The Tycoon's Ultimate Conquest

‘Well, now, my friend. That depends entirely on your definition of unethical...’

* * *

‘Someone here to see you, Rose.’

Rose looked up at the spiky-haired young girl standing by the door of the office she shared with her co-worker, Phil. It was little more than a large room on the ground floor of the Victorian house which was also her home but it was an arrangement that worked. The rent she got from Phil and from the occupants of the other two converted rooms—who were variously the local gardening club twice a week, the local bridge group once a week and the local children’s playgroup twice a week—covered the extensive running costs of the house she had inherited when her mother had died five years previously. Well, alongside the sizeable loan she had had to take out in order to effect urgent repairs on the place.

She occasionally thought that it would have been nice if she could have separated her work life from her home life but, on the other hand, who could complain about a job where there was no commute involved?

‘Who is it, Angie?’ Bad time. Middle of the afternoon and she still had a bucketload of work to do. Three cases had cropped up at precisely the same time and each one of them involved complex issues with employment law, in which she specialised, and demanded a lot of attention.

‘Someone about the land.’

‘Ah. The land.’ Rose sat back, stretched and then stood up, only realising how much she’d cramped up when she heard a wayward joint creak.

The land.

No one called it anything else.

Between Phil’s property law side of the business and her labour law, the land had become the middle ground which occupied them both, far more than either had expected when the business of some faceless tycoon buying up their green fields to build yet another housing estate had reared its ugly head.

Phil was a relative newcomer to the area, but she had lived in the village her whole life and she had adopted the cause of the protestors with gusto.

Indeed, she had even allowed them to use her sprawling kitchen as their headquarters.

She was unashamedly partisan and was proud of her stance. There was nothing that stuck in her throat more than big businesses and billionaire businessmen thinking that they could do as they pleased and steamroll over the little people so that they could make yet more money for themselves.

‘Want me to handle it?’ Phil asked, looking up from his desk, which was as chaotic as hers.

‘No.’ Rose smiled at him. She could never have hoped for a more reliable business partner than Phil. Thirty-three years old, he had the appearance of a slightly startled owl, with his wire-rimmed specs and his round face, but he was as sharp as a tack and won a breathtaking amount of business for them. ‘If they’ve actually got around to sending one of their senior lawyers then I’m ready for them. It’s insulting that so far they’ve only seen fit to send junior staff. Shows how confident they are of being able to trample us into the ground.’

‘I like your faith in our ability to bring a massive corporation to its knees,’ Phil said with a wry grin. ‘DC Logistics pretty much owns the world.’

‘Which,’ Rose countered without skipping a beat, ‘doesn’t mean that they can add this little slice of land to the tally.’

She tucked strands of her unruly hair into the sort of bun she optimistically started each and every day with, only to give up because her hair had a will of its own.

She glanced at the sliver of mirror in between the bookshelves groaning under the weight of legal tomes and absently took in the reflection that stared back at her every morning when she woke up.

No one had ever accused her of being pretty. Rose had long accepted that she just wasn’t, that she just didn’t fit the mould of pretty. She had a strong, intelligent face with a firm jaw and a nose that bordered on sharp. Her large eyes were clear and brown and her best feature as far as she was concerned.

Everything else...well, everything else worked. She was a little too tall, a little too gangly and not nearly busty enough, but you couldn’t concern yourself with stuff like that and she didn’t. Pretty much.

‘Right! Let’s go see what they’ve thrown at us this time!’ She winked at Phil and made approving noises when Angie said that she’d stuck their visitor in the kitchen—it would do whoever it was good to see the evidence of their commitment to the cause—and headed out of the office.

She didn’t know what to expect.

Overweight, overfed, overpaid and over-confident. Someone at the height of his career, with all the trappings that an expensive top job afforded. Angie had given nothing away and wouldn’t have. She was gay and paid not a scrap of attention to what members of the opposite sex looked like.

Rose was only twenty-eight herself but the young people who had been sent to argue the case had seemed so much younger than her.

She pushed open the kitchen door and then stood for a few moments in the doorway.

The man was standing with his back to her, staring out at the garden, which flowed seamlessly into open land, the only boundary between private and public being a strip of trees and a dishevelled hedge of sorts.

He was tall. Very tall. She was five eleven and she guessed that he would be somewhere in the region of six three.

And, from what she was seeing, he was well built. Muscular. Broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist and legs that moulded perfectly to the faded jeans he was wearing.

What sort of lawyer was this?

Confused, Rose cleared her throat to give notice of her presence and the man turned around slowly.

‘My secretary didn’t tell me your name, Mr...’

‘Frank.’ The stranger took his time as he walked towards her, which annoyed Rose because this was her house and her kitchen and yet the man seemed to dominate the space and own it in a way she didn’t care for.

‘Well, Mr Frank. You’re here about the land, I gather. If your company thinks that this ploy is going to work, then I hate to disappoint you but it won’t.’

Alarmed because he had somehow managed to close the distance between them and was standing just a little too close for comfort, Rose sidestepped him to the kettle, only offering him something to drink seemingly as an afterthought.

‘You can sit,’ she said crisply. ‘Just shove some of the papers out of the way.’

‘What ploy?’

Rose watched as he looked at the placards in the making on the kitchen table, head politely inclined. After some consideration, he held up one and examined it in reflective silence before returning it to its original position on the table.

‘What ploy?’ he repeated.

‘The lawyer-in-jeans ploy,’ Rose said succinctly. She shot him a look of pure disdain, but only just managed to pull it off because the man was just so...so...crazily good-lookingthat her nervous system felt as though it had been put through a spin cycle and was all over the place.

He’d sat down but not in a lawyer-like manner, which was also annoying. He’d angled the pine chair, one of ten around the long rectangular table, and was sprawled in it, his long legs stretched right out in front of him, one ankle over the other. He looked effortlessly elegant and incredibly cool in his weathered jeans and faded polo shirt. Everything clung in a way that made her think that the entire outfit had been especially designed with him in mind.

She pushed the coffee over to him. He looked just the kind of guy to take his coffee black, no sugar.

‘Does your company think that they can send someone who’s dressed down for the dayin the hope that we might just soften our stance? Maybe be deluded into thinking that he’s not the stuffed shirt lawyer that he actually is?’ She narrowed her eyes and tried and failed to imagine him as a stuffed shirt lawyer.

‘Ah...’ Mr Frank murmured. ‘That ploy.’

‘Yes. That ploy. Well, it won’t work. My team and I are committed to the cause and you can tell your employers that we intend to fight this abhorrent and unnecessary development with every ounce of breath in us.’

‘You overestimate my qualifications,’ Mr Frank said smoothly, sipping the coffee. ‘Excellent coffee, by the way. I’m no lawyer. But were I to be one, then I would try very hard not to be a stuffed shirtone.’

‘Not a lawyer? Then who the heck are you? Angie said that you were here about the land.’

‘Angie being the girl with the spiky hair and the nose ring?’

‘That’s correct. She also happens to be an extremely efficient secretary and a whizz at IT.’