A Deal For Her Innocence

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_6045575e-245c-5a92-a855-eace14638fa4)

‘MR ROSSI IS in the gym.’ The cool, blonde beauty manning the desk in the six-storeyed glass house that comprised the European headquarters of Niccolo Rossi’s sprawling empire glanced up from the computer in front of her. Her face didn’t crack a smile.

‘The gym?’ Had she got the day wrong? ‘But I have an appointment,’ Ellie said, hand tightening on the briefcase clamped to her side.

‘Lower level, and the lifts are to the left,’ the glacial beauty said, tapping one long, scarlet fingernail on the marble counter. ‘He’s expecting you. He has allotted you twenty minutes. He’s a very busy man.’

Ellie’s lips thinned. Reading between the lines, the message was loud and clear: Get a move on, because time is money for the billionaire Niccolo Rossi, and you should consider yourself lucky that he’s granted you an audience at all.

Ellie wondered if acting as a barrier between her billionaire boss and the outside world was part of the woman’s duties. Probably. Niccolo Rossi came with an extensive reputation as a ruthless playboy with a penchant for catwalk models and short-term relationships. The sort of man who had fun with women and, the second the fun was over, dropped them like a hot potato and moved on to the next one.

Only a month ago, she had been flicking through a weekly gossip rag, and there had been a telling picture of a stunning woman hiding behind a pair of over-sized sunglasses, the bold caption implying that she didn’t want the world to see her distraught, puffy eyes in the wake of a cruel break-up.

Niccolo Rossi probably needed a Rottweiler at the front desk making sure distraught, puffy-eyed exes didn’t get through to his inner sanctum.

Ellie had never met the man in the flesh but it didn’t take a genius to figure out the sort of person he was. Young, rich and powerful. Good-looking as well, if you went for the traditional Italian type. Heavy on phoney charm, light on sincerity.

The kind of guy who didn’t give a hoot about other people, which was why Ellie was now having to conduct her meeting with him in a gym, and with one eye on her watch, because time wasn’t going to be on her side.

Hardly ideal. But then conducting this meeting on her own was hardly ideal either, even though she had talked herself into handling the pitch. She had a great record for winning work, she had secured two record, large clients, which had been a real boost, and she’d wanted to prove her worth to herself and to the other two partners in the small start-up advertising agency, in which they were joint investors, by winning this solid-gold client. She had used every scrap of the small inheritance left to her by a grandparent she had never met and had borrowed to meet the remainder of her contribution. She was an equal partner with an equal voice, but she was younger and less experienced, and still felt that there was a ladder to climb before she was on a par with her two other partners.

This was to be the feather in her cap, but Stephen would still accompany her for gravitas, although his role would be to sit back and watch and field any awkward questions. His role, unfortunately, had bitten the dust when his mother had been rushed to hospital the evening before. Right now, Stephen Prost was on bedside vigil and Adam, the other partner in the agency, couldn’t possibly abandon ship to hold her hand.

‘I don’t need my hand to be held!’ Ellie had reassured him with glowing confidence.

However, that was before she had been faced with the change of venue and a stopwatch.

She thought of the painstaking work she had put in on the advertising campaign for Niccolo Rossi. She had worked even longer hours than she usually did because this job was beyond big. She had sourced every available scrap of information she could on his boutique resort in the Caribbean, which hardly needed any outside help when it came to getting noticed. She had spent endless hours, way into the night, thinking of creative ways to sell the resort to the mega-rich audience he wanted to attract.

And now she was being granted twenty minutes while the big man ran on a treadmill with one headphone in his ear, making a pretence of listening to what she had to say. She didn’t think that the other big players in advertising tendering for the job had pitched to him sitting on a yoga mat in a gym. No chance.

The heat of the gym hit her like a solid brick wall the second she pushed open the glass door. Her eyes skittered over the fearsome array of machines, the punch bags to one side, the unforgiving mirrored wall, and finally came to rest on the single sweating male in the room lifting a stack of weights that literally made her wince.

Niccolo Rossi.

He looked nothing like the grainy images she had occasionally glimpsed of him in the past. For a start, in all those grainy images he had been fully dressed. Here, in the gym, he was in a black tee shirt and a pair of shorts, standing with his back to her, his lean, bronzed body rippling with taut muscle as he slowly hefted the bar with its impossible load, from ground to waist, and from waist to shoulder, then up. His skin gleamed with sweat.

Mesmerised, Ellie could do little more than just hover in the doorway and stare.

Still in her coat, she could feel perspiration trickling down her back.

She was dressed for a cold winter day. Barely there black tights, black skirt, neat white blouse, not quite buttoned to the neck but almost, and black pumps. She was dressed for a meeting in a boardroom with men in suits and a whiteboard safely tucked away somewhere in the background. Here, in this testosterone-charged space, she felt ridiculous in her neat work outfit, clutching her briefcase.

Consummate professional that she was, Ellie was irritated with herself for the lapse in focus. She was here to do a job. True, she would have wanted more time than the scant twenty, probably now fifteen, minutes she had been allocated, but she was smart enough to filter out all unnecessary information and still work to her brief. She had no choice.

