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Recently, the feedback on her articles had been taking something of a dive. The comments on her online column had started off unpleasant and steadily descended into venomous. She’d stopped reading them, chalking them up to bullies with nothing better to do. But her boss had told her in no uncertain terms that the powers that be at the paper were paying attention.
And maybe they were right; Ever since her heart had been broken, she’d lost her home, and realised that the best advice she could dish out to anyone looking for romance tips was to get out, get your life together on your own, and make yourself happy. The words that had been bandied around in that meeting—cynical, bitter—when had she become that?
But how was she meant to undo the hurt and the anger that had been simmering under her skin? The pain that had become such a part of her that she wasn’t sure if, never mind how, she was meant to shake it off.
This wasn’t just about her feelings. If Maddie was right and her job was at stake...well, there was nothing that she wouldn’t do to save her job. It was all she had. She’d literally lost the roof over her head when her relationship had broken down. Now her rent ate up most of her salary, and her travel card to get in from Zone Three took the rest. Even a month without work would be a disaster. She could not lose this job.
She’d thought she’d be able to beat the check-in queues by doing it online last night, only to be told at bag-drop that she had to go to the desk after all. It was taking an age—an immaculately manicured woman in an airline colours scarf was tapping at a computer and frowning at her passport.
‘I’m sorry for the delay, madam.’ She looked up and Amber forced her mouth back into a smile. There was nowhere she could escape the judgemental gaze of her readers. ‘Some of the information from your passport was missing from the upgrade request, but it’s all sorted now. Here’s your boarding pass, and the executive lounge is just over there. Mr Evans asked me to let you know that he has already checked in.’
Executive lounge? With budget cuts at work, and the unmitigated disaster that was her personal finances, she’d got so used to travelling economy that she’d forgotten that there was any other way.
She determinedly ignored the flutter in the base of her stomach as she walked towards the lounge. There was no way she was going to allow Mauro Evans to have that effect on her. No way she’d be pulled into those sparkling green eyes and be tempted to flirt. The man was incorrigible—a playboy who was with a different woman on the front page of each week’s trashy magazines, and remembering that was her best defence. She was sure that she was going to need one. She’d felt a pull of attraction from the second that she had realised who she was speaking to. A relationship, a fling, a flirtation was the last thing that she wanted, or needed. Especially with someone that the sidebars of shame told her regularly saw, conquered and came all in the space of a weekend. Every weekend.
Ugh, she didn’t even know why she was worrying about this. It wasn’t as if he was going to be interested in her. He had picked her for some perverse reason of his own. He must have wanted to annoy the producers of the show for some reason. Anyway, she had more important things to concentrate on.
She needed an image update. She needed her readers to see something different in her. Something that they could identify with. So far she’d been honest in her columns, brutally honest. But that wasn’t what the readers wanted. She wasn’t what the readers wanted. So while the cameras were rolling, she was going to have to be someone else.
Perhaps Mauro could help her out. No doubt he’d just gone into this whole thing looking for the image boost that came with charity work. She needed to show a softer side. Maybe there was a way they could both get what they wanted.
She didn’t have to do anything. She didn’t even have to promise anything. All she had to do was let the light of Mauro’s brightly shining libido reflect on her for a while. All she had to do was be friendly.
When had that started to be something she needed to work at? Since when had friendly seemed like such an effort?
Her boss was right. Something had to change, and a luxury holiday to a sunny destination—all on someone else’s budget—seemed like as good a place as any to start a little soul-searching.
‘Amber, you found us!’
Mauro greeted her as she stepped through the door to the lounge. He was already sipping from a glass of champagne, with the camera and a microphone pointed at him. The two members of the TV crew swung round at his words, and a camera was thrust in her face. She moulded her features once again into the smile that she’d practised in the mirror, and hoped that it looked more convincing that it felt.
‘Mauro! This was a surprise. An upgrade?’
‘The best way to travel,’ he said with a smile, and the smallest salute from his champagne flute. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added, and Amber guessed that some uncertainty had shown on her face. She’d thought that she’d kept her smile pinned in place, but he had seen through it. ‘I matched the cost of the upgrade with a donation to the charity, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
Maybe she should have been worried about it. This was a PR exercise after all. But that hadn’t been what she was thinking. What she’d been thinking was that his white shirt highlighted the hint of red in his hair and the golden warmth of his skin. That his hair looked as if it had been carefully undone, perhaps by some other woman’s hands as he left her bed that morning. That the smile on his face was warm and open, as genuine as hers was strained.
