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When she didn’t immediately sit down, Tom McFarlane glanced up and she felt a jolt—like the fizz of electricity from a faulty switch—as something dangerous sparked the silver specks buried in the granite-grey of his eyes. The same jolt that had passed between them on their first meeting. Hot slivers of lightning that heated her to the bone, bringing a flush to her cheeks, a tingle to parts of her anatomy that no other glance had reached since … no, forget since. She’d never felt that kind of response to any man. Not even Jeremy.
What on earth was the matter with her?
She’d never done anything at first sight. Certainly not love. She’d known Jeremy from her cradle. Actually, that might not have been the best example …
Whatever.
She certainly didn’t intend to change the habits of a lifetime with lust. Mixing business with pleasure was always a mistake.
But it meant that she understand exactly what Candida had been thinking. Why she hadn’t settled for some softer billionaire. Some malleable sugar daddy who would buy her the country estate and anything else she wanted …
‘I’d advise you to sit down, Miss Smith,’ he said. ‘This is going to take some time.’
Usually, she and her clients were on first name terms from the word go but they had both clung firmly to formality at that first meeting and she didn’t think this was the moment to respond with, Sylvie, please …
And since her knees, in their weakened state, had buckled in instant obedience to his command, she was too busy making sure her backside connected securely with the chair to cope with something as complicated as speech at the same time.
He watched as she wriggled to locate the safety of the centre of the chair. Continued to watch her for what seemed like endless moments.
The heat intensified and, without thinking, she slipped the buttons on her jacket.
Only when she was completely still and he was certain that he had her attention—although why it had taken him so long to realise that she couldn’t possibly imagine; he’d had her absolute attention from the moment she’d set eyes on him—did he speak.
‘Have you sacked him?’ he demanded. ‘The Honourable Quentin Turner Lyall.’
She swallowed. Truth, dare … She stopped right there and went for the truth.
‘As I’m sure you’re aware,’ she said, ‘falling in love is not grounds for dismissal. I have no doubt that the Employment Tribunal would take me to the cleaners if I tried.’
‘Love?’ he repeated, as if it were a dirty word.
‘What else?’ she asked. What else would have made Candy run for the hills when she had the prize within days of her grasp?
She had Tom McFarlane, so presumably she had the lust thing covered …
But, having dismissed her question with an impatient gesture, he said, ‘What about duty of care to your client, Miss Smith? In your letter you did make the point that I am your client.’ He regarded her stonily. ‘And I imagine Mr Lyall did go absent without leave?’
Oh, Lord! ‘Actually, he … No. He asked me for some time off …’
He sat back, apparently speechless.
‘Are you telling me you actually gave him leave to elope with a woman whose wedding you were arranging?’ he said, after what felt like the longest pause in history.
This was probably not a good time to give him the ‘dying grandmother’ excuse that she’d fallen for.
When Candy had borrowed Quentin for bag-carrying duties on one of her many shopping expeditions it had never crossed Sylvie’s mind that she’d risk her big day with the billionaire for a fling with a twenty-five-year-old events assistant. Even one who’d eventually make her a countess. He came from a long-lived family and the chances of him succeeding to his grandfather’s earldom before he was fifty—more likely sixty—were remote.
And, while she’d been absolutely furious with both of them, she did have a certain sympathy for Quentin; if a man like Tom McFarlane had succumbed to Candy’s ‘assets’, what hope was there for an innocent like him?
But, despite what she’d told Tom McFarlane, when Candy had finished with Quentin and he did eventually return, she was going to have explain that, under the circumstances, he couldn’t possibly continue working for her. Bad enough that it would feel like kicking a puppy, but Quentin was a real asset and losing him was going to hurt. He had a real gift for calming neurotic women. He was also thoroughly decent. It would never occur to him to go to a tribunal for unfair dismissal.
Maybe it was calming Candy’s pre-wedding nerves—she had gone into shopping overdrive in those last few weeks—that broad sympathetic shoulder of his, that had got him into so much trouble in the first place.
Tom McFarlane, however, having fired off this last salvo, had returned to the folder in front of him and was flicking through the invoices, stopping to glance at one occasionally, his face utterly devoid of expression.
Sylvie didn’t say a word. She just waited, holding her breath. Watching his long fingers as they turned the pages. She could no longer see his eyes. Just the edge of his jaw. The shadowy cleft of his chin. A corner of that hard mouth …
The only sound in the office was the slow turning of paper as Tom McFarlane confronted the ruin of his plans—marriage to a woman whose family tree could be traced back to William the Conqueror.
