Читать книгу Desired By The Boss - Catherine Mann - Страница 18

THE NEXT AFTERNOON Hugh set up the scanner on the marble kitchen benchtop.

April was just finishing up the second reception room. He could hear the sound of the radio station she listened to above the rustle and thud of items being sorted.

When he’d interrupted her earlier to announce his presence she’d been singing—rather badly—to a song that he remembered being popular when he was back at high school.

She’d blushed when she’d seen him. The pinkening of her cheeks had been subtle—but then, he’d been looking for it, familiar now with the way she seemed to react to him.

He reacted too. As he always did around her. Even when she’d been standing before him, hands on hips, acting as self-designated saviour of old photos, evidence of his lack of artistic ability and irrelevant school reports.

Even then—as he’d struggled with the reality that the distance down that hallway to the skip had been traversed on feet that had felt weighted to the ground with lead—and hated himself for it—he’d reacted to her.

He’d reacted to the shape of her lips, to the way she managed to look so appealing while her hair escaped from its knot atop her head, and to the shape of her waist and hip as she leant against that broom...

And then he’d reacted to her imperious words, admiring her assertiveness even as he’d briefly hated her for delaying him. He’d needed to get that stuff out of the house. Quickly. Immediately. Before he succumbed to inertia like with the other box, which—while no longer on his coffee table—still taunted him from the back of the cupboard in his otherwise spotless spare room.

But then he had succumbed to April’s alternative. At least temporarily.

If it keeps a good employee happy, then what’s the problem? I can just delete it all once she finishes.

That was the conclusion he’d decided he’d come to.

He finished hooking up the scanner to the laptop he’d previously provided for April, then waited as the software was installed.

Footsteps drew his gaze away from the laptop screen.

April stood across from the kitchen bench, smiling again. Sans blush.

She looked confident and capable and in control—as she always did in all but those moments between them he refused to let himself think about.

Again, questions flickered in his brain. Who was she, really? How had she ended up working here?

But that didn’t matter. Their relationship was purely professional.

Really?

He mentally shook his head.

It was.

Belatedly he realised she was holding those damn photos.

‘Shall we get started?’ she asked.

This was when he should go. From her CV, he knew April was computer savvy—she’d work it out.

Instead, he held out his hand. ‘Here, let me show you.’

They sat together, side by side at the kitchen bench, on pale wooden bar stools, scanning the photographs together.

They’d quickly fallen into a rhythm—Hugh fed the photos through the scanner and then April saved and filed them.

Initially she’d attempted to categorise the photos, but Hugh wouldn’t have any of that. So April simply checked the quality of the scan, deleted any duplicates and saved them into one big messy folder.

Based on the decor of his flat, April would bet that Hugh usually carefully curated his digital photos. He’d give them meaningful file names, he’d file them into sensibly organised folders, and he’d never keep anything blurry or any accidental photos of the sky.

But she got why he wasn’t doing that today: he was telling himself he was just going to delete them all one day, anyway.

Was it weird that she could read an almost-stranger so easily? Especially when he was so deliberately attempting to reveal nothing.

Possibly.

Or possibly she was just spending too much time with young backpackers she had nothing in common with, pallets of groceries that needed to be stacked and walls of cardboard boxes? And now she was just constructing a connection with this man because in London she had no connections, and she wasn’t very good at dealing with that?

That seemed more likely.

But, even so, she liked sitting this close to him. Liked the way their shoulders occasionally bumped, when they’d both act as if nothing had happened.

Or at least April did.

What was the reason she’d given her sisters for not...doing anything with Hugh?

Ah. That was right. She was still technically married.

And what would she do anyway? She’d had one boyfriend. Ever. She’d kissed one boy—slept with one man. Evan. That was it. Plus, Evan had pursued her. In the way of high school kids. With rumours that had spread through English Lit that Evan liked April. Like, liked, liked her.

She was ill-equipped to pursue a darkly handsome, intriguing, damaged man.

But what if she turned to him? Right now? And said his name? Softly...the way she really wanted too? And what if he kissed her? How would his lips feel against hers? What would it be like to kiss another man? To be pressed up tight against another man...?

‘April?’

She jumped, making her bar stool wobble.

‘You okay?’

She put her hands on the benchtop to steady herself. ‘Yes, of course.’

He looked at her curiously. Not anything like the way he had that day of the stripy top.

Another of those damn blushes heated her cheeks. It was ridiculous—she was never normally one to blush.

‘In my first day-at-school photos, from Year One, I’m always with my sisters. I’m the middle child. That means I’m supposed to have issues, right?’

