Midnight At Tiffany's (2 page)

“Ignore her,” Frankie advised. “She’s a cup half full sort of person. It’s annoying.”

Matilda was also a cup half full person, but usually because she’d spilled the other half. She’d decided long ago that Eva was the kindest person she’d ever met. She envied the strength of the friendship between Eva, Paige and Frankie, who had grown up together on a small island off the coast of Maine. Paige always joked that they were small-town girls transplanted into the big city. They’d swapped rural life for the excitement of New York, and the three of them shared a brownstone in Brooklyn along with Paige’s older brother, Matt. Matilda had met him once and immediately used him as inspiration for one of her heroes.

Matilda had never told them, but she’d borrowed shamelessly from Paige’s, Eva’s and Frankie’s personalities when she was creating Lara. The result was a heroine who was the perfect mix of tough and sexy.

She’d chosen to give her heroine Frankie’s fiery red hair, but now she was wondering if she should have given her Eva’s golden curls. People invariably underestimated blondes, didn’t they? It would be fun to see someone underestimating Lara.
That
was a scene she would have had fun writing.

“I’m supposed to tell her if I see Chase Adams, but I have no idea what he looks like.” What did “the man who had everything” look like?

She didn’t reveal her real reasons for wanting to meet him. She knew it was a long shot. She didn’t need anyone to tell her.

Eva glanced around. “I know what he looks like—insanely handsome as it happens—but I don’t think he’s here.
I do, however, see Jake Romano, and he gives Chase a run for his money.”

Matilda followed her gaze and saw a wickedly handsome dark-haired man laughing with an incredibly beautiful woman.

She sighed. “They seem totally in love.” She glanced at Paige, expecting her to agree, and noticed the brief flash of pain in her eyes.

“The only person Jake Romano loves is himself.”

There was a shimmer of emotion in her voice and Matilda knew she’d inadvertently stepped into dangerous territory.

Did Paige know Jake? Did they have a history?

The last thing she wanted to do was hurt Paige, and she was about to say something when Eva gave a quick shake of her head and changed the subject deftly.

“You wouldn’t like Chase Adams. They say he’s a ruthless moneymaking machine with no heart or soul.”

Matilda didn’t care about that. She did care about the fact he might be able to give her his brother’s email address.

“Of course he’s here. How can he not be here? What sort of man wouldn’t show up at his own event?”

Paige smiled, her natural good humor restored. “Probably a man who knows Cynthia is looking for him.”

So he wasn’t old and fusty, Matilda mused.
Insanely handsome.
He sounded like someone her heroine would be seeking out. Luscious Lara had no time for the conventional rules of relationships. She would never wait for a man to call. She was a sexually confident woman who went after what she wanted. The words
regret
and
apology
didn’t appear in her vocabulary.

Chase Adams might consider himself to be the man who had everything, but he’d never had Lara. If she walked into
his life, he’d soon discover what was missing. Lara would give the ruthless, coldhearted Chase Adams a night he would never forget.

T
UCKED BEHIND ONE
of the pillars on the terrace, Chase Adams stood staring over the Manhattan skyline. He scanned the building closest to him; fifty-four floors of winking glass and gleaming metal, now providing corporate headquarters for three Fortune 100 companies.

He was familiar with every steel bolt.

His company had built it, as they had at least four other buildings within his line of vision.

Buildings were his life. His world.

As a child he’d played with Lego. This was more satisfying. He was creating something permanent, something that became part of the city he loved.

“Chase!” A soft, feminine voice told him that his moment of contemplation was over.

He turned, resigned. “Victoria.”

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you. There are people waiting to talk to you!”

Not because they were interested in him, but because they wanted something.

People always wanted something.

There were days when he felt every interaction he had was fake, including his relationship with Victoria.

His parents kept telling him she would be a perfect life partner for someone. It was obvious they were hoping he’d be that someone.

It was true that she was socially adept and confident. She would stand next to him at events like this one and make polite conversation with anyone and everyone from presidents to police chiefs.

There was only one problem.

The thought of waking up next to Victoria for the next fifty years chilled him. He’d never seen her anything but perfectly groomed, and never heard her utter a word that hadn’t been carefully edited. There were times when he felt like tickling her to see if she was capable of spontaneous laughter.

Chase wondered what she looked like in the morning when she hadn’t spent half the day being pampered. Did she sleep in makeup?

What would marriage to someone like Victoria look like? Would she rush to the bathroom before he woke? Their relationship would be strictly regimented. Dinner would be scheduled into their calendars, a stiff formal affair. What about sex? Would he be expected to book that in, too? Their future would be a sea of diary notes and reminders, with no room for spontaneity. Soon he’d be going on more and more business trips to avoid her.

“I was enjoying the view.”

