Tempted by trouble…

The moment Tash Sinclair sets eyes on family rival Aiden Moore she knows she’s in trouble. His vendetta against her is bad enough, but the fact that she finds Aiden outrageously attractive makes everything a million times worse!

Tash and Aiden clash immediately, but everyone knows that the line between love and hate is paper-thin. As the fireworks fly will Tash and Aiden spontaneously combust—or will Tash do the unthinkable and fall for her own worst enemy? After all, you should keep your friends close, but maybe your enemies the closest of all…!

My Boyfriend and Other Enemies

“There’s something about you…” Aiden went on. “It’s hard to put my finger on.” But he did, tracing it along the top edge of her bodice.

Her throat tightened up immediately and the thing between them surged and swelled as a ball of heat low in her chest. There it was again…the connection. So ready to combust. “Two minutes ago you thought I was sleeping with your father.”

He shuffled closer. “But you’re not. And my relief about that is quite…disturbing.”

“Why relieved?” She didn’t dare ask why disturbed.…

“Because it means I can do this.”

The warmth of the cumulative coats hanging at her back was nothing to the furnace pumping off Aiden as he swooped down to capture her lips with his. They took hers with a certainty that stole her breath.

She wanted to respond to him—his size, his intensity and the sheer overwhelming maleness of him—but something told her if she gave an inch, she’d be lost. Aiden Moore was a man who knew what he wanted and how he wanted it.

And right now, the answer was her and here in the coatroom of MooreCo’s party.

My Boyfriend and

Other Enemies

Nikki Logan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT NIKKI LOGAN

Nikki Logan lives next to a string of protected wetlands in Western Australia, with her long-suffering partner and a menagerie of furred, feathered and scaly mates. She studied film and theater at university, and worked for years in advertising and film distribution before finally settling down in the wildlife industry. Her romance with nature goes way back, and she considers her life charmed, given she works with wildlife by day and writes fiction by night—the perfect way to combine her two loves. Nikki believes that the passion and risk of falling in love are perfectly mirrored in the danger and beauty of wild places. Every romance she writes contains an element of nature, and if readers catch a waft of rich earth or the spray of wild ocean between the pages, she knows her job is done.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Excerpt

ONE

Tash Sinclair stared at the handsome, salt-and-pepper-haired man across the bustling coastal café as he exchanged casual conversation with a younger companion seated across from him. The electric blue of Fremantle harbour stretched out behind them. She should have been all eyes for the older man—Nathaniel Moore was the reason she was here, monitoring from across the café like a seasoned stalker—but she caught her focus repeatedly drifting to the modestly dressed man next to him.

Not as chiselled as his older friend, and closer to Tash’s thirty than Moore’s fifty-odd, but there was something compelling about him. Something that held her attention when she could least afford it.

She forced it back onto the older man where it belonged.

Nathaniel Moore looked relaxed, almost carefree, and, for a moment, Tash reconsidered. She was about to launch a rocket grenade into all that serenity. Was it the right thing to do? It felt right. And she’d promised her mother...kind of.

The younger man reached up to signal the waiter for another round of coffee and his moss-green sweater tightened over serious shoulders. Tash felt the pull, resisted it and forced her eyes to stay on Nathaniel Moore.

It wasn’t hard to see what first attracted her mother to the executive thirty years ago. He had a whole Marlon Brando thing going on, and if she couldn’t guess it for herself, Tash had dozens of diaries, decades of memories and reflections captured in ink, to spell out the attraction. Adele Porter—she’d abandoned the name Sinclair right after Eric Sinclair had abandoned her—might have had trouble living her feelings, but she had no difficulty at all writing them down in the privacy of her diaries once her divorce had come through.

Tash studied him again. Her mother had died loving this man, and he—from what she could tell from the diaries and family gossip only now coming to light—had loved Adele back.

Yet they’d been apart most of their lives.

She might never have thought to look at those diaries—to look for him—if not for the message she’d received from him on her mother’s phone. A fiftieth birthday message for a woman who would never get it made about as much sense as Tash maintaining her mother’s exorbitant mobile phone service just so she could ring and hear her voice message when she wanted to. When she needed to.

Because it was her voice. And apparently that was what they both needed.

Tash’s eyes returned to the man across the café.

Nathaniel’s head came up and he swept the diners vaguely with his glance, brushing past her table, past the nameless woman in dark sunglasses disguising her surveillance. That was when she saw it: the bruising beneath his eyes, the dark shadows in his gaze. The same expression Tash had worn for weeks.

Nathaniel Moore was still grieving, and she would bet all of her best art pieces that he was doing it completely alone.

His colleague pushed his chair back and stood, sliding the empty espresso cups to the side for collection by the passing staff. A small kindness that would make someone’s job that tiny bit easier. He excused himself to Nathaniel and headed towards the restrooms, crossing within feet of her table. As he passed, his eyes brushed over her in the way that most men’s did. Appreciative but almost absent, as though he were checking out produce. A way that told her she’d never be going home to meet his family. That said she might get to wear his lingerie at Christmas but never his ring.

The story of her life. Ordinarily she would steadfastly ignore such a lazy appraisal, but today...the chance to see what colour his eyes were was too good to resist. She turned her head up fractionally as he passed and crashed headlong into his regard. Her breath caught.

How had she, even for a moment, thought he was the lesser of the two men? Not classically handsome but his lips were even and set, his jaw artistically angled. And those eyes...bottomless and as blue as the rarest of the priceless cobalt glass she’d worked with.... They transformed his face. Literally breathtaking.

She ripped her stare away, chest heaving.

He kept walking as if nothing had happened.

Her heart tugged against her ribs like a nagging child and she took a deep, slow breath. She wasn’t used to noticing men beyond their mannerisms, their social tells, the things that told her who they really were. With him, she’d been so busy studying the shape of his mouth and the extraordinary colour of his irises she’d failed to notice anything else. She’d failed to think of anything else.

Like the reason she was here.

Her focus dragged back to the water’s edge and the man sitting there alone, staring out.

Do it.

The voice came immediately. Not her mother’s and not her own. A weird kind of hybrid of both. But it was the reason she was here today and the reason she’d paid particular attention to a newspaper article in which Nathaniel Moore was captioned in the photograph. The reason she was able to find out where he worked and, then, how to contact him. The voice that was just...planting seeds. Inspiring particular actions. Pushing when she needed a nudge. Kind of like a guardian angel with an agenda, prompting from off-stage.

Do it now.

Tash’s hand reached for the call button on her mobile even as her eyes stayed glued on the greying man across the alfresco area. He reached into his suit pocket casually, tugging his tie a little looser, winding down a notch further. She was about to dash all of that against the rocks of the harbour side they sat on. Tash very nearly pressed the ‘end’ button but he flipped his phone open as she watched.

‘Nathaniel Moore.’ Deep and soft.

Tash’s heart squeezed so hard she couldn’t speak and a frown formed between elegant eyebrows.

He lowered the phone to check the caller ID. ‘Hello?’

Speak! Her mouth opened but the tiny sound she uttered was lost in the café noises. He shook his head and started to close his phone. That was the shove she needed.

‘Mr Moore!’

He paused and lifted his eyebrows, speaking again into the phone. ‘Yes?’

She took a deep breath. ‘Mr Moore, I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch—’ Damn! She wasn’t supposed to know where he was. But he seemed to miss the significance. She narrowed her eyes and looked closer. In fact, he seemed to have paled just slightly. His hand tightened noticeably around the phone.

‘Mr Moore, my name is Natasha Sinclair. I believe you knew my mother.’

Nothing.

Tash watched expressions come and go in his face like the changing facets of good glass. Horror. Disbelief. Grief. Hope.

Mostly grief.

His free hand trembled as he fidgeted with a napkin. He didn’t speak for an age. Tash watched his panicked glance in the direction of his lunch partner and she twisted slightly away as his gaze dragged back past her table.

