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‘Unless he’s having us on and, trust me, he’s not the sort to have anyone on. We’re not exactly rolling in the aisles from his sense of humour in there.’
‘So...!’ She stepped briskly back towards the child, who eventually looked up when there was no choice because Katherine had made introductions and was heading at speed towards the door.
Sunny got the feeling that the other woman was probably as awkward around young kids as she was.
The door shut and Sunny walked towards Flora and looked at her for a few seconds without saying anything.
She was a beautiful child. Long dark hair flowed down her back; her eyelashes were so long they brushed her cheeks, the eyes staring right back at her were huge, almond-shaped and as dark as night.
‘I don’t want to be here either.’ Flora scowled and folded her arms. ‘It’s not my fault Nana had to drop me off.’
A surly, rebellious child was more what Sunny felt she could deal with and she breathed a quiet sigh of relief. ‘You’ve brought all your toys to play with?’ She eyed the collection of high-end gadgets and wondered how many other children of eight or nine walked around with thousands of pounds’ worth of electronics to amuse them.
Faced with this unexpected job, she had had no time to ponder over the weird fact that the billionaire Stefano Gunn had a child. He might feature in the Financial Times with the regularity of a subscription holder but she had to concede that he was very private when it came to his personal life because, as far as she knew, no one was aware of the fact that he had a daughter.
For that she owed him more credit than she had otherwise thought.
‘I’m bored with them.’ Flora yawned extravagantly without putting her hands over her mouth.
‘How old are you?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘You may think you’re tough but you can never outdo me when it comes to being tough,’ Sunny said honestly, which provoked a fleeting spark of interest. ‘How old are you?’
‘Nearly nine.’
‘Good.’ She beamed and walked towards the files she had lugged into the room with her. ‘In that case, if you’re bored with your toys you can help me with my work...’
* * *
Long legs stretched out at an angle, Stefano did his utmost to stifle a yawn.
This entire situation could have been handled by one of his employees. In fact, had it not been for his mother, this entire situation would not have been happening in the first place.
He had a perfectly competent team of in-house lawyers and had they not been up to the job of dealing with this particular slice of intricate patent law then he would have immediately gone to the biggest and the best.
Instead, here he was, at his mother’s instigation, sitting in the offices of a company that was so new that it had barely left the embryo stage.
‘Jane’s daughter works there. You remember my friend Jane, don’t you?’
No, he didn’t. With those opening words three weeks ago, Stefano had been able to second-guess where his mother was going and Jane’s daughter, whoever she was, was going to feature in the scenario.
It wasn’t the first time Angela Gunn had tried to set him up. Ever since his ex-wife had died, driving too fast, having had too much to drink in a car that was way too sporty for winding New Zealand back roads, his mother had been keen to find him a suitable woman who could provide, as she was fond of telling him, a stable, nurturing maternal influence in his daughter’s life.
‘A girl needs her mother,’ she had repeatedly said in a wistful voice. ‘Flora barely knows you and she misses Alicia...that’s why she’s finding it so hard to adjust...’
Stefano had had to agree with his mother on at least one count and that was that he barely knew his daughter, although he always made sure to refrain from telling his mother just why that was the case.
His marriage to Alicia had been brief and disastrous. Having met young, what should have been no more than a passing fling had turned into a marriage of necessity when she had fallen pregnant. On purpose? That was a question he had never directly asked, but was there really any need? Alicia had come from New Zealand to study and had decided to stay on to work in one of the larger London hospitals as a nurse. He had met her there when he had suffered three broken ribs while playing rugby and the rest, he had always thought, was history. He had lusted after her, she had played coy and hard to get and then, when he had eventually got her into bed, safe in the knowledge that she was taking the Pill and, as a nurse, would be only too aware of the importance of making sure she stuck to the rigid regime, she had had an accident.
‘I remember having a tummy upset,’ she had told him, winding her arms around his neck and snuggling against him while he felt the bottom of his world drop away, ‘and I don’t know if you know but sometimes, if you have a stomach bug, the Pill doesn’t work...’
