LITMIR.BIZ

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cropped hair shining blue-black in the sunlight coming at him from the window behind him and casting deliciously brooding dark shadows across his face.

      Alpha man relaxing at home, she drily observed. If you put him on the front page of Vogue looking like that the shops would sell out within minutes of the copies hitting the shelves. He was gorgeous—sexy; her tummy muscles flipped over and that hot, telling sting hit her abdomen to remind her that this was the only man ever to make her feel like this.

      He glanced up and saw her then and surprise froze him, cutting off his voice as if someone had severed his tongue from his throat.

      ‘Hi,’ she smiled at him, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you here but—'

      ‘You are very welcome to disturb me,’ he declared as he shot bolt-upright. The phone rattled as it landed on its rest. As he strode quickly towards her everything about him was jerky and tense. The way he came to stop directly in front of her filled her with the strangest impression that he was deliberately blocking her off from the desk.

      It spooked her enough to send her heart on a sinking dive to her stomach. When he reached out to take hold of her to kiss her, she took a wary step back. Something was wrong here.

      ‘No, don’t touch me yet,’ she jerked out. ‘I need to ask you something first …'

      His dark eyes narrowed on her sudden tension. As he lowered his hands to his sides, Louisa watched them ball into two tense fists. When she looked up again it was as though a shutter had been slammed down across his face.

      ‘Ask me what?’ he prompted.

      And then she knew. It was right there in his body language, in the clenched fists and his shuttered expression and his tense, blocking stance. It had nothing to do with his family—it was him.

      She took another step back from him, feeling very cold suddenly, shivering, pins and needles chasing up her legs from the oddly unstable pads of her feet. Her heart began to thump. Eyelashes flickering as she looked away from him, she took a sideways step then just walked around him to go over to the desk.

      A tense, dragging silence followed as she stood there moving her stark blue eyes from one stack of papers to the next stack, each one clearly labelled with the name of one of Max’s companies. Her name—her other name, Louisa Jonson—jumped out at her from a closed folder on the far side of the desk.

      The phone started ringing—ringing and ringing, while Andreas held his stillness and the air slowly thickened with that insistent sound slicing through it as if it were trying to slice through her.

      Then the phone stopped. Louisa drew in a breath. ‘I thought it was your father,’ she pushed out unevenly. ‘I refused to believe that you would …’ Pale as death, she spun around. ‘Why?’ she choked out.

      His shrug was so insolent it almost hurt her more than all the rest put together. ‘Landreau is your lover.'

      Louisa stared at him and couldn’t push out a single word in denial because he looked so calm, sounded so casual about the accusation that she actually found herself waiting for him to offer another one of those horrible shrugs.

      ‘Nothing to say?’ He offered a quick condemning smile instead. ‘Very wise,’ he added as he strode back to the desk, all lean, lithe, smooth-moving male in complete control of himself.

      He reached across the desk to flip open the file with her name on it. ‘To give you your due, yineka mou,’ he continued, ‘at least you used your unmarried name while you spent the last four years travelling Europe, passing yourself off as Landreau’s assistant.’ The last word bit from between his teeth. ‘If, however, I can gather this much intimate information about your affair with him so quickly, then how much more could an experienced reporter dig up if he was curious enough?'

      ‘You’ve been coming here—each day—to investigate me?’ Despite all the evidence laid out in front of her, Louisa was still struggling to believe any of this. ‘For what purpose, for goodness’ sake?'

      ‘For the purpose of being prepared for the enterprising person who decides to drag my name through the mud if or when it comes to light that Max Landreau’s long-term live-in mistress is also my wife.’

      As if he’d slapped her face, Louisa drew in a sharp breath. ‘I am not Max’s mistress.'

      ‘His long-term live-in—what, then?’

      ‘Assistant,’ she insisted. ‘His personal assistant. My duties deal with the personal and social side of his life but I don’t sleep with him.'

      ‘Intriguing,’ he drawled, turning to settle his lean hips against the desk again with that same long, relaxed sprawl of his legs. ‘You live in his house—'

      ‘I do not!’ she denied. ‘I rent the flat above his garages!’

      ‘You live in his house,’ he repeated. ‘It is your permanent address. You have a permanent stateroom on his yacht! Wherever he goes you go as if joined to him at the hip!'

      His voice had hardened and thickened with each declaration he’d tossed at her. Reaching round, he snatched up the folder and in a shocking display of uncharacteristic carelessness sent a spill of papers sliding onto the desk as he flipped through them with long fingers to filter out several computer-generated photographs.

      ‘You,’ he said, ‘in a hot-pink bikini, leaning against him at a lunch party on his yacht.’ He showed her. ‘You,’ he continued, ‘wearing the slinkiest red dress I have ever seen, pinned to his side by the diamonds you wear around your beautiful throat at a charity ball at his house! Then we have the beach party in the south of France, where you use him as a pillow while he shades your face from the sun with his hat. You are laughing!’ he accused, as if laughing was a very big sin in his eyes. ‘You are wearing a white bikini! He wears nothing!'

      ‘Sh-shorts,’ Louisa stammered, face going pinker with each revealing photograph. ‘Max has sh-shorts on.'

      ‘He does not wear his shorts up as high as that muscle bronzed chest you are so comfortable with!'

      She gasped as he flung the images at her. They fell in a slithering waft to the floor while he launched himself away from the desk. Shaken by his sudden burst of violence, Louisa just stared after him, not sure what to say in her own defence. She did travel wherever Max travelled. She did live-in, if that phrase could still be innocent after the rude interpretation Andreas had put on it. And the pictures did look pretty intimate, she allowed reluctantly.

      ‘I don’t sleep with him,’ she insisted.

      ‘Who mentioned sleep?’ he spun to rake back. He was vibrating with anger now, riding on a river of it. ‘The guy romantically proposed to you on top of the London Eye in front of a thousand guests—I watched the replay on the internet!'

      The way his fingers shook as he scraped them through his hair almost made Louisa feel sorry for him—if he hadn’t roughed out a very rude word that stiffened her spine on an offended jolt.

      ‘It was six guests, and it was a publicity stunt,’ she corrected, refusing to admit how angry she’d been with Max for pulling the silly stunt at all. ‘He works in the media! He lives a very high-profile life!'

      ‘With my wife as his sexy little sidekick—am I supposed to be pleased to see you with him like that?'

      ‘How come you didn’t see the London Eye thing when it happened?’ she retaliated hotly. ‘It went worldwide at the time, so what were you doing in June last year while I was being proposed to, Andreas—hiding away in your island retreat with one of your floozies?’

      ‘Did you want me to see you?’

      The challenge locked her eyes on his face, her mouth dropping open on a gasping quiver of shock.

      ‘Tall, dark, handsome media mogul, older than me but not by much, filthy rich,’ he listed, using each word

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