Eventually he spoke, half whispering, ‘You sound just like her.’

It sickened her to be doing this to a man her mother had loved. ‘I know. I’m sorry. Are you all right?’

He reached for the water pitcher and poured a glass. She heard him take a sip even as she watched him raise a wobbly glass to his lips. ‘I’m...yes. I’m fine. Just shocked. Surprised,’ he added, as though realising he’d been rude.

Tash laughed. ‘Shocked, I think.’ She took a breath. ‘I wanted to call you, to touch base. To make sure you knew...’ Yes, he already did know; his expression spoke volumes.

Silence fell as Nathaniel Moore collected his emotions. He glanced towards the restrooms again. ‘I did hear. I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the funeral. It was...not possible.’

Tash knew all about the fall-out between their two families; she’d seen the after-effects repeatedly in her mother’s diaries. ‘You didn’t get to say goodbye.’

He looked desperately around the café and then turned his face away, out to the harbour. His voice grew thick. ‘Natasha. I’m so sorry for your loss. She was...an amazing woman.’

Tash took a deep breath and smelled a heavenly mix of spices and earth. She knew, without looking, who was passing her table again. Broad, moss-green shoulders walked away from her towards Nathaniel Moore. He spared a momentary, peripheral glance for her. It was the least casual look she’d ever intercepted.

Her heart hammered and not just because her time was running out.

‘Mr Moore,’ she urged into the phone, ‘I wanted you to know that regardless of how your family and mine feel about each other, my door is always open to you. If you want to talk or ask any questions...’

The younger man reached his seat, recognising immediately from the expression on the older man’s face that something was up. Nathaniel Moore stood abruptly.

‘Uh...one moment, please...will you excuse me?’

Was that for her or for his colleague?

Nathaniel moved unsteadily from the table, indicating the phone call with the wave of a hand. Concerned blue eyes followed him and then looked around the café suspiciously. Tash threw her head back and mimed a laugh into her mobile phone as the stare sliced past her. Not that he’d have a clue who was on the other end of Nathaniel’s call but she absolutely didn’t want to make difficulties for the man her mother had died loving.

Not for the first time since finding the diaries, Tash imagined how it would feel to be loved—to love—to the depths described in such heart-breaking detail on the handwritten pages. Her eyes drifted back to the younger man now sitting alone at the waterside table.

‘Are you there?’

‘I’m sorry, yes.’ She found Nathaniel where he stood, back to her, half concealed in giant potted palms. She groaned. ‘Mr Moore, I just wanted you to know that...my mother never stopped loving you.’ The Armani shoulders slumped. ‘I’m sorry to speak so plainly but I feel like we don’t have time. Her diaries are full of you. Her memories of you. Particularly at...the end.’

Her heart thumped out the silence. His posture slumped further.

‘You’ve lost so much.’ His voice was choked. ‘Endured so much.’

She glanced back to the table. Hard blue eyes watched Nathaniel from across the café, narrowing further.

Tash shook her head. ‘No, Mr Moore, I had so much.’ More than you ever did. More than just one extraordinary night together. She sucked in a breath. ‘As hard as it has been to lose her, at least I had her for my whole life. Thirty years. She was a gift.’

The greying head across the alfresco area bowed and he whispered down the phone. ‘She was that.’

Silence fell and Tash knew he was struggling to hold it together. ‘You should go. I’ve called at a bad time.’

‘No!’ He cleared his throat and then glanced back towards his table, sighing. Blue-eyes stared back at him with open speculation. The hairs on Tash’s neck prickled. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. This isn’t a good time. I’m here with my son—’

Tash’s focus snapped back to the younger man. This was Aiden Moore? Entrepreneurial young gun, scourge of the social scene? Suddenly her physical response to his presence seemed tawdry, extremely un-special, given that half the town’s socialites had apparently shared it.

‘I have your number in my phone now.’ Nathaniel drew back to him the threads of the trademark composure she’d read about in business magazines. ‘May I call you back later, when I’m free to speak?’

She barely heard the last moments of the call, although she knew she was agreeing. Her eyes stayed locked on the younger Moore, realisation thumping her hard and low. He couldn’t be compelling. He couldn’t smell as tantalising as an Arabian souk. She couldn’t drown in those blue, blue eyes.

Not if he was Nathaniel Moore’s son.

The Moores hated the Porters; and the Sinclairs, by association. Everyone knew it, apparently. Why should the heir be any different?

It took Tash a moment to realise two things. First, she’d let down her guard and let her eyes linger on him for too long.

Second, his ice-blue gaze was now locked on her, open and speculative.

She gathered up her handcrafted purse, slid some money onto the table and fled on wobbly legs, keeping her phone glued to her ear as though she were still on it even after Nathaniel had returned to the table.

She felt the bite of Aiden Moore’s stare until she stumbled out into the Fremantle sunshine.

TWO

The woman in front of him was barely recognisable from the one he’d seen in the café, but Aiden Moore had learned a long time ago not to judge a book by its cover. She may have looked fragile enough to shatter last time, but watching her wield the lance with the molten ball of glass glowing on its tip, watching the control with which she twisted it and lifted it closer into the burning furnace, and he was suddenly having doubts about the likelihood of her caving to a bit of his trademark ruthlessness. That strong spine flashing in and out of the light coming off the blazing magma ball didn’t look as though it lacked fortitude.

His plan changed on the spot.

This woman wouldn’t respond to one of his calculated corporate stares. She wouldn’t sell out or be chased off. Waiting her out might not work either. The focused way she persuaded the smelted glass into the shape she wanted with turn-after-agonising-turn of the rod spoke of a patience he knew he didn’t have. And a determination he hadn’t expected her to.

She lifted the glowing mass—whatever the hell it was going to be when finished—and balanced the long tool on an old fashioned vice, then reached forward with something resembling tin-snips and started picking away at the edges of the eye-burning mass of barely solid glass.

She was tiny. She’d peeled down her working overalls in the heat and tied the arms around her waist, leaving just a Lara Croft vest top to protect her against anything that might splash or flare up at her from her dangerous craft. Incredibly confident or incredibly stupid. Given how hard she’d worked to catch his father’s attention, he had to assume the former. He’d bet his latest bonus that her eyes would hold an intelligence as keen as the rapidly cooling shards she sliced away from her design—if they weren’t disguised behind industrial-strength welding goggles. In the café, it had been oversized sunglasses. She’d used them well to disguise her surveillance, but he’d finally twigged to how much attention the stranger across the restaurant was paying to his father. And how hard she was working to hide it. The moment she realised her game was up she took off, but not before he got a good look at the line of her face, the shape of her lips, the elfin shag of her short hair. Enough to memorise. Enough to recognise a week later when she turned up in the park across from MooreCo’s headquarters.

And met his father there.

She plunged the entire burning arrangement into a nearby bucket of water and promptly disappeared in a belching surge of steam. It finally dissipated and Aiden realised that her body was still oriented towards her open kiln, but her face had turned to where he stood in the doorway, those infuriating goggles giving her the advantage. Tiny droplets of steam clung to every one of the light hairs on her body, making her look as if she were made from the same stuff she was forging.

But this woman was a mile from fragile glass.

‘Mr Moore. What can I do for you?’

It took him a moment to recover from the brazen way she immediately admitted to knowing who he was. She didn’t even bother faking innocence. More than that, the soft, strained lilt of her voice; nervous but hiding it well. He found it hard not to give her points for both.

How to play this? ‘You can end your affair with my father,’ was hardly going to effect change. Except maybe to set those tanned shoulders back even further.

He cleared his throat. ‘I was hoping to purchase a few pieces for our lobby. Something unique. Something natural. Got anything like that?’

She could hardly say no, he knew; everything she had was like that. He’d taken the trouble to search the web before coming here. Tash Sinclair had quite the reputation in art circles.

She pushed the enormous tinted goggles up into pale, sweat-damp hair. ‘That’s not why you’re here.’