She laughed—a carefully modulated sound, not too loud and not too soft—and linked arms with him in a gesture intended to remind anyone watching that they were intimate. Close.

Chase had never felt more distant from her than he did at that moment.

“You are funny. The view from your apartment is vastly superior, and you’re wasting time staring into space. You
need to mingle. There are so many people waiting to meet you.”

Mingle.

The thought lowered his spirits as much as the thought of spending the rest of his life with Victoria.

Was he being unfair? The time they spent together was at events such as these, and there was never time to talk properly.

“Let’s get out of here, Vic.”

“Excuse me?” She frowned at the shortened version of her name, and he wondered what he was supposed to call her if they ever made it as far as the bedroom.

“Let’s leave. Go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Let’s be spontaneous. Walk and see where we end up.”

“
Walk?
Leave your own party?” She gave a breathless laugh, as shocked as if he’d suggested stripping off and dancing naked on the table. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not joking. Let’s take off these stupid clothes, change into jeans and go for a walk in Central Park. Let’s
talk.
Really talk. Not about stocks, shares or the state of the property market. Let’s talk about life. I need air. I need—”
I need to work out if I like who you are.

And he needed to work out if he liked who he was when he was with her.

She withdrew her hand from his arm, her smile a little cooler. “I don’t own a pair of jeans, and these ‘stupid clothes,’ as you call them, were custom-made. I know how important tonight is for you and I wanted to make a special effort.” If her smile was cool, her voice was deep-frozen. “I’m not one of those women who needs compliments all
the time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate one when it comes my way, Chase.”

“You look great.” He wondered how many hours it had taken her to look that perfect. “But I want to spend time with you, not a dress.”

“You can. Right here.” Her voice was light. “There are important people here, Chase. People who want to talk to you.”

The problem was that he didn’t want to talk to them.

“If they all went away, if all this went away, would you still want to be with me?”

She stared at him blankly, as if he were speaking a foreign language and all she had to hand was a basic phrase book. “Chase, your company is booming. Daddy says he has never met a man with your business skills, and coming from him that’s a real compliment. You’ve turned your family business around. You’ve proved to your father that you can do it. What you have is never going away.”

“But what if I didn’t do this? What if I worked for the fire department or the police force, would you still want to be with me? What if I went back to building houses instead of paying other people to build them?” At the beginning he’d done that. He had the skills needed to build a house from scratch. He’d been interested in eco-designs, and sustainable features. He’d had plans; plans that had been derailed by his father’s first heart attack.

“Have you been drinking?” She frowned for as long as it took her to remember that frowning caused lines. “You’re not yourself.”

That was the problem. He
was
himself, but no one was interested in who he was. No one cared who he was, as long
as he was still CEO of the Adams Construction Group. They wanted the man with the money.

He felt as if he were being suffocated.

He was the man who had everything, except the things that really mattered in life.

If he lost it all tomorrow, he knew he’d find himself alone.

Victoria’s presence had drawn attention to him, and people were starting to hover hopefully. His moment of peaceful contemplation was over.

“Chase!” Two men and a woman approached, but before the predictable flow of conversation could begin there was a massive crash from behind them as one of the waitresses dropped a tray of champagne. The sound echoed around the cavernous room and was followed by an appalled hush and a lone female voice.

“She’s
ruined
my dress!”

Everyone turned and stared. A few people moved closer and Chase pondered the darker side of human nature that meant they were so often drawn to gloat over another’s disaster.

He turned away, unwilling to feast on someone else’s embarrassment, and stared down the glittering canyons of Broadway and Seventh Avenue to the darkness and shadows of Central Park, that lush urban oasis that offered New Yorkers a world beyond glass and steel.

At the moment he was living in the penthouse of the apartment block his company had built, but not for one moment would he have called it home. The media had salivated over that particular project, and every unit had been sold before hitting the open market.

Chase was ready to sell but hadn’t yet decided where he
was going to live once he did. His day was so busy it left him no time to think about it.

Taking advantage of the commotion, he turned and strode out of the room without looking back.

One phone call would have summoned his driver, but that would have meant being trapped inside a car. Tonight he was going to walk. Walking would clear his head.

Better to be alone and be himself than be someone else with a bunch of strangers.

Because that’s what they were. All of them. Even Victoria. Strangers. They didn’t know who he was and they weren’t interested.

Unobserved, he walked out of his own party without looking back.

M
ATILDA FOUND HER BAG
, pulled out the emergency dress she always carried and dragged it over her soaking wet legs. It was nothing more than a long T-shirt, but it rolled into small spaces and was perfect for situations such as this.

The champagne had been vintage, apparently, so expensive that she was tempted to bend over and lick her own legs. It was the only way she was ever going to get close to champagne of this quality again.

Fired.

She’d been fired.

Crap.

