LITMIR.BIZ

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of him in the press—at parties with the great and good of London society, usually with some eminently beautiful woman hanging off his arm—and she knew in her bones he was going to be a challenge. If she was going to win him over she couldn’t allow herself to be daunted by that famous dark charisma and overabundance of sexual confidence.

      He was exactly the sort of man she usually avoided in real life. Bad-boy types who flitted from woman to woman like moths in a lighting shop were the antithesis of what she was looking for in a partner. She needed steady and safe. Comfortable. A relationship she could feel in control of.

      A nervous shiver tickled down her spine at the thought of facing him, but she shook it off. She was not going to let his challenging reputation get to her. She was a smart, savvy, professional woman and that was exactly what he was going to see—when she finally arrived there.

      She sat there for another fifteen minutes, tapping her feet and biting at a ragged fingernail until the train finally began its excruciatingly slow roll into Old Street station.

      She was now officially late for her interview.

      She hated being late. Hated it.

      Anything that took control out of her hands like this made her so stressed she felt ill with it.

      After a few more frustrating minutes of trying to figure out where she was meant to be going using the sat nav on her phone, she finally found the converted warehouse where Xander’s studio was located.

      Feeling sticky and jumpy after running all the way there in her heels, she stepped into the blissfully cool entrance lobby and looked at the list of names and businesses on the large brushed-metal sign. Xander’s studio was just one of a collection of spaces used by a group of high-profile artists and creatives.

      The place was shabby chic through and through with huge, squashy leather sofas scattered around a break-out kitchen area, all done out in stainless steel and black lacquer-fronted cupboards. Amazing murals had been painted on all the walls and Jess recognised one in Xander’s famously biting style. It was a social commentary on the state of reporting in the press. An open newspaper showed a picture of a child crying, with a meat cleaver slicing through the middle of it and the word HACK painted in big red bloody letters along the blade.

      Okay, she really needed to stop looking at that before the fear got to her. Did he really hate journalists that much? Would that make it even harder for her to conduct a successful interview with him?

      Only one way to find out.

      Gritting her teeth and smoothing down the jacket of her suit, she walked up the stairs to where Xander’s studio was located on the third floor.

      Taking a moment to get her breath back, she knocked loudly on the heavy wooden door to his studio and stood back to wait for him to appear, her hands grasped tightly behind her back and what she hoped was an open and friendly smile plastered across her face.

      There was the sound of footsteps from the other side of the door and Jess steeled herself as it swung open to reveal Xander Heaton, with a paintbrush in one hand and a look of tense annoyance on his face.

      Jess couldn’t help but stand and stare up at him as he towered over her. She’d anticipated him being somehow disappointing in the flesh, but he wasn’t. He really wasn’t.

      Paint-splattered jeans hung low on his hips and a grey cotton T-shirt clung tightly to the hard contours of his chest, making no effort whatsoever to disguise the swell of muscles on his rangy frame.

      Despite the hard angles of his bone structure there was something faintly boyish about him. Perhaps that was the key to his appeal? A hard alpha male on the outside with just a glimmer of a softer, more vulnerable soul inside.

      There was an almost ethereal glow about him, too, as if his charisma were being overmanufactured inside his body and the excess were spilling out through the pores of his skin.

      Even his just-rolled-out-of-bed, designer mess of rich chestnut-brown hair seemed to glow like a freshly shelled conker in the sunshine pouring in through the large warehouse windows.

      Jess’s body buzzed with longing to reach up and run her hands over his face, to feel the hard contours of his bones under that golden skin and the gentle rasp of his barely there stubble as it caught on the whorls of her fingertips.

      It took her a moment to realise he was staring at her mouth with his amazing, bright, aqua-coloured eyes and giving her an impatient frown as if he was utterly nonplussed by her appearance and thoroughly pissed off about being disturbed.

      She gave herself a little shake and pulled herself together. She was a twenty-five-year-old professional woman, not some love-struck teenager, and she needed to act like it.

      ‘Hi, Xander, I’m here to do the interview with you today,’ she said brightly. ‘Maggie’s caught up so you’ve got me instead.’ Her smile began to falter when he didn’t give up his hard frown. ‘I know I’m a few minutes late, but it was totally beyond my control. The tube train I was on...’ She ground to a halt as he began shaking his head.

      ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

      Panic rose in her chest and her blood began pumping round her body with such vigorous force she could feel the jittery buzz of it right down to her toes. ‘The interview. With Maggie? She said you’d agreed to talk to her today about the new exhibition you’re planning.’ He continued to stare at her blankly. ‘Before you go to Italy,’ Jess said, gesticulating wildly now, as if she could somehow waft the memory of the interview back into his head through the sheer force of her determination.

      Her rambling explanation must have sparked something in his brain because his eyes widened a fraction before his expression shut down into a hard frown again.

      ‘Yeah, okay, I’d forgotten about that...’ he shrugged ‘...but you missed your window. I’m right in the middle of something now.’

      ‘But...’ Jess could barely get the words past her lips in her panic.

      ‘Sorry, sweetheart, but you snooze, you lose.’ He turned to go.

      ‘What? That’s it? You can’t even give me five minutes of your time?’ she nearly shouted in her panic.

      Xander sighed and turned back, rubbing a hand through his hair. ‘To be honest, I never wanted to do this interview in the first place. I only agreed because your colleague is a friend of a friend and she caught me at a weak moment. I seem to remember I was pretty drunk.’ He leant against the doorjamb and flashed her a ‘crap happens’ look. ‘I don’t have time to pander to journalists right now. I have work to do. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ He shot her a wink before striding off into his studio, slamming the door behind him and leaving Jess mouthing like a landed fish in his wake.

      * * *

      Xander Heaton walked back to where he’d been sketching his model, trying to shake off an unsettling twinge of guilt as the look of utter dismay on the journalist’s face permeated through to his conscience.

      He flipped it out of his head. He didn’t need distractions like that at the moment. It was hard enough holding it together without having to accommodate any old Tom, Dick or Harriet who wandered in for a bit of show-and-tell. Everyone seemed to want a piece of him at the moment and he barely had enough of himself left to keep his strung-out existence going.

      His latest model—who was giving it everything she’d got to contort herself into the strange pose he’d asked her to take up—gave him a slow, seductive smile as he sat down and attempted to focus back on her.

      Ah, hell. He knew he’d been playing with fire when he asked her to pose for a picture. She’d been one of a bunch of professional models he’d got talking to at a party and he’d thought she might be an interesting subject to paint. She was making it pretty clear she was interested in more than just modelling for him right now, though.

      She was a beautiful woman—too young for his tastes—but she was going to be a big thing at some point, he could tell. He should

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