He had married her. He had walked up the aisle with all the enthusiasm of a man walking to meet his executioner. They hadn’t been married for five minutes before he realised the enormity of his mistake. Alicia had changed overnight. With free rein to more money than she could ever know in a lifetime, she had taken to spending with an exuberance that bordered frenetic. She had begun demanding that he spend more time with her. She had complained incessantly about the hours he worked and thrown hissy fits if he was late back by more than two minutes.
He had gritted his teeth and told himself that pregnancy hormones were to blame, even though he knew that they weren’t.
When Flora was born, her demands had become more insistent. She needed constant, round the clock attention. Their London mansion became a battleground and the less he wanted to return to it, the more spiteful she became in her verbal attacks.
And then she began, as she took great pleasure in telling him, to find stuff to do because she was bored and he was never around.
He found out what that stuff was when he returned to the house early one afternoon and caught her in bed with another man. The fact that he had not felt a shred of jealousy had been the clearest indication that he needed a divorce.
What should have been a straightforward separation of ways, for he had been more than willing to give in to her strident, excessive demands for the sake of his daughter, had turned into a six-year nightmare. She had grabbed the money on the table and fled back to New Zealand, from where she had imperiously controlled his visiting rights, which, from the other side of the world, had been difficult, to say the least.
He had done his utmost to fight her for more reasonable custody but it had been impossible. She had thwarted him in every way conceivable and only her premature death had granted him the child he had fought so hard to know, but in reality had only seen a handful of times.
Now he had Flora but the years had returned him a daughter he didn’t know, a daughter who resented him, who was sullen and uncooperative.
A daughter who, having now lived with him for nearly a year, needed, as his mother kept insisting, a mother figure.
He looked at Katherine Kerr, who was frowning at the various company accounts he had brought with him.
‘You mustn’t worry about your daughter.’ She caught his eye and smiled warmly. ‘I’ve left her in the capable hands of one of our brightest stars.’
Katherine Kerr was intelligent, attractive and empathetic. His mother would be hoping that they would click, that his next step would be to ask her out to dinner. It wasn’t going to happen.
‘I’m not worried about Flora,’ he drawled. ‘I’m worried that if we don’t put this one to bed soon I’m going to miss my five-thirty meeting at the Savoy Grill.’
‘It all looks fairly straightforward.’ Katherine closed the file and sat back. ‘If you’re happy to leave it with us, then I can assure you we’ll do an excellent job for you, Mr Gunn.’
Stefano looked at his watch and stood up. If the woman was looking for things to go further, then she was going to be disappointed. ‘If you tell me where I can find my daughter, Miss Kerr, then I won’t keep you any longer. I take it you now have all the relevant information you need to proceed with this patent case?’
Yes, she did. Yes, it was a pleasure doing business with him. She hoped that should he need any further legal work, he would consider their firm.
Leaving the office, Stefano decided that he would have to gently tell his mother that she would have to curb her desire to find him a wife. It wasn’t going to happen. She would have to accept that when it came to women, he liked things just the way they were. Pretty, undemanding and admittedly not over-bright little things who came and went and allowed him windows of fun and sex for as long as he required them. It worked.
He made his way to the conference room, already bracing himself for the expected confrontation with his daughter and feeling mightily sorry for whoever had had the dubious pleasure of looking after her. Flora had a special talent for making her antagonism known and she was invariably antagonistic towards anyone babysitting her.
The offices smelt of recently applied paint and newly acquired carpet and had been decorated in just the sort of style he liked, which was understated and unpretentious.
This wouldn’t have been a natural choice for him when it came to law firms but he’d liked what he’d seen and he was toying with the idea of throwing some more work their way as he knocked perfunctorily on the door before pushing it open and striding into the room.
Sunny looked up.
For a few seconds she felt winded, as though the breath had been knocked out of her.
She knew what Stefano Gunn looked like. Or at least she’d thought she’d known. She’d seen blurry pictures of him in the financial pages of the broadsheets, shaking hands, looking satisfied at some incredible deal he’d just pulled off. A tall, good-looking man whose roots lay in Scotland but whose looks were far from Scottish.
Seeing him in the flesh was a completely different matter. He wasn’t just good-looking. He was staggeringly, sinfully sexy.