‘A great surprise, I should have said.’ She forced the words out. ‘Here’s to the start of a great week.’ Ayisha, the TV producer, had passed her a glass and she matched Mauro’s toast with one of her own.
‘To us,’ Mauro said, with a searching look.
‘To us,’ Amber agreed, fixing her smile in place again, trying to hide the effect that Mauro was having on her.
God, he was attractive. Far too attractive for his own good, or for hers. He had been sent to test her. That was the only way she could think of it. One week, trying to show a softer side. Showing that she wasn’t the bitter old hack that the Internet had labelled her. But did the dating gods really have to send this guy to help? Someone who it seemed she was physically programmed to react to. Someone whose eyes seemed to twinkle into the depths of her own, who seemed to sense her discomfort, however hard she tried to hide it.
She sat beside him, and he reached for her hand, pulling her towards him for a friendly kiss on the cheek. A day’s worth of stubble scratched her cheek—he’d lain in bed too long that morning perhaps. Had something more tempting than a close shave kept him there?
Good for him if it had.
Just because she was sworn off romance and men, and sex by default, that didn’t mean everyone had to live her celibate life. If he was getting some, she was pleased for him, really. And not in any way the teeniest, tiniest bit jealous. She settled into her seat and glanced at the screen showing flight details. Another hour until they had to be at the gate. Were they meant to make small talk until then? With the camera rolling?
‘I think I might just have a look round the shops until they call our flight.’
She needed something to read, something to bury her nose in during the flight, to keep her eyes from wandering over to Mauro.
‘Great idea,’ Mauro said, draining his glass. ‘Lead the way.’
‘I meant—’
‘You were trying to get away from me?’
He said it with a laugh, but the question in his eyes was serious enough.
‘Of course not. I’m just surprised that you’re so keen on shopping.’
‘Casual sexism? I’m shocked at you, Miss Harris.’
She smiled, not quite sure whether he’d shamed her or charmed her into it. ‘Well, shopping it is, then. We’ll meet you back here before we go to the gate,’ she told Ayisha, pre-empting any thoughts of them following. She was going to have to get used to a camera watching her every move, of making sure that every word and action was projecting the image that she needed it to, but she couldn’t just turn it on from nowhere. She needed to practise without the cameras on her. One misstep and she was sure that they would be all over her.
‘So, then, what’s it going to be?’ Mauro asked. ‘Handbags? Clothes? Are you going to disappear into the make-up for an hour?’
‘Who’s sexist now?’ she asked. ‘None of the above.’ Her interest in make-up hadn’t survived her relationship with Ian. She’d never seemed to get it right, however hard she’d tried—too slutty, too shabby, too colourful, too drab. In the end, she’d stopped trying.
She strode purposefully across the concourse towards the bookshop, dodging tourists dragging cases behind them with no sense of spacial awareness.
‘What? My witty repartee isn’t going to be entertaining enough for you?’ Mauro asked as he zipped into a space in front of her, using his chair to clear a path through the throngs of holidaymakers. ‘I’m clearly not making a great impression.’
‘What can I say?’ Amber replied with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘I’m a writer. Which by default makes me a reader. We get a free pass to have our nose in a book whenever we want.’
‘Even when there’s something better to do.’
She laughed.
‘Wow. I’m surprised you got that ego of yours in the terminal. And, for the record, I have absolutely no intention of doing you.’ There, if she was going to try and flirt for the cameras then that needed to be said. She could pretend to be attracted to him now with a clear conscience. There was no leading him on if she’d already told him it wasn’t happening. He’d understand friendly banter. No doubt flirting came to him as easily as breathing.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘We’ll see about that.’
‘I want to be honest with you, Mauro. I’m here for the charity, because my work insisted on it, and for a week in the sun. I’ll smile for the cameras and if you want to get to know each other while they’re rolling then fine. But that’s all. No funny business.’
He held her gaze for a second longer than was comfortable. What was he seeing? What was making him search her features like that, as if he was trying to get inside her head?