That, and the ragged breathing of the woman opposite him.
She was nervous. And so she should be.
He had never been so angry.
His marriage to the aristocratic Candida Harcourt would have been the culmination of all his ambitions. With her as his wife, he would have finally shaken off the last remnants of the world from which he’d dragged himself.
Would have attained everything that the angry youth he’d once been had sworn would one day be his.
The good clothes, expensive cars, beautiful women had come swiftly, but this had been something else.
He hadn’t been foolish enough to believe that Candy had fallen in love with him—love caused nothing but heartache and pain, as he knew to his cost—but it had seemed like the perfect match. She’d had everything except money; he had more than enough of that to indulge her wildest dreams.
It had been while he was away securing the biggest of those—guilt, perhaps for the fact that he’d been unable to get her wedding planner out of his head—that she’d taken to her heels with the chinless wonder who was reduced to working as an events assistant to keep a roof over his head. How ironic was that?
But then he was an aristocratic chinless wonder.
The coronet always cancelled out the billions.
When it came down to it, class won. Sylvie Smith had, after all, been chosen to coordinate the wedding for no better reason than that she’d been to school with Candy.
That exclusive old boy network worked just as well for women, it seemed.
Sylvie Smith. He’d spent six months trying not to think about her. An hour trying to make himself send her away without seeing her.
As he appeared to concentrate on the papers in front of him, she slipped the buttons on her jacket to reveal something skimpy in dark brown silk barely skimming breasts that needed no silicone to enhance them, nervously pushed back a loose strand of dark blonde hair that was, he had no doubt, the colour she’d been born with.
She crossed her legs in order to prop up the folder she had on her knee and for a moment he found himself distracted by a classy ankle, a long slender foot encased in a dark brown suede peep-toe shoe that was decorated with a saucy bow.
And, without warning, she wasn’t the only one feeling the heat.
He should write a cheque now. Get her out of his office. Instead, he dropped his eyes to the invoice in front of him and snapped, ‘What in the name of blazes is a confetti cannon?’
‘A c-confetti c-cannon?’
Sylvie’s mind spun like a disengaged gear. Going nowhere. She’d thought this afternoon couldn’t get any worse; she’d been wrong. Time to get a grip, she warned herself. Take it one thing at a time. And remember to breathe.
Maybe lighten things up a little. ‘Actually, it does what it says on the tin,’ she said.
His eyebrows rose the merest fraction. ‘Which is?’
Or maybe not.
‘It fires a cannonade of c-confetti,’ she stuttered. Dammit, she hadn’t stuttered in years and she wasn’t about to start again now just because Tom McFarlane was having a bad day. Slow, slow … ‘In all shapes and sizes,’ she finished carefully.
He said nothing.
‘With a c-coloured flame projector,’ she added, unnerved by the silence. ‘It’s really quite …’ she faltered ‘… spectacular.’
He was regarding her as if she were mad. Actually, she thought with a tiny shiver, he might just be right. What sane person spent her time scouring the Internet looking for an elephant to hire by the day?
Whose career highs involved delivering the perfect party for a pop star?
Easy. The kind of person who’d been doing it practically from her cradle. Whose mother had done it before her—although she’d done it out of love for family members or a sense of duty when it was for community events, rather than for money. The kind of person who, like Candy, hadn’t planned for a day job but who’d fallen into it by chance and had been grateful to find something she could do without thinking, or the need for any specialist training.
‘And a “field of light”?’ he prompted, having apparently got the bit between his teeth.
‘Thousands of strands of fibre optic lights that ripple in the breeze,’ she answered, deciding this time to take the safe option and go for the straight answer. Then, since he seemed to require more, ‘Changing colour as they move.’
She rippled her fingers to give him the effect.
He stared at them for a moment, then, snapping his gaze back to her face, said, ‘What happens if there isn’t a breeze?’
Did it matter? It wasn’t going to happen …
Just answer the question, Sylvie, she told herself. ‘The c-contractor uses fans.’
‘You are joking.’
Describing the effect to someone who was anticipating a thrilling spectacle on her wedding day was a world away from explaining it to a man who thought the whole thing was some ghastly joke.
‘Didn’t you discuss any of this with Candy?’ she asked.
His broad forehead creased in a frown. Another stupid question, obviously. You didn’t become a billionaire by wasting time on trivialities like confetti cannons.