Aiden sucked in a slow, silent breath. The goggles left red pressure marks around the sockets of her eyes but all he could look at were the enormous chocolate-brown gems shining back at him, as glorious as any of her glass pieces. And full of suspicion.

Immediately, a ridiculous thought slipped into his mind. That they had each other’s eyes. He had his mother’s dark, European colouring and her blue, blue eyes. Whereas Tash Sinclair was practically Nordic but with brown eyes that belonged in his face. The combination was captivating.

‘It may not be why I came, specifically, but I do mean it. Your work is amazing.’ He wandered permission-less into her studio and examined the pieces lining the shelves. An array of tall, intricate vases; turtles and manatees and leafy sea-dragons, extraordinary jellyfish detailed in fine glass. This wasn’t where she displayed her works but it was where they were born. The genesis of her expensive pieces.

Only her eyes followed as he moved around her space. In his periphery, he saw her lift trembling fingers to her messy hair, then curl them quickly and shove them out of sight behind her back. His eyes narrowed. Despite working on his father, she could still find time to be concerned about whether she looked okay for him.

Charming.

But it gave him an idea. If Little Miss Artisan here was hell-bent on hooking up with his father, perhaps the most effective weapon in his arsenal wasn’t from his corporate collection of steely glares. Or his chequebook. Perhaps it was something more personal.

Him.

If she was after the Moore name or Moore money, he had both. Maybe she’d allow herself to be diverted from his father—his married-thirty-years father—in favour of the younger, single model. Long enough for him to do some good.

If she cared what he thought when he looked at her, then he had something to work with.

Mind you, if she knew what he really thought when he looked at her she’d probably run a mile. She might work with fire every day but she didn’t look as if she regularly played with it. Not the way he had. He liked it rough and he liked it short and blazing with volatile, brilliant, ambitious women. About as far from a tiny, tomboyish artsy type with big, make-up-less eyes as you could possibly get.

Which would make it all the easier to remember not to blur the lines. He was the toreador and she was the bull. His goal was to keep her eyes on him long enough that she’d forget her obsession with his father. To keep dancing around her in big flamboyant circles drawing her farther and farther from the family he was so desperately trying to protect.

His mother had sacrificed her life raising him. The least he could do was repay the favour and help keep her husband faithful.

If it wasn’t too late.

‘Make yourself at home,’ she mocked, one eyebrow raised, stripping off protective wrist covers and tossing them on her workbench.

He swallowed a smile and glanced at the still-steaming bucket. ‘What are you working on?’

‘It was a practice piece for an ornamental vase. I wasn’t happy with it.’ She pulled the rod and the inadequate creation on the end out of the nearly evaporated water. The glass had completely shattered. She nodded to a series of coloured glass sticks laid side by side on the workbench. ‘Those will be lorikeets mounted around its mouth.’

‘I’ll take it.’

‘It’s not for sale until I’m happy with it.’ She laughed as she tossed the waste glass into a recycling bin off to one side. The two sounds melded perfectly. ‘Besides, you don’t strike me as someone who would appreciate a pink lorikeet vase.’

‘I appreciate quality. In all its forms.’ He lifted his eyes intentionally and locked onto hers. Classic Moore move.

Doubt-lines appeared between her brows, drawing them down into a fine V. But where he’d expected a blush, she only looked irritated. ‘If you still like it when it’s done, I’ll make you a pair for your reception desk. At a price.’

‘I’m not expecting mates’ rates.’

‘That’s good, because we’re not mates. I don’t even know you.’ Her dark eyes shone. ‘But you know me, it seems. What really brought you here?’

Aiden used silence to best advantage in boardrooms. The speed with which an opponent rushed in to fill a thick silence said a lot about them. But the one he unleashed now ticked on for tens of seconds and the diminutive woman before him simply blinked slowly and waited him out, serenity a shimmering halo around her.

Well, damn...

He broke his own rule. ‘You were watching us at the café.’

Those eyes widened just a hint. She took a careful breath, shrugged. ‘Two good-looking men...I’m sure I wasn’t the only one looking.’

The blank way she said it made it feel like the opposite of a compliment. ‘You met my father last week.’

She took a careful breath. ‘Across the street from your offices. Hardly clandestine. Does your father know he’s being monitored?’

‘I was passing by.’ Liar!

‘Does he know I’m being monitored, then?’

Aiden blinked. The woman was wasted in an art studio. Why wasn’t she working her way rapidly up one of MooreCo’s subsidiaries? For the first time he got a nervous inkling that his father’s interest in the pretty blonde might not just be connected to those full lips and innocent eyes. Natasha Sinclair had a brain and wasn’t afraid to use it.

‘Have dinner with me.’

Her instant laugh was insulting. ‘No.’

‘Then teach me to blow glass.’

The shocked look on her face told him he’d just asked her for something intensely personal. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Make some custom pieces for MooreCo.’ That was work; she was a professional artist. She couldn’t refuse.

He hoped.

Those dark eyes calculated. ‘Would I be required to go to your offices?’

It was a risk, putting her so close to his father, but he’d be there to run interference. Moreover, it would allow him to keep her close; where all enemies belonged. Win her over. And gather more information on what this thing between her and his father was all about. ‘For consultation, design and installation.’

She wavered. His own brilliance amazed him, sometimes.

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Will you be there?’

Oh, that was just plain unkind. ‘Naturally. I’m the commissioning partner.’

If a humph could be feminine, hers was. ‘When do you want me there?’

He mentally scanned through the appointments he knew his father had, and picked the most non-negotiable one. One taking his father halfway across the city. He named the date and time.

Nothing wrong with stacking the deck in his favour. It was what he did for a living. Find opportunities—make them—and turn them into advantage.

She reached up for her goggles. ‘Okay. I’ll see you then.’ Without waiting for his answer, she re-screened her soul from his view, pressed her steel-caps onto a pedal on the floor and turned towards a brace-mounted blowtorch that burst into blue-flamed life.

Aiden let his surprise show since she was no longer looking. He’d never been so effectively dismissed from his own conversation. Firm yet not definably rude. Had he even had control of their discussion for a moment or was that just a desperate illusion?

Still, at least he’d walked away with what he’d set out for, albeit via a circuitous route. Whatever Natasha Sinclair and his father had going on was thoroughly outed. And he was now firmly wedged in between any opportunity for her to engage with his father.

Couldn’t have worked out better, really.

* * *

If not for his already monumental ego, Tash would have kissed Aiden Moore.

He’d handed her the perfect excuse, the other day, to get closer to her mother’s lost love with his transparent commission. She’d been hit on enough times to know the signs. And the likely outcome. Every guy she’d ever dated had started out by buying something of hers. Or expressing interest in it. She’d lost interest in those kinds of sales—those kinds of men—no matter how lucrative.

She knew from firsthand experience that men with Aiden Moore’s charisma and social standing didn’t plan lifetimes with women like her. Women like her made terrific mistresses or fascinating show-and-tell at boring dinners or boosted your standing in local government in an arts district.

She’d met—and dated—them all.

Not that she cared. Aiden was a Moore and she was a Porter-by-proxy and if he hadn’t already joined the dots he soon would and that would be that. Their families’ feud would only add to the antagonism he so clearly felt towards her.

Because that had to be what was zinging around the room when he was in it.

Nathaniel had told her to put their family differences out of her mind. But it was easy to be dismissive of a family feud when you were the cause of it. She had simply inherited it. So had Aiden.

She jogged up the railway-station steps into daylight and wandered towards the Terrace, her trusty sketchpad under her arm. The excitement of a new commission bubbled away just beneath the surface, hand in hand with some anxiety about seeing Nathaniel again. So publicly. He’d changed an important meeting when he’d heard she was coming in, embracing the opportunity to get to meet her in a work capacity. To legitimise all the sneaking around they’d been doing.

