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Orla paced back and forth in her office. It had been a week since her cataclysmic night and that disastrous meeting with Antonio Chatsfield. And all week she’d been trying to work out some way to avoid ever having to see him again. Which, she knew, was entirely selfish and resulting out of her own reckless behaviour which made it even worse.
Tom asked now, ‘You know the longer you drag this out, the more likely your father will hear of it? He thinks that negotiations are under way.’
Orla wrung her hands together and stopped pacing to face their solicitor. He looked stern. Her belly sank like a stone.
Tom went on. ‘Once he’s finished selling off your assets in South-East Asia he’ll be back and expecting to hear good news. You know how important it is to him that the Chatsfields agree to an integrated takeover and the stipulation that the UK and Ireland Kennedy Group hotels keep their name? Not to mention the last remaining New York Kennedy hotel.’
Orla nodded miserably. Tom didn’t have to spell it out. She was jeopardising everything she had worked so hard for. Her father was already sick with guilt at the bad business decisions he’d made—against Orla’s repeated entreaties to do otherwise.
Orla had done her best ever since she could remember to be there for her father, ensuring that he had the support he didn’t get from her mother. When she had been about nine years old she’d overheard her father talking with his business manager, late one night after a party. He’d said sadly, ‘Marianne can’t have any more children … so it’s just Orla. If we had a son to leave it all to, then there might be a chance … but I just don’t see how we can expect Orla to fulfil that role.’
Orla knew now that her father was innocently old-fashioned in his beliefs about women’s roles but she’d vowed since that day to work extra hard to prove to him that she could take on the burd
en. And she’d excelled at it. Working at their hotels at every opportunity—after school, weekends, school holidays. Sitting in on her father’s meetings, largely unnoticed but soaking everything in. Gaining a master’s degree in hotel management by the incredibly young age of twenty-three.
In the end her sex had made no difference. Her hypervigilance and diligence hadn’t been able to stop her father from being influenced by his need to keep his pleasure- and luxury-loving wife happy.
They’d been living beyond their means for so long now that this offer from the Chatsfields was their only option. The sick circling in Orla’s brain came to a halt. Their only option. The knowledge sank like a stone in her heart.
She looked at Tom and sighed heavily. ‘Very well. I’ll go back … but I’ll go and see him alone.’
Orla didn’t want witnesses to the potential humiliation Antonio Chatsfield was about to serve up to her.
‘Miss Orla Kennedy is here to see you.’
Antonio did not like the jump of his pulse to hear this annoucement or the anticipation that sizzled in his veins to think of her outside his office right now. Curtly he answered, ‘Send her in.’
Good manners prompted Antonio to stand up when he would have preferred to stay sitting, as much to disguise any bodily reactions he was afraid he might not be able to control as an effort to demonstrate a position of power. Not that he even agreed with pathetic games like that. That was more his father’s style.
He went and stood by the window and waited, forcing his blood to cool. The door opened. ‘Miss Kennedy, sir.’
Steeling himself, he finally turned around, but despite his best efforts his body reacted as if it was made of iron filings and a magnet had just walked into the room. It was that physical a sensation.
‘Thank you, Maggie,’ he managed to get out, and vaguely heard his secretary say something about bringing refreshments. Orla Kennedy looked pale. There were shadows under her eyes. Her hair was up in a bun at the back of her head and it reminded him forcibly of that first night he’d seen her. She was dressed today in a dark green knee-length shift dress and matching jacket, black heels. The green made her Celtic colouring look even more dramatic.
To his intense irritation he could feel the blood pooling in his groin, stiffening his flesh as he imagined pulling her into him, removing her jacket, pulling down the zip at the back of her dress….
Moving before he could embarrass himself, Antonio went back around his desk and indicated the high-backed seat on the other side. ‘Please, take a seat.’
Orla walked in, her face set and stern. Mouth compressed. Clearly as loath to be facing him again as he was to be facing her. She put down a briefcase and sat down primly on the chair.
Just then a knock came and Maggie reappeared with a tray holding tea and coffee. Antonio forced himself to smile at the woman and said, ‘We’ll take it from here, thank you. Please see to it that we’re not disturbed.’
When she’d left, Antonio looked at Orla, who had two flags of pink in her cheeks now. His groin throbbed. ‘Tea or coffee?’ he gritted out.
‘Tea, please.’
That husky voice. Just hearing it again brought back the X-rated dreams he’d had to endure every night for the past week. Reminded him of waking in damp sheets, his body painfully aroused and aching for fulfillment.
He poured the tea and handed her the cup and saucer which she took quickly, putting it down in front of her with a clatter of crockery. The pinkness in her cheeks intensified.
Antonio poured his own coffee and took a sip, willing his body to behave.
Orla ignored her tea. She looked so tense she might break in two. And then she blurted out, ‘Look, Mr Chatsfield, I regret what happened between us that night, as I’m sure you do too. I think we’re both agreed that if we’d known who each other was, it never would have happened. I just … I just want to put that night behind us and start again. Pretend it didn’t happen.’
There was such an earnest expression on her face and her eyes were so huge that Antonio almost felt sorry for her. Almost. But something wicked and hot inside him chafed at her insistence on calling him by his surname, and that she regretted it, or that they could put it behind them. Even though he’d been telling himself all week that he regretted it.
Faced with her now, separated by only a desk, with his body throbbing with need, Antonio couldn’t be anything less than completely honest.
