AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Have you told little Rose yet about Mike moving to the States?’
Natalie rubbed the faint worried indentation between her feathery eyebrows and shook her head. ‘Nope. I suppose I should before the wedding?’ What am I doing asking a childless bachelor advice on child-rearing when I already know the answer? she thought begrudgingly. ‘But I just don’t know how she’s going to react.’ Liar! She knew Rose would react like any other five-year-old when she learnt the dad who spoilt her rotten every other weekend—when he turned up—was moving halfway around the world—badly!
Luke shifted uncomfortably. ‘Actually it’s about the wedding I wanted to have a word, Nat.’
His next words confirmed that the shiver of apprehension snaking down her spine was justified.
‘I hate to do this to you, but Rafe has put me on the Ellis account; he’s sending me to New York for a couple of weeks.’ He tried to sound casual about this amazing opportunity and failed miserably.
‘Congratulations.’
‘Thanks, Nat. It should be you that’s going, though.’
Natalie shook her head and pinned on a smile. Only a real cow would begrudge someone as nice and genuinely talented as Luke a break like this. ‘You deserve it, Luke,’ she assured him warmly.
‘I’m afraid it means…’
‘You won’t be able to come to the wedding with me,’ she completed, unable to totally disguise her dismay behind a sunny smile. ‘That’s fine, don’t worry,’ she added stoically.
She wasn’t surprised that Luke had said yes; when Rafe asked hungry young executives like Luke they never said no. In fact, she brooded, people in general don’t say no to him…except me.
These days she didn’t rate cosy chats with His Lordship, as the blue-blooded heir to a baronetcy was called—sometimes affectionately, sometimes not!—behind his back. Which just proves, she told herself wryly, that there is a bright side to having a career that’s going nowhere.
On paper she and Luke had the same qualifications, they had even begun working at the top-notch management consulting firm within weeks of one another, but ten months on Luke had his own office and she was still sitting at the same desk doing routine stuff that she could have done asleep.
Things weren’t likely to get better either. You didn’t get offered a chance at Ransome twice and Natalie had, after much soul-searching, refused hers. Luke, who hadn’t had to weigh his desire for promotion against the problems of child care, had not said no to his.
The rest, as they said, was history. She’d made her choice; she didn’t consider herself a victim—lots of women managed to have high-flying careers and babies. Clearly she didn’t have what it took.
‘God, Nat, I’m really sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Natalie soothed a guilty-looking Luke. ‘It’s that man,’ she breathed, venom hardening her soft voice as she contemplated the grim prospect of attending the marriage of her ex to the glamorous Gabby without the support of a passable male to give the ego-bolstering illusion she had a well-rounded life. ‘I don’t suppose it even occurs to Rafael Ransome that some people actually have a life outside this place!’
‘Nat, he’s not that bad.’
‘Bad! The man’s a cold-blooded tyrant! I’m surprised he doesn’t make us sign our contracts in blood,’ she retorted with a resolute lack of objectivity. ‘Forget all that stuff you read about him in the glossy supplements,’ she advised Luke, imaginatively expanding her theme. ‘He might have turned this place into one of the top management consulting firms in Europe virtually overnight—the success of the nineties…’
To Luke’s amusement she proceeded to dismiss one of the most spectacular financial successes of the decade with a disdainful sniff.
‘And have every top company beating a path to his door, but I’ve always reckoned he was born in the wrong century.’
Luke looked amused. ‘Sounds like you’ve given the subject some thought?’
‘Not especially,’ Natalie responded hurriedly. ‘It’s just obvious that underneath the designer suits—’
‘You’ve not given that much thought either, I suppose.’
‘Most certainly not!’ Natalie denied, insulted by the suggestion she was in the habit of mentally undressing her boss.
‘Sure you haven’t. So what do you think goes on under his designer suits, Nat?’
‘I think there lurks the soul of a feudal, your-fate-is-in-his-hands type of despot. I can just see him now grinding the odd handful of peasants into the ground.’
Her voice lost some of its crisp edge as an intrusive mental image to match her words flashed into her head. In her defence, Rafe Ransome, his well-developed muscular thighs covered by a pair of tight and most likely historically inaccurate breeches, was enough to put the odd weak quiver into the most objective of females’ voices.
Unlike Natalie, most women were not normally objective about her employer’s looks; his mingled genes—Italian on his mother’s side and Scottish on his aristocratic father’s side—had given the man an entirely unfair advantage in the looks stakes.
‘Nat!’
Natalie was too caught up in her historical re-enactment to hear the note of warning. ‘On his way to burn down his neighbours’ castle and ravish the local maidens…’
Like the modern-day equivalent, his victims probably wouldn’t have put up much of a fight, she thought, contemplating with disapproval the inability of her own sex to see beyond a darkly perfect face of fallen angel and an in-your-face sensuality.
It struck her as ironic, when you considered he was set to inherit a centuries-old title and the castle that went with it from his Scottish father, that Rafael Ransome, all six feet three of him—and most of it solid muscle—looked Latin from the top of his perfectly groomed glossy head to the tips of his expressive tapering fingers.
Even she, who wasn’t into dark, dynamic, brooding types, had to admit that if you discounted his disconcertingly bright electric-blue eyes Rafael looked like most women’s idealised image of a classic Mediterranean male. Dark luxuriant hair that gleamed blue-black in some lights, golden skin stretched tautly over high chiselled cheekbones, and a wide, sensually moulded mobile mouth…just thinking about the cruel contours caused a shudder to ripple through her body and she hadn’t even got to his lean, athletic body!
‘Natalie!’
It was Luke’s strangled whisper that finally made her lift her unfocused angry eyes from the computer screen, filled by now with row after row of angry exclamation marks.
Oh, God!
Even before Natalie heard the inimical deep mocking drawl the back of her neck started to prickle and her stomach gave a sickly lurch. Why, she wondered despairingly, hadn’t her selective internal radar, selective as in it only spookily zapped into life when His Lordship was in the vicinity, kicked in a few moments earlier?
Her wide eyes sent an agonised question to Luke, who almost imperceptibly nodded.
I must have done something really terrible in a previous life, she thought.
CHAPTER TWO
‘EMPLOYMENT law being what it is these days, I generally have to satisfy myself with the odd formal written warning, Ms Warner.’
As an alternative to ravishment?
The unbidden image that accompanied her maverick and fortunately silent response made Natalie’s skin prickle with heat. She shook her head slightly as if to physically dislodge the breathless, tight feeling that made her head buzz. Being ravished, even hypothetically, by the owner of the most blatantly sensual lips she was ever likely to see was somewhere Natalie was not going.
‘See you, Nat! And good luck,’ Luke hissed.
And I’ll need it, she thought wistfully, watching Luke making one of the fastest exits she’d ever seen—discretion obviously being the better part of valour as far as he was concerned, and who could blame him?
Still, at least there would be nobody to see her grovel, she thought dully. She took a deep breath and, squaring her slender shou
lders, resolutely pushed aside a tide of self-pity that threatened to engulf her—she only had herself to blame. If you were going to bad-mouth your boss a sensible person took a few basic precautions first, such as checking he wasn’t within hearing distance!