She was sure they both considered it worth it. They spent hours chatting about her mother, about their families, their lives. Nathaniel Moore wasn’t a man to regret his choices but he was human enough to need to set some ghosts to rest. And she was motherless enough to want to hang onto Adele Porter-Sinclair no matter how vicariously.

‘Natasha. Welcome.’

The silken tones drifted towards her from the kerbside taxi in front of the MooreCo building just as she approached it. Aiden leaned in to pay the driver, then turned and escorted her into his building with a gentle hand at her back. She ignored it steadfastly.

The first time she’d been here, she’d been too nervous to appreciate her surroundings. Now the enormity of this opportunity struck her. MooreCo’s lobby was high, modern and downright celestial with the amount of West Australian light streaming in the glass frontages. Tiny dust particles danced like sea-monkeys in the light-beams. The best possible setting for glasswork.

‘You’ll just need to sign in.’ Aiden directed her to the security desk.

Once she was done, the security guard slipped her an ID tag and smiled. ‘Thank you, Ms Sinclair. I’ll let Mr Moore know you’re on your way up.’

The deep voice beside her chuckled. ‘He knows.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Moore, I meant the senior Mr Moore. He’s waiting for Ms Sinclair’s arrival.’

The masculine body to her left stiffened noticeably. Couldn’t be helped. Nathaniel was an adult and could socialise with whomever he chose. Whether his son liked it or not.

Aiden’s jaw clamped tight. ‘Up we go, then.’

The elevator ride was blessedly short and horribly tense. Aiden’s dark brows remained low even as he stole sideways glimpses of her in the mirrored wall panels. Tash did her best to remain bright and carefree even though she was sure it was infuriating him further. The elevator climbed and climbed in silence and, just as Aiden opened his mouth to speak, it lurched to a stop and a happy ding ricocheted around the small space.

Saved by the bell. Literally.

The elegant doors parted and Tash all but fell out, eager to be moving again. A familiar face waited at the landing. She stepped forward and extended her cheek for Nathaniel’s waiting lips.

‘Natasha. Such a delight to have you here. An unexpected delight.’ He directed a look to his stony-faced son. ‘I was not aware that the two of you knew each other.’

‘I might say the same, Father.’

He ignored that. ‘I believe you are to create some wonders for our entry lobby, Natasha? I look forward to seeing the designs.’

‘I look forward to working with you—’ common courtesy demanded she say it ‘—both. Shall we get started?’

They turned down a long hall. ‘Your meeting with Larhills?’ Aiden murmured towards his father.

‘Conveniently delayed.’

‘Ah.’

Tash saw the older man slip his hand onto his son’s shoulder. ‘A change of fortune. I wouldn’t have appreciated missing Natasha’s visit.’

Aiden held the boardroom door respectfully. ‘How do you know each other?’

‘I knew her mother.’

I loved her mother. Tash heard the meaning behind the words ringing as clear as the elevator bell. Even Aiden narrowed his gaze as he followed them into the generously appointed boardroom overlooking the wide blue river to the leafy riverside suburb beyond it.

‘But I didn’t know of her stunning artistic talents until very recently,’ Nathaniel went on. ‘Let’s see what she can do for our shabby foyer, eh?’

She could practically smell Aiden’s frustration and confusion, and a small part of her pitied him. If not for the predatory way he’d tracked her down and tried to ask her out. If not for the likelihood that he’d toss her out on the street when he found out she was a Porter in disguise. Commission or no commission.

But the anxious furrow that he hid from his father wheedled its way into her subconscious and brought an echoing one to her brow, and she felt, for the first time, guilt for barging into their perfectly harmonious lives with her bag of secrets.

She placed her hands serenely on the polished jarrah table. Timber was too clunky and dense to have ever interested her much but she recognised the craftsman and knew his price tag. Just a pity she wasn’t planning to charge Nathaniel for this commission. No, this would be a gift from her mother to the man she’d loved.

‘Your foyer light is perfect for glasswork,’ she opened, speaking to Nathaniel. ‘Well oriented for winter light and high enough for something cascading. Something substantial.’

Aiden’s left brow peaked. ‘We’ve gone from a pair of vases to “something substantial” very quickly.’

She turned her eyes to him. ‘The space determines the piece.’

‘I would have thought I’d determine the piece,’ he pointed out, ‘being the commissioner.’

She flicked her chin up. ‘Commissioners always think that.’

Nathaniel laughed. ‘It may be your commission, Aiden, and your creative offspring, Natasha, but it’s my building. So it seems we’re equal stakeholders.’

She turned her head back to him, quite liking the idea of being partners in something with Nathaniel Moore. Even if it also meant tolerating his son. ‘You own the whole building?’

She hadn’t realised quite how wealthy the Moores were. Entire buildings in the heart of the central business district didn’t come cheap.

‘Did your price just go up?’ Aiden asked.

‘Aiden—’ Disapproving brown eyes snapped his way.

‘I’m interested because that means you don’t need to get the buy-in of the other tenants. That will save a lot of time and hassle.’

Nathaniel nodded. Satisfied and even pleased with her answer. ‘So, shall we talk design?’

* * *

In Tash’s experience, the number of times a man glanced at his watch during a business meeting was directly proportional to how important he believed he was. A man like Aiden should have been flicking his eyes down to his wrist on the minute.

But he never did. Or if he did, she never caught him at it. He gave her one hundred and ten per cent of his attention.

Nathaniel was similarly absorbed and entirely uncaring about the passing of time, it seemed. But at the back of her mind, she knew what ninety minutes of a company’s two top personnel must be worth.

‘I think I have enough to get started with,’ she said. ‘I can email you some early designs next week.’

‘Bring them in,’ Nathaniel volunteered and Aiden’s eyes narrowed. ‘We can have lunch next time. It’s a bit late to have it now.’

Not if you asked her gurgling stomach. She’d been too nervous to eat beforehand. Still, there were more than a dozen cafés between here and the railway station. Hopefully, their kitchens would still be open. ‘Okay. That sounds lovely.’

Aiden frowned again. If he kept that up, he was going to mar that spectacular forehead perpetually.

Their goodbyes were brief; she could hardly give Nathaniel the open-armed hug she wanted to in an office full of eyes—even if his all-seeing son weren’t standing right there—and so she left him standing as she’d found him, on the landing to MooreCo’s floor. Aiden summoned the elevator for her and then held the door as it opened. As if to make sure she actually got in it. When she did, he stepped in as well.

‘You must have somewhere better to be,’ she hinted. Somewhere other than stalking her.

‘I’ll call you a cab,’ he murmured.

‘I’m taking the train.’

He stayed on her heels as she stepped out into the foyer. ‘I’ll walk you to the station.’

‘I’m stopping for something to eat.’

‘Great. I’m starving.’

She slid her glance sideways at him. Subtle. Most men at least feigned some reason to hang around her long enough to hit her up. Aiden Moore didn’t even bother with excuses. She slammed the brakes on his galloping moves.

‘I’m not going to go out with you, Aiden.’

He turned. ‘I don’t recall offering.’

‘No. You just assumed. Our relationship is professional.’

Speaking of excuses...

His pale eyes narrowed. ‘It’s just lunch, Natasha. I’m hardly going to proposition you over a toasted sandwich.’

She straightened her shoulders. ‘In my experience that’s exactly how it goes.’

The assumption. The entitlement.

His head tipped. Something flickered across his expression. ‘Then you’ve had the wrong experiences.’

She laughed. ‘Hard to disagree.’

She spent the last four years of high school disappointing the raging hormones of boys who thought her hippy clothing reflected her values. Being disappointed by them in turn. Waiting for the one that was different. The one who liked her for who she was, not for what they thought she might do for them. To them.

And then, after graduation, the men who wanted an unconventional arty sort on their trophy wall. And then Kyle...

‘Lunch. That’s it.’ He peered down on her, a twist to his lips. ‘Until you tell me otherwise.’

