“Hollie, will you focus?” I took the martini glass out of her hand. “Look at me.”
“I’m looking,” she replied, staring at me. The blue flecks in her green eyes seemed to have expanded over the course of the afternoon.
“Stay in London and finish your internship at Daniels & Co.”
She seemed to be following what I was saying and her eyelids fluttered open and shut a thousand times and she reached for me.
“You would do that?” she asked, stroking the palm of her hand down my cheek.
I swallowed, trying to push down the instinct to scoop her up and take her home. “It makes sense. We need more hands on deck now we’re through to the finals. And you need a job.”
“You are so sweet.” She sighed. “The British.”
“So that’s agreed. You’ll start on Monday.”
She picked up her martini glass. “Absolutely not. I shall not work for you.”
I groaned. I should have waited until she was sober after all. “We can discuss it again tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to offer me a job to get into my panties. You are welcome there. There’s a little brass band down there, ready to say hi whenever you’re ready. They have banners and balloons. There is no job required.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or be completely horrified by the idea she thought I was offering her a job in return for sex. And I guess I should also be slightly freaked out by the idea of her vagina band. “I’m not offering to swap you a job for sex. It might surprise you to know that I don’t have to pay for it.”
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” she said, suddenly completely sober. “Why would you even do such a thing?”
I got it. She was a gorgeous girl and I could imagine that she’d been offered a number of things to sleep with a guy before. “I do not want to have sex with you.”
“Rude!” she said. “I thought . . .”
This girl gave me whiplash. “Yes, of course I want to have sex with you—if nothing else so I can meet the tiny brass band in your underwear.”
She started to giggle and it was so bloody delightful that I wanted to grab her hand and escape somewhere I could hold her for the rest of the evening in front of a roaring fire, watching the London rain freshen up the city.
“I’m not offering you the job so you’ll have sex with me. I’m offering you the job because you need a job and I need the help.”
“Really?” she asked. “Tell me the truth.”
“Okay. That’s the truth. Also I don’t like the way Sparkle has treated you, and if I get to right some of their wrongs, that makes me feel good.”
“Any other reason?”
No more holding back or skating on the surface. “And I’d like to hang out with you some more and if you fly back to Oregon, I won’t ever see you again.”
She looked at me, concentration freezing her expression. “The problem is . . . if I’m your intern, I can’t sleep with you. Because I want to be taken seriously. I want people to see that I’m hardworking and that I have potential, not that I’m humping the boss.”
“Humping?”
I got where she was coming from. Daniels & Co wasn’t that kind of organization. The people I worked with were professional. They weren’t gossips but she wasn’t to know that. “Looks like I won’t be getting laid, then. Not if you’re back in Oregon and not if you stay in London.”
She grinned, as if the thought delighted her. “Are you serious? You want me to intern?”
“I have two conditions. First, I need to be open with my head designer, Primrose, about how I know you. I don’t keep anything professional from her. But she’s discreet and won’t judge either of us.”
“And the second condition?” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously at me.
“Everyone who works for Daniels & Co gets paid. So, for the next nine weeks, you’ll get a salary. Just above minimum wage, so don’t get too excited.”
“Are you serious? No, I mean, I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be right.”
I just offered her a minimum-wage salary and she’d reacted as if she’d won the lottery. “Take it or leave it. But you’re not working for my organization for free. That’s not the way I operate.”
“Life is freaking ironic, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Why? Because the day you lose a job, you get one so much better?” Sparkle were idiots.
She tilted her head to the side. “No. Because I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to sleep with a man more than I want to get naked with you. And now you’re my boss and it’s strictly not allowed.”
Before I could respond, she called the waiter over and asked for the bill—or “check” as she put it. “I’ll get this,” she said. “As a thank you.” She took the bill from the waiter at the same time as I handed him my card. There was no way I was going to let her pay.