Tilly Bagshawe 3-book Bundle: Scandalous, Fame, Friends and Rivals

‘Come on, Rach. You’re being ridiculous!’

‘So you didn’t try to sleep with her? She’s lying, is that what you’re saying?’

The entire bar, restaurant and lobby had turned to tune in to the screaming match between Jackson Dupree and the gorgeous blonde girl. So far it was blonde fifteen, Jackson love.

‘I don’t try to sleep with anyone,’ said Jackson coldly. ‘If I want to sleep with a woman, I do.’

Fifteen all.

‘Do you want to sleep with me?’

A slow smile spread over Jackson’s face. ‘Of course I do, angel. That’s why I’m here. Let’s not let a silly misunderstanding spoil our vacation, OK?’

Rachel turned sweetly to a woman at the bar. ‘Could I borrow that for a second?’ Picking up the woman’s ice-cold vodka tonic, she threw it in Jackson’s face.

‘Well you can’t. Not now, not ever, you lying son of a bitch.’

Game, set and match blond.

It was too late to get a flight back to New York that night. Lying in bed alone, staring at the ceiling in his palatial hotel suite, Jackson was too angry to sleep.

How dare Sasha Miller rat him out to Rachel? He knew damn well she’d been attracted to him. He’d seen it in her eyes. If there was one thing Jackson Dupree knew how to do, it was to spot desire in a woman. All that feminist anger, it was just a way of acting out. She was angry at herself. She knew she didn’t come because of the job and it killed her.

The irony was, he didn’t even want her that badly. Sasha Miller was pretty, more than pretty, but she was pricklier than a porcupine’s hide. Rachel, dear, sweet, uncomplicated, teenage Rachel, she was much more Jackson’s type. He’d only gone for Sasha because she presented a mild challenge, and a little variety. Jackson did like variety. What he did not like was rejection.

Fuck it. Tomorrow he’d go back to the city and bang a few models to restore his equilibrium. Harvard girls are more trouble than they’re worth.

The next morning, Sasha opened her college mail to find a handwritten letter in a Ritz Carlton envelope.

An apology. Better late than never, I suppose.

Inside was a two-line note. ‘You start as an Associate Vice President. $750,000 p/a plus bonus. JD.’ There was a phone number at the end.

Sasha leaned unsteadily against the wall. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Base! Merrill had offered her $250,000, which was a third more than all the other banks. She thought about Jackson Dupree and how much she loathed him. Then she thought about Theo Dexter, and everything that he’d taken from her. She called the number.

‘I won’t report to you directly.’

‘Fine.’

‘I need to be in a different division altogether.’

‘That can be arranged.’

‘I can’t start for two weeks.’

‘Don’t push it, Sasha. You start on Monday.’

The line went dead.

Sasha looked at the note again and laughed out loud. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Jackson Dupree must want to sleep with her very badly indeed.

CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_bf930977-04b3-5423-a066-0da11defc12c)

Jackson Dupree did not want to sleep with Sasha Miller. Right at this moment he did not want to talk to her, see her, hear her, or be forced to acknowledge her existence in any way. Sasha had just lost them a huge deal, and Jackson was furious.

‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ he exploded. ‘Do you know how valuable Morgan Graham’s business is to us? You can’t even be polite.’

‘Oh, I can be polite.’ Strutting down Wall Street in a severely cut black Donna Karan suit and power heels, Sasha was equally angry. ‘What I can’t be is coquettish and fawning and flutter my eyelashes like Bambi just because Graham needs his dick massaged.’

‘Jesus Christ. It was an anecdote. A funny story.’

‘That story wasn’t funny. It was cruel. He screws his poor wife over and I’m supposed to laugh at that? I’m supposed to be impressed?’

‘You called him a prick, Sasha. To his face. You called the head of Goldman Sachs’s Private Equity Group a prick, and you blew up a joint venture that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars to this firm.’

Sasha shrugged. ‘He is a prick.’

‘Yeah? Well so are you,’ snarled Jackson. They glared at each other.

It was six months since Sasha Miller had joined Wrexall Dupree. Six months since Jackson had been deafened by the howls of protest from the board about her exorbitant salary. Six months since Sasha’s hostile, truculent little face had appeared in the doorway of Jackson’s office, demanding to see her contract and to be seated as far away from him as was feasibly possible within the confines of the building. In that time Jackson had grown to respect and dislike Sasha in equal measure. Her intellect was astonishing. Jackson was no slouch himself in the brains department, but he had never seen another human being assimilate information so quickly. Her maths skills were outrageous.

‘No way she’s a business major.’ Jimmy Noakes, who ran Wrexall’s highly regarded modelling group, told Jackson in an awestruck voice. ‘She’s a quant. I’ve never seen anyone crunch numbers that fast and with that degree of accuracy. She should be working at NASA, not wasting her life here.’

The marketing department was equally impressed. ‘Clients love her. Seriously. John Walsh practically ate the girl up with a spoon. And it’s not just men. Angie Jameson called Bob Massey to tell him how impressed she was with Sasha. Angie Jameson!’ A brilliant businesswoman and one-time knockout beauty, Angie Jameson famously loathed working with other women, especially pretty ones. Her entire company, Jameson Estates, was staffed by men, right down to the secretarial and catering staff. But somehow Sasha Miller had won Angie over, scoring her first big deal for Bob Massey’s commercial real estate division by selling Jameson Estates a chain of strip malls. Soon after that, the board stopped bitching about Sasha’s salary. For once, they agreed, Jackson had done well.

When he offered to take Sasha out to celebrate, she turned him down flat.

‘Come on, now,’ he said smoothly. ‘I know we got off to a bad start. But don’t you think it’s time to bury the hatchet? I was really proud of your work today. We all were.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sasha.

‘So you’ll come out for a drink?’

Sasha smiled sweetly. ‘Absolutely not.’

She was never unprofessional, or overtly rude. She avoided Jackson where possible, and where not possible worked alongside him with a cool detachment that would have made Henry Kissinger proud. But her distaste for the company of Wrexall’s heir apparent was not lost on anyone at the firm. Jackson couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being laughed at behind his back, and that it was all Sasha’s fault.

Lottie Grainger, a Yale graduate with short chestnut hair and an enchanting, freckled, pixie-like face, couldn’t understand Sasha’s continued hostility. One of the few other female executives at Wrexall and a rising star in the PR and communications group, Lottie considered Sasha a friend and confidante. But she also liked Jackson.

‘Don’t you think you should give him a chance? Compared to a lot of the old farts on the board he’s a good guy, you know. And you have to admit he’s great at his job.’

‘I never said he wasn’t.’

Over the last few years, Jackson had developed something of specialization in high-end residential work, focusing on uber-wealthy private clients and developers. Sasha officially worked in the commercial group, under Bob Massey, which meant their paths rarely crossed. Recently, however, she’d been roped in to help with a potential joint venture in the hotel sector. The deal with Goldman Sachs’s Private Equity Group was Jackson’s baby. To Sasha’s surprise and irritation, he had specifically requested to have her work on it with him.

Lottie Grainger would have given her eye teeth to have been Jackson’s right-hand woman and couldn’t understand Sasha’s bitching.

‘I know Jackson’s a player and all that,’ said Lottie.