But the moment never came. Instead of a sly smile, there was a furrowed brow and what he guessed were teeth biting at her inner cheek. She wasn’t looking at him as the answer to all her hopes and dreams, she was looking at him as though she felt sorry for him. And where he had been prepared to be disenchanted, instead he was stunned.
She finally collected herself and smiled, but her expression was infinitesimally cooler than when she had first burst from the inner room, all coltish legs and curtsies.
‘So, anyway,’ she said, her tone pleasant but no longer perky, almost as though she preferred to pretend the past two minutes hadn’t existed. ‘I have been told that the TV station has an account at a lovely little bistro around the corner and I was hoping that I could take you there for lunch.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said, gathering his wits after being befuddled by her strange response, ‘but I don’t think that’s in the rules of the game.’
Her confusion was evident. She took in a short breath as though ready to question his comment, before she obviously figured it out for herself, her eyes brightening again with the realisation.
‘Please! I am not a contestant! The last thing I want or need is some brazen, bawdy billionaire breathing down my neck. Funny, though. You’re the second man today to think that. What is it about me that screams bikinis and hot tubs, I wonder?’ She said it more to herself than to him, but he still took a brief moment to consider the image.
Her conservative outfit did little to hide the long, lean curves and those unbelievable red shoes did things to her legs and her posture that made his mind turn easily to bikinis and hot tubs.
She moved over to the couch and sat down, patting the seat beside her, beckoning him to join her.
If she wasn’t a possible love interest for Chris, then who was she? His interest stirred, he did as he was told, sidling over and sitting beside her, one leg hooking up to cross on top of the other and his arms reaching out to lie across the back of the long leather couch.
‘I should have done this better,’ she said, holding out a slim ringless hand. ‘I’m Cara Marlowe.’
He shook her hand, taking a moment to enjoy the crisp, cool contact. But he waited for her to talk. He found that another good tactic. Most people could not leave silence well alone and they were more likely to fill it with interesting information than if they were questioned directly.
‘I am going to be Chris’s stylist for the duration of the shoot. It will be my job to dress him.’
‘Dress him?’
‘Choose his outfits,’ she explained. She then reached out and touched his knee, her voice affecting the tones of a New York gossip show host. ‘Honey, if I had to actually dress the guy, I’d be asking for a lot more money!’
Adam glanced at her slim hand resting on his knee. It felt nice until it recoiled as though scorched, then moved to slap across her unruly mouth.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m a tad overexcited right now. First I get the job of a lifetime and then I meet a real live Australian Businessman of the Year. I would love to talk to you about that some time. Sorry. There I go again. Taking liberties with a practical stranger. My tongue tends to have a mind of its own when my adrenalin is off and running.’
He gave her a slight nod, though he was again quietly stunned. She knew about his award too? And she was obviously a heck of a lot more impressed with that than with his bank balance. In Adam’s long experience with women, this one was proving to be more unusual with every word that came from her lovely mouth.
She was an enigma wrapped in a very enticing dress. A girl with a good head on her shoulders, and a seriously charming face to boot. A woman with such a sexy, husky kick to her voice it could lure sailors to dash their ships upon mountains of rock, whose words spoke, not of the expected sly seduction, but of exuberant enthusiasm for her job.
No matter whom Chris was destined to date on the show, it seemed he would have at least one socially aware woman on set with whom to shoot the breeze. Struck curiously dumb by the thought, Adam once more decided it best to let her do the talking.
And she did.
‘So, since they will have your friend Chris tied up for the next couple of hours, let’s get out of here and have a natter.’
Even despite becoming lost in those expressive eyes, he somehow managed to pick out the pertinent information. A couple of hours until he saw Chris again? If he had to sit in the dull room for a second longer he would explode even if he was in the company of such an engaging woman.
Secondly, Adam knew when a golden opportunity landed in his lap. He couldn’t hide the smile that began to warm him from the inside out. She was to be Chris’s stylist. Thoughts of Chris in bizarre golfing outfits or excessive amounts of tartan wove their way through his devious mind. If he couldn’t convince Chris he was doing the wrong thing, here was the perfect opportunity to interrupt the process from an entirely unrelated angle.
‘It seems that you and I are destined to have a lunch date.’
‘Excellent,’ she said.
Adam stood, holding out an elbow in invitation. ‘Well, then, Ms Marlowe, shall we?’
‘Only if you call me Cara,’ she said, standing, placing a hand lightly in the crook of his offered arm. Her beguiling smile giving him a third reason to accept the lunch offer with increasing pleasure.
Cara watched Adam from the corner of her eye as she perused the large menu in the lovely little bistro around the corner.
I am having lunch with Adam Tyler, she thought, knowing she would rather be picking his brains about his business practices than about his friend.
As a connoisseur of stories about locals made good, she knew the highlights of his career as reported inside and outside of the business pages. Inside were tales of a marketing guru, part-owner of the fastest growing company in Australia. Awards and plaudits followed in his wake like tin cans clattering along behind a wedding car. Outside the business pages he was more well known for being a playboy-billionaire type, not quite hip enough to make it onto the cover of any of the supermarket gossip magazines, but certainly fascinating enough to grace their social pages time and again.
No wonder too. In the flesh he was pretty darned gorgeous. He oozed manliness, from the woodsy scent of his aftershave, to the easy way he wore his suits. From the practised nonchalance of every effortless movement, to the fact that that very nonchalance could not cover up the fact that his mind did not miss a beat behind those fierce, hooded eyes. Beneath the cool exterior beat the pulse of a brilliant, shrewd, powerful man to whom success on every front would have come all too easily.
And all she’d been able to do was go goo-goo and paw him and talk about bikinis and hot tubs. It was not exactly the impression she would have hoped to make on someone whose business acumen she greatly admired.
She found him looking her way, his eyes faintly questioning, and she knew she had been caught staring. She shot him a big cheesy grin, then went back to flicking through the menu.
The last thing she wanted was to be turning all gooey over some guy with money. And a billionaire? That was entirely out of the question. Money meant power. Money meant control. And Cara was not about to give any of her hard-earned power and control away.
Especially to one who, above and beyond the whole gorgeous, blue-eyed, strapping, silent man thing, was so obviously involved in The Billionaire Bachelor project against his will. He was trouble in a three-piece suit. No doubt about it.
‘You made up your mind?’ Adam asked.
‘You bet I have,’ she said, her voice deep with determination.
Then after a few seconds of ensuing silence she looked up to find the waiter smiling blandly at her. She quickly picked the first thing that came into focus to cover up the fact that she’d had no idea Adam had been asking about