He was very tall, his body lithe and muscular under the hand-tailored suit. His black hair was slightly long, curling at the nape of his neck, and the arrangement of his features...was dramatic. Everything about him oozed exotic sex appeal and she found that she was holding her breath.
Horrified to be caught staring, she pulled herself together at speed and stood up, hand automatically outstretched.
‘Mr Gunn. I’m Sunny Porter...’
His cool fingers as they briefly touched her sent an electric impulse racing through her body and when she withdrew her hand she had to fight not to wipe it on her skirt.
‘Flora...’ she turned to the child, who hadn’t glanced up and was ferociously highlighting the photocopied piece of printed paper which Sunny had given her ‘...your father’s here.’
‘Flora!’ Stefano’s tone was sharp but he modulated it to add, ‘It’s time to go.’
‘I’d rather stay here,’ Flora said coolly, throwing Stefano a challenging stare.
For a few terse seconds complete silence greeted this mutinous remark. Embarrassed, Sunny cleared her throat and began shuffling her papers together. She could feel his presence and it was suffocating.
‘You seem to have captured my daughter’s interest with...what exactly is she doing?’
Sunny reluctantly looked up. She was tall, at five eight, but she still had to crane her neck to meet his eyes.
She’s beautiful was the thought that sprang into Stefano’s head as he stared down at her. Not just pretty or attractive, but a stunner, even though she couldn’t have done more to try and conceal that fact.
Her clothes were cheap and drab, the colours draining, but they still couldn’t subdue the radiant, startling beauty of her heart-shaped face and those huge green eyes. His gaze roamed the contours of her face, taking in the small straight nose and the full, perfectly formed mouth.
Sunny was used to men staring but Stefano’s brooding dark eyes didn’t send her irritation levels soaring. Instead, she felt her nipples pinch with sudden, forceful awareness and an unfamiliar, horrifying and unwelcome dampness spread uncomfortably between her legs.
Her response confused and panicked her.
Having lived the unstable, disjointed and bewildering life of a child with a mother whose primary concerns were men, drugs and drink, a mother who had been prone to disappearing for days on end, leaving her with a neighbour, any neighbour, Sunny prided herself on being tough, on being able to handle any situation.
Especially men.
She’d been attracting their attention since the minute she had become a teenager and started to develop. When her mother had died from an overdose, leaving behind her eleven-year-old daughter, she had been fostered by a couple and had lived on her nerves, uncomfortable with her foster father’s leering eyes, terrified into locking her bedroom door every night although he’d stared but never touched.
At thirteen she had won a scholarship to an exclusive boarding school and, even there, she had been ostracised because of her remarkable looks. She was the cuckoo in the nest, out of her depth with girls who came from serious money, isolated because whenever boys happened to be around, they drooled over her.
She had hated every second of it all but the shell she had developed had protected her, had allowed her to ignore what couldn’t be changed.
Men were driven to look at her. She had learned to blank them out.
She had told herself that the guy for her would be one who would want her for her brain, for what she had to say, for her personality.
Except when, at university, that guy had come along, dear, sweet John, who had been kind and chivalrous and thoughtful; she just hadn’t been able to respond physically to him. That had been two years ago but it still hurt to think about it.
Had she, under the tough shell, been secretly searching for love? Had she longed for someone to ignite the sort of gentle romance she’d fantasised about in the deepest, darkest corners of her mind? Was that what had driven her to John, who had ticked all the right boxes as candidate for the Big Romance? If that had been the case, then she’d been way off mark and what she’d got hadn’t been a Big Romance, but yet another tough learning curve which had closed the doors, for good, on any stupid belief that she was destined for a happy-ever-after life with the perfect soulmate. John should have been the perfect soulmate and she should have wanted to touch him all the time. It hadn’t been that way at all. She’d concluded what she should have concluded a long time ago, which was that her background had irretrievably damaged her. She had moved on and accepted her lot.
So why was she all hot and bothered now? In the presence of a man like Stefano Gunn? Since when had she ever felt hot and bothered when some guy stared at her? Hadn’t she stopped being an idiot two years ago when she and John had ended their doomed relationship?
