“Thought I’d get an early start. Plenty to do, after all.”
I’d texted my team late last night. It might have been about two in the morning when I’d made my final selection—but there wasn’t a shadow of doubt in my mind that all twelve of them were still awake and working. If they weren’t—they’d better get awake and working.
“Yeah,” he chuckled, making a beeline for the coffee maker, “I got your text.”
I handed him down a mug and took a sip myself.
Not the best. Certainly nothing like Nick’s. We could do with another upgrade.
“But that’s exactly why I’m surprised to see you here,” he continued. “I’m working up a full press packet for the girl, but don’t you have to go meet her?”
I shook my head, shrugged an innocent shoulder, and waltzed into my office with a secret little smile. The same smile that had been dancing around my face since two in the morning.
The girl’s name was Ella Campbell. And I would be meeting her here. In this office.
The location might have been seen as a slap in the face by those sensitive enough to take it that way. To an up-and-coming model like Ella, a person with a giant egotistical chip on her shoulder, it would most certainly be taken that way. But considering that of the two people in the equation, I represented Nicholas Hunter—I felt I had the leverage to call the shots.
And to be frank, a little slap in the face might be exactly what the doctor ordered if I was introducing her to Nick later that day. I wanted her bitchy. I wanted her fuming.
I
circled around my desk and leaned back in my chair with that same little smile. Already, I could hear an argument at the security gate, as I’d failed to put Campbell’s name on the list.
Time to make a little mischief...
TEN MINUTES AND A LOT of shouting later, there was a tentative knock on my office door. I closed the book I was reading, set down my mug of coffee, and folded my hands upon my desk.
There was an art to it. This throne-like posture. I had picked it up from Mitchell.
“Who is it?”
Alison, my secretary, popped her head inside. A thin sheen of sweat had broken out over her forehead, and her dilated eyes locked nervously onto mine.
“Ms. Wilder, there’s an Ella Campbell here to see you.” She paused a second, then lowered her voice to a hush only I could hear. “She looks about ready to explode.”
Perfect.
I nodded with a little stab of satisfaction.
“Send her in.”
Allison disappeared, shaking her head like I’d been spending too much time with crazy-Nicholas. A moment later, the door burst open and two people swept inside.
One was a tiny little man. Glasses. Tight suit. All the classic indicators of an over-worked manager to an up-and-coming star, the kind who couldn’t yet afford to pay him.
The second...? Well, the second was different thing entirely.
The first thing I noticed were the breasts. In fact, they were all I could notice.
For a split second, my heart froze in my chest. Nick was a breast man. Like all adolescents cast off at an early-age to boarding school, he had developed an almost unparalleled affinity for the wonders of the female chest.
But then my eyes travelled up to her face.
My heart continued beating.
The second I’d seen the picture in her file, I knew I’d found ‘the one.’ There were simply no other candidates—I’d closed my computer soundly behind me.
She was a dead ringer for Nick’s least favorite ex-stepmother.