The Party Starts at Midnight

CHAPTER TWO

FOR WHAT FELT like the longest time Abby didn’t say anything. Didn’t do anything. She couldn’t. She was speechless. Stunned into immobility.

So much for explaining why she was really here, as she’d been about to. And so much for thinking that she was muddling through what was a hideously awkward situation reasonably all right.

That assumption had been well and truly shot out of the water because had he really just said what she thought he’d said? Implied what she thought he’d implied? Did he really think that she’d been sent to seduce him? In a professional capacity? Supplied by his brother?

Her mind was blank with shock and she was reeling all over again because OK, so he didn’t know who she was—the meetings she’d had had always been with Jake, who was the face of the company while Leo very firmly remained in the background, and from what she understood he’d been away a lot of the time anyway—but seriously? Didn’t he recognise her name? Hadn’t he received any of her emails? And was this really the way his supposedly razor-sharp brain worked?

With her jaw about to hit the floor, Abby q

uite forgot the purpose of the hand-to-eye combo, which wasn’t just to protect his modesty but also to stop her from ogling his body, lowered her hand and stared at him.

And immediately wished she hadn’t because prone and passed out he’d been impressive, but sitting upright, radiating energy, tension, and well, sheer presence, he practically robbed her of breath, never mind speech.

Not that he was exactly waiting for an answer even if she had been able to provide one. No. Now, to add insult to injury, he appeared to be checking her out, looking over her, slowly, lazily and thoroughly, his gaze sliding from her eyes to her mouth to her breasts and lower, lingering over every available inch of her.

And dammit if her body didn’t begin to respond to his scrutiny. To her appal, she could feel it happening. The heat pooling in her stomach. The tingles prickling her skin. The tension winding through her muscles and the beginnings of desire, intoxicating and heady and so inappropriate on so many levels she didn’t know who she was more disgusted with, herself or him.

‘Well?’ he asked, finally raising dark, inscrutable eyes to hers and arching an eyebrow.

‘I’m none of the above,’ she said tartly, silently adding you obnoxious jerk and feeling her estimation of him—which had previously been pretty high given everything he and his brother had achieved—plummet through every one of the thirty floors that lay between them and solid ground.

‘No?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Well, whatever you are,’ he said flatly, ‘you’ve had a wasted journey because I’m not interested.’

And, wham, there was another insult.

Abby swallowed back a gasp and tried not to recoil at the bolt of—what was that? Disappointment? Couldn’t be. Hurt? No way. Outrage? Definitely. That was what it was. She was outraged. Offended. Incensed.

And she’d had enough. Certainly of being on the floor and having him looking down on her with such dry disdain, such ice-cold superiority when he was so totally, so unbelievably in the wrong.

Setting her jaw and trying to formulate a response that wouldn’t cost her her job, she grabbed her clipboard and, holding it to her middle like some sort of a shield, stood up.

‘Actually,’ she said, fixing a cool smile to her face and just about keeping a lid on the urge to tell him exactly what she thought of him because however much of a jerk he was he was still a client, and an influential one at that, ‘I am here in a professional capacity, just not the one you’re thinking of.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m an event organiser,’ she said, then added pointedly, ‘Your event organiser. And you’re paying me a lot for the privilege, so there’s absolutely nothing “gifty” about it at all.’

There followed a couple of seconds of silence as presumably this sank into his seriously warped brain and then something that she hoped might be mortification flickered across his face.

‘My event organiser,’ he echoed with a faint frown, as if it was taking considerable effort to assimilate the information, which maybe it was because his head was clearly a mess. But, ooh, she didn’t like the way he emphasised the ‘my’, whether he’d meant it that way or not.

‘Yours and Jake’s,’ she clarified, then added in a tone so chilly it could have frozen the Sahara, ‘And just in case we’re still not clear, the event I’ve organised for this evening is your Christmas-slash-ten-year-anniversary party taking place right now downstairs. The party you’re meant to be at. Thanking your staff for all their hard work this year, celebrating your success, and generally being around looking full of festive cheer.’ Instead of being upstairs, unconscious as the result of a drinking spree and then flinging potentially slanderous allegations about the place.

His jaw tightened, his dark eyes narrowed and she thought that she’d never seen anyone less full of festive cheer, but that wasn’t her problem.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Seven.’

He swore and raked his hands through his hair and she kept her eyes firmly on his face, not lowering them to watch the play of muscles and the stretch of his chest caused by the gesture for even a second. ‘I overslept,’ he muttered with a frown.

If that was the way he wanted to put it, she thought, swallowing hard and locking her knees because she might have peeked just for a moment and she might be feeling a bit faint, then that was up to him. If he thought it all right to drink himself into oblivion and shirk his responsibilities, then fine. ‘Apparently so.’