There were hard copies of everything anyway. She never pitched for any job without meticulous preparation and she never, ever relied on her clients remembering everything she said. It always paid dividends to make sure they had all the information to hand by way of something both tangible and in email format.

Hard copy anything felt superfluous here.

Straightening, she took a deep breath and walked towards Niccolo.

Her shoes clicked briskly on the hardwood floor and, if he hadn’t been aware of her existence before, he was now, because he dropped the weights on the mat with a resounding crash that made her jump.

He turned round slowly and Ellie stopped. Her heart had vacated her chest and migrated to somewhere in her mouth, which had gone dry. The blood running through her veins had turned to molten lava. Her thoughts had suddenly become scrambled and a deep fog had settled over her brain. The man was beauty in motion, his body slick, his slightly long, dark hair damp with sweat.

Eyes as dark as night registered her as she stood in front of him, clutching her briefcase for dear life, and fit to explode from the heat in the sensible coat which she hadn’t thought to remove.

He had the lushest lashes she had ever seen on a man, long, thick and fringing eyes that were, just for a few seconds, veiled of all expression.

His features were chiselled to perfection. She knew that he was part-Italian but, unless one was standing right in front of him, it was hard to tell from a picture just how exotic that ancient thread of ancestry was. He wasn’t just your typical tall, dark and good-looking guy. He was a one-of-a-kind dangerously tall, dark and good-looking guy. He oozed the sort of blatant, uncompromising sex appeal that made women walk into lamp posts.

‘Eleanor Wilson.’ Ellie rushed into frantically confused speech, thoroughly disconcerted by the effect he was having on her and not caring for it at all. ‘Ms.’

The veiled expression cleared and his dark, dark eyes connected with hers with a hint of amusement.

‘Ms Eleanor Wilson,’ he drawled, reaching down for a towel she hadn’t noticed and wiping his face before slinging it over his shoulders. He looked at her from her head down, then back up again, then he made an elaborate show of peering around her. ‘Where are the rest of you?’

‘Just me, I’m afraid. Stephen Prost, my business partner, is dealing with a personal emergency at the moment. I hope you won’t mind me saying, but I wasn’t expecting to have to discuss my pitch in a gym. Would we be able to find a seat somewhere?’ She looked around her and failed to see anywhere that could remotely work for her to show him what she had brought with her unless she opted for doing her spiel on the treadmill.

Annoyance flared. How hard was it to stick to the rule book? He had made an appointment, and surely he could at the very least have the courtesy to honour the commitment he had made?

She pursed her lips, bristling. Rules and regulations were in place for a reason. The work place and life in general only operated smoothly if all parties concerned took time out to respect one another.

‘You should take the coat off,’ Niccolo said gently. ‘You must be very hot.’

‘I hadn’t expected to be in a gym,’ Ellie repeated with a tight smile.

‘And so now you are.’ Niccolo shrugged. ‘You have to roll with the punches. Follow me.’ He spun round and began walking towards the back of the gym.

Changing rooms. He was heading to the changing rooms. She could see a concealed door. Ellie cast a desperate glance behind her to the door through which she had come, while her legs propelled her behind him, towards a scenario that took her so far out of her comfort zone that she felt faint.

Ellie behaved by the rules and she believed in them. It was just the way she was. She liked them. She liked the sense of order they conferred. She had lived a peripatetic life with her wandering, nomadic, hippy parents. She had spent a childhood that had spanned the continents, from India as a toddler, through Australia with a brief stint in New Zealand, before returning to Europe via Ibiza, Greece and Spain. She had barely seen the inside of any schools because nothing as dull and as institutional as a school had been allowed to cloud the endlessly blue horizons of her free-spirited parents. Routine had been their enemy and she had become the unwitting victim of their scatty, idealised belief system.

For Ellie, being on the move had fostered a deeply ingrained desire for stability.

By the time her feet had hit the ground at fourteen, and her parents had ruefully accepted that their thirst to see every corner of the globe had been sufficiently quenched, Ellie had thrown herself into the joy of going nowhere with a passion that had almost been physical.

She was a stickler for detail but with a creative streak that had been passed down from her arty parents. That combination had won her her first job at a major advertising agency and, from there, she had been invited to take a chance and team up with Stephen and Adam, both ambitious CEOs at the same firm, to form their fledgling agency. It was the biggest risk she had ever taken, and she had taken it after careful consideration, because she had felt confident about their prospects at capturing a niche but significant market with a media-savvy audience. Everything she did was done with consideration, with nothing left to chance. Like the portfolio she was clutching. A portfolio that should have been displayed in the sanitised confines of a designated office space. With the whiteboard. And no treadmills or punch bags in sight.

She eyed Niccolo’s muscled torso as his T-shirt clung to it, the length of his legs, the strength of his arms, the powerful ripple of muscle and sinew, and she shivered. Here was a man who scorned rules and regulations, and now she wondered just how she was supposed to form any sort of rapport with a man who thought nothing of conducting a meeting in a gym. In the world of advertising, rapport was top dog.

Worse. He was now going to conduct his meeting in the changing rooms of a gym.

He opened the door and she shrieked to a stop, nerves all over the place, fingers grasping the briefcase until her knuckles were white.

Niccolo turned around, both hands on the ends of the towel looped over his shoulders.