‘Right,’ he s
aid. ‘Sleep. Goodnight, Evie.’
He
clos
ed
his eyes.
e closed his eyes.
‘Goodnight,
Mr
Hadleigh.’
He
open
ed
them again.
She quickly looked away.
‘I really don’t think you can
“
Mr
Hadleigh
”
me when I’m in bed next to you, even if I
am
only here as a sort of sleeping pill. I’m sure it won’t hurt
us
to drop some formality whilst we’re in Italy
. You can call me Tom. B
ut only whilst we’re here.’
‘Goodnight, Tom,’ she said, and s
he smiled at the dark rafters above her.
Chapter Two
In the scheme of things …
The rays of the early morning sun slanted through the small window
in the ceiling
and fell on Evie’s face. She stirred. Still half
asleep, she turned over and buried her face in
the
pillow
next to her
. Her cheek met with hard muscle, and a male scent filled her nostrils. Her eyes flew open. Ohmigod
, t
hat was no pillow
.
She rolled on
to
her back and brea
thed in deeply. She’d done it. S
he’d actually done it, and after only two small glasses of
red
wine. She’d found the courage from somewhere to ask Tom Hadleigh
–
hotshot barrister Tom Hadleigh
–
to get into bed with her, and he’d agreed. Well, perhaps agreed was a bit too strong for the position she’d put him in, but the result was the same.
Wow!
It had been an inspired plan, if she said so herself, and it just showed how keen she was
on
keep
ing
her job – her real job.
Within two days of working in Tom’s house, she’d realised that she was never going to uncover the proof her editor wanted by looking through
Tom’s
files and
in his desk drawers
. No one would leave full details of their affairs, complete with times
, dates
and
places
, lying around to be read by every nosy temp.
Her only hope of finding out what he’d been up to socially
–
well, sexually, to be more precise
–
in the previous couple of months
was going to be the week in Italy.
The first stage
of
P
lan
A
had been to get things on to an informal footing
by getting him into her bed
– she glanced
across
at the sleeping back and smiled
in satisfaction
–
and
the
second
stage
was to
encourag
e
him to start talking
as they lay side by side
.
Getting him to
start talking
was going to be far from easy. The habit of watching his words in court had clearly extended to his private life, and although he
’d
always
been
courteous and polite when they
’d
met, he
’d
firmly kept his distance. Perhaps more of a distance than he would have kept if she hadn’t gone quite so overboard in following the editor’s instructions about her appearance.
‘You’ll need to keep a low profile
, Evie,
’ he’d told her when he’d called her into his office at
Pure Dirt
less than a week after she’d started working for the magazine.
‘Be smart but unobtrusive.’
As he’d been speaking, his eyes had been travelling down from the auburn hair that was pile
d carelessly on top of her head;
to th
e unnaturally long black
eye
lashes;
to the bright green sweater, cut very low, that clung to her curves and barely reached the waistband of her
short black skirt;
to the expanse of long, fake-tanned leg that ended in emerald green spiky-heeled sling-backs.
‘Unobtrusive,’ he’d repeated. ‘We don’t want to scare him, do we?’
Minu
tes before, he’d told her that one of his
contact
s
at an employment agency had rung earlier
in the
day to tell him that Tom Hadleigh urgently needed an Italian speaker
. The
person
had to be
available
to go to Italy
with him for a week, and if
he
or she
had secretarial skills, too, the contract would be for a month – a week working at his Hampstead house, a week in Italy, and then two more weeks
back
at his house.
As he’d
only just hired Evie, the editor remembered her listing fluent Italian on her CV. Unable to believe his luck, he instantly dug deep into the magazine’s pocket and paid his contact to courier Evie’s CV to Tom, along with a personal recommendation from the agency saying that she was fairly new to their books but that she’d made a highly favourable impression on her first placements for them. His contact had got back almost at once to say that the job was Evie’s.
Normally the lawyer would have interviewed her first, the agency contact told the editor, but he was extremely busy, and it would be difficult to find the time to do so. He’d used the agency for several years and was prepared to take their recommendation on trust. However, he’d look upon the first week in London as a probationary period. If
she
proved unsuitable, he’d terminate the contract, no matter the difficulty that caused him.
‘
Fuck probationary periods and all that crap
,’ the editor concluded. ‘
All I’m interested in is
the
proof that h
e was screwing
the so-called morally blameless
Zizi Westenhall.
Get me
that, and
I
’ll
sue her for the
shitload of money we had to pay her
. A
nd
I’ll
make that
fucking
lawyer look bad, too
, for screwing a client whilst he was trying to screw us
.
