Hired: The Boss's Bride

The tram creaked to a stop, and so did her Corvette. Veronica let her head fall against the headrest and looked up into the bright blue sky. A web of tram cables glittered over her head and she had to blink against the bright sunlight flickering through the wide gaps.

She sniffed deep, letting the sights and sounds of Melbourne, the town in which she’d been born, come back to her after a good six years away. She wondered how it would treat her return: with wide-open arms, or with a cliquish turn of its graceful head?

She hoped the former because the job she was in town to interview for—in-house auctioneer for an established and esteemed art gallery—sounded just perfect. It was temporary, it was immediate and it meant working with a close friend she hadn’t seen in yonks. And super especially it was located at the other end of the country from her last job. And thus her last boss.

Thoughts of her dash from Queensland with nothing but a suitcase and her car and the exultant resignation message she’d left on Geoffrey’s answering machine, made her next breath in a tad shaky. But not because she was worried; because she was free.

So what if she was jobless and homeless? So what if this job opportunity Kristin had mentioned in passing on the phone the week prior was the only opportunity currently on her horizon? So what if her next car payment was due in less than a week and her bank balance was laughable?

She caught her reflection in the rear-vision mirror and checked her lipstick. ‘No pressure,’ she said, a wry smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

The tram heaved to a start. Veronica saw her chance to slip past while the cumbersome trolley slowly got up to speed, then she purred off down the road on the lookout for what Kristin had described as a two-storey, redbrick building, the façade of which was reminiscent of an old fire station. The Hanover House Art and Antique Gallery.

* * *

Mitch Hanover paced behind the oversized reception desk of stately Hanover House, the enduring antique and art auction business his family had owned for generations.

‘So what is the time?’ his assistant, Kristin, asked.

He looked up from the watch he’d been staring at for the past thirty-odd seconds and stared through the large arched front windows to the street outside. ‘It’s late. She’s late. I thought you told me this friend of yours was a pro.’

Kristin angled her hip against the edge of the desk and glowered at him. ‘I said she was the answer to all your dreams. If you saw “pro” in that, then who am I to argue?’

He growled at the back of his throat, and then gave up when he remembered who he was talking to. ‘You do realise she’s my last interview, do you not? We are going to have to choose a new auctioneer by the end of today or next week’s pre-show will have to be cancelled.’

He didn’t need to add that if the pre-show was cancelled, the show itself would soon follow. And after that would fall the business itself. Everyone in the building knew it. Knew it, dreaded it, yet somehow expected it.

Kristin, imperturbable as always, grinned. ‘Don’t panic, Mitch. She’s perfect. So perfect that within the hour you’ll be eating humble pie. You just wait and see.’

He narrowed his eyes, his hogwash radar prickling feverishly in the back of his head until it resulted in a headache.

Trying to distract himself, he picked up and began playing with an ancient fountain pen that looked as if it had seen better days. Better centuries, in fact. Why people liked collecting relics of the past, he had no idea. The future was his game.

He put the pen back where he found it.

‘And stop frowning,’ Kristin said. ‘Unfair as it is on the whole men age far better than women but that doesn’t mean you want to hurry the process.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that I only frown when you’re in the room?’

‘Never. You need a massage. Or a week off. Ever been camping? Communing with nature can be very relaxing. No? Then how about dinner with someone who can string a sentence together without prefacing every other word with an “um”. Serial-dating walking clichés will age you even more than frowning overly much ever could. I read that somewhere recently.’

‘Maybe you’re the one who ought to be looking for a new job,’ he said with the kind of humourless smile that usually sent his minions running to their desks in fear.

Kristin merely blinked. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’

Mitch gave up and ran a hand over his forehead, surprised to find just how deep the furrows in fact were. ‘When’s my next appointment in the city?’

Kristin poked at some buttons on her BlackBerry. Her eyes widened a tad, but when she looked back to him she was the picture of innocence. ‘You have plenty of time. Relax.’

Relax? As if he could relax. He’d been blithe for far too long, spending years in London greedily gobbling up emerging markets, IT and telecommunications companies into the Hanover Enterprises fold and all the while Hanover House, the one-time jewel in the crown of the Hanover family business, the business his parents had poured their hearts and souls into before retirement, had been run deep into the ground by lax and old-fashioned management.

He felt the imminent failure of the foundation business like a heavy weight upon his already overloaded shoulders. Now he was back, now he had nothing tying him to London anymore, now he was CEO of Hanover Enterprises, he couldn’t relax while something his parents loved so dearly upped and died.

The growl of a high-end sports car split the taut silence and he glanced up to see a hot-pink Corvette slip into a tiny no-parking space right in front of the gallery.

‘Idiot,’ he said beneath his breath, the expulsion of the word relieving his stress a little bit. The council was so hot in this part of town the guy’d be towed within the hour. He knew well enough. It had happened to him twice.

The engine cut off, leaving the blare of some awful eighties party track pulsating through the gallery windows before that too shut off, leaving the room filled with its usual musty silence.

Kristin suddenly made an excited squeak and pushed past him as she ran outside. She hit the Corvette and leant in so far to hug the occupant her feet came off the ground and Mitch had to avert his gaze so as not to see if her stockings were full or held up by suspenders.

