This was the deal of a lifetime and there was no way he was going to allow it to be jeopardised.
As his PA knocked and entered his office, Lucas slowly turned round, hand in trouser pocket, and looked at the woman whose job was a thing of the past, if only she knew it.
Eyes narrowed, it hit him that he really should catch up on the people who actually worked for him, because he hadn’t expected this. He’d expected a nerd with heavy spectacles and an earnest manner, whilst the girl in front of him looked less like a computer whizz-kid and more like a hippy. Her clothes were generic: faded jeans and a tee-shirt with the name of a band he had never heard of. Her shoes were masculine black boots, suitable for heavy-duty construction work. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder, and stuffed into the top of it was some kind of jacket, which she had clearly just removed. Her entire dress code contradicted every single thing he associated with a woman, but she had the sort of multi-coloured coppery hair that would have had artists queuing up to commit it to canvas, and an elfin face with enormous bright-green eyes that held his gaze for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom.
‘Miss Brennan.’ He strolled towards his desk as Vicky, his secretary, clicked the heavy door to his office shut behind her. ‘Sit, please.’
At the sound of that deep, dark, velvety voice, Katy started and realised that she had been holding her breath. When she had entered the office she’d thought that she more or less knew what to expect. She vaguely knew what her boss looked like because she had seen pictures of him in the company magazines that occasionally landed on her desk in Shoreditch, far away from the cutting-edge glass building that housed the great and the good in the company: from Lucas Cipriani, who sat at the very top like a god atop Mount Olympus, to his team of powerful executives who made sure that his empire ran without a hitch.
Those were people whose names appeared on letterheads and whose voices were occasionally heard down the end of phone lines, but who were never, ever seen. At least, not in Shoreditch, which was reserved for the small cogs in the machine.
But she still hadn’t expected this. Lucas Cipriani was, simply put, beautiful. There was no other word to describe him. It wasn’t just the arrangement of perfect features, or the burnished bronze of his skin, or even the dramatic masculinity of his physique: Lucas Cipriani’s good looks went far beyond the physical. He exuded a certain power and charisma that made the breath catch in your throat and scrambled your ability to think in straight lines.
Which was why Katy was here now, in his office, drawing a blank where her thoughts should be and with her mouth so dry that she wouldn’t have been able to say a word if she’d wanted to.
She vaguely recalled him saying something about sitting down, which she badly wanted to do, and she shuffled her way to the enormous leather chair that faced his desk and sank into it with some relief.
‘You’ve been working on the Chinese deal,’ Lucas stated without preamble.
‘Yes.’ She could talk about work, she could answer any question he might have, but she was unsettled by a dark, brooding, in-your-face sensuality she hadn’t expected, and when she spoke her voice was jerky and nervous. ‘I’ve been working on the legal side of the deal, dedicating all the details to a programme that will enable instant access to whatever is required, without having to sift through reams of documentation. I hope there isn’t a problem. I’m running ahead of schedule, in actual fact. I’ll be honest with you, Mr Cipriani, it’s one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on. Complex, but really challenging.’
She cleared her throat and hazarded a smile, which was met with stony silence, and her already frayed nerves took a further battering. Stunning dark eyes, fringed with inky black, luxuriant lashes, pierced through the thin veneer of her self-confidence, leaving her breathless and red-faced.
Lucas positioned himself at his desk, an enormous chrome-and-glass affair that housed a computer with an over-sized screen, a metallic lamp and a small, very artfully designed bank of clocks that made sure he knew, at any given moment, what time it was in all the major cities in which his companies were located.
He lowered his eyes now and, saying nothing, swivelled his computer so that it was facing her.
‘Recognise that man?’
Katy blanched. Her mouth fell open as she found herself staring at Duncan Powell, the guy she had fallen for three years previously. Floppy blond hair, blue eyes that crinkled when he grinned and boyish charm had combined to hook an innocent young girl barely out of her teens.
She had not expected this. Not in a million years. Confused, flustered and with a thousand alarm bells suddenly ringing in her head, Katy fixed bewildered green eyes on Lucas.
‘I don’t understand...’
‘I’m not asking you to understand. I’m asking you whether you know this man.’
‘Y-yes,’ she stammered. ‘I... Well, I knew him a few years ago...’
‘And it would seem that you bypassed certain security systems and discovered that he is, these days, employed by the Chinese company I am in the process of finalising a deal with. Correct? No, don’t bother answering that. I have a series of alerts on my computer and what I’m saying does not require verification.’
She felt dazed. Katy’s thoughts had zoomed back in time to her disastrous relationship with Duncan.
She’d met him shortly after she had returned home to her parents’ house in Yorkshire. Torn between staying where she was and facing the big, brave world of London, where the lights were bright and the job prospects were decidedly better, she had taken up a temporary post as an assistant teacher at one of the local schools to give herself some thinking time and to plan a strategy.
Duncan had worked at the bank on the high street, a stone’s throw from the primary school.
In fairness, it had not been love at first sight. She had always liked a quirky guy; Duncan had been just the opposite. A snappy dresser, he had homed in on her with the single-minded focus of a heat-seeking missile with a pre-set target. Before she’d even decided whether she liked him or not, they had had coffee, then a meal, and then they were going out.
He’d been persistent and funny, and she’d started rethinking her London agenda when the whole thing had fallen apart because she’d discovered that the man who had stolen her heart wasn’t the honest, sincere, single guy he had made himself out to be.
Nor had he even been a permanent resident in the little village where her parents lived. He’d been there on a one-year secondment, which was a minor detail he had cleverly kept under wraps. He had a wife and twin daughters keeping the fires warm in the house in Milton Keynes he shared with them.
She had been a diversion and, once she had discovered the truth about him, he had shrugged and held his hands up in rueful surrender and she had known, in a flash of pure gut instinct, that he had done that because she had refused to sleep with him. Duncan Powell had planned to have fun on his year out and, whilst he had been content to chase her for a few months, he hadn’t been prepared to take the chase to a church and up an aisle, because he had been a fully committed family man.
‘I don’t understand.’ Katy looked away from the reminder of her steep learning curve staring out at her from Lucas’s computer screen. ‘So Duncan works for their company. I honestly didn’t go hunting for that information.’ Although, she had done some basic background checks, just out of sheer curiosity, to see whether it was the same creep once she’d stumbled upon him. A couple of clicks of a button was all it had taken to confirm her suspicion.
Lucas leaned forward, his body language darkly, dangerously menacing. ‘That’s as may be,’ he told her, ‘but it does present certain problems.’
With cool, clear precision he presented those certain problems to her and she listened to him in ever-increasing alarm. A deal done in complete secrecy...a family company rooted in strong values