‘Flora didn’t want to play with...any of her expensive toys—’ she fought to remember that this was a very important client and swallowed down her natural instinct to be contemptuous ‘—so I gave her some work to do and she’s been doing it for the past three hours.’
‘Work?’ He drew her aside while Flora continued doing what she was doing with the highlighters and making a pointed show of disinterest in his arrival.
‘Not actual work,’ Sunny explained, shifting a few inches away from him in an attempt to ward off the disconcerting impact of his presence. ‘I photocopied some pages of one of my law books, Petersen versus Shaw, and asked her to read it and highlight the bits she thought were relevant to Petersen winning the case.’
‘You did...what?’
‘My apologies, Mr Gunn.’ She stiffened, automatically defensive. What else was she supposed to do? Magic up some Lego and play building games with her? Was that even what eight-year-old girls were interested in doing? ‘She said she was bored with whatever...games are on her iPad...or laptop...and I had a stack of work to get through...’
‘I’m not criticising you,’ Stefano said drily. ‘I’m expressing open-mouthed amazement that Flora was drawn into doing something like that.’
Sunny relaxed and stole a glance at his handsome face. His voice was deep and lazy, as velvety as the smoothest of chocolate and his bronzed colouring spoke of an exotically foreign gene pool. And she could breathe him in, a woody, clean, utterly masculine scent that made her senses swirl.
‘She’s more than welcome to take the little file back with her.’ She could feel the hot burn of an uncustomary blush. ‘It’s a historic case. I would never have given her anything that could have remotely been seen as sensitive information.’
‘What are you doing later?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Her eyes flew to his face in consternation.
‘Later. What are you doing?’ The Savoy Grill would have to be put on hold. ‘I’d like to thank you for your impromptu babysitting by taking you out to dinner.’
‘There’s no need!’ Sunny was aghast at the thought of having dinner with him. She was aghast at the thought of doing anything with the man, aside from saying goodbye and never clapping eyes on him again. He did something to her that she didn’t like—something that made mincemeat of her nervous system—and for someone who valued her control that was tantamount to disastrous.
Stefano eyed her narrowly, taken aback by her horrified refusal.
‘I... I couldn’t.’ She backtracked from being outright rude. ‘I...happen to have a job that starts at six so I couldn’t possibly...and there’s really no need to thank me... All in a day’s work...’
‘A job?’ He frowned. ‘What job?’
‘I... I work four nights in a restaurant... Qualifying to be a lawyer costs money, Mr Gunn,’ she said bluntly. ‘I also have rent to pay and food to buy. What I earn here doesn’t quite stretch to cover it all.’
‘In which case,’ Stefano said smoothly, ‘have dinner with me. I have a proposition for you and I think you’ll find it...irresistible...’
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_97c2bcd7-771b-5f09-abbe-14ece7eeedf4)
SUNNY BARELY HAD time to make it home, change quickly and head out to the restaurant, which was just five minutes from where she lived and attracted an eclectic crowd of tourists and students because it was cheap, which appealed to the students, and trendy, which appealed to the tourists.
She had been lucky to get the job. The tips might not have been great because students were notoriously stingy when it came to that sort of thing, but the pay was better than average and the young couple who owned the place were generous, which meant that at the end of the week, if the takings had been particularly high, the staff were all given a small bonus over and above what they were paid.
Every penny went into Sunny’s savings.
She was out of breath by the time she flew into the kitchen to change at speed out of her jeans and T-shirt and into the uniform, which was a jazzy red number, trousers and a T-shirt with the restaurant logo printed in bold white across the front, and a cap. Sunny had no idea what the significance of the outfit was and neither did Tom and Claire. They had decided on it because, Claire had confided, giggling, it had been a cheap bulk buy and the punters had seemed to like it so they had stuck with it.
‘It’s going to be a busy one tonight...’ Claire was rushed off her feet. Tom was supervising in the kitchens, barking orders at the staff, and the other two waitresses were already zooming in and out, pinning orders to the cork board in the kitchen.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ Sunny apologised, stuffing her hair into the cap. ‘I got held up at work.’
‘No matter, darling. Go, go...go! Tom’s having a meltdown because the tuna delivery hasn’t arrived yet. You don’t want to get anywhere near him!’
