‘Never better.’ He exhaled, manoeuvring himself out of the car and effortlessly lifting the comatose woman into his arms. She stirred, but instantly resettled against him. No doubt a combination of shock and jet lag was laying her out cold.
A security guard opened the glass-plated door to his building, looking for all the world as if there was nothing out of place in his boss carrying an unconscious woman towards the service lift.
‘Nice afternoon, sir.’
Tristan grunted in return, flexing his arms under Lily’s dead weight.
He exited the lift and strode towards his office throwing a ‘don’t ask’ look at his ever-efficient secretary as she hurried around her desk to push his door open for him.
‘Hold all my calls,’ he instructed Kate, before kicking the door closed with his heel.
He tumbled Lily gently down onto the white leather sofa in his office and she immediately curled into a fetal position, pulling his jacket more tightly around her body while she slept.
Scratch laundering it, he thought. He’d just throw the bloody thing away.
LILY was hot. Too hot. And something was tugging on her. Pulling her down. Jonah?
She blinked and tried to focus, and found herself lying in an unfamiliar room.
‘Missing your boyfriend already, Honey?’ An aggravated male voice she instantly recognised drawled from far away.
Lily tentatively raised herself up on her elbow to find Tristan seated behind a large desk strewn with leatherbound books and reams of paper.
For a moment she just stared at him in a daze, unconsciously registering his dark frown. Then the events of the morning started replaying through her mind like a silent movie on fast forward.
The flight, the drugs, the interrogation, Tristan—
‘You called his name,’ he prompted. ‘A number of times.’
Whose name?
Lily didn’t know what he was talking about. She didn’t have a lover and never had. She smoothed her fingers over her flushed face and wiped the edges of her mouth. It felt suspiciously as if she had drooled. Urgh! She was grimy and sweaty, as if she’d been asleep for days. Of course she hadn’t been—had she?
Lily peered at Tristan more closely and noticed the same white shirt he’d worn earlier, the sleeves now rolled to reveal muscular bronzed forearms. The same red tie hanging loosely around his neck and the top button of his shirt was undone. Okay, still Friday. Thank heavens. She glanced around his impressively large and impressively messy office.
For some reason she had expected someone so controlling to be a neat freak, but his desk was barely visible behind small towers of black, green and red legal tomes and spiral-bound notebooks. A set of inlaid bookcases lined half of one wall, with books stacked vertically and horizontally in a slapdash manner, and what looked like an original Klimt dominated another.
And that surprised her as well. Klimt had a soft, almost magical quality to his work, and that didn’t fit her image of Tristan at all.
‘It’s an investment,’ he said, as if he could read her mind. ‘So who is he to you?’ Tristan repeated, pulling her eyes back to his.
‘Gustav Klimt?’
Tristan made an impatient sound. ‘The loser whose name you were chanting in your sleep.’
Lily shook her head, realising one of the reasons she felt so hot was because she still wore Tristan’s jacket. Removing it quickly, she placed it on the seat beside her and met his scornful gaze. ‘I don’t know who you’re—Oh, Jonah!’
‘He’d no doubt be upset to find himself so easily dismissed from your memory. But then with so many lovers on the go how can a modern girl be expected to keep up?’
Lily’s brow pleated as she gazed at him. No improvement in his mood, then. Wonderful.
And as for his disparaging comments about her so-called lovers—the press reported she was in a relationship every time she so much as shared a taxi with a member of the opposite sex, so really he could be talking about any number of men.
She was just about to tell him she didn’t appreciate his sarcasm when he held up a manila folder, a look of contempt crossing his face.
‘I’ve had a report done on you.’
Of course he had.
‘Ever considered going directly to the source?’ she suggested sweetly. ‘Probably save you a lot in investigators’ fees.’
Tristan tapped his pen against his desk. ‘I find investigators far more enlightening than “the source”.’
‘How nice for you.’
‘For example, you’re currently living with Cliff Harris…’
A dear friend who had moved into her spare room due to financial problems.
‘A lovely man.’ She smiled thinly.
‘…while you’ve been photographed cosying up to that effeminate sculptor Piers Bond.’
Lily had been to a few gallery openings with Piers, and Tristan was right—he was effeminate.
‘A very talented artist,’ she commented.
‘And presumably sleeping with that dolly boy in Thailand behind both their backs?’
Lily suppressed her usually slow to rise temper and threw him her best Mona Lisa smile. A smile she had perfected long ago that said everything and nothing all at the same time.
‘Grip,’ she corrected with forced pleasantness. ‘He’s called a dolly grip.’
‘He’s also called a junkie.’
‘Jonah once had a drug problem; he doesn’t any more.’
‘Well, you should know. You’ve been photographed going in and out of that New York rehab clinic with him enough times.’
Also true. She volunteered there when she could, which was how she’d met Jonah. She just hoped Tristan didn’t know about the director’s marriage she was supposed to have broken up while working on a film the year before. But since it had been all through the papers…
‘And Guy Jeffrey’s marriage? Or is that so far back you can’t remember your part in that particular melodrama?’
Great. He probably knew her shoe size as well.
‘My, your man is thorough,’ she complimented dryly. ‘But do you think I might visit the bathroom before you remind me about the rest of my debauched lifestyle? I don’t think I can hang on till tomorrow.’
Tristan scowled at her from beneath straight brows, and if the situation hadn’t been so awful she might have laughed. Might have.
She picked up her tote bag from the floor and grimaced as she realised she felt as if she was requesting a permission slip from the school principal when she had to ask for directions to the bathroom.
Tristan nodded towards a door at the rear of his office. ‘Leave the bag,’ he ordered, returning his focus to his computer screen.
‘Why?’
‘Because I said so.’
Rude, horrible, insufferable…He raised his eyes and locked them with hers. His gave nothing away about how he was feeling while she knew hers were shooting daggers.
She suspected she knew why he wanted her to leave it. She suspected he was trying to show her