Page 12 of In Bed with Her Billionaire Bodyguard

Her pulse tripped when she spied Luc waiting for her outside her apartment. If she’d thought that things might have changed between them after the drive back from Tunbridge Wells, she’d been wrong. Whatever intimacy she had imagined was absent the next time she’d seen him. It was as if it hadn’t happened. Which would have been fine, had it not left a gaping hole in its place—as if something between them was missing and she couldn’t quite say whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

She found herself distracted by his aftershave, especially when he held the door open for her. It teased her senses, adding weight to the thump of her heart and a betraying flush to her cheeks. A part of her wanted to tell him to change it and the other part wanted to get closer, to stand chest to chest with him, to angle her head so that it fitted in the crook of his neck, so that she could get as close as possible to where it would be strongest, to where the scent was heated by his body, his skin, and where she could justinhale.

As Luc guided the car north, away from central London, towards Hackney, she ordered herself to get her head in the game. In less than twenty minutes she would meet with Kinara, the fashion designer she’d been hoping would help her bring Harcourts back into the twenty-first century.

They were a British designer, young but fresh and exciting and with no naiveté about the world they were working in. Born and working in Hackney, there was both a street element to their designs as well as a business casual style that spoke to Hope. It was the direction she desperately wished Harcourts would move towards. Intelligent, contemporary, broad appealing and sexy.

So Hope would get through the meeting with Kinara and go to the shareholders’ meeting where the nominations would take place. Once she saw who was running against Simon, she’d be able to make a decision about what to do next. She would get through the entire day and she would get home and then she would let the walls come down around the pain of spending the anniversary of her parents’ death alone.

Luca turned the car down a narrow street that looked barely fit for pedestrian use, disliking the menacingly industrial feel of the north London area. He hadn’t been familiar with Hackney at all, and while the main road was urban but bright and clean, this...not so much.

He flicked a gaze to Hope, who was talking to Elise on the phone about the timing of the shareholders’ meeting. She’d been doing her best to ignore him since he’d withdrawn behind a wall of professional civility following the visit to her grandfather’s.

He glared at the display on his own phone as if it would make Nate Harcourt call him back. He’d hoped that he might have some information on what had passed between Hope and her grandfather, but Nate had remained unreachable and Luca had been forced to remind himself that it was hardly the man’s fault that he was in a Swiss hospital.

The narrow lane finally opened out onto a large square surrounded on all sides by red brick buildings several storeys high, giving the strange impression of a modern-day amphitheatre. One that was, apparently, being put to good use.

Three models were posed around an old metal bin with real flames curling into the sky. A man leaned forward, hunched over his camera, clicking away while shouting directions at both the models and the staff. Another group of people were crowded around a laptop on a small table set up off to the left.

Luca shrugged off the thought that what he was seeing just made him feel old. He pulled up off to the far right, where a kid dressed in jeans hanging too low and an off-the-shoulder T-shirt was pointing.

He exited the car and went to Hope’s door, holding it open for her as she got out and trying to ignore all the natural danger points of what was essentially the spatial equivalent of a shooting gallery.

Hope barely paused long enough to tell him to ‘Wait here,’ before walking away, and he told himself that her sharpness was the least he deserved, as his eyes tracked her to a table where three people stood staring at a monitor and speaking quietly.

One of the teens, a young woman with blue eyes and brown lazily curling hair that fell halfway down her back, was now the sole focus of the photographer.

‘Look over your shoulder, Tina,’ called the man with the camera, and Luca’s pulse jumped.

The woman didn’t even remotely look like his mother. But between the posing, the photographer, the press, it was all hitting a little too close to home.

It had been nearly fourteen months since he’d last seen Anna. It had been another cloak-and-dagger meeting in a hotel in some city that happened to be a midpoint of nowhere for them both. And it had been the time he’d finally realised what he most disliked about these less than yearly meetings.

‘Sit down and tell me all about how you’re doing,’she’d said, patting a space on the chair opposite her.

As if he were still the same child she’d said exactly the same thing to when he was nine. As if twenty years hadn’t passed. Always focused on him and never sharing about herself.

That last time it had hit him more forcefully than ever before, because it was exactly what his last lover had accused him of as she’d left.

‘You don’t share yourself, Luca. You give me everything I could possibly need, apart from yourself.’

He’d not even been consciously doing it. And it made him wonder whether his mother realised she did it too, that she kept their relationship on those terms,herterms, or whether it had just become habit. And as difficult as it had been growing up with only one foot in her life and the other in Palizzi with Alma and Pietro, he’d wondered what it must have been like for her. To see her child grow up over a handful of days across a handful of years, rather than day in, day out. To see how he had become an adult in less than a month’s worth of time, while she had miraculously stayed the same.

‘Now, look away?’ the photographer called and Luca wondered about these people’s families. Did they have them? Were they waiting at home? What would these people choose to sacrifice for fame and money?

He became aware of someone’s eyes on him and searched through the crowd of people to see who it was. He managed not to react to the amusing and utterly obvious way a young male model was ogling him. If he’d been off-duty he would have smiled graciously at the guy while discreetly refusing any advance—just in the same way he would have done with the female model next to him, also devouring him with her gaze.

But he wasn’t. He was working and he returned his focus returned to Hope, who was talking to a person he presumed was Kinara, and he forgot about the two models laughing and giggling over the looks that were one of only two things he could thank his mother for.

‘That man isfine,’ Kinara observed.

Hope raised an eyebrow as if unaware that they were speaking about Luc.

‘Oh, girl, don’t play coy with me. Every single person here with a pulse has checked him out. He could be in front of that damn camera. In fact, if he wants to go and put on some of my—’

‘Hands off,’ Hope interrupted.

Kinara laughed, a rich, joyous tease of a laugh. ‘All that was missing from the end of your sentence wasmy man.’

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