Ugh. Such a delicate line between confidence and conceit. One she couldn’t help being drawn to, the other sent her running. She’d had her fill of supercilious men. She fired him her most withering stare and turned for the exit. In the polished glass of the building’s front, she saw the reflection of his smile. Easy. Genuine.

And her gut twisted just a hint.

Nice smile for a schmuck.

They stopped outside a café called Reveille two blocks down, probably better for breakfast but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Aiden chose a table at the back.

‘So how do my father and your mother know each other?’

The question took her aback. She’d not expected him to ask outright.

‘Did.’ She cleared her throat. ‘She died last year.’

He frowned. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’

‘No reason you should.’

‘How did they originally know each other?’

‘They went to the same university.’

True. And yet not complete. The whole truth wasn’t something she could share if he hadn’t already done the maths. It wasn’t her place.

‘That means your mother and mine may have known each other, too. That’s where my parents met. Although she dropped out before graduating so perhaps not.’

Tash held her breath and grabbed the subject change. ‘She didn’t finish?’

He smiled at the waiter who brought their coffees. ‘My fault, I’m afraid. Universities weren’t quite so family friendly back then. My grandparents pulled her out of school when she got pregnant.’

‘She never went back? Finished?’

‘I think child-rearing and being the wife of an up-and-coming executive rather took over her life.’ His eyes dimmed. ‘She sacrificed a lot for me.’

‘You’re her son.’

‘I’m still grateful.’

She didn’t want to give him points for being a decent human being. Or respond to his openness. She wanted to keep on loathing him as a handsome narcissist. ‘Do you tell her that?’

He glanced up at her and she found herself drawn to the innate curiosity in his bottomless eyes. Opening up in a way she normally wouldn’t have risked. ‘The first thing I regretted when I lost Mum was not telling her all the obvious things. Not thanking her.’

For life. For opportunity. For all the love. Every day.

His eyes softened. ‘She knows.’

Was he talking about his mother or hers? Either way, it was hard not to believe all that solid confidence. He didn’t understand. How could he? Plus, Aiden Moore’s business was none of hers, and vice versa.

She handed him a menu. ‘So were you serious about a toasted—?’

‘Are you a natural blonde?’ he asked at the same time. The menu froze in her fingers. But he hurried on, as if realising how badly she was about to take that question. ‘It’s your eyes...I thought blonde hair and brown eyes was genetically impossible. Like all ginger cats being male.’

Her frost eased just a little and she finished delivering the menu to his side of the table.

His eyes grazed over the part of her visible above the table before settling back on hers. ‘Unless they’re contacts?’

‘I’ve had both since birth. And I’ve met a female ginger cat, too. It happens.’

Kyle’s old ginge was a female. One of the things that let her get so close to him was how loving he was of that cat. Turned out how people treated animals wasn’t automatically a sign of how they’d treat people. Just another relationship myth.

Like the one about love being unconditional.

Or equal.

She opened the menu and studied the columns.

* * *

Aiden took his cue from Natasha, but he knew what was on the menu and he didn’t really care what he had. The meeting before theirs had been a luncheon so he wasn’t hungry. At least not for food.

Information he was greedy for.

Her mother was dead. That explained why the woman wasn’t hovering on the scene discouraging her daughter from dating a man twice her age. Maybe it explained the vulnerability in her gaze, too. But one personal fact wasn’t nearly enough.

He’d work his way slowly to what he really wanted to know.

‘Have you been a glass-blower all your life?’

She didn’t look old enough to have had time to become a master at her craft. With her sunglasses holding her shaggy hair back from her lightly made-up face, she looked early twenties. Fresh. Almost innocent.

But looks could be deceiving. She was old enough to have a reputation for excellence in art circles and old enough to have worked out that there were faster ways to make money than selling vases when you looked as good as she did.

‘Twelve years. We went to a glassworks when I was in school and I grew fascinated. I started as a hobby then took it up professionally when I left school.’

‘No tertiary study?’

Her chin came up. ‘Nothing formal. I was too busy getting my studio up and running.’

‘It’s a good space,’ he hinted. ‘Arts grants must be pretty decent these days.’

Her lips thinned. ‘I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had one for years.’

He studied her closely. ‘You’re fully self-sustainable just on your sales?’

‘I traded pieces for studio space until I was established enough to sell commercially.’

‘So somewhere there’s a crazy Tash Sinclair collector with a house full of glass seahorses?’

She shrugged. ‘He had empty commercial space and I had investment potential. Our boats rose together.’

‘Ah, a patron.’ Of course.

Her eyes darkened for a heartbeat, then flicked away. ‘At the time. Now he’s the mayor.’

Kyle Jardine. He knew the man. Big fish, small pond. Always a little bit too pleased with himself given what little he’d actually achieved in life—mid-level public office. Exactly the sort of man to be suckered by a hot, intriguing gold-digger.

‘A notable patron.’

Her lips twisted. ‘Notable enough to drop his support the moment he had candidacy.’

Ironic that an opportunist should find herself so treated. And now she was working up his father to fill the vacancy for sucker?

She flicked back her hair. ‘Except him cutting me free made me discover that I could stand on my own. So, yes, I’ve been self-sufficient for two years now. I own my studio thanks to him, I own my house, thanks to Mum, and I make my rates and put something better than fast-boil noodles on the table at night thanks to my seven-day-a-week glass habit.’

‘And thanks to your reputation. Your pieces don’t come cheap.’

She shifted in her seat but held his eyes. ‘As you’re about to find out.’

He chuckled and then asked something off-script. Something just because he was curious. ‘It doesn’t bother you that Jardine got rich on your talent? Then cut you loose?’

She looked as if she wanted to say a whole lot more on the subject but thought better of it. ‘He can only sell them once. I can make a new one every week. Besides—’ she smiled at the woman who came to take her order ‘—when you’re an artist, every single piece you sell is going to make someone else more money than it made you. Nature of the beast. It doesn’t pay to get attached.’

Did that go for people as well? Was that a survival tactic in her world?

She turned to order. All-day breakfast. Totally unapologetic that it was nearly four o’clock. He ordered something small and a second coffee. This was going to be an interesting meal.

‘So why the fascination with nature?’ All those sea creatures and birds and stormy colours.

She considered him and then shrugged. ‘I make what the glass tells me to. Usually it’s something natural.’

‘“The glass made me do it.” Really? That’s not a bit...hippy?’

She smiled. ‘I am a hippy. Unashamedly so.’

If she was, she’d reined it in today. Dark crop top with an ornate bodice over the top, and a full skirt. Feminine and flowing. He couldn’t see her feet but he itched to know whether she’d have sandals or painted nails or—something deep inside him twisted sharply—a toe ring. Maybe tiny little bells on her ankle. Some ink?

Get a grip, Moore. Fantasising about a woman’s foot decoration. Pervert.

‘What?’ she asked, a breadstick halfway to her mouth.

He composed his expression. What had he betrayed? He scrabbled his way to something credible. ‘I have a memory,’ he said. ‘Of my parents. When I was young. My mother was dressed a bit like you. I think they might have been a bit...organic...in their day.’

She smiled. ‘What was that, mid-eighties? The New Age movement would have been burgeoning about then. It’s very possible. Or did you think your father was born in a business suit?’

The memory that his subconscious spat up when he needed the lie became manifest. He did remember his mother dressed loose, earthy and free. Down by a river somewhere. Laughing with his father, her arms wrapped around Aiden as a toddler. The memory even had that Technicolor tinge, the way old photos from the eighties did.

But, it was his mother’s happiness that struck him as incongruous. It had been a long time since he’d had any memories at all where she’d looked at his father like that. Adoring. Engaged.

Maybe it was more figment of imagination than of memory.

Because he kind of had thought his father was born in a suit. And some days it felt as if he had been, too. Mergers and acquisitions did that to you after a decade or two. He couldn’t imagine father or son on their back in the grass by a river. Picking shapes out of the clouds. Breathing in synch with the tumbling water.