I don’t care how you go about it
,
just get me the fucking lowdown.’
‘Why are you so sure they were an item?’
The editor rifled through the
pile of
papers on his desk and pulled out a photo. He waved it in front of her. ‘That’s why. Just look at them both – you can almost smell the sex. A paparazzi mate of mine
came across them
and
he
took it when they didn’t know.’
She picked up the photo. Tom Hadleigh was gazing across a candlelit table into the eyes of a very beautiful woman.
‘
That’s Zizi Westenhall.
Mrs
Rich Bastard. And she had the fucking cheek to say we libelled her for
fool
ing around be
hind her idiot husband’s back.
Huh
!
You l
ook at that and tell me she’s not
having it off with her lawyer.’
‘They certainly seem to be very close.’
‘Tell me about it
.
Well, we’ve well and truly got him now. He sure is gonna regret the times he’s deliberately twisted our words and made us look like incompetent fools and li
ars. It’s up to you now, Evie.
Together we’re gonna
shaft the bastard.’
Scared witless and giddy with excitement at
having been
given such an important first
commission
, she’d turned to leave the editor’s office, but he’d stopped her.
‘If you fuck up this assignment,’ he’d said steadily, ‘your first job at
Pure Dirt
will be your last, and you’ll never again work on any
other
magazine if I can help it. But you know that, don’t you?’
The next day, she’d tied her hair tightly back in a bun, left her false eyelashes on the bedside table, put on
the
tortoiseshell
spectacles
she’d bought in the market
and a drab beige suit
,
and presented herself at Tom Hadleigh’s house. She’d nearly spoilt it all by giggling at the
expression
on his face when he saw her thick glasses and sensible shoes.
The week in London
had gone
smoothly
, and he’d seemed pleased
with her work. S
o far things had gone well in Italy
, too
–
after all,
in fewer than twenty-four hours, they were calling each other Evie and Tom. But there was no time
for her
to rest on her laurels
–
she had to step things up a notch
in double quick time
, and she couldn’t expect the black scorpion to do it for
her again
.
Th
e moment she’d caught sight of the
scorpion in the corner
of an empty hearth
on her way back to her room after dinner,
she knew
she’d found the inspiration she’d been looking for. With wooden beams everywhere, there was
bound
to be a black scorpion somewhere in her room. All she had to do was find it, wait for the right time, jump on the bed and scream as loudly as she could. Which is what she’d done, and very successfully, too, as testified by the
legal
head on the pillow next to hers.
She glanced sideways at the object of her thoughts. He was a
sleep, half lying on his back. She p
ropp
ed
herself up on her elbow
and
leaned
slightly
over him to get a better look at his face. Her eyes slowly traced his features and slid down
his
throat
to
a
mat of rough chest hair. She moved closer
still
and followed the line of hair until it disappeared into a tangle of
white
linen.
Holy crap, she thought, and she fell back against the cool sheet
–
he’s absolutely gorgeous.
She closed her eyes tightly. She wasn’t
going to look at him any more. H
e was a job,
and
nothing
else
. She pressed her eyelids harder against each other.
‘So, Evie
,
which of us is going to move first – assuming a) that you’ve finished your physical examination of me and b) that you don’t need to be rescued from any other insects
prior to
moving?’
She gasped and opened her eyes.
Tom had raised himself on his elbow and was staring down into he
r face.
‘Well?’ he repeated.
‘Huh?’ she squeaked nervously, trying not to look at the broad chest in front of her.
‘With reference to a), you’ve just given me a thorough once
-
over, but if you haven’t finished, I could lie still a little longer. It’s as you wish. With reference to b), as far as I can tell, I seem to have been a successful bug deterrent, but despite you not wearing your glasses at present, you might
be able to spot
something I
’ve
missed.’
She felt herself going scarlet. ‘I was just wondering if you were awake.’
‘I see. And there was I, thinking you were scoring me out of ten. Silly ol’ me.’
‘N
o, I wasn’t.’ Her voice ended in a high-pitched croak.
He sighed deeply. ‘A
h, Evie. I’ve spent too many years watching people in court not to know when someone’s telling me porkies. So what was the score?’
She looked up and saw laughter in his eyes.
‘Well, then,’ she said, breaking into a
smile
. ‘Since I wouldn’t want to disappoint my boss on this beautiful Tuesday
morning
, I’ll quote my father – although he used to say it in Italian
–
every beetle is a beauty to its mother.’