The Morning After the Night Before: Love & Lust in the city that never sleeps! (7 page)

‘Look at it this way, Iz,' Tori started. ‘Do you have feelings for him?'

‘Not good ones,' she muttered.

‘Did he treat you well when you were his employee?'

He'd treated her with the same under-informed judgement she'd battled all her youth. ‘Not overly.'

‘Did he ever donate a kidney to you?'

An eyebrow lift was better than an answer. Not that Tori was waiting for one.

‘And do you ever plan on seeing him again?'

‘Absolutely not.'

‘Then you owe him nothing, least of all your confidence.'

And that was why Izzy had been Tori's friend since sixth form, when she'd first arrived at Trenton as a scholarship entry. Unassailable logic, no matter how disguised beneath the crazy hair.

‘I guess not.'

‘So spill!'

She glanced between her two best friends, opened her mouth for a mute heartbeat and then just let the words tumble. All about how good Harry had been. All about how feminine she'd felt when she was in his arms and how forbidden
it all was. How she should have done the whole one-night-stand thing long before now, and how she would categorically not be doing it again. About how she was still secretly thrumming from his touch and more than a little sore in more than a few places.

About what a jerk he was.

The girls listened intently, exclaimed or squeezed her arm in the right places and generally fulfilled their obligations under the universal BFF contract.

‘So Mitchell sucks in the office but rocks it in bed,' Tori summarised.

‘Pretty much.'

‘Well, context is everything,' Poppy rationalised. ‘And clearly he comes into his own one-on-one.'

My wordy lordy, yes.

Until he spoke.

Ignite's maître d', Marco, swung by their table to check on their breakfasts and chatted for a few moments. But the impatience stamped clearly on their three faces soon sent him drifting professionally off to be charming to someone else.

‘So…I saw a few half-hearted circles in the
positions vacant section of yesterday's paper,' Poppy nudged. ‘Anything interesting?'

‘Plenty of jobs if I want to do the same thing I've been doing for years.'

‘And you don't?'

Nope. Not even a little bit. ‘Time for something new.'

‘Out of finance?'

‘I still love numbers but…not
in
finance, if you get my meaning.'

‘I totally do,' Tori sighed. ‘I'm the queen of in but not in.'

Izzy and Poppy exchanged a worried glance. But Tori would talk about Mark when she was ready. And the rapid way she kept the conversation galloping onwards said that she wasn't yet.

She sat up straighter, as if that would help the unwanted attention slide right off her, and spoke. ‘What did you imagine yourself doing when you were a kid?'

Izzy didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about her childhood. When she did it tended to bubble over with PTSD memories of her parents' water-saving
if-it's-yellow-let-it-mellow
flushing policy and other delightful poverty-busters. Clothes she felt sure were liberated from donation bins. Long walks to school and endless
after-school jobs just to afford excursions and textbooks and some of the basics her schoolmates enjoyed.

Isadora couldn't be poorer.

Playground chant, then, but it still echoed now when her origins came back to haunt her. Like last night. Her classmates pretty much had her pegged as the most likely to be pregnant by final year.
Like mother like daughter
, given the whole town seemed to know how few years there were between her and her mum, who'd had her at fifteen and then found herself unskilled and unemployable at thirty. In fact, that was probably where they all thought she'd gone at the end of fifth form: to pop out a sprog.

Much more credible than a top academic scholarship to an exclusive girls' school.

Except, of course, getting pregnant required some boy to be vaguely interested in getting anywhere near her. And
that
required at least one who was prepared to look beyond the worn clothing and public benefits and work to fit in with her relentless after-school shifts.

And teenaged boys, on the whole, weren't much on working for things.

‘I remember wanting to do something with animals,' she ventured. What little private time
she'd had as a kid she'd spent out in whatever field was in walking distance with whatever furry creature she could find.

Tori's jaw gaped. ‘Please tell me we're not talking about cows and pigs.'

‘Wildlife,' Izzy clarified, then, at their blank expressions, continued. ‘You know, badger, deer, sparrows…'

Tori's memory cells lit up. ‘You were always chasing down hedgehogs at Trenton.'

‘And bloody otters,' Poppy added.

Good times. Hours down at the brook trying to find evidence of creatures in and around the waterway. Conveniently also giving her somewhere credible to go while her peers were rowing sculls or learning badminton or dressage or any other number of extra-curricular activities that weren't included in her scholarship.

Although… ‘I'm not sure how many jobs there are where I'd get paid to spend my days crawling around under hedgerows searching for wildlife.'

‘You could volunteer.'

‘I was hoping to keep eating, Pops.'

‘Well…maybe you could help some greenie group manage what little money they have,' Poppy improvised. ‘Maximise it. I bet they're all
great with animal skills but not so much with financial management.'

Huh…

That would certainly be different. But same enough to be not too overwhelmingly scary. ‘What are the odds, though, of a group like that having a vacancy right now?'

Poppy gave her the look. ‘Since when have you ever waited to be asked? Go work for them on commission. Fifteen per cent of whatever you generate for them. Until they see your worth and beg you to stay.'

‘I guess I have signed off on enough of Broadmore Natále's sponsorships to know how the other side works.'

Tori snapped her fingers. ‘That would have to be a professional advantage, right?'

‘And no risk to them,' Poppy urged. ‘No funding, no percentage.'

‘And I'd have an in with whoever replaces me on the grants selection panel at Broadmores…'

Tori took a big swallow of her coffee. ‘There you go.'