* * *
Managgia, she was driving him crazy already. He’d fixed her with his most challenging look. The one that had got impossible contracts signed, and unattainable goals achieved. And she still hadn’t shown him who she was. She was carrying this front of hers like some sort of armour, and all he wanted was a glimpse at what was behind.
He’d heard the real her on the show, he was sure. The take-no-prisoners, ‘I’d be a killer whale’ Amber. The one whose caustic humour had hit him so hard he’d had to go off script, just to see what happened if he called her bluff.
So where was she now? Because she damn sure wasn’t in this airport with him. Instead, in her place, was a woman trying to appear...ordinary.
Was she soft underneath? he found himself wondering. Like the silk shirt she’d worn beneath that blazer the first time he’d met her. The one that had gaped slightly between the buttons, that had skimmed gently over her generous breasts, hinting at the shape below just enough to keep him awake last night, concealing him enough to drive him crazy.
What had happened to make her so...closed? So controlled? Where had these defensive walls around her appeared from?
At least she had made it clear that she hadn’t expected anything from him this week. It was why he had gone off-script and chosen her, of course. When he had been swimming competitively it had been his time in the pool that had controlled his schedule, his time, his life. Now it was time in the boardroom, trying to steer his sports marketing company from one market-leading success to another. There was no room in that life for a relationship. It simply didn’t fit. If he was going to achieve everything that he wanted in this life—everything that he needed to—then he had to be focussed.
Since his university friend had driven the car they were travelling in into a tree, leaving him with a spinal injury and a brush with death that had been closer than was comfortable, he’d been determined to do more. To see more. To be more.
Before the accident, he’d been a naturally talented but under-committed athlete. The thought of leaving this world with just a mediocre list of achievements to his name: a bronze medal in the university swimming championship. Scraping a two-two in his Sports Marketing degree. A girlfriend he had liked a lot, but not loved. Not enough, anyway.
After the accident? It had all changed. It had to. He wanted to leave a mark on the world. So he’d watched the ParaGames from his hospital bed with an interest that had bordered on obsession. Four years to get himself fit, to be the best in the world. And he’d done it. Six gold medals over two games. And then after a day in the pool or the gym it was packing as many more achievements and successes as was humanly possible: flying lessons, professional development courses, a one-night stand with a beautiful woman. Anything new, anything remarkable, anything to make his life meaningful. To drive him further and further from the mediocrity that had almost been his epitaph.
And after he retired from swimming, he’d attacked the business world with zeal. The seeds he’d planted when he was competing started to grow, and somehow, ten years later, he had money rolling in from sponsorship deals, which he’d used to set up his own sports marketing business, his half-dozen medals hanging in his Sicilian home, and a passport that had seen almost as much action as his super-king-sized bed.
This front of Amber’s was meant to keep people at a distance, he guessed. To keep herself apart, private. She must not realise how much he could see. How her hurt radiated from her like an inflamed wound; how her strength and her vulnerabilities were so tangled together he couldn’t seem to see one without seeing the other.
He had thought that he was picking the least complicated option, when he had chosen Amber. That she was someone who couldn’t be less interested in a relationship with him. And yet now, with this strangely fragile front she was presenting to the world, she suddenly seemed more complicated. More dangerous.
And now she was off again, without a backward glance at him, elbowing her way through the crowded shop to the till. He followed in her wake, through the path that her elbows had created between the tourists, and caught up with her.
He gripped his wheels tightly with his fingers. Because despite every well-reasoned argument he made about why he absolutely, definitely could not get involved with her, it was taking all the self-control he possessed to stop himself reaching out and brushing his fingertips over her skin. Pulling her down to sit on his lap so that he could explore today’s silk blouse, tug at the ends of that prissy pussycat bow and satisfy his need to know what it hid beneath. Whether she was peaches and cream or strawberries; firm and toned or soft and yielding.
Because it didn’t matter how much he wanted to know, the fact remained that trying to find out would be a very bad idea indeed. She was the walking embodiment of complicated, and he didn’t need that in his life.
