CHAPTER ONE
JOSH was late in the office on Monday morning—a sure sign that his weekend had been a heavy one.
Jemma’s smile was wry as she dealt efficiently with the morning’s mail. She had to give it to Cassie Drake—the gorgeous brunette had certainly succeeded where countless before had failed, and managed to keep the equally gorgeous Josh Tanner on a nice rolling boil for three whole months!
A record for him. His women usually lasted only as long as it took him to bed them thoroughly. A low boredom threshold, Josh called it—and the added fact that he couldn’t resist trying it on with just about any presentable woman who happened to catch his wandering eye.
Jemma should know—he had tried it on her once or twice. Not that it had worked. She wasn’t into men—not men like Josh anyway. He looked at a woman and saw sex with a capital S, and nothing else. He was a rake. A handsome, conceited, feckless rake, and the last type of man she would ever let herself become mixed up with.
She’d already been there—via her father, witnessed what his overactive libido had done to her mother. And no way—no way would she ever let herself fall into that thankless trap.
Josh hadn’t given up on her that easily, though, she recalled with a smile. It had taken him two months to accept defeat. Another month to stop sulking about it. And since then—nearly two years ago now—he had made her his best friend and confidante instead.
Which was why she knew all about Cassie, and what she did to him. How just one look at her softly rounded, sensually luxurious figure and his temperature shot off the gauge.
‘Why her?’ he’d once demanded in sheer exasperated confusion. ‘She isn’t even my type! I like them tall and slender with legs that go up to their armpits like yours do. And long blonde hair like yours I can strangle myself with!’
‘My hair is not blonde, it’s sandy.’
‘Blonde,’ he’d insisted. ‘Golden-blonde like honey—hot honey.’ His eyes had begun to smoke. ‘Makes me want to—’
‘Lay one finger on me and I’ll tell Cassie!’
It was enough to cool his ardour. ‘What is that black-haired witch doing to me?’ he’d muttered and slammed away to his own office to brood.
Jemma thought she had the answer to that question, but refused to offer it to him. It would be bad enough working with him once he discovered it for himself without her bringing forward the dreadful day. But, in her opinion, Josh Tanner, the sexy blond rake of London town, had met his Waterloo—and at the hands of a woman who made no secret of what she wanted from Josh.
‘Marriage, children—the full works,’ she’d told Jemma recently while sitting on the corner of her desk waiting for Josh to take her to lunch. ‘I’m sick of playing the field. And anyway, I’m getting on.’ It seemed that in this day and age twenty-seven was really getting on by the expression on Cassie’s face when she said it. ‘So I started looking around me for a suitable candidate.’
Which happened to be Josh, something Jemma found rather strange since she considered her boss the last man on earth a woman would actually want to settle down with. After all, a rake was a rake in her book. Good fun to be with, great in bed, so the tale went, but not—definitely not—husband material.
‘I happened to meet Josh at a party I’d gone to with an old friend of mine,’ she’d gone on. ‘Fell for the self-obsessed jerk on the spot and would have had to be blind not to understand the lecherous look in Josh’s eyes. The air fairly sizzled between us, highly amusing Leon, I can tell you—you know Leon Stephanades?’ she’d asked, and at Jemma’s blank look had added, ‘Darling, you do not know what you’re missing. If I’d dared to set my sights so high, I would have gone all out to catch him instead of Josh. But Leon is—special. Very Greek. Very wealthy. And very, very possessive of his freedom. His father has tried all ways—threats, bribes, you name it—to get his son to marry the nice Greek girl with the hefty dowry he has picked out for him, but Leon refuses to so much as consider it. Caused quite a family rift, so I gather.’ Her beautifully sculptured brows had arched ruefully, the reason why coming in the next sentence. ‘So what chance does a not-so-nice English girl with nothing to offer him but a great body have against all of that? None,’ she’d answered her own question. ‘So I decided to go all out to catch Josh instead. Leon and I are still good friends, though—which Josh hates,’ she’d added with a grin that was all feminine guile. ‘He’s as jealous as sin of Leon because he thinks we had something going between us once, which is not true,’ she had insisted, though her expression had implied that she maybe would have liked it to be true. ‘But his jealousy is probably the only ray of hope he allows me in this crazy relationship we’re having—that and the fact he can’t get enough of me,’ she’d tagged on ruefully. ‘Leon says if I land Josh Tanner he’ll buy us a twelve-inch solid gold flying pig for a wedding present, because that’s how much of a chance he thinks I’ve got of pulling it off! But I’m working on it,’ she had concluded determinedly.
Cassie must have told Josh more or less the same thing, because it was only a few days after that conversation with Cassie that Josh had come striding into the office, growling, ‘I’m not marrying any woman! Not even for a solid gold pig!’
The phone began to ring now. Jemma picked up the receiver to have the familiar impatient bark of Josh Tanner hit her eardrums. ‘I’m late,’ he stated the obvious. ‘I’ve had one hell of a weekend. Only just woken up. You’re going to have to hold the fort until I can get there.’
‘What about your ten o’clock appointment with that big cheese from the Leonadis Corporation?’ she reminded him, glancing at her watch only to confirm that it was already twenty to ten. There was no way Josh could make it here in time.