She was rambling—needing to fill the tense silence. In addition to never blushing, she never rambled. She had sparkling, meaningless conversation down to an art—she’d been to enough charity functions/opening nights/award galas to learn how to speak to anyone. Intelligently, even.

Not with Hugh.

‘My big sister is a typical first child. Such an over-achiever. I get exhausted just thinking about all she does. Although my baby sister has never really felt like the baby. She’s kind of wise beyond her years—she always has been. But that fits with something I read about third-born children—they’re supposed to be risk-takers, and creative, which totally fits her.’

She paused, but couldn’t stop.

‘You know what middle children are supposed to be? Like, their defining characteristic? Peacemakers. I mean, come on? How boring is that?’

She was staring at the laptop screen and all the photos of cherubic child-sized Hugh.

‘You’re not boring,’ he said.

April blinked, hardly believing he’d been paying attention.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She rotated the latest photo on the screen and dragged it over to the folder she’d created.

‘I can see the peacemaker thing, too. Just not when it comes to my old school photos.’

April grinned. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Especially when I wish I had photos like this. My mum worked really hard when we were growing up. She was often already at work when it was time for us to go to school.’

‘What did she do?’ Hugh asked.

She swallowed. ‘She worked in an office in the city,’ she said vaguely. As CEO of Australia’s largest mining company. The words remained unsaid.

Thankfully, Hugh just nodded. ‘My mum had lots of different jobs when I was growing up. We didn’t have a lot of money, so she often juggled a couple of jobs—you know, waitressing, receptionist...she even stacked shelves at a supermarket for a while, when I was old enough to be alone for a few hours at night.’

This was the longest conversation they’d ever had.

‘I do that!’ April exclaimed. ‘After I get home from this job.’

‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Why?’

April shrugged. ‘So I can get out of the awful shared house I live in in Shoreditch.’

His gaze flicked over her—ever so quickly. April ignored the way her body shivered.

‘Aren’t you a bit old to live in a shared house?’

She narrowed her eyes in mock affront. ‘Well, yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m thirty-two. But I made some dumb decisions with a credit card and I need to pay it off.’

She was choosing her words carefully, keen to keep everything she told him truthful, even if she wasn’t being truly honest with him.

But then, her family’s billions really shouldn’t be relevant. That, after all, was the whole point of this London ‘adventure’. Even if it had made a dodgy flatshare detour.

‘What kind of dumb decisions?’ he asked.

The question surprised her. She hadn’t expected him to be interested. ‘Clothes. Eating out. Rent I couldn’t afford. No job. That kind of thing.’

He nodded. ‘When I first moved out of home I rented this ridiculous place in Camden. It was way bigger than what a brand-new graduate needed, and my mum thought I was nuts.’

‘So you racked up lots of debt, too?’

‘No. I’d just sold a piece of software I’d developed for detecting plagiarism in uni assignments for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, so the rent wasn’t a problem,’ Hugh replied. ‘But I did move out because all that space was really echoey.’

April laughed out loud.

‘And—let me guess—you didn’t move into a shared house?’

His lips quirked upwards. ‘No. I can’t think of anything worse.’

‘You do realise your story has nothing in common with mine, right?’

He shrugged. ‘Hey, we both made poor housing choices.’

‘Nope. No comparison. One of my housemates inexplicably collects every hair that falls out of her head in the shower. Like, in a little container that she leaves on the windowsill. I...’

‘I’ll pay off all your credit card debt if you stop your sentimental junk crusade.’

It wasn’t a throwaway line. He said it with deadly seriousness.

April tilted her head as she studied him. ‘I know—and you know—that if you really wanted this stuff gone it would already be gone. Some random Aussie girl nagging you about it wouldn’t make any difference.’

He slid off his stool, then walked around to the other side of the kitchen bench. She watched as he filled the kettle, then plonked it without much care onto its base. But he didn’t flick the lever that would turn it on.

He grabbed April’s mug from the sink, and another from the overhead cupboard, then put both cups side by side, near the stone-cold kettle.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked. She could only guess at whatever was swirling about in his brain. His attention was seemingly focused on the marble swirls of the benchtop.

His head shot up and their gazes locked.

‘No.’

‘Cool,’ April said with a shrug. ‘I don’t need to know.’

Although she realised she wanted to know. Really wanted to.

April slid off her stool, too. She skirted around the bench, terribly aware of Hugh’s gaze following her. She didn’t quite meet his gaze. She couldn’t. Even as thoughts of discovering what was really going on in Hugh’s head zipped through her mind, other thoughts distracted her. About discovering how Hugh might feel if his lovely, strong body—hot as hell, even in jeans and jumper—was pressed against hers. If, say, he kissed her against the pantry door just beside him...