There was something terrifically appealing about being master of her own future. She was one hundred per cent
over
being told what to do and who to do it with.

Izzy lifted her chai latte and held it aloft. Poppy and Tori joined her. ‘To the future,' she toasted.

All three designer mugs clanked together like medieval tankards formalising the rightness of this moment. This decision.

‘The future,' her friends said in unison.

* * *

He had no idea.

If he did, Harry knew Rifkin would be sweating blood that he'd shouted down the phone at the son of Broadmore Natále's chief and owner, Weston Broadmore. That he'd told the heir to the Broadmore global dynasty to work on his people skills.

Not feedback Harry had received with much grace, it must be said, but exactly the kind of honest critique he'd moved across the planet for.

Careful what you wish for.

Back home, the country knew him as Harrison Broadmore. It was only here in the UK that he was known as Mitchell. Not that it was completely confidential; way up the food chain at HR global they knew—they had to—but other than the head of London Security, who was sworn to secrecy, no one in the office knew.

And that was exactly how he wanted it.

His father was happy to humour him because he thought Harry was spying on international operations, and in Weston Broadmore's book that was a worthy undertaking. Harry hadn't bothered to mention that he was more interested in discovering whether he could succeed—or not—on his own merits. Without the illustrious Broadmore name backing him.

Without his father's money buying him advancement.

Or academic achievement.

Or friends.

Finding himself.
Good old Dad would have laughed until his tar-soaked lungs gave out on that one. As if what Harry wanted mattered one bit. The company was his as soon as Weston Broadmore decided it would be. All Harry needed to do was turn up at the office, be seen, sign stuff throughout the day, then go home again. His father didn't much care what he did with his time in between.

It was all about appearances.

Just like relationships.

But the human resources director in London must have gone to the same school of personality as Weston Broadmore, because Rifkin was as
tough and demanding as the CEO, he just didn't come with all the emotional baggage. So, while Harry was annoyed right now, he wasn't emotionally invested in that annoyance. It wasn't laden with agenda or residual childhood angst.

He'd stuffed up. This was the consequence.

As they said back home:
Fair bump, play on.

Rifkin didn't sound all that surprised that he'd failed to bring Dean back into the fold—though his forehead would have creased like an accordion if Harry had confessed where his conversation with their recently departed financial whiz had ended up. Failing his mission came at a price: the bulk of Dean's key functions had been divvied up amongst the rest of Harry's best performers.

Rifkin had to know that the fastest way under his skin was to put more pressure on the people Harry valued most. That hurting
him
wouldn't be an effective tool.

So maybe Rifkin did know who raised him, after all.

End result… In the office on a Sunday, taking on a bunch of things himself to ease the burden on his most valuable workers.

Though, anyone watching would be forgiven for thinking that getting the jump on the week's
workload looked suspiciously like staring absently out the window.

He crossed to his desk and reached under the pile of files for Dean's ID card and dragged his thumb across her pretty mug shot.

Nine days had passed since the party. Since he'd crossed a line he'd never imagined having in his rear-view mirror. Sure, Dean had not been an employee at that moment, but that was a mere technicality. He'd never—ever—become involved with someone from the office. Brief or otherwise.

On principle.

Something about pens and corporate ink his father had hammered into him before he'd even hit university. Given his father was partial to dipping his pen wherever the hell he pleased, Harry always took that to be more of a ‘how not to get caught' cautionary tale.

Then again, his father had no shortage of direct experience to reference. His mother had been a nineteen-year-old Broadmore intern when his greying father had met her and—if Weston's drunk stories to his high-rolling friends were to be believed—she got him wound up so tight he would have done anything to bed her. That eventual merger must have come with
a whole swag of assurances—probably in writing—before she let him climb on top of her.

Rule of thumb for both his parents was simply ‘don't get photographed.'

Two tiny pops issued from Harry's neck as he stretched it hard to the left. Bad enough knowing that about your parents without also having the visual embedded behind your eyeballs.

So…yeah. Not an employee; he was going to cling to that technicality like the life raft it was. Despite what the media suggested, he wasn't anything like his father. He'd never made a habit of sleeping with anyone for strategy and he wasn't about to start now.

Despite what Dean almost assuredly thought.

He couldn't even think of her as
Izzy
, because when he thought her name, he heard it in his head the way he'd been saying it that night. Half breath, half groan, pressed up against her ear as she'd made him come like a steam train. And reliving that whole experience sure as hell wasn't conducive to getting work done.

He tossed the ID back on his shambolic desk.

Isadora Dean was now in his past. He'd bear his punishment for failing to get her back with philosophical stoicism and he'd protect his team from HR's dubious game-playing by doing as
much of the overflow as he could himself. He didn't earn this job without having some pretty decent financial skills of his own, after all.

Rubbing his rough face with both hands, he turned his back on Canary Wharf and returned to the pile of files on his desk. Monthly reports, corporate partnership requests, financial statements needing sign-off, budget cash-flow analysis.

Some of it his, some of it Dean's.

All his now.

But that was okay. He'd work himself to death before giving Rifkin—or his father—the satisfaction of thinking him beat.

If nothing else came from all of this he'd damn well prove what kind of a man he wasn't.

Izzy smoothed
her hair and skirt and took three deep breaths before emerging from the washroom on the nineteenth floor of Broadmore Natále's glass-and-chrome tower in London's Thameside financial district. Her old stamping ground.