He pushed through the crowds after her, wondering how he had found himself chasing again. It wasn’t a situation he found himself in often. He’d got used to a slightly embarrassed deference when he was with other people—he’d heard, ‘Oh, no, after you...’ so many times that it made him wince. He was so different from the youth he had once been in so many ways—the money, the medals, the chair—that he wasn’t sure which of the three it was that had that effect on people. All he knew was that whichever it was it didn’t have an effect on Amber. It seemed there was actually a chance that he might have a normal conversation this week. One with someone who wasn’t an employee, or a fan, or trying to get into his bed or his bank account. How refreshing. How utterly tempting.
He forced the thought away as they left the shop and the crowds thinned.
‘Now we have something to keep us entertained on the flight, what next?’ he asked. ‘More shopping? More champagne?’ Keeping themselves busy seemed like the best defence against his thoughts wandering in inappropriate directions, like sliding down the neckline of her silky blouse.
She glanced at the screen in the centre of the terminal. ‘They’ve announced the gate number. We get priority boarding, right? Might as well head straight over.’
‘Sure, if you want.’ What he wanted was to take her shopping for one of the teeny tiny bikinis he could see in the window of the shop opposite. What, so that he could torture himself by looking at something that he couldn’t have? He’d need his self-restraint locked down before they reached his pool later, with sunshine and Prosecco in abundance.
He just hoped that she was going to be taking care of her own sunscreen. The thought of smoothing his hands over her shoulder blades, lifting her blonde hair to one side and tracing the nape of her neck with his fingers, rubbing cold lotion into hot skin... He imagined her, muscles relaxing under his touch, leaning her weight back against him as his hands skirted her sides, dipped into the hollows of her waist, found twin indentations at the base of her back. Would she object if his hands drifted lower still, if they dipped into the waistband of that tiny bikini?
‘Mother—’ Amber stopped and grabbed her foot, pulling it up to nearly waist level and inspecting the grubby mark across her shoe, which looked suspiciously like a tyre mark. ‘Watch your wheels, Mauro!’
Damn. He’d caught her toes like a complete novice and all because he’d let his thoughts get carried away, imagining something that he could never allow to happen. She was still standing on one leg, grimacing, and gripping her toes as if she were worried they might fall off.
‘I’m sorry, Amber. Here, let me see.’ Before she could protest he’d wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her down onto his lap. Caught off guard and off balance, she fell into him without protest, her bum landing on one thigh, her injured foot propped on the other.
‘Mauro! What the hell; let me up.’
His arm was still wrapped tight around her waist—even as he was doing it he knew what a bad idea it was, but he’d just run her down, and it wasn’t as if he were a waif. Between him and the chair they were well capable of doing some serious damage to a little toe.
‘How about we wait until the smart wears off, cara? Don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt—I can see that it does.’
‘It doesn’t hurt so bad that I need to be in your lap.’
‘It’s nothing,’ he said, wishing that he could believe what he was saying. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Just think of me as a convenient seat. One of the underrated benefits of using a wheelchair, in my opinion. I’m very useful to have around when there’s swooning going on.’
‘Swooning? I didn’t swoon, you tried to cripp—’
He saw the blood drain from her face as she realised what she had been about to say and stuttered to a halt.
‘I mean—I meant—I didn’t—’
Oh, he would enjoy this. Finally, a crack in this Ice Queen’s façade. This was the most out of her comfort zone he’d seen her since that screen had pulled back and she’d realised he hadn’t taken her ‘back off’ bait.
He raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to speak.
‘I wasn’t thinking.’ The words rushed out of her as she desperately tried to backtrack and swerve around the very politically incorrect word that had nearly escaped her mouth. ‘I would never use that word if I was talking about...’
Flames were devouring her face and there was an earnest, beseeching look in her eyes. OK, that was probably enough.
‘Relax—’ he nudged her shoulder with his own ‘—I know that you didn’t mean anything by it. It’ll take a lot more than accidentally dropping the C-word into conversation to offend me.’ He’d learnt pretty quickly after his accident that it was the intention behind a particular word that would offend him, rather than the word itself. In his opinion, that word used among friends was far less offensive than being labelled ‘brave’ by someone who knew nothing at all about him.
