The Valentine Bride

Max heard the voicemail prompt click in, then Louise’s cool, businesslike voice suggesting he leave a message, assuring him that she would return his call as soon as possible.

That would be about as likely as a cold day in hell, he thought, ignoring the invitation and tossing the phone onto his desk. Why would Louise bother to call him back? Why would she waste one moment of her time doing what he wanted? It had been years but she’d never forgotten, or forgiven him for firing her.

As if he’d had any choice.

One of them had had to go and Bella Lucia was his future, the one fixed point in his life. Even when his father had been changing wives faster than most men changed cars. When his mother had been more interested in her career, her lovers.

Everyone knew that Louise was just filling in time at the Chelsea restaurant until she fulfilled her mother’s ambition for her by marrying a title so that she could spend the rest of her life swanning around a country estate, decorating the pages of Country Life, while a nanny raised her kids…

Not that the problem had been all her fault.

The truth was that he’d never been able to think straight around Louise and it had been ten times worse since she’d returned from a summer spent in Italy with a full set of curves, blonde curls that looked as if they had been tousled by some dark-eyed Latin and eyes that seemed to mock him.

If she hadn’t been his cousin…

But she was. Family. Which meant that after college she’d joined the company, working in his restaurant, a situation about as restful as ploughing a minefield; you just never knew when the next explosion was going to happen.

The effect on the staff had been bad enough, but when a particularly disruptive outburst had involved a group of diners he’d had no choice but to fire her on the spot. No choice…

He could cheerfully throttle Jack for putting him in this position.

All the time he’d been in Qu’Arim, setting up the new restaurant, he’d been doing his best to convince himself that his half-brother didn’t know what he was talking about.

Obviously he was right about the need to bring in some heavyweight PR muscle. It was a different world from the dreary postwar era; when his grandfather had opened his first restaurant, people had flocked to eat good Italian food served in warm and welcoming surroundings. Under the control of his father and uncle, they’d grown complacent. They’d been living off reputation, history, for too long. The business had stagnated. The restaurant in Qu’Arim was just the beginning of a new era of global expansion, but to make it work they needed someone who could update the image, get them reviewed, talked about; re-define them not just as a London, but a worldwide ‘A-list’ restaurant group.

Except that it wasn’t ‘they’ any more.

The future of the company was in his hands and his alone. He needed someone. And his brother had made it clear that he didn’t just need someone with Louise’s talent to take up the challenge.

He needed Louise.

Of course, Jack, having dropped that little bombshell, had waltzed off back to New York leaving him to convince Louise to drop everything and come and work for him.

Yes, well. Having driven her away in the first place, he had to be the one to convince her to return. Whatever it took. Because it seemed to him that just at this moment Louise needed him, just a little, too, whether she’d admit it or not.

He wasn’t fooling himself that it would be easy. Louise might have been a useless maître d’, more interested in flirting with the customers than doing her job, but since then she’d carved out a brilliant career for herself in marketing and PR. Her client list included one of the most successful restaurant chains in the country. She knew everyone in the business. Everyone in the media. And her mother’s high society family gave her an in with the social elite. She was ‘A’ list.

She was also bright enough to know that Bella Lucia needed her a lot more than she needed Bella Lucia.

That he needed her a lot more than she needed him.

If the situation were reversed, if he were in her shoes, he knew he wouldn’t listen to one word she had to say until she was on her knees, begging.

He hoped, for his knees’ sake, that she wasn’t inclined to carry a grudge that far.

Fat chance, he thought, checking the time.

If he shifted himself, he should catch her leaving the office. It wouldn’t be so easy for her to ignore him face to face.

‘You are a wonder, Louise.’ Oliver Nash had waited while she locked up, walked her down to the street and now continued to hold her hand long after it had ceased to be the kind of handshake that concluded a successful meeting. ‘Are you going to let me take you to dinner somewhere special? So that I can thank you properly?’

‘You’ll get my account at the end of the month, Oliver. Prompt payment is all the thanks I need.’

‘One of these days you’ll make my day and say yes.’

She laughed. ‘One of these days I’ll say yes, you old fraud, and scare you half to death. Go home to your lovely wife.’

‘You know me too well,’ he said, then as he bent to kiss her cheek she saw Max leaning against his muscular sports car, watching them.

‘Dumped your toy boy for a sugar-daddy, Lou?’ he asked.

Louise was thankful that the shadows were deep enough to disguise the flush that had darkened her cheeks. Even now he only had to look at her, speak to her, be in the same room, to send a shiver of something dark, something dangerous, rippling through her body. To disturb the even tenor of her life.

Not that there had been much that was even about it in the last few months.

Oliver, his hand still firmly holding hers, raised a brow a fraction of an inch and, since there was no way to avoid making introductions, she said, ‘Oliver, I don’t believe you know my…’ She caught herself. She was still readjusting to her new identity. Still forgot…‘I don’t believe you know Max Valentine. Max, Oliver Nash is a valued client; the chairman of the Nash Group.’

‘Fast food?’ Max replied.

‘Fast profit,’ Oliver replied, more amused than annoyed at being the butt of a younger man’s jealousy. ‘How’s business in the slow food sector?’

The exchange, unpleasant though it was, had given her time to recover, put up the barriers with a distant smile, and she stepped in before it deteriorated further.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Oliver,’ she said.

‘You’ll be all right?’ He looked up as a thin, icy rain began to fall, then at Max. ‘I’d be happy to give you a lift.’

‘Louise and I have business to discuss, Nash,’ Max intervened, his hand at her elbow, before she could be tempted to let Oliver chauffeur her as far as the nearest underground station in his Rolls. ‘Family business.’

His hand was barely touching her. Max never touched her if he could help it, not since that summer before she’d gone away to Italy; after that everything had changed.

They had changed. Become unsettlingly aware of each other in a way that, for cousins, wasn’t quite…decent.

Except that now she knew they weren’t cousins. That she’d been adopted…

Carefully lifting her arm away, she said, ‘Office hours are from ten until six, Max—’

‘It’s nearly eight.’

He didn’t look at his watch and she wondered exactly how long he’d been waiting for her to emerge from her office. Her PA had left a little after six—she had a life—and it must have been before then, or how would he have known she was still on the premises?

She refused to feel guilty about that. Or rise to his bait. She didn’t have to explain herself to him. To anybody.

‘For valued clients,’ she said, ‘office hours are infinitely expandable.’

‘Infinitely?’

She ignored the innuendo. What she did, whom she did it with, was nothing to do with him.