LITMIR.BIZ

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couldn’t believe she’d just blundered into a strange man’s bedroom then lied shamelessly while he flirted with her. Worse, that she’d responded as if he’d reached out and flipped a switch—turning her on had been that easy. And, with the game so swiftly won, he’d lived up to his reputation and just as quickly become bored.

      She groaned as she ran down the spiral staircase, wishing that it were possible to stop the clock, rewind time…

      ‘Miss Lautour?’ Mrs Figgis, standing at the foot blocking her way, a puzzled expression creasing her face, brought her to an abrupt halt. ‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’

      The voice of Rich Mallory’s cleaner had much the same instantly bracing effect as the proverbial cold shower. Allegedly. She’d never found the need for such self-abuse.

      ‘Through the French windows, Mrs Figgis,’ Ginny said, clinging to the truth. Her voice shocked back to crispness. Besides, having bearded the lion in his den and escaped in one piece, she wasn’t about to be scared by someone wielding nothing more dangerous than a duster.

      Nevertheless, she held her position two steps up. Just to even up the cleaner’s height advantage.

      A mistake. It just drew attention to her boots. Puzzlement instantly shifted to disapproval.

      ‘Can I ask you to be careful when you’re going round with a vacuum cleaner?’ she asked. Getting it in before she was on the receiving end of a lecture about leaving footwear at the door—particularly anything as unsuitable as boots—in keeping with the Japanese theme of the décor. ‘I’m afraid I’ve lost my hamster—’

      ‘Hamster?’

      What was it about hamsters that was so unbelievable?

      All across the country people kept hamsters as pets. As an undergraduate, she’d briefly shared rooms with a girl who’d kept one. It had escaped all the time. It had even got under the floorboards once. Life with a hamster was a constant drama.

      That was where she’d got the idea in the first place…

      ‘Small, buff coloured rodent. About so big.’ She sketched the rough dimensions with her hands. ‘He’s called Hector,’ she said, her head distancing itself from her mouth as she elaborated unnecessarily. Or maybe not.

      She probably thought a woman who kept a hamster as a pet would be a sad-sack obsessive—not true, her room-mate had been the life and soul of any party—but Richard Mallory would undoubtedly mention the incident, be suspicious if Mrs Figgis knew nothing about it. With good reason.

      ‘Easy to mistake for fluff in a dark corner,’ she added.

      ‘There is no fluff in any corner of this apartment,’ the woman declared indignantly.

      ‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean…’ Then, ‘I’m sure Mr Mallory will explain.’

      ‘Mr Mallory?’ Mrs Figgis blanched. ‘He’s still here?’ So she wasn’t the only one who’d been caught out. ‘He should have left hours ago.’

      ‘Really?’ she said. Oh, listen to her to pretending not to know! She was shocked at just how convincing she sounded. ‘Well, it’s still early.’ If you were a multi-millionaire businessman who’d just had a hard night with a girl who wore black silk stockings. ‘Actually, I think he might appreciate coffee. And he did mention something about scrambled eggs…’

      She didn’t hang around to see whether Mrs Figgis considered it any part of her duties to make coffee rather than drink it. Instead, she headed swiftly in the direction of the French windows, legging it across the formerly immaculate raked gravel of Richard Mallory’s roof garden before scrambling through Her Ladyship’s now less than pristine hedge.

      She didn’t stop until she was safely inside, with her own French windows shut firmly against the outside world.

      Only then did she lean back against them and let out a huge groan.

      Rich Mallory straightened under the shower, letting the hot water ease the knots in his shoulders, the ache from the back of his neck. These all-night sessions took it out of him. They were a young man’s game.

      Then he grinned.

      Okay, he was well past the downhill marker of thirty, but he could still teach the whizkids who worked for him a thing or two, even if he did need a massage to straighten out the kinks next morning.

      Maybe he should have lived up—or was that down?—to his reputation and taken up the offer in Ginny Lautour’s disturbing eyes. They were curiously at odds with her clothes, her mousy, not quite blonde hair caught back in a kid’s scrunchy adorned with a velvet duck-billed platypus; he knew it was a duck-billed platypus because he’d been handbagged by his five-year-old niece into buying her one just like it.

      But there was nothing childlike about her eyes. A curious mixture of grey and green and slightly slanted beneath finely marked brows, they were intense, witch’s eyes…

      His grin faded as he shook his head, flipped the jet to cold and stood beneath it while he counted slowly to twenty. Only then did he reach for his robe, towelling his hair as he padded back to his bedroom, trailing wet footprints across the pale carpet.

      Orange juice. Coffee. Eggs. In that order. He’d been wise to pass on the side order of sex. Not that he hadn’t been tempted. Beneath the shapeless clothes, Ginny Lautour’s body had hinted at the kind of curves that invited a man’s hand to linger. And her eyes had invited a lot more than that. But he wasn’t ready to be bewitched just yet.

      He’d beaten off several attempts to break through his security cordon, steal the latest software his company had developed which was now going through the rigorous testing phase. He’d hoped that they, whoever they were, had given up. Apparently not.

      But he was smiling again as he picked up a phone, hitting the fast dial to his Chief Software Engineer as he headed downstairs in the direction of the kitchen. Despite the fact that she had been lying through her pretty teeth—not even the most athletic hamster could have got into that drawer—he’d enjoyed watching Ginny getting into deeper and deeper water as she had tried to extricate herself from an impossible situation.

      For a girl in the industrial espionage business she had a quite remarkable propensity to blush. It gave her a look of total innocence that was so completely at odds with the hot look in her eyes that a man might just be fooled into believing it.

      Maybe he’d be a little less relaxed about it if there’d been anything of any value in his apartment for her to steal. As it was, he was rather looking forward to her next move.

      ‘Marcus.’ He jerked his mind back to more immediate concerns as his call was picked up. ‘I’ve finally cracked the problem we’ve been having.’

      Then, as the spiral turned inward so that he was facing into the vast expanse of his living room, he saw the open bottle of champagne standing on the sofa table and belatedly remembered the luscious redhead he’d taken to the retirement party he’d thrown for one of his senior staff.

      ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour to bring the team up to speed,’ he said, not waiting for an answer before he disconnected.

      Well, that explained the earring. It was Lilianne’s. She must have taken him at his word when he had told her that he’d just be five minutes, invited her to make herself comfortable.

      How long had she lain in his bed, waiting for him to join her? How long before she’d stormed out in a huff? Even he could see that it would have to be a huff. At the very least.

      Long enough to write him a note and tie it to the neck of the champagne bottle with one of her stockings, anyway. Presumably to emphasize what he’d missed.

      He sighed. She’d been playing kiss-chase with him for weeks and he’d be lying if he denied that he’d enjoyed the game. Hard to get was so rare these days. He wasn’t fooled, of course. He understood the game too well for that.

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