It was bad enough that she’d lost her job, but worst of all she’d lost her chance to meet Chase Adams and engineer a way of sliding her manuscript onto his brother’s desk.

Maybe if she’d paid more attention to her surroundings and less to exactly what Lara would have been doing to Chase Adams in the bedroom, she might have seen the
woman with the huge feathers sticking out of her dress. They’d caught the edge of a champagne glass and toppled the lot, like dominoes, only a great deal wetter.

The woman’s rage had been almost as great as Cynthia’s, not least because being showered in champagne had turned her dress see-through, exposing support underwear. If the woman’s wrath was anything to go by, the need to wear support underwear wasn’t something she’d wanted broadcast.

Matilda tugged the stretchy dress over her damp body, stuffed her uniform into a bag and left it for Cynthia. It was an ignominious end to her time with Star Events.

She knew Paige and the others would be looking for her, but she couldn’t face seeing them. Couldn’t face the fact that she’d let Paige down. She’d recruited her when no one else would give her a chance, and now she’d screwed up. And all because she was clumsy and dreamy.

Dragging her damp, miserable, humiliated self to the elevator, Matilda stepped inside, relieved to be on her own.

But it seemed she wasn’t going to be granted even a moment of respite.

As the doors started to close, a strong male hand clamped the edge of the door and it slid open again.

Matilda watched gloomily, reflecting on the fact that if she’d done the same thing, the doors would have snapped shut on her hand. There would have been a hideous crunching of bones and she would have spent the night in the emergency room.

It seemed the doors had an inbuilt ability to sense authority, because they slid back meekly, allowing him access.

He strolled into the elevator and her idle glance turned to a disbelieving stare. His hair was midnight black, his eyes
the color of the ocean. The expensive fabric of his tux fitted perfectly, highlighting powerful thighs and wide shoulders.

He was stunning.

He was also perfect hero material.

Matilda wanted to grab her notebook and scribble frantically.

Chiseled jaw, check. Razor-sharp cheekbones, check. Firm mouth, check. Muscles—
everywhere.

Could she take a surreptitious photo? No. Too risky.

As if the gods hadn’t already heaped enough good fortune on him with striking looks and great coordination, he was also tall. A whole head taller than her, which was unusual. She was used to looking down on men or, at the very least, being eye to eye. It made her feel clumsy and awkward even when she wasn’t knocking into anything.

This man topped six feet, and his formal dress told her he’d come from the party she’d just left. Was he one of the unlucky few she’d drenched by accident?

She slunk back against the wall and kept her head down, conscious that even her hair was damp and curling from the splashes of champagne.
Please don’t let him recognize me.

Even without looking at him, she sensed his simmering tension. Trapped in the confined space, it was impossible not to notice that he was in a
very
bad mood. She sneaked another look and saw what she’d failed to notice at first glance. Strong brows pulled together in a frown, and a slim mouth set in a grim line that even an optimist couldn’t have pretended was a smile. He probably
was
one of the people she’d tried to drown in champagne, and judging from the look on his face it wasn’t top of his list of favored ways to die.

He lifted his hand and yanked his bow tie away from his
throat as if it were strangling him. Then he opened his top button and—

Matilda’s thoughts came to an emergency stop.

Confronted by a tantalizing glimpse of bronzed skin and a hint of dark, masculine body hair she was incapable of doing anything but stare. Everything inside her shifted and tumbled.

Oh, my—

Who cared if he was moody? With a body like that he could go through life with a face like thunder and still be forgiven.

Lara would have closed the gap between them, ripped open his shirt and taken a long, close look at whether the rest of his body lived up to the promise of that small glimpse. She’d use this man for her own sexual gratification until he could no longer—

“Were you at the party?” His voice, velvet deep, shook her out of her erotic daydream.

“What?” So his voice was as sexy as his body. Her head was spinning with desire. “Me?”

“Yes, you. I saw you running for the lift. It’s obvious you’ve just changed out of one outfit and into another.”

“Why is it obvious?”

“Because half your hair is inside your dress and it’s tucked up at the back.”

“Oh.” She freed her hair and straightened her dress. Her face was as hot as the inside of a pizza oven. Still, at least she didn’t have toilet paper stuck to her shoe. As someone to whom that had happened on a million occasions, she’d learned to be grateful for small mercies.

“You were part of the champagne accident?”

Oh, crap.
“I was—er—caught in the cross fire.” Matilda
tensed and waited for him to say something caustic but he frowned slightly.

“Why do people always crowd around when a person is in trouble? It’s something I’ve never understood.”

The last thing she’d expected was for him to be sympathetic. “It’s human nature. Like watching a hanging in medieval times.”

“It’s one of the very worst parts of human nature.” He pushed his bow tie into his pocket. “So, who are you avoiding?”