Her uncertain voice was like a splash of cold water. God, what was the matter with me? This was Lucy – Hetty’s daughter, Mike’s sister. Hetty and Mike trusted me. I forced myself to take a step back, dropping Lucy’s hand. She blinked up at me in confusion, the flush of desire still staining her cheeks, her pupils still huge. She looked so young standing there in my kitchen in the exact same pose as when we were kids. Mike would kick my arse if he knew what I almost just did to his sister. Taking advantage of an employee was lower than low,and it was not my style. Taking advantage of a Mayweather was completely unacceptable.
But there was a small voice in the back of my head asking me why. Why couldn’t I have Lucy? I was rich enough, and I’d worked hard enough to have what I wanted, surely? However, the most prevalent voice (the one that sounded suspiciously like my father’s) questioned whether I deserved Lucy. What could I really offer her? It certainly wasn’t a meaningful relationship – not with my track record and inability to trust anyone. And did I want to risk my relationship with my best friend and my surrogate mum?
“Right,” I said briskly, crossing my arms over my chest and pulling away from Lucy altogether. “Better get you home. I’ll call my car for you.”
I watched as Lucy’s shoulders slumped just a little. Better a small disappointment now than the heartbreaking kind later. At least, that’s what I told myself.
Chapter 11
Go away, Felix
Lucy
“What is this shit, Mayweather?” Will snapped, and I wished I had the backbone required to slap him. The man had a very slappable face.
“Er… it’s coffee.”
“It tastes like a baboon’s arse. What have you put in there?”
“You asked for soy milk,” I said through my now-chattering teeth. Will was really putting the effort in now to torment me. His current favourite was to send me on the most ridiculous errands. He almost seemed to get off on it. Hence this Costa run in the pouring rain for his over-complicated drink order. I was soaked to the skin and totally dishevelled as it was half a mile away and the traffic was gridlocked, so I’d had to jog there. And now he was in his office with two other executives he seemed hell bent on humiliating me in front of.
He laughed. “Do I look like a fucking woke, hippy, soy-drinking dickhead to you?”
I hesitated, wanting to say exactly what I thought he lookedlike but not having the lady balls. My hesitation was enough to infuriate him though. His eyes narrowed as he stared at me. “Go back andget it right.” Each word was said slowly and carefully as if he was addressing someone who was intellectually challenged.
“But it’s quite a?—”
“Gentlemen,” Will cut me off, looking at the other two suits in his office who were shifting uncomfortably in their seats (one of them was David, who I had previously thought wasn’t a total wanker) clearly not at peace with how much of a knob Will was being, but also not ballsy enough to stick up for me. “Your orders?”
They both demurred, but Will pressed it so much that eventually they gave in, and as I was a big wussbag and terrified of Will, I resigned myself to going back to the cursed Costa through the now torrential rain.
On my way back, the coffees were shaking so violently as I shivered that it took all my effort and concentration to keep them upright. So I didn’t notice the sleek, low-slung sports car pull up beside me. Not until the beeping of horns from the cars behind it was blocking started.
“Lucy!” Felix shouted, and I almost flipped the tray of coffee. His window was down now, and he was scowling at me from the driver’s seat. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” I called back. “This is my job. I’massisting. You said you wanted me to do it better. This is me doing better.”
“I didn’t say go out in a howling gale and get hypothermia.”
“Go away, Felix,” I said and turned to carry on walking. I was cold, pissed off and I’d had it with this man. I really thought he was going to kiss me last week at his house. My disappointment was so acute that I was having a hard timebeing rational. To know that this fierce, almost painful attraction was still one-sided after having had that small glimmer of hope was unbearable. And I was sure that for a moment, just for a second, he’d felt it too. But then I’d been bundled into my coat and shoved into one of his cars that he seemed to have on twenty-four-hour call like I was radioactive. I was crushed. And I was not up to dealing with him yet.
At the office, I’d managed to avoid him, especially as I was spending more time with Vanessa to help with the ad campaigns in lieu of Will actually doing his job. But after the first day, I realised he was avoiding me as well, which was even more galling. Probably worried that silly little Lucy would get the wrong idea.
“Get in the car.”
“Bugger off.” The beeping had escalated now. Felix was causing a massive backlog of traffic – which in London was quite possibly a hanging offence.
“You can’t tell me to bugger off.” He sounded so ridiculously affronted that I almost laughed, although I doubted that would have been possible given how hard my teeth were chattering.
“Felix Moretti, I’ve known you since you had your first snog with Melanie Green behind the outdoor bogs at The Badger’s Sett. I can tell you to bugger off if I want to.” That had broken my little eight-year-old heart back then, and I was still letting him do it to me now.
“Right, fine,” he bit out, bringing his car to a complete stop and putting the hazards on. People in the cars behind him were swearing now and gesturing out of their windows. I stopped in my tracks and my mouth dropped open as he rounded his car, totally ignoring the chaos he was causing, and closed the distance between us in just a few long strides. Before I couldreact, he grabbed the tray of coffees out of my hand, chucked them in the bin next to us, turned back to me, put a shoulder to my stomach and lifted me over it.
“What the hell are you doing?” I screeched. The honking behind us had fallen silent. They were probably just as shocked as me. I heard the car door open, and I was lowered, then dumped into the deep bucket seat. Felix, still in the torrential rain, which had already soaked his hair, leaned down to unzip my soaking puffa, pulled it off me somehow, then took off his own coat and threw it over me. Still not finished, he pulled the seatbelt across me and his coat and plugged it in like I was a child. When he moved back to slam the door shut, his shirt was soaked and clung to his muscular torso like a second skin. He flipped off the cars behind us and rounded his bonnet to fling himself into the driver seat. Continuing to ignore the horns, he yanked up the thermostat on his car and I was blasted by warm air. Finally, cool as a cucumber, he casually drove away.
There was water dripping from his hair down the line of his jaw and into his stubble. I tried to drag my eyes away from his arms and chest, revealed by the wet shirt in all their glorious detail, but it was a losing battle. He was almost too perfect to be real.
“When do you get the time to work out?”