Stop.

This was Ivy and Mila’s influence, scrambling her common sense. It wasn’t how she really felt. She’d never felt like this.

She reached past him, incredibly careful not to brush against him, and switched on the kettle.

She sensed rather than saw him smile—her gaze was on the kettle, not him.

‘Let me help you,’ she said. ‘Stop trying to convince yourself you want something you don’t actually want. At all. Stop pretending.’

Too late, she realised the error of her ‘help him with the kettle the way she’d help him with his stuff’ metaphor. She’d ended up less than a foot away from him.

Or maybe it hadn’t been an error at all.

‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was deep. Velvety.

April looked up and their gazes locked.

It was like the stripy blouse moment all over again. But more, even.

She was suddenly unbelievably aware of her own breathing—the rise and fall of her chest was shallow, fast. And the way her belly clenched, the way her nails were digging into her palms to prevent herself from touching him.

‘I’ll stop pretending,’ he said.

His gaze slid to her lips.

She closed her eyes. She had to, or she couldn’t think.

The way Hugh was looking at her...

‘April...?’ he said, so soft.

Was that his breath against her lips? Had he moved closer so he could kiss her?

She refused to find out.

Instead, she stepped away. Two steps...three.

‘Good!’ she said. ‘Great! Let’s make time to go through the stuff I find each couple of days, okay?’

Hugh wasn’t thinking about the boxes. ‘What?’

April nodded sharply. ‘Okay, I can finish up here. Thanks for your help.’

He was gone a minute later—just as the kettle whistled to say that it had boiled.

Later, as she walked to the supermarket, all rugged up in scarf and coat, Hugh’s words echoed in her brain.

I’ll stop pretending.

But she wouldn’t stop pretending. She couldn’t.

For now she was April Spencer, not April Molyneux.

The thing was she had no idea what was pretend any more.

Hugh sat at his desk, typing a message to an old friend from university.

Ryan had completed the same computer science qualification that Hugh had, although he’d made his money in a completely different field—internet dating. Ryan’s innovative compatibility matching algorithm had been game-changing at the time. But his friend had long since sold the empire he’d built, and now ran an extremely discreet, exclusive online dating agency, using a new—Ryan said better—matching algorithm.

This had come in handy for Hugh.

Ryan’s system was cutting-edge, and Hugh honestly couldn’t fault it. He’d liked every woman he’d met through Ryan’s system—even if he hadn’t been attracted to them all. Or them to him.

After all—there still wasn’t an app that could guarantee that.

He didn’t date often, but when he did he was very specific. He liked to meet at quiet, private restaurants where it was easy to converse without distraction. He’d go to the movies, or to a show. He didn’t go to bars or pubs—there was too little order and too many people talking. He couldn’t think.

If things went well, after a few dates he might sleep over at his date’s place. But he never lingered long the morning after. Or stayed for breakfast.

Usually, at some point later, he’d be invited to a party, or to a family event.

He always said no.

At such events he would become ‘the boyfriend’. And he didn’t want that.

Understandably, usually things ended then.

A couple of times he’d met women equally happy to avoid a relationship. Those arrangements had lasted longer, until eventually they’d run their course too.

Of course he was always clear that he wasn’t after a relationship, and he was never matched with anybody who specifically wanted to settle down. However, it would seem that the ‘wanting a relationship’ and ‘not wanting a relationship’ continuum was not linear. And everyone’s definition of where they stood along that line varied. Wildly.

So a woman who started off not wanting a relationship might actually want a bit of clarity around her relationship with Hugh. Or an agreement of exclusivity.

And exclusivity, to Hugh, was an indicator of a relationship—not that he had ever dated more than one woman at once, however casually.

So at that point he was out.

He got it that he was weird when it came to relationships. Women always eventually asked him about his stance. But it wasn’t easy for him to define.

He knew, intellectually, that it originated from his mother’s serial dating. She had been quite openly on a quest to find her Mr Right after the disappearance of his deadbeat father. He’d become used to the cycle of hope and despair that each new boyfriend would bring, and he’d decided he had no wish to experience that for himself.

But—and this had been his original theory—the risk of a relationship ending in despair was surely reduced if you approached dating with comprehensive data on your side. If you were matched appropriately—your values, your interests, your goals—then surely you minimised risk.

