Page 204 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

‘Of course.’ Letting go of Sydney’s hand, he watched her buckle up, liking how the movement made her red hair shimmer beneath the overhead lights.

His pulse gave a jerk as the jet began to rumble down the runway. This was it. He could still stop this. And he should stop it. Sydney Truitt was bad news and trouble all tied up with a bow, metaphorically and literally.

Of their own accord, his eyes flicked to the bow on the back of her head, because all he wanted to do was tug that ribbon loose. Maybe then she would try to kiss him again as she had yesterday, he thought, watching her pale fingers tighten around the armrest as the plane lifted away from the ground.

And just like that, it was too late to do anything.

Twenty minutes later they were at cruising altitude and it was clear that any assumption that this arrangement would be happening on his terms was looking a tad premature.

Yes, Sydney smiled warmly at the stewards and answered their questions in that husky, precise way of hers that he seemed to find so fascinating, but the moment they were unobserved, she would retreat back into silence and present that profile of hers to him like a queen on a coin instead of the thief and the liar that she was.

‘Are you hungry?’ He didn’t wait for her answer, just inclined his head slightly towards the hovering air steward. ‘Good morning, Adam. I’d like three eggs, sunny side up, four rashers of bacon and an espresso to follow, and Ms Truitt will have the same. Aside from the coffee,’ he added. ‘She prefers an americano.’

Sydney’s head jerked up and he thought she was going to say she wasn’t hungry or that she didn’t eat bacon or eggs, but instead she stared at him, two small lines furrowing her smooth forehead. ‘How do you know how I drink my coffee?’

He shrugged. ‘Intuition.’

That was a lie.

After she’d delivered his lunch and they’d had that strangely charged encounter, he had found his gaze drawn to her again and again throughout the afternoon. At one point he had wandered casually over to stand by the glass so that he could watch her return from the coffee run, her face scrunched with concentration as she made her way across the office. Even at that distance he could tell the contents of the cups from their height and colour and she had distributed the tall, skinny lattes in their cream beakers to her colleagues but kept the shorter black beaker containing an americano for herself.

‘Intuition?’ She stared at him suspiciously, not sure whether to believe him or not.

But why did it matter if she did or didn’t? He’d never cared before what other people thought about him. With a father like his he’d had to force himself not to care, which was not easy when Gerry McIntyre was the punchline of so many jokes.

Tiger felt his jaw tighten. But he’d had the last laugh.

Taking on the name callers, calling out each and every person who thought he was as weak and dupable as his father and making it painfully and unquestionably clear to them that was not the case.

He had never looked back. But then there was no reason to do so. Everything behind him was lost or wrecked. His mother had died before he could remember her, then his grandmother had followed less than a year later. Now his father was dead too and his childhood home was a derelict shell.

All that remained was the business, and that would have gone too if he hadn’t single-handedly turned it around. It hadn’t been easy. On the contrary, he had earned his stripes. It was during that period of his life that he had cemented both his nickname and his reputation for ruthlessness, despatching his rivals with a speed and savagery that had left him prowling the corporate jungle almost alone so that now he was free to make the rules, not just bend them to his will.

And as the apex predator he had got used to a lot of scraping and sycophancy.

That had changed yesterday when he had generously offered this tightly wound woman sitting beside him the opportunity to be his ‘girlfriend’ for a week and instead of biting off his hand she had more or less told him to shove his offer where the sun didn’t shine.

Such a thing had never happened before. Only, instead of hurling her to the wolves, he had doubled down, astonished and intrigued by her defiance and by the pale curve of her jaw as she’d lifted her chin to meet his gaze, because, truly, it was so alien for anyone to talk to him in that way. Which was no doubt the reason she had this effect on him.

Gauzy rays of early morning sunlight were slanting through the window onto Sydney’s face and, taking that as permission to follow, he let his gaze move over her features.

She was undeniably beautiful with that red hair, dark like damp fox fur, curling over her collarbone and that matching flush of colour on those cut-glass cheekbones. The soft pink bow of her mouth was nothing short of perfection.

But instead of yesterday’s office armour she was wearing black gingham capri pants, a white blouse flecked with tiny yellow flowers and low-heeled taupe-coloured sandals. His gaze steadied on her toenails, which were painted a soft, pale pink. Smart-casual, he’d said, and she was definitely erring towards the more casual end of smart-casual, but she was all the more luminous and fascinating for that.

‘Have you been to Italy before?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘But you have been on a plane?’ he persisted, suddenly remembering how she had clutched the armrest during take-off.

‘Yes, of course. But I’ve never been to Europe.’ She gave him a light gleam of a smile that knocked him sideways until he realised that she was smiling at Carole, who had arrived to tell them that their food was ready.

As he sat down at the table, his pulse skipped a beat as he realised that it was the first time he had eaten breakfast with a woman on his own since his grandmother died.

Like everything he did, that was a conscious decision.

He knew most people would think that dining together was the most intimate of meals and it was in the sense that fine food, low lighting and alcohol could and often did lead to sex.

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