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“You let me love you, and all the time you belonged to another man!”
“I didn’t ask you here to rake up the past, Mel. You help companies that are in trouble, and, loath as I am to admit it, I need your advice. They say you’re the best.”
“I don’t come cheap, Jade.”
“You never did.”
“But you did, didn’t you? Bargain basement.”
The insult was unbearable. “Your sole purpose for being here is to humiliate me for what you think I did to you four years ago, isn’t it?”
“I came here to lay a few ghosts before I made the big commitment.”
Jade stared at him, her dark eyes wide with pain. “Y-you’re going to…to be married?”
NATALIE FOX was born and brought up in London, England, and has a daughter, two sons and two grandsons. Her husband, lan, is a retired advertising executive, and they now live in a tiny Welsh village. Natalie is passionate about her three cats, two of them strays brought back from Spain where she lived for five years, and equally passionate about gardening and writing romance. Natalie says she took up writing because she absolutely hates going out to work!
Man Trouble!
Natalie Fox
‘MEL BIAGGIO for you, Jade,’ came over the intercom.
Jade Ritchie took a nervous breath. Well, this was it, what she had been waiting for all week. He was here, and the fact that he had agreed to see her at all was something, she supposed. She cleared her throat to respond to her secretary, striving to sound cool and efficient because she knew Mel would be able to hear her voice as he waited by the reception desk and the last thing she wanted him to know was that she was terrified of facing him again.
‘Send him in, Diane, and hold all my calls till he’s gone.’
Jade’s index finger stayed suspended over the buzzer, as if by depressing the button again she could wish all this away. But it was impossible. Her company needed a troubleshooter and, as Nicholas had sagely advised, when you were in trouble you didn’t mess with second best. There were other troubleshooters, of course, but unfortunately none with Mel’s track record of unparalleled success. He had the Midas touch when it came to rescuing companies from the brink of bankruptcy. And Jade’s company needed rescuing and, miserably, the best happened to be Mel Biaggio, the Mel of her painful past.
Jade felt sick inside and bravely stood up ready to face him. She was of medium height but her small bone structure put her in the class of petite. His pocket-sized princess, he’d used to call her, and her bones had always melted when he’d murmured the endearment in her ear. Now, after four years without sight of him, she wondered whether if he spoke those tender words again those same silly bones would melt She shivered at the thought, flicked her jet hair away from her neck and fixed her dark eyes on the back of the door.
The door opened and instinctively Jade clenched her fists with tension, her polished nails digging into her palms, but the pain was nothing compared to what was searing her heart. He hadn’t changed a bit and she was overwhelmingly disappointed. She had prayed that he’d look different so that she could look at him and wonder what she had ever seen in him in the first place. But life wasn’t that obliging.
Folding down the collar of his navy cashmere coat, he approached. He was still as wretchedly good-looking as ever, his hair as black as ever, not even a wisp of silver to soften the dark severity of it. Tiny lines around his dark grey eyes were the only sign that an eternity had passed since they had last met.
She understood why gossip columnists took such interest in him. When she had known him he hadn’t yet hit the tabloid columns but he had since made up for lost ground. Classed as one of the most eligible bachelors in the financial City, he had certainly earned his title. He’d had more on-off relationships than a light-house. With punishing, morbid curiosity Jade had brooded over those reports, hardly able to believe them at times, because surely that wasn’t the Mel she had known and loved? So hadn’t she had a narrow escape, hadn’t time drawn out his true character and wasn’t she the lucky one in escaping?
As he came to a stop in front of her desk, silent, predatory, cold, her emotions swam with a dizzying effect that totally confused her. She wanted to despise him for the injustice he had done her four years ago, for the women in his life since, and even for not having had the decency to age since she had seen him last. But those silly bones were softening already.
‘Mel Biaggio,’ Jade breathed levelly, surprising herself with the evenness of her tone. Her insides were heaving like an oarless boat on the perimeters of a whirlpool but at least her voice hadn’t failed her.
Not a smile of greeting or even recognition softened his dark features and Jade’s heart floundered helplessly. A business associate of Nicholas’s had arranged this meeting for her, someone Mel had helped in the past. Nicholas didn’t know Mel personally and yet he was the one inadvertently responsible for the break-up of their love affair. Jade hadn’t enlightened him when Nicholas had suggested Mel for the job. It was done, over with, and nothing to do with the present. And yet now Mel was looking at her as if she were a stranger and the name Jade Ritchie hadn’t registered with him when this meeting had been set up.
‘Jade