Then it hit him. The idiot driver had to be Veronica Bing. His final interview. Naturally. It was some time since he’d decided God enjoyed punishing him. And longer still since he’d known why. His brow-furrowing hit epic proportions.

He took in a deep breath. He’d interview the woman, he’d hire one of the three other perfectly adequate candidates and then he’d take delight in informing Kristin her Christmas bonus this year was going to be a canned ham.

Once Kristin’s feet fluttered back to the ground Mitch moved so that he could get a better look at the kind of person Kristin—a woman he’d until this moment trusted with his Christmas shopping, his travel packing and with ordering just the right kind of flowers with which to say ‘it’s been lovely knowing you but…’ —supposed might be the answer to all his dreams.

The answer was tall with dark brown curls and even darker huge sunglasses covering half her face, beneath which surprisingly lush red lips stretched out into a shiny white smile. He made out the flash of a sleeveless black T-shirt, which revealed a pair of long, lean arms that had been kissed by a far kinder sun than seen in Melbourne over the long winter. And when Kristin shook her hard before enveloping her in another hug, he could all but hear the dozen odd black bangles on her left wrist rattling.

Not bothering to open the door of the low-slung car, she of the red lips vaulted over the side and the soles of her boots came to a loud slap on the pavement. Black, they were, and knee high. With the tightest pair of dark denim jeans Mitch had ever seen tucked into them. Jeans that encased the kind of curves that would make any half-alive man sit up and pay attention.

Mitch cricked his neck. He was at least half alive, and when he’d woken up that morning, he’d had no intention of paying such close attention to any woman, much less one he might well be about to hire. But his eyes were riveted to the creature on the other side of the glass.

He pulled at the Windsor knot of his tie, which suddenly felt too tight. It wasn’t. He’d been tying that exact knot since his first day of private prep school when he was five years old. That morning he’d also woken at five on the dot as he always did. He’d taken his usual five kilometre run on the treadmill in his apartment. He’d eaten his usual low GI, high-fibre breakfast.

Usually that austere routine was enough to allay midday surges of adrenalin at nothing more than the sight of a nice backside in a pair of tight jeans. He blamed Kristin with all that talk of nature and massages and dating women with lingual skills. She’d talked him into feeling this way, thinking this way. And he would simply have to talk himself out of it.

The future of the business is in your hands, he reminded himself. This is not the time for a momentary lapse in judgement. He also consoled himself with the fact Veronica Bing was wearing the least likely interview outfit he could have imagined and therefore couldn’t possibly be what he, or the business, needed in order to move forward. Hadn’t the woman heard of a navy suit and beige stockings?

Then when his interviewee bent into the car, kicking one long leg behind her as she reached into the back seat to pull out a large silver handbag, he gave himself one last chance in hell of pulling himself together by closing his eyes and turning away.

The bell over the double oak doors clanged. Mitch opened his eyes, drew in a breath, looked straight down the barrel of the respectful portrait of his great-grandfather, Phineas Hanover, which hung behind the reception desk, muttered, ‘Heaven help me,’ then turned to the bright windows.

And in she came, bringing with her a waft of warm spring air and raucous conversation as Kristin prattled on beside her like an overexcited teenager.

He readied himself to take the proceedings in hand but his words stopped in his mouth when he caught a load of the image emblazoned across Veronica’s T-shirt. A huge pair of glistening red lips followed the dips and curves of her chest.

The ensuing tightness in Mitch’s chest was definitely not the result of hyperventilation. Or a stitch, as he hadn’t made a move. And it couldn’t be a heart attack. He was thirty-four and fit as a fiddle, for Pete’s sake.

He blinked, breathed deep and looked up into her eyes instead. Only to find that without the huge sunglasses covering half her face she was…lovely. There was no other word that he could bring to mind no matter how hard he tried. With all that tousled dark hair that made her look as if she’d just rolled out of bed, a pair of sparkling dark eyes and skin so tanned and healthy-looking she practically shone.

Mitch felt the faint but conspicuous beginnings of a chemical reaction deep within his bones before it quickly spread, making his palms tingle and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Saying the rapid rush of such a feeling shocked the hell out of him would have been an understatement.

When Veronica’s eyes finally swung from Kristin’s beaming face to look his way, he actually braced himself for impact.

Her smile faltered. Even from that distance, and with the sun behind her, he saw it. Felt it. Then her gaze raked him from the top of his dark hair, down his conservative suit to his freshly shone shoes and back to his eyes again. And his skin contracted as though it had been one long red fingernail that had traced his skin rather than the casual caress of a pair of big brown female eyes.

She broke eye contact and the skin on the back of his neck suddenly felt cold, as though he’d come out in a sweat. Which was ridiculous. This whole thing was quite simply all too ridiculous. He was a man of experience. Far wider reaching experience than he would admit to in polite company. And in his experience he’d come to believe that this kind of instantaneous, primal, physical reaction to a woman was no longer his to be had. The fact that he’d cultivated his indifference to the point of it being an art form all of itself was beside the point.