The water feature out front of MooreCo was about as close as they got. And the last time he was on his back in the grass...?

Not a thought for a public place.

‘So you don’t know a lot about your parents’ past, then?’ she asked, her face carefully neutral. As if he wouldn’t notice her poor attempts to elicit information about his father. Maybe information she could use in her seduction.

He fixed his jaw. ‘Before I came on the scene? No, not really. I know they met at uni. He was doing a double-major in commerce and law and she studied arts until she withdrew at the end of second-year.’ All pretty much public record. ‘That’s about it.’

‘Aren’t you curious?’

‘Not especially. It’s ancient history.’ If they’d had any friends at university, they didn’t stay in touch into adulthood. If they had, he’d have known. They’d be amongst the endless honorary aunts and uncles that visited the Moore home when he was younger.

Which made it strange that Tash’s mother didn’t rank amongst them, now that he thought about it.

Almost as strange as realising he now thought of her as Tash.

She lifted one brow. ‘Or is it more that it doesn’t involve you so it doesn’t rate?’

Ouch. Had he been that much of a jerk since meeting her?

Yeah, probably.

‘My family are close but they’ve always tried to keep the kids out of the old business.’ In fact, in his family the kids got knuckle-rapped for sticking their noses into anything adult.

Which was how he knew exactly how pissed his father was going to be when he realised his son was running interference with a gold-digger. But he didn’t care. He was hardly going to stand around and let Natasha Sinclair lure his father’s attention away from his wife of thirty years like some toe-ring-wearing siren.

His father was a handsome, rich man. Ambitious women came and went regularly. But generally they didn’t make a ripple. In all the years they’d worked together, he’d never seen his father so fixated on a woman. Especially such a young woman. Though he knew there’d been at least one time.... It was infamous in his family and no one talked about it above a whisper.

So, like it or not, he was going to keep himself right up in their faces and on alert. If she wanted to mess with a wealthy Moore, she could have a crack at the heir. He was more than capable of taking her on, and—as his body tingled at the thought—more than willing.

Maybe some of her free spirit would rub off on him like a breath of fresh air.

* * *

He didn’t know.

Or, if he did, he had an outstanding poker face.

Nothing about that had changed in the week since she’d first sat in this boardroom.

Tash glanced out at the suburbs across the river stretching off beyond the horizon. The MooreCo building executive floor had to have one of the best views in town.

Aiden Moore seemed entirely oblivious to their parents’ shared past. Exactly as oblivious as she was before she’d opened that first diary. For a whispered-about family secret, this one was surprisingly well maintained. She was hardly in a position to enlighten him.

She glanced at both men. By the way, did you know that my mother and your father were lovers?

She didn’t owe Aiden any loyalty just because they were offspring-in-the-dark in common. Her loyalty lay with Nathaniel—her mother’s love—and outing them both to Aiden would damage more than just his relationship with his own father. They were close, she could see. Not close enough to share secrets—and she had no doubts that Aiden had his fair share, too—but they were respectful of each other where it counted and disrespectful enough to speak of a close, affectionate relationship. Much closer than she could ever imagine with her own father. Their humour was pretty much aligned with hers and she had to concentrate on not smiling as they gently ribbed each other.

She wasn’t part of this family, even if she felt like it.

She was an outsider.

All this affection and father-son camaraderie wasn’t for her to enjoy. No matter how she craved it. And no matter how connected she felt to them. How much she felt as if—inexplicably—she belonged here with them.

‘All right,’ she said, sitting forward. ‘So everyone’s happy with the design?’

Six little scale models in glass and a large pencil sketch decorated the table between them. Fish of various sizes, seahorses, a diving kestrel, strips of kelp, a sparkling school of krill. ‘And this will be the shards of sunlight cutting down through the ocean.’

Nathaniel smiled, but he wasn’t looking where her fingers pointed. ‘We’ve never had anything like it in any of our buildings. It will be astonishing.’

‘How much is it going to cost?’ Aiden asked, lips pressed.

So the arctic thaw over lunch the week before was only a lull, it seemed. Just as she might have relaxed.

‘Aiden,’ his father barked. ‘Unimportant.’

Tash moved to ease the sudden tension between the two men. ‘This is a showpiece for me. I’ll be doing it for material costs only.’

Aiden frowned.

Nathaniel sat up. ‘No, Tash. You mustn’t...’

She locked eyes on his. ‘I’m not going to charge you, Nathaniel. Not for my time. But there’ll be a lot of glass in this piece so if you’d cover that I’d be grateful.’

Insisting would just be awkward and she’d handed him a chivalrous out. But, of course, this was Nathaniel. ‘Naturally we’ll pay for materials but...’ He pursed his lips and thought for a moment. ‘What we really need is a public announcement. That way you get the PR benefit in lieu of payment for your time.’

‘I don’t require payment for my time.’

Aiden’s eyes darted between the two of them.

‘Well, I wish to show off this marvellous design and if I choose to do that in front of my corporate equivalents and that just happens to lead to more work for you, so much the better.’

‘Nathaniel—’

‘It’s decided. I won’t protest at you not charging MooreCo for what I’m sure will be a considerable amount of your time and artistic focus, and in return I expect you to be gracious and professional about my desire to throw a party to celebrate the acquisition of our biggest ever art piece.’

Snookered.

She glared at him. Then very ungraciously snorted. ‘Fine.’

His smile was immediate. ‘Good girl.’

Aiden’s left eye narrowed.

She met his gaze and held it.

‘That’s worked out well, hasn’t it?’ he asked flatly.

But she got the sense that he really wanted to add ‘...for you’ to that.

THREE

Tash stepped out of the expensive vehicle onto the highest heels she owned. Their engineering had always seemed pointless, but she’d take the extra inches against Aiden any day.

‘I’m still struggling to understand why I needed to be invited to a party in my own honour?’ she said.

‘Think of it as more of a VIP escort than an invitation,’ he murmured.

Uh-huh. She would have believed that from his father, but not from Aiden. Although it was entertaining to imagine him as an escort. Upper-case E. He was slick, handsome and full of fakery enough for it...and he had the right body.

‘Something amusing?’

Tash forced her lips into a more serious line. ‘No. Just appreciating the architecture. I’ve never been inside this building.’ The second part was true, at least.

‘You’re in for a treat. It’s beautifully restored.’ His hand dropped to her lower back as he guided her up the stairs and through the ornate doors. Heat from his fingertips tingled through the soft fabric of her dress. ‘I thought you would have seen the glasswork, at least. That’s why we chose this as a venue for the launch party. And this time of day.’

She let her eyes drift up to the stunning stained-glass windows on the western side of the building practically glowing in the rich, low afternoon light. ‘I’ve seen them from the outside, of course.’

‘Natasha. Aiden.’ Nathaniel moved towards them, as dapper and handsome as ever. ‘Did you arrive at the same time?’

Aiden’s chin lifted the tiniest bit but it was enough to put paid to his lie about her needing an escort. But it was too entertaining watching him trip up on his own transparency to make a big deal of it. She leaned in for a kiss on each cheek from Nathaniel then glanced around the beautifully appointed venue. Up on the big screen her glass prototypes had been photographed and lit by a professional and looked about as good as the finished artwork would. The AV team flicked quickly through them in rehearsal for the speeches later.

‘This is all so beautiful. Are all your parties this lavish?’

‘Usually. Aiden sets a high bar.’

She turned her surprise to him. ‘This is your work?’

‘I didn’t personally choose the flowers, if that’s what you’re asking, but I do know the quality planners in town and how to get the best out of them.’

I’ll bet.

‘Will you forgive me?’ Nathaniel said. ‘The inexcusably prompt are starting to arrive.’

He waved his arm in a flourish and the visuals on the big screen ended with a snap as the lights sank in a subtle crossfade with the music that grew out of the silence around them.

And just like that, it was a party.

