Элли Блейк – A Night with the Society Playboy (страница 1)
He lifted her so that her legs wrapped around him.
Her eyes locked with his as he walked her to the front of the car. Then he sat her upon the still hot hood.
‘Hot! Hot!’ she cried out.
‘Tell me about it,’ he murmured, and the car had nothing on the temperature of her skin.
‘I meant the car,’ she managed to breathe. ‘It’s scorching.’
He frowned. Whipped his T-shirt and sweater over his head in that sexy back-to-front way men had of doing so. Silly the way that small move made Ava’s already weak knees begin to quake.
He laid them on the hood, slid his hands beneath her backside, lifted her, then set her back upon his clothes.
‘Better?’
She smiled, running hands over the tight, hard muscles of his bare arms. ‘My hero,’ she purred.
His neck pinkened. ‘Don’t go getting any ideas, Ava. I’m no gentleman.’
When Ally Blake was a little girl she made a wish that when she turned twenty-six she would marry an Italian two years older than her. After it actually came true, she realised she was onto something with these wish things. So, next she wished that she could make a living spending her days in her pyjamas, eating M&Ms and drinking scads of coffee while turning her formative experiences of wallowing in teenage crushes and romantic movies into creating love stories of her own. The fact that she is now able to spend her spare time searching the internet for pictures of handsome guys for research purposes is merely a bonus!
Come along and visit her website at www.allyblake.com
Ally Blake also writes for Mills & Boon Romance™ series! Don’t miss HIRED: THE BOSS’S BRIDE, on sale this month!
Recent books by the same author:
Modern Heat™
STEAMY SURRENDER
THE MAGNATE’S INDECENT PROPOSAL
Mills & Boon® Romance
FALLING FOR THE REBEL HEIR
Dear Reader
This book is a very special one for me. It was a book I truly wondered if I would be able to write. It was the first book I wrote after the birth of my little girl.
As you can imagine, having a new little person in my home and in my life has been the most wondrous experience. Her smiles, her goos and gahs, and every new milestone reached have made for much beautiful time wastage. I mean, who can possibly write when they have a digital camera permanently attached to the end of their arm?
That said, a writer writes. And with this charming bad boy and the girl who got away mulling about in the back of my mind, the day came when they would no longer be denied their love story.
So there I sat, night after night, strapped to my computer, while my hubby had our little angel all to himself for a couple of hours. Okay, I admit, I did step out to give her a cuddle or a kiss or a tickle several times a session. Even thus happily distracted, the book came together. It was really a lot of fun to write, and now I know how very lucky I am to have the two best jobs in the world: romance author and mum. Pinch me now!
A NIGHT WITH THE SOCIETY PLAYBOY
BY
ALLY BLAKE
To my urban family, Chris, Sheree,
Tom and Ben Breasley: the ones who have
made my time away from home feel like home.
CHAPTER ONE
‘WILL you, Damien Halliburton, take Chelsea London to be your lawful wedded wife?’
The minister’s words blurred into one long onerous drone as Caleb, acting as best man to his mate and business partner, fidgeted inside his tux, stifled a yawn, and pretended as best he could to pay attention.
‘I do,’ Damien said, his voice deep and true, his eyes all for his admittedly scrumptious new bride.
Though he couldn’t deny that Damien had seemed happier since Chelsea appeared on the scene, Caleb had long since decided that that kind of indiscriminate happiness was for chumps. Not only was it fleeting, once gone it invariably took a little piece of you with it.
And Caleb liked himself and all his pieces. Quite a bit in fact.
He enjoyed his privileged life. He adored the pursuits that came with it: tennis, sailing, golf, drinks at the club. The capacity to spend the occasional weekend basking on a private beach somewhere didn’t go astray.
And he thrived on his work. He took great pleasure in doing whatever it took to land ostensibly ungettable clients for Keppler, Jones and Morgenstern day traders. Others in the biz thought him ruthless in his tunnel-visioned pursuit of the big fish. But the simple fact was he’d always found it too easy to make people say yes.
He’d been told by a former weekend getaway companion it had everything to do with a distracting glint in his eyes. It blinded people to the fact that he never switched off, he was always, always silently working out a way to come out on top.
To her credit it had taken him several seconds to realise she hadn’t meant it as a compliment, or in fact a come- on, and by that stage she’d walked out his door never to darken it again.
Caleb glanced across the altar and caught the eye of Kensey, a bridesmaid, who also happened to be Chelsea’s older sister. She was dark where Chelsea was fair, and he had always preferred brunettes.
He glinted for all he was worth.
Kensey’s eyes grew wide before she flipped her left ring finger at him from beneath her bouquet. A gold wedding band flashed his way.
His smile only widened as he offered a shrug by way of apology, but as he moved his gaze away the smile twisted into a grimace. Was the whole damn world getting married?
He gave himself a mental pat on the back for deciding not to bring a date to this thing. Weddings stirred up all sorts of irrational emotions in people. He’d seen it before. Perfectly level-headed gents cut down by a giddy mix of floral scents, blinding amounts of pink satin, and over-indulgence in cake frosting.
Finding that scrunching his toes in his shoes wasn’t proving distracting enough to keep him from yawning again, Caleb looked over the extensive crowd that filled the elegant city church.
He called upon his well-tuned affluence radar to decide which unsuspecting guest would be signing on the dotted line as a client by the end of the night.
The groom’s divorced, but friendly, parents sat in the front row weeping all over one another. If they didn’t end up renewing their vows by the end of the month he’d eat his shoes. But they were already Damien’s clients so they didn’t count.
His own parents, the estimable Gilchrists, a couple who had taken the ‘till death’ part of their own wedding vows so seriously he wouldn’t be surprised if they one day throttled one another, had naturally wangled the next best seat in the house: row two, on the aisle. They were no doubt the filthy-richest pair in the room, but they had never forgotten the year he’d lost all his pocket money running a secret Spring Racing betting ring while in middle school and thus wouldn’t part with a cent of their precious dough. Talk about the ungettable get.
Damien’s Aunt Gladys gave him a little finger wave from the fifth row. Caleb winked back and she all but fainted on the spot. He knew without a doubt she would have given him a perfume-scented cheque within five minutes of him courting her. But where was the thrill in that?
Masses of other faces he’d never seen and never particularly wanted to again soon passed him by in a Technicolor blur.
Until his brain slowly caught up with his eyes and he realised halfway down on the left side he’d passed over a swathe of long brunette waves, the immobilising combo of soft blue eyes fringed by impossibly long dark lashes, and the kind of soft, sweet, wide, pink mouth any sane man would kill for. Would die for.
Her name launched itself smack bang in the centre of his unsuspecting consciousness from somewhere deep inside like a guided missile gone astray.
His eyes retraced their journey over the colourful crowd, sweeping across row after row, even though he knew it couldn’t have been her.
Well, logically it
But he saw nothing but a sea of unfamiliar faces, none of which made his stomach clench as hers did. Or more precisely as hers had.
The last time he’d laid eyes on her he’d been a twenty- two-year-old business school graduate who’d been perfectly happy to bank on his family name to get where he was going. While she’d been a nineteen-year-old humanities wunderkind prepared to go to the far end of the earth to find a place where nobody knew her family name.
They’d been friends since high school, combatants just as long, and lovers for just one night, the day before she’d left to take up a scholarship at Harvard, the first of several top- class schools she’d flitted between since, and never looked back.
Never written a postcard, nor a letter, nor an email. No carrier pigeons had been employed by her, nor telephones rung on his behalf.