Tom McFarlane had signed the equivalent of a blank cheque and left his bride-to-be to organise the wedding of her dreams while he’d concentrated on making the money to pay for it.
No doubt, from Candy’s point of view, it had been the perfect division of labour. She’d certainly thrown herself into her role with enthusiasm and there wasn’t a single ‘effect’ that had gone unexplored. It was only the constraints of time and imagination—if she’d thought of an elephant, she’d have insisted on having one, insisted on having the whole damn circus—that had limited her self-indulgence. As it was, there had been more than enough to turn her dream into what was now proving to be Tom McFarlane’s—and her—nightmare.
A six-figure nightmare, much of it provided by the small specialist companies Sylvie regularly did business with—people who trusted her to settle promptly. Which was why she was going to sit here until Tom McFarlane had worked through his anger and written her a cheque. Even if it took all night.
Having briefly recovered her equilibrium, she felt herself begin to heat up again, from the inside, as he continued to look at her and she began to think that, actually, all night wouldn’t be a problem …
She ducked her head, as if to check the invoice, tucking a non-existent strand of hair behind her ear with a hand that was shaking slightly.
Tidying away what was a totally inappropriate thought.
Quentin wasn’t the only one in danger of losing his head.
The office was oddly silent. His phone did not ring. No one put their head around the door with some query.
The only sound for what seemed like minutes—but was probably only seconds—was the pounding beat of her pulse in her ears.
Then she heard the rustle of paper as Tom McFarlane returned to the stack of invoices in front of him and started going through them, one by one.
The choir.
‘They didn’t sing,’ he objected. ‘They didn’t even have to turn up.’
‘They’re booked for months in advance,’ she explained. ‘I had to call in several favours to get them for Candy but the cancellation came too late to offload them to another booking …’
Her voice trailed off. He knew how it was, for heaven’s sake; she shouldn’t have to explain!
As if he could read her mind, he placed a tick against the list to approve payment without another word.
The bell-ringers.
For a moment she thought he was going to repeat his objection and held her breath. He glanced up, as if waiting for her to breathe out. Finally, when she was beginning to feel light-headed for lack of oxygen, he placed another tick.
As they moved steadily through the list, she began to relax. She hadn’t doubted that he was going to settle; he wouldn’t waste this amount of time unless he was going to pay.
The 1936 Rolls-Royce to carry Candy to the church. Tick.
It was just that he was angry and, since his runaway bride wasn’t around to take the flak in person, she was being put through the wringer in her place.
If that was what it took, she thought, absent-mindedly fanning herself with one of her invoices, let him wring away. She could take it. Probably.
The carriage and pair to transport the newly-weds from the church to their reception. Tick.
The singing waiters …
Enough. Tom raked his fingers through his hair. He’d had enough. But, on the point of calling it quits, writing the cheque and drawing a line under the whole sorry experience, he looked up and was distracted by Sylvie Smith, her cheeks flushed a delicate pink, fanning herself with one of her outrageous invoices.
‘Is it too warm in here for you, Miss Smith?’ he enquired.
‘No, I’m fine,’ she said, quickly tucking the invoice away as she shifted the folder on her knees, tugging at her narrow skirt before re-crossing her long legs. Keeping her head down so that she wouldn’t have to look at him. Waiting for him to get on with it so that she could escape.
Not yet, he thought, standing up, crossing to the water-cooler to fill a glass with iced water. Not yet …
Sylvie heard the creak of his leather chair as Tom McFarlane stood up. Then, moments later, the gurgle of water. Unable to help herself, she pushed her tongue between her dry lips, then looked up. For a moment he didn’t move.
With the light behind him, she couldn’t see his face, but his dark hair, perfectly groomed on that morning six months ago when he’d come to her office, never less than perfectly groomed in the photographs she’d seen of him before or since, looked as if he’d spent the last few days dragging his fingers through it.
Her fingers itched to smooth it back into place. To ease the tension from his wide shoulders and make the world right for him again. But the atmosphere in the silent office, cut off, high above London, was super-charged with suppressed emotion. Instead, she forced herself to look away, concentrate on the papers in front of her, well aware that all it would take would be a wrong word, move, look, to detonate an explosion.
‘Here. Maybe this will help.’
She’d been working so hard at not looking at him that she hadn’t heard him cross the thick carpet. Now she looked up with a start to find him offering her a glass of water, presenting her with the added difficulty of taking it from his fingers without actually touching them.