Some very unsavoury vocabulary came slashing down the line. He had obviously forgotten all about the appointment. Not like Josh, she acknowledged. It had to have been a hell of a weekend. ‘Him of all people,’ he muttered. ‘That’s all I need today. Look, you’re going to have to try and put him off,’ he added impatiently. ‘See if you can catch him before he leaves his office. Make my excuses. And if that conniving bitch I’ve been seeing turns up—tell her I’ve died and gone to hell! And not to bother following me!’
‘Who?’ she asked, frowning. ‘Cassie?’
But Jemma was already talking to fresh air. Josh had slammed down the phone. She sat staring at the contraption for the space of ten seconds while trying to make head or tail of that final scathing remark, then shrugged, replacing her own receiver. It seemed that when Josh had said he’d had a hell of a weekend he’d meant it.
The lovers’ bed must have had thorns in it, she mused, and smiled to herself as she hunted out the number of the Leonadis Corporation.
It was only as she waited for someone to answer that she realised she had no idea what the managing director’s name was. Josh had made the appointment himself on Friday. And all he had said was, ‘I hate the damned man, but he’s hunting for new outlets to get his design components from and I need the business. So I suppose I’ll have to fanny round him.’
She grimaced, wondering what the man could have done to Josh to make him dislike him so much; her boss was not normally drawn to taking personal exception to potential clients. In fact, he was usually quite happy to ‘fanny round’ anyone so long as it brought him business.
‘The Leonadis Corporation?’
Jemma blinked. ‘Ah,’ she began, wondering how to get around this one without sounding like a fool. She explained who she was and why she was ringing, then added, ‘So I hoped to catch your managing director before he leaves the building,’ she concluded, mentally crossing her fingers that the receptionist on the other end would provide the name and save her having to ask.
‘Oh, I’m afraid you may be too late,’ she was informed. ‘But I’ll put you through to his secretary.’
‘Thank you.’ Jemma held the line while she waited to be transferred, but a single glance at her watch told her she was running out of time. ‘Damn you, Josh,’ she muttered to herself.
‘Mr Stephanades’s secretary speaking. Can I help you?’
Stephanades—now where had she heard that name before? ‘I do hope so,’ she said, then quickly went into her explanation again. ‘Mr Stephanades had an appointment with Mr Tanner for ten o’clock this morning, but I am afraid Mr Tanner has been delayed. Am I too late to save him a wasted journey?’
‘When I am already standing right here, I would say yes, you are much too late,’ a deep, smooth, beautifully accented and drily amused voice drawled at her from across the room.
Startled, Jemma glanced up—then felt everything vital inside her grind to a shuddering halt when she found herself staring at the most disturbingly attractive man she had ever seen in her life!
He was leaning in the open doorway, hands shoved into the pockets of his dark silk business suit trousers so that the side panels of his jacket had been shoved out of the way to expose the solid breadth of his chest beneath the crisp clean whiteness of his shirt. He was tall and dark, his black hair cut in a short, neat style which kept the hint of a wave contained to the silken top of his head. His bone-structure was square and strong, the skin stretched across it smooth and tanned. Black eyes were teasing her from between jet-black, sleepily curling lashes. And he was smiling at her with the most startlingly sensual mouth she had ever encountered.
Faultless, she decided hazily. He is absolutely faultless. He set her blood pumping in a way which left her in no doubt whatsoever as to what was happening to her. And the dark, coiling warmth she was experiencing in the pit of her stomach confirmed it.
This, she accepted, as she continued to stare breathlessly at him, was what it was all about.
Attraction. Dark and hot and rousing.
Her continued silence sent his sleek brows arching. Jemma heaved in a deep breath of air in an effort to pull herself together. The action lifted her breasts in a slow quivering motion beneath her white silky blouse then dropped them again in the same tremulous way, making those gorgeous lashes of his fall in two luxurious curves over his eyes as he followed the revealing motion. Her nipples stung painfully in response, and she blushed hotly with embarrassment, wishing for the first time ever that she possessed such a thing as a bra, because she didn’t have to look down at herself to know what he was witnessing happening to her.
‘Miss Davis?’ a slightly puzzled voice prompted in her ear.
‘I...’ She ran the tip of her tongue around her suddenly parched lips. ‘It—it doesn’t matter,’ she whispered breathlessly and replaced the receiver without really knowing she had done it, her eyes not leaving the man leaning in the doorway.
The smile widened on his lips, giving them a sensually knowing quality that annoyed her even as she accepted his right to display it. She knew who he was, of course. He had made that clear when he let her know he was there. But she could not for the life of her respond with anything like the light brisk, ‘Good morning, Mr Stephanades!’ Josh would expect of her. She wanted to know his first name, to feel it curl off her tongue like a caress. Her heart was bursting, her breasts tingling, her calves and thighs trembling with the full fermenting blast of his attraction.
‘Shall we leave now, or do you need a few moments longer to compose yourself?’
‘W-what?’ She blinked, blue eyes filling with bewildered confusion. ‘L-leave for where?’
‘My apartment,’ he explained, levering himself away from the door-frame to come further into the room, closing the door behind him. ‘I must say,’ he went on lightly before Jemma had a chance to digest the full import of his first remark, ‘I have in my life been propositioned in many ways, but never with such open and—dare I say it?—helpless invitation before. I find it rather—enchanting.’