolly analytical brain—no number-crunching going on at all—he was actually looking forward to the fall-out.
CHAPTER THREE
DAISY’S mind was reeling. Her heart was galloping faster than any racehorse. Any second now her boss was going to throw a major tantrum and she’d bear the brunt of it. Ethan Cartwright was too important a person to cop the whiplash from his strike on her behalf.
Why had he done it?
Why, why, why…?
Even if he’d meant well, he should have known it would rebound on her. He just hadn’t cared. It wasn’t going to affect his life. He was an untouchable. Anger at not getting his own way with her had spilled over onto Lynda Twiggley. Never mind that Daisy was the one who would pay for it—the selfish, arrogant pig! She’d explained the situation to him, begged him to let her go, and what he’d done was put her job at risk—the job she had to keep or see her parents’ home go down the bankruptcy drain.
Panic ripped through her stomach as her boss started puffing herself up to let fly her ferocious temper. Mean blue eyes cut her to ribbons. The attack had the cyclonic force of a fireball.
‘How dare you complain about how I treat you, you ungrateful little cow!’
‘I didn’t! I swear I didn’t!’ Daisy babbled.
‘I speak from my own observation,’ Ethan Cartwright sliced in.
It didn’t improve the situation. It made it a thousand times worse. Being subjected to such personal criticism from him was so offensive, Lynda turned to him in a towering rage, probably thinking her bid to have him fix her financial affairs had been sabotaged and Daisy knew she was going to be blamed for it, regardless of anything Ethan Cartwright said.
‘I pay her very well to do what I tell her. There’s nothing slavish about that, I assure you,’ she hissed at him, steam pouring from her.
‘I take exception to you telling her to stay away from me,’ he shot back. ‘That’s not work. It’s—’
Lynda exploded into a tirade at Daisy, cutting Ethan Cartwright off in mid-speech. ‘You stupid, stupid girl! Have you no sense of discretion, no brain in your head? Might I remind you that you signed a confidentiality clause in your contract with me. Which you’ve just broken in the worst possible way with your stupid, wagging tongue.’
She had committed the indiscretion.
It was impossible to defend herself.
What could she say…that Ethan Cartwright’s persistence had goaded her into it? No way would that be an acceptable excuse. She had not put her boss’s interests first. The chaotic effect he had on her had overwhelmed her usual grasp of what was permissible.
Daisy stood in appalled silence, quaking inside as the storm broke over her, her heart sinking as she realised there was no hope of this being forgiven or forgotten.
The inevitable lightning struck.
‘You’re fired! As of now!’
She felt the blood draining from her face.
The thunder rolled on. ‘And don’t come back to the office. I’ll have your personal things parcelled up and sent home. Untrustworthy blabbermouth!’
Lynda Twiggley’s last look of furious disgust barely penetrated the dizziness flooding through Daisy’s head. Like some fade-out on a television screen, the back of her ex-employer disintegrated into dots.
Ethan caught her as she started to fall, scooping her into a tight embrace. It was where he’d wanted Daisy Donahue but not limp and unconscious. He had to get her firing on all cylinders again. With a quick stoop to hook an arm under her knees, he lifted her off her feet, cradling her across his chest.
A chair was needed—set her down, lower her head to get some blood back in it, a glass of water…that was what common sense said, yet as he started carrying her towards one, he was riven by the strong temptation to keep right on going, out of the marquee, into a limousine and off to his cave. He’d caught his woman. She felt good in his arms. He wanted her out of this jungle of people and completely to himself.
Problem was she’d probably come to before he got her to the limousine. How long did a faint last? And she’d undoubtedly throw a scene at the hotel before he could take her to his suite.
No, it was a mad idea.
A sheikh might get away with it.
Or a buccaneer of old who was captain of his own ship.
Not Ethan Cartwright in this modern world of political correctness. He would have to answer for his actions.
Nevertheless, he was almost at the exit to the marquee when Mickey caught up with him. ‘Hey, Ethan. You doing a runner with the girl?’
It stopped him. He turned to his friend whose face was alight with fascinated curiosity. ‘She fainted. I have to get her to a chair.’
‘You’ve passed a whole bunch of them.’
‘Distracted,’ Ethan muttered. He hadn’t been aware of anything except the woman in his arms—the feelings she generated in him.
‘Over here,’ Mickey directed, steering him towards one as Daisy stirred in his arms, her lovely full breasts swelling against the wall of his chest as she gulped in air.
Ethan told himself his brain needed a blast of oxygen, too. As much as he wanted to hang onto Daisy Donahue she was going to rip into him the moment she had regained her wits. He’d be enemy number one for causing her to lose her job, regardless of whether or not it had been a good position for a person like her to have. And freeing her from it so she could be with him was not an argument she was about to appreciate. Somehow he would have to make her see him as her saviour instead of the black dog of disaster.
Daisy struggled to regain her strength and her wits. Never in her whole life had she fainted and to have Ethan Cartwright take advantage of this momentary weakness, manhandling her even more than before, was the absolute pits. At least she wasn’t being carried by him any more. He’d put her on a chair and was sitting beside her. Despite the fact that he’d shoved her head down to her knees, it was still swimming, and he had his arm around her in support, which she probably needed, though she hated needing anything from him. He’d just destroyed the lifeline to keeping her parents in their home.
‘Fetch her a glass of water, will you, Mickey?’
His voice upset her even further, loaded with concern. After the event. No concern when it really mattered.
‘Sure. And here’s her hat. It dropped off on the way.’
Total indignity on top of everything else!
By the time the glass of water came, she was steady enough to lift her head and sip it. ‘Thanks,’ she muttered to the man who’d brought it—Mickey Bourke, another A-list bachelor with no worries about where his next dollar was coming from.