In her horror at what she had been about to say, the fight had left her body, and she now sat comfortably in his lap, leaning just ever so slightly into the arm around her waist. Maybe sitting a little too comfortably. He might have lost a lot of the sensation from his legs, but his spinal injury was incomplete—doctor-speak for the fact that his spinal cord hadn’t been completely severed—and those nerves that were still attached? Boy, were they doing an awesome job right now. And his eyes? There was nothing wrong with those. Nothing wrong with his nose, either, which was drinking in the rich scent of her hair by the lungful; or his hands, which were begging for permission to take hold of that stubborn chin, angle her luscious mouth down towards his own, and take the kiss that he’d been completely unable to stop imagining from the moment that he had first seen her, however much he had tried.
Or maybe he didn’t need to use his hands at all, because she was turning towards him all of her own accord. Those big hazel eyes were locked on his, until they dropped and he just knew that she was looking at his lips. He flicked a tongue out to moisten them, to tempt her into reacting to him. Her skin flushed again as she watched him, her eyes not leaving his mouth. He moved closer, a centimetre, and then another, waiting for the moment when she blinked, when she realised he was getting too close, and froze up on him. When there was nothing but a couple of millimetres between them he breathed in another lungful of that intoxicating scent and closed his eyes, desperate for the moist warmth of her lips on his.
And then the wind was knocked from his chest and they were wheeling across the floor. Someone must have barged his chair out of the way. His hands went to his wheels as her arms tightened around him.
Brakes, Mauro. He’d never been so relieved to have made such a schoolboy error. If he’d put on the brakes he wouldn’t have just been barged across the terminal building. She’d still be sitting in his lap, her lips on his, rather than scrambling herself upright. He was going to have to be more careful if he wanted to keep his life exactly as he liked it, with nothing getting in the way of his ambition and his achievements. The only relationships he had space for were simple, honest flings where both parties knew what they were getting and were happy with the bargain.
A relationship with Amber would be anything but simple. Something about the brittleness of the front she showed the world told him that she had been broken. It was as if the pieces of her didn’t fit together quite right, leaving chinks to the hurt and vulnerable woman underneath. ‘What the hell? Did someone just push you?’ She spun around, looking for a fight. Nice deflection, he thought, wondering why she was so angry at herself.
‘Leave it, Amber.’
There had been a time when he’d have chased anyone trying to push him around—literally or metaphorically—and shown him just how much damage a bloke with a spinal-cord injury was capable of inflicting with his fists. It just so happened that when you used a wheelchair you were at the perfect height for one or two particularly vulnerable targets. But he’d long accepted that some people would act like idiots around him. He could either let the anger consume him, as it had sometimes threatened, or he could learn to rise above it. To be the bigger man and show the world what he was capable of with his medals rather than with his fists and fury.
He glanced up at the flight information screen and realised that they had no time to pick a fight anyway. There wasn’t even time to head back to the lounge and meet Ayisha and the cameraman—they’d have to hope that they would make their own way there without them.
‘Come on,’ he said to Amber, his resolve cracking for a second and brushing his hand against her hip. ‘They’re calling our flight.’
* * *
As the car swung into the driveway of the villa Amber caught her breath. The low-slung walls of the building were rendered in white, which in the late afternoon sun seemed to glow a warm orange. Three sides of the building wrapped around a central swimming pool, with expansive glazing, so every part of the house had a view of the water. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, Amber could see straight through the building, through more windows, to the clear blue-green of the Mediterranean. She stopped as she was climbing out of the car for a moment, stalled by the beauty of Mauro’s home.
Somehow, even though Ayisha had told her to expect luxury, she’d been expecting the sort of villa she and her ex, Ian, had stayed in during happier times; the sort with slightly noisy plumbing and grass growing between uneven paving stones in the garden. This—this was something else.
Imagine being able to call this your own, she thought, her mind wandering back to her bedsit in a grimy part of London. She was grateful to have a roof over her head at all, but to think that this was real life for Mauro, not a week of playing house... Their lives couldn’t be more materially different. It was bad enough that he was a millionaire, successful in every aspect of his life, whereas she was just holding onto her job by a thread. They had to rub it in her face with this beautiful house as well. Not that he was going to be interested in her, with her bargain basement clothes and her grubby flat. Not that she wanted him to be.
She turned to look at Mauro.
‘This is beautiful.’
‘Thanks,’ he said with a nonchalant shrug. ‘Come on, I’ll show you around.’
