His gaze narrowed further. ‘You’d better,’ he said, his upper-class British accent completely at odds with the roughness of his voice, his scarred face and worn jeans. ‘I’m not accustomed to repeating myself.’
Concentrate, fool! It’s like you’ve never seen a man before.
Well, to be fair, I hadn’t seen a man like him before.
‘Sorry, Mr Evans.’ I grinned like an idiot, pretending I wasn’t still blushing furiously. ‘I was thinking about something else.’
He stared at me with the same intense focus as when he’d opened the suite door earlier. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Ellie. Ellie Little.’
Would my surname mean anything to him? Probably not. Evans Investment, his venture capital firm, invested money in a lot of different projects so there was no reason he’d know about our company in particular.
Sure enough, there was no recognition in his eyes as he unexpectedly put out his hand. ‘Good to meet you, Miss Little.’
Now, he wanted to shake? A small, rebellious part of me was very tempted to refuse, which would have been stupid given the massive favour I had to ask of him at some point.
So I ignored the urge, reaching out to take his hand politely instead. Yet as his big palm and long fingers wrapped around mine, the weirdest thing happened.
A jolt of electricity shot straight up my arm, making me jerk my hand out of his before I could stop myself.
Good one, fool.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘Damn static.’
An odd expression I couldn’t quite decipher crossed his face, making the unsettled feeling inside me deepen.
My heart was beating fast and my skin was tingling where he’d touched me. It felt sensitive, as if I’d been scorched by his fingers.
It wasn’t static, you idiot.
But I didn’t want to think about what else it might have been so I shoved that thought away and put my hands behind my back instead. ‘Ready when you are, Mr Evans,’ I said, as if nothing had happened.
He gave me another of those intense searching looks, though what he was searching for I had no idea.
‘Go down and wait in the car,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
With one last dismissive glance, he turned away, the colours of the tattoo on his back flashing, leaving me with no other option but to do as I was told.
Ash
I LOOKED OUT of the window of the limo, watching a string of couture-clad people file through the entrance into the elegant historic brick building, and allowed myself a certain sense of satisfaction.
Finally. Fucking finally.
Here I was, outside the door to the most exclusive private members’ club in the world: The Billionaires Club.
Joining was by invitation only—an invitation that only came once your bank balance reached a certain level. A cool billion, obviously.
Mine had come a week ago in the form of a hand-delivered black envelope with a simple gold seal on the back and my name, Mr Ash Evans, written in cursive on the front.
Inside was a heavy slice of black platinum the size of a credit card, embossed with the club insignia: an M with two bars over the top of it, the Roman numeral for billion.
An exclusive club for the rich and famous.
And here was I, the scum of the streets, with a key.
Dad would be turning in his fucking grave. He’d have hated the thought of his bastard son finally having access to everything he’d denied him over the years.
Correction. Dad wouldn’t hate the thought, because, even if he’d still been alive, he wouldn’t have thought of me at all. Not thinking of me was all he’d done from the moment I was born, the product of an illicit affair with one of his maids.
Still, I wasn’t going to let happy memories of my prick of a father ruin my evening, not tonight. I’d worked too long and too hard to get to this point and I had other, bigger fish to fry.
Fish like my half-brother and chief competitor, Sebastian Dumont. He was one of the reasons I’d decided that my first appearance at the club would be at their burlesque event in Paris. I knew he’d be attending and I wanted to shove my membership in his rich and privileged face. He wouldn’t be expecting it and seeing me, his undeserving, lower-class half-brother, showing up where he didn’t belong, would piss him off in the extreme.
Petty? Yes. Satisfying? Completely.
But that wasn’t the only reason. I was also hoping to sabotage his latest business deal, too, just for the hell of it.
John Delaney, a property investor who was looking to sell a couple of islands in the Caribbean that he owned, was also going to be attending the event tonight, and my plan was to corner him and make him an offer for those islands.
I had a luxury hotel business that I’d just got off the ground and the islands Delaney was selling were perfect sites for it.
They were also the same islands that Dumont just happened to be after for his luxury hotel business.
Oh, Dumont had tried to keep his intentions under wraps, but I had my ways of finding out things. And now my entire plan was to buy those islands out from under him.
Yes, we had a rivalry. And to say it was mild was like saying England and Germany were slightly at odds during World War II.
It had been going on for years and I had no plans to build bridges any time soon. Not after what he’d done to me.
I flicked a glance in the rear-view mirror of the limo and found my chauffeur for the evening, the sexy little Australian, staring back at me.
And for a second, all thoughts of my hated half-brother vanished.
When she’d come to the door of my hotel, I’d been expecting Bill, white-haired and grizzled and pushing sixty-five. Instead, what I’d got was brunette and fresh-faced, and pushing twenty-five, if that.
Not to mention small and curvy, with a pretty, freshly scrubbed face, glossy brown hair in a no-nonsense ponytail, the usual chauffeur uniform of black trousers, white shirt and a black tie doing its best to hide the fact that she was unequivocally female.
Oh, yes, and she had a sunny attitude to match.
She hadn’t appeared to notice my scars or to be in the least bit intimidated by my manner, and she had looked me in the eye, which most people never did.
Then there had been that smile. That pretty smile like a bright burst of sunshine. As if she’d never heard of my reputation and had no idea what a bastard I was.
Those things shouldn’t have made her so immediately fascinating to me, because she was nothing like my normal type. I preferred them beautiful and expensive-looking, all the better to soil with my rough, dirty hands, not with a dusting of freckles, dressed in a chauffeur’s outfit, and telling me with a cheerful smile how my assistant not briefing me on her arrival wasn’t her problem.
Not many of my employees would have dared say that to my face.
Correction, none of my employees would have dared say it.
What made her think she could?
She stared at me in the mirror, hints of gold and emerald glinting from beneath long,