Aiden’s hand was back at her lower spine again but where before it had only tingled, now it blazed with un-ignorable heat. Either he’d developed a raging temperature in the last thirty seconds or hers had inexplicably plunged. So much so that tiny bumps prickled up all over her back.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he murmured, close to her ear.

How galling. That his charm and charisma should have actually had some effect. She spun away from his gentle touch. ‘You don’t actually need to escort me, Aiden. I’m quite capable of getting safely to the bar.’ Or not, since she didn’t drink much and certainly not at work events. ‘I’m sure you’ll have better things to do this evening than shadow me.’

And as the word slipped unconsciously across her lips she realised that was exactly what he was doing. Babysitting her. Controlling her arrival and departure and her movements while here.

Why?

‘Tonight is very important to my father,’ he simply said. ‘I’m on hand to run interference should anything go...wrong.’

Interference? By sticking close to her? ‘What is it you imagine I’m going to do here? Lie back on the bar and drink shots straight from the bottle?’

His blue eyes crackled. ‘I would pay good money to see that.’

‘I’m sure you would, given some of the other things you’re famous for spending your money on—’ she ignored his flare of surprise ‘—but I’ve been to many of these nights, Aiden. I know the drill. Turn up, look good and be wild enough to be interesting but not inappropriate. Intrigue but don’t offend. Generate speculation but not gossip.’

It was all about appearances. And buzz.

She fronted the bar and ordered a virgin cocktail in a fast and low breath. If he noticed the virgin part, he didn’t comment. The important thing was that it looked like something harder. But she’d be in full control of her faculties all night.

He frowned. ‘Is that what you think you’re here for? Entertainment?’

She turned and drew a long sip of her drink through the pretty glass straw. A clever and thoughtful touch given the focus of this evening. ‘This is a little different, I’ll admit. But the principle doesn’t change just because the date does.’ Not that he was her date... ‘The important thing is that I won’t be doing anything to embarrass Nathaniel in front of his associates.’

‘You think I’m worried about that?’

‘I don’t know what to think, Aiden. All I know is you’ve been playing me since the day we met and running interference—’ it felt so good to throw his own word back at him ‘—between myself and your father. MooreCo has already given me a massive commission. What more do you imagine I’m trying to screw him out of?’

His dark brow lifted. ‘Your word, not mine.’

Realisation rushed in, tumbling and tripping over astonishment. How stupid she’d been not to see it before. The straw dropped from her gaping lips. ‘You think I’m hitting on your father?’

For the first time, he dropped the casual veneer and that carefully neutral expression simmered with something else entirely. Something quite captivating in its passion. ‘He’s obsessed with you. And you shower him with your attention and your come-hither smiles and keep him dangling, helplessly, in your thrall.’

Come-hither? She wasn’t sure what offended her more: the suggestion that she was consciously trying to seduce Nathaniel or the realisation that any interest that Aiden had shown in her until now was purely strategic. ‘He’s a grown man, Aiden. I’m sure he’s managed to fend off women much more beautiful and much more skilled than I am in his fifty-five years on the planet.’

‘Then why the interest?’ he urged. ‘Why him?’

Her chest tightened. ‘He knew my mother.’

Aiden snorted and tugged her around behind a large potted arrangement, out of view of the arriving guests. ‘Then go hang your neediness on one of her other friends. Leave my family out of it.’

Her breath backed up in her gridlocked chest. The term needy cut her much deeper than it should have but something bigger than that stole focus. A clue about what this was all really about—and who this man really was.

‘Family? I thought we were talking about money.’

His nostrils flared wildly. ‘Because it’s always about money with you?’

It was almost never about money with her. Even with Kyle she’d believed he had genuine feelings for her. Money was just what brought them together. That and necessity. ‘I think that’s just what you expect. Because it’s the language you speak.’

He snorted. ‘You’re trying to tell me money doesn’t talk.’

‘It talks; I’m a realist. But it’s not what makes the world turn.’

She might as well have sprouted antennae; he looked at her as if she were from another planet. ‘Please don’t say love,’ he sneered.

‘I was going to say people. People are what matter, but, yes, love is part of that. For each other. For our families.’ She leaned on the word extra-hard.

‘You’d rather be loved than wealthy?’ Disbelief dripped from his handsome lips.

‘You say that as if it’s worse than preferring to be wealthy than loved.’

‘Maybe it is.’

She stared at him. ‘Is your mother like this?’

Instant granite. Eyes, face, body. ‘What does my mother have to do with anything?’ he gritted.

‘You are so unlike your father, attitudinally. I can only assume it’s your mother’s influence that has made you like this.’

‘Like what? Unlike you? If you are so damned hippy about love and people and flowers and sunshine, I’d have expected you to be more accepting of the differences between us.’

That would have niggled less if not for the peace-symbol tattooed on her ankle. ‘I’m not unaccepting of the differences. I’m just trying to understand them.’

‘Why? You don’t like me. You don’t want to be around me. What the hell does it matter?’

Was it possible that he was wounded by her lack of interest in him—way down deep where the bluff and bluster didn’t penetrate? She stared into those hard eyes and found it impossible to believe.

‘I guess it doesn’t matter.’ Though that didn’t stop her from being interested...way down deep where her protective veneer didn’t penetrate. ‘Except that you’ve made stalking me your personal project so I get the feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.’

His laugh was short. ‘If I’m stalking you I’m doing a lousy job.’

‘No. Not stalking. Your brand of creepiness is much more overt.’

The moments the words were out, she regretted them. Not that anything he’d said to her these past minutes was particularly polite but branding a man creepy was quite an indictment. Especially when he was commissioning your next work.

He reeled for just a moment, astonishment vivid on his face. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever been summed up quite like that before.’

But she wasn’t backing down. She straightened and drained her glass. ‘What did the last woman you subjugated like to call it?’

His lips twisted and his eyes darkened and, in that moment, the little corner he’d backed her into shrunk just like Wonderland around Alice. Yet he still found room to take one more half step forward.

‘The last woman I subjugated begged me to do it,’ he breathed. His eyes flicked down and he stretched out a finger and ran the knuckle down the laces of her arty bustier. Instant heat rushed up into her chest and bloomed tellingly in her décolletage.

She twisted away from his cloying presence and crossed back to the bar. ‘Nice try.’ She laughed, one-hundred-per-cent casual and two-hundred-per-cent fake, and signalled the bartender for a repeat of her drink. ‘But I’m not buying it.’

He was right behind her. ‘Buying what?’

‘All of it. The charming, rich bad-boy act, the overbearing son, the interfering business partner.’

‘Are you saying I’m not all those things?’

‘Oh, you’re definitely all of them, but I don’t buy that that’s all you are. There’s something else going on. I’ll just have to work out what it is.’

‘I’m no mystery, Tash. What you see is what you get.’

She turned to face him. ‘You’re in business, Aiden. What you see is never what you get.’ She glanced around. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone over there I’m sure I should meet.’

She spun, skirts flowing, and left him standing speechless in her wake.

* * *

Tash Sinclair worked the room like a professional. Ten days ago, he would have imagined the wrong kind of professional, but now he watched her through a different lens. A Tash-coloured lens. One not quite so tinted by what he thought he knew.

She’d summed him up so accurately earlier this evening, nailed him to the cross of his own bad behaviour and then promptly ignored him for the next two hours. She flitted from guest to guest charming the men, engaging the women and drafting them into the ranks of Team Tash. She was exactly as she promised him to be: intriguing enough to have multiple curious eyes follow her around the room, but appropriate enough to give the tabloids nothing tangible—or even intangible—to work with. She’d brushed past his father several times and the glances they exchanged were carefully neutral, blank enough to give no cause for comment whatsoever.

Unless you were looking for cause.

Or was he still digging for something that just wasn’t there? Reacting to a decades-old incident that he still didn’t fully understand. Something had happened twenty years ago, something that had created tension in his extended family and a wedge between his parents. Something to do with a woman. And he’d grown up with the echoes of that event and the memory of his mother sobbing in the wine cellar where she’d gone not to be heard and cursing a name he’d only ever heard whispered by his aunts and uncles thereafter.