And this, in his experience, was true. He had never experienced the euphoric highs or the devastating lows of his mother’s relationships. When he dated it was...uncomplicated.

But that was where his stance on relationships became much more about him. Because, despite all this data-matching and uncomplicated dating, he still didn’t want a relationship.

It was a visceral thing. When he woke up in a woman’s bed—he never invited them to his place—his urge to leave was not dissimilar from the way the bloody boxes that filled his mother’s house made him feel.

Trapped.

It all came back to the same thing: to Hugh, relationships were clutter.

Ryan: I’ll send you the link to our latest questionnaire—we’ve tweaked things a little so you’ll need to answer a few more compatibility questions.

Hugh: No problem.

Ryan: Then the system will automatically send you a shortlist. Same as always—if the women you say yes for also say yes then you’re set.

Hugh: Great. Thanks.

But it was weird... He’d been keen to talk to Ryan, but now he was losing enthusiasm. He’d been so sure that it was the six or more months since his last date that had triggered his interest in April. And today he’d almost kissed her.

Hugh: What’s your current success rate with your matching algorithm?

Ryan wouldn’t need time to look this up—he knew his company inside out.

Ryan: Almost one hundred per cent. We rarely have a customer receive no matches.

That wasn’t what Hugh had meant.

Hugh: So one hundred per cent go on at least one date?

Ryan: Yes. And over ninety per cent of users rate their first date experience with a score of eight or above. We’re very proud of that stat.

Hugh: Second date?

Ryan: We don’t track activity beyond the first date.

Hugh: Long-term relationships? Engagements? Marriages?

Ryan: Lots. There are many testimonials available.

He pasted a link, but Hugh didn’t click on it.

Hugh: Percentages?

Ryan: We don’t have that data.

Hugh: Could you guess?

He could just imagine Ryan sighing at his laptop screen.

Ryan: Low. Easily under ten per cent. Under five per cent, probably. Which makes sense when you consider that each user gets matched with multiple people. But anyway our job is the introduction. The rest is up to the couple. But, mate, why the interest? Do we need to update your profile to ‘Seeking a long-term relationship’?

Hugh: No. Just—

He stopped typing.

Just what?

Why was he suddenly questioning the method he’d been following for ten years? Especially when he’d contacted Ryan today to follow that exact method again. Nothing different. No changes.

He finished the sentence:

Hugh: No. Just wondering.

If Ryan had been a close friend—the kind of mate who knew when you were talking out of your backside—he would’ve questioned that. But he wasn’t a close friend. Hugh didn’t have close friends. The habits of his childhood—of keeping people at a distance, and certainly away from his home—had never abated.

Hugh asked Ryan a few more questions—just being social now. About his new house, his new baby...

After several baby photos, Ryan wrote: We should catch up for a beer. Somewhere quiet, of course.

Hugh: Sure.

And maybe they would organise it. But, in reality, ninety-five per cent of their friendship was conducted via video-conference or instant message. And that suited Hugh just fine.

Later, he answered the new compatibility questions.

He hesitated before submitting them.

Why?

Because his subconscious was cluttered with thoughts of April Spencer.

Particularly the way she’d looked at him that afternoon in the kitchen. Particularly the way her lips had parted when she’d closed her eyes.

But Ryan’s algorithm would never match him with April.

April was vivacious and definitely sociable. She had an easy sunniness to her—he found it difficult to imagine that many people would dislike April. He imagined her surrounded by an ever-expanding horde of friends and family, living somewhere eclectic and noisy.

While he— Well, he had a handful of friends like Ryan. A handful he felt no need to expand. No family.

She was a traveller...an adventurer. She must be to be her age and working at this job in London. Meanwhile, he’d lived nowhere but North London. And he rarely travelled—save for those essential meetings when he’d first expanded his company internationally. Now he insisted all such meetings took place via video-conference.

He was intensely private, and unused to having his decisions questioned.

She questioned him boldly, and she’d told him about her family and her absent father without the slightest hesitation.

And somehow he’d revealed more to her than to anyone he could remember.

So, no, they wouldn’t have been matched.

Apart from the added complication of her working for him, their obvious incompatibility could not be ignored.

He was attracted to her—that was inarguably apparent. She was beautiful. It was natural, but it didn’t mean anything. April Spencer was all complications. He didn’t do complicated.

What he needed was a date with a woman who knew exactly what he was offering and vice versa. And who was like him: quiet, private, solitary. No ambiguity. No confusion. Just harmless, uncomplicated fun.

He clicked ‘Submit’.

A minute later he received an email confirmation that his responses had been received.

Now he just needed to wait to be matched.