Porter.

That was all he knew. But it was enough to teach him an early lesson about fidelity. And about how many different things a man could be at the same time. Successful businessman. Loving father. Cheating husband. He’d learned to compartmentalise the same way his mother presumably had in order to continue living with—and loving—the man that could do something like that. They’d worked their way through it and onto another twenty years of marriage and Aiden had, too.

But he’d never forgotten it. Or the lessons it taught him about trust.

His eyes tracked Tash the length of the room.

‘She’s something else, isn’t she?’ The voice came out of nowhere, low and edgy to his left. ‘Have you slept with her yet?’

Aiden spun to face the question.

‘Something to look forward to,’ the man went on. ‘She’s a cracker.’

The disrespect and sheer contempt in Kyle Jardine’s eyes stabbed in below Aiden’s ribs. Hard and ugly. His curiosity hardened up into pure anger. ‘Harsh words considering you got rich off her back, Jardine.’

The mayor’s eyes narrowed. ‘Or she got rich on hers. Though, to be fair, she was on top more often than not.’

The urgent need to defend Tash slammed headlong into the unbidden image of her, all golden and glorious reared back above him. Jardine’s words should have been exactly what he wanted to hear. That she was the gold-digger he’d always suspected. That she’d slept her way to her present success.

Except, inexplicably, he didn’t believe that. Not for one moment.

That just wasn’t Tash.

‘I didn’t realise you were on the list for tonight,’ Aiden muttered, knowing full well Jardine wasn’t. Though it had been tempting to get him along to pick his brains about Tash. Turned out there wasn’t much brain there to pick amongst.

‘Admin error, I’m sure. I came with Shannon Carles.’

Right. His latest ‘cracker’.

‘I hadn’t realised exactly who your father’s ingénue was,’ Jardine went on, blind to the tension pouring off Aiden. ‘Should I give him a heads-up that there’s not too much that’s innocent about her?’ He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and Aiden had never had a stronger urge to step slightly away.

His fingers curled into fists of their own accord. ‘Her personal life is none of MooreCo’s concern. We’ve simply commissioned her artistic skills.’

‘I give that a week.’ Jardine snorted, swigging down the last of his drink. ‘She’s insidious.’

If he’d said anything else...any other word...

‘What do you mean?’ The question bled out of him. So maybe at least one part of him was still looking for evidence.

‘You won’t mean to. You won’t know quite how it happened. But one day you’ll have her toothbrush in your cabinet and her brand of milk in your fridge.’

‘That doesn’t sound too sinister.’ It actually sounded weirdly good. For a half a heartbeat.

‘She’s like one of those spiders that lures you in with the pretty exoskeleton and the seductive dance and then, once she’s got you, wham, not so pretty and not so seductive any more.’

He couldn’t really imagine either of those things. ‘She doesn’t strike me as the black widow type.’

‘I’m talking about the tears and the neediness that start.’

Needy. Hadn’t he used the exact same word himself, earlier? Aiden stared at Jardine and wondered if this was how he came across to strangers. Or, worse, to people he knew.

Maybe to Tash.

‘Classic bait and switch, mate,’ Jardine said, turning for the bar. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’

No. He was saying so much more, and he was probably saying it to everyone here. Suddenly those eyes following Tash around the room didn’t seem so benign. He scanned the venue, found Jardine’s date drinking it up at the second bar and reached for his phone.

He and Carles had at least two mutual friends. One of them was bound to owe him a favour.

Within ten minutes, Carles was shoving her mobile phone back into her purse and copping an earful from a very unhappy Jardine as they moved towards the exit. He couldn’t really stay without his date and she’d just received an urgent phone call from her marketing department....

Unfortunate, but necessary, she’d gushed.

Aiden had just smiled and held the door for them both.

As he turned back to the room he caught the tail end of Tash’s glance. Her relief was patent and he knew, without asking, that Jardine had likely been enjoying taunting her with his presence.

‘Jerk,’ he muttered.

‘I hope that wasn’t for me, darling,’ a familiar voice said from behind him.

He turned into the warmth of a familiar smile. ‘Mother.’

‘Well, I’m here. I hope this will be worth it,’ she announced. It had been years since Laura Moore had been to any of MooreCo’s events. The ribbon-cutting for the Terrace high-rise was probably the last. Corporate parties, unlike dinner ones, just weren’t his mother’s forte. She didn’t do well with all that pressure and no formal role to play.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he murmured, kissing her cheek. Though his purpose for asking wasn’t quite as solid now as it had been at eight o’clock this morning. This morning he’d believed that his mother’s presence might help to remind Tash that Nathaniel Moore had a loving wife to go home to. That there was a marriage about to be wrecked. And it might help his father, too, to have them in the same room at the same time. For the same reasons.

Maybe that was all he needed to be cured of this obsession he seemed to have.

Insidious. An ugly word from an ugly human being but he just couldn’t shake it. Tash had certainly wheedled her way dangerously close to out of his bad books, which was quite an achievement given how in them she’d been when he first walked into her studio.

He furnished his mother with something from the bar, topped up his own glass and then turned to search out his father.

‘Who’s your father talking to?’

Aiden’s heart shrivelled to half its size as his eyes followed the direction of his mother’s enquiry, but then plumped out again as he realised it wasn’t Tash. ‘Margaret Osborne. The wife of—’

‘Trevor Osborne, yes, I recognise her now. Goodness, the years haven’t been kind.’

Every part of him cringed at the slightly too-loud tenor of her voice. Guess that was what came of being out of the scene for so long—she’d lost her social skills when it came to business matters. Though he couldn’t even imagine her working a room quite as fearlessly as Tash, even at the top of her game.

He shepherded his mother across the crowded room until they caught his father’s eye. It widened with alarm—as well it might....

‘Laura?’

She leaned in for an air kiss—so she hadn’t completely forgotten how to be Mrs Nathaniel Moore—and then smiled at her husband’s surprise. ‘I know. I’m as flummoxed to be here as you are seeing me. Your junior partner invited me.’

His father seemed about as discomposed as Aiden had ever seen him. ‘You’re always invited, Laura. You know that.’ Dark eyes scanned the room and then flared even further.

‘Nathaniel, should we—?’ Tash appeared by Aiden’s side and then jerked to a halt at the immediate tension in his father’s body language. ‘Oh, I’m sorry for interrupting.’

She turned her curiosity to his mother, who stood politely blank-faced.

His father quite literally couldn’t speak.

‘Laura Moore,’ his mother finally said, introducing herself on a smile, her dark brows slightly folded in. ‘And you are?’

‘I’m—’ Tash opened her mouth to speak but both men rushed to cut her off.

‘The guest of honour,’ Nathaniel said.

‘Natasha’s here with me,’ Aiden blurted, simultaneously. The surprise Tash turned on him very neatly matched his own. Why the hell had he said that? Was it because inviting his mother here tonight suddenly seemed like the worst idea ever?

Or was it because he didn’t want to be proved correct all of a sudden?

‘Oh, you’re the artist?’ Laura covered for both her momentarily inept men. ‘Nathaniel has brought home photographs of your work. Just lovely.’

Tash smiled and Aiden recognised it instantly as her game-face smile. The one she’d been feeding everyone here. The one she’d used with him the first few times they met. The fact that she couldn’t be genuinely polite to the wife of her biggest commissioner instantly brought his suspicion screaming back to the fore.

Why not—what did she have to lose? Or hide?

But her answer gave nothing away. ‘Thank you, Mrs Moore.’

‘Please, call me Laura.’

That offer seemed to actually pain Tash, but she kept the fake smile glued to her face. Was he the only one who could see how it paled just slightly at the corners?

His own frown deepened until it must have matched his mother’s.

‘Have we met?’ Laura queried. ‘You seem so familiar....’

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