It's always fun to see a new outing for a favourite book.
I wrote this novella the year I went to the RWA conference in New York. I had the idea before I went and then did everything that my heroine would. It was a brilliant few days even though Debbie Macomber beat me to the Rita that year.
Here's the blurb -
Talie Calhoun had briefly met billionaire Jude Radcliffe whilst working as a temp at the Radcliffe Group. It was a rare holiday away from nursing her invalid mother. But when she's asked to accompany Mr Radcliffe to New York, she is over the moon.
Radcliffe isn't so pleased with his secretary's choice of temp, but Talie is a force of nature, hard to ignore and her zest for life draws him out of the shell he;s built around himself.
Here's a snip -
‘WAIT for me!’
Talie Calhoun
sprinted across the marble lobby of the Radcliffe Tower
as the lift doors began to close. The occupant of the lift obliged by holding
the lift and she beamed a grateful smile in his direction.
‘Thank you so much! It’s my first day and I am sooo
late,’ she said, all in a rush as she checked her wrist watch and let out a
tiny wail of anguish before looking up at her fellow passenger. Nothing unusual
there. Looking up was what she did, mostly. Her grandmother had warned her. If
she didn’t eat up her spinach and crusts, she wouldn’t grow tall and her hair
wouldn’t curl.
One out of two to granny.
Oh good grief. It was just her luck that the man was a
serious babe magnet. Slate grey eyes, cheek bones to die for, a mouth that you
just knew would melt your bones. If you were in the market to have your bones
melted, that was. In short, the kind of man that you wouldn’t want to meet
unless your makeup was perfect, your clothes elegant – but sexy – and your hair
was totally in control. Instead, she was pink in the face, dishevelled and
flustered. She wasn’t even going to think about her hair…
‘That’s not good is it?’ she said, offering a smile,
but if she’d been hoping for reassurance, she was out of luck.
‘It does suggest a certain lack of enthusiasm,’ he
replied, coolly.
Would it have hurt the wretch to smile?
‘Which floor?’ he enquired
‘Oh…’ She consulted the card she was holding. ‘Thirty-two,
please.’ Then, as her knight errant pressed the button for her floor. ‘It’s not
true, you know,’ she said. ‘I am incredibly enthusiastic.’
He lifted his left eyebrow no more than a millimetre. It
expressed a world weary lack of belief that she found totally galling.
‘No, honestly!’ she protested. Then, ‘But you’re
probably right. This may be the shortest temp job in the entire history of
temping.’
‘If it was important, maybe you should have set your
alarm a little earlier.’ Her outraged response to this calumny was still a
fledgling thought when he said, ‘Who are you going to work for?’
‘The Finance Director.’
‘Then you are in
trouble.’
A twinge of unease tightened her stomach. She couldn’t
be that unlucky...
‘Look, it wasn’t my fault. My alarm was set for six
o’clock. I was almost here an hour ago.’
‘I should perhaps warn you that the Finance Director never
accepts “almost” as good enough.’
‘Please… Tell me that you’re not him…’
‘No. You’re safe for another couple of minutes.’ His
smile was definitely worth waiting for. Tiny creases appeared at the corners of
his mouth and eyes to demonstrate that although it was more ironic than ha ha
ha, it was the genuine article.
‘Whew!’ she said, flapping her hand as if to cool her
cheeks – actually it wasn’t wholly pretence... ‘That would have been a really
bad start.’
‘Late is bad enough. Have you got a good excuse
prepared? Delay on the Underground is a favourite I believe.’
‘With good reason,’ she declared, ‘but it wasn’t
anything that simple. I wish it was.’
The eyebrow did its job again, inviting her to
elaborate. Or maybe in disbelief... ‘Look, it’s just me, okay? I seem to have
this fatal attraction for calamity, mayhem and misadventure. Today it was some
poor man having a seizure down in the Underground.’
‘That’s
a reason for him being late, not you,’ he pointed out.
‘Yes, but I will get involved.’
‘Oh. I see.’
For a moment she suspected that he was laughing at
her. No, his mouth was perfectly straight…
She dragged her gaze from the kind of lower lip that
sent a rush of hormones to her brain.
‘He’d, um, collapsed on the platform. People were
walking right past him. I suppose they thought he’d been taking drugs or
something. It wasn’t exactly a rerun of While You Were Sleeping –‘
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The movie? Where the girl rescues the guy when he
falls onto the track and then everyone thinks she’s his fiancee…’ She stopped. Clearly
he hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. ‘Obviously I couldn’t just leave
him there.’
‘Obviously,’ he said. And then he did smile. Really
smile. He was clearly killing himself with the effort not to laugh out loud.
Why did men always
do that?
Because she was only 5’3 in her thickest socks and
twenty pounds overweight according to some stupid height/weight chart in one of
her aunt’s slimming magazines?
Why was it that only tall, thin people were taken
seriously?
‘You find that funny?’ she demanded.
‘No! No, absolutely not,’ he said, rapidly losing the
smile. ‘You weren’t afraid?’ Then, ‘I suspect that’s why none of those people
stopped.’
‘Of course it was, but he was sick. He needed help. I
grabbed the nearest person and wouldn’t let go until the poor woman got out her
mobile phone and called for an ambulance, then I did what I could to make him
comfortable. Of course it took the paramedics forever to get through the rush
hour traffic and then I had to stay and explain what had happened, what I’d
done.’
‘Is he going to be all right?’
Okay. He’d smiled at the wrong moment, but he had
asked the right question…
‘I think so. He was a bit dazed, but he seemed to have
pretty much recovered by the time I finally got away.’ The lift stopped, the doors
slid back. ‘Uh-oh. This is my floor. Well, thanks for holding the lift.’
‘Any time,’ he said, and then he smiled again. And her
bones… melted. ‘Just yell.’
Oh good grief. She’d yelled…
In the hallowed precincts of the Radcliffe Tower.
This edition of The Temp and; the Tycoon is a LP library edition and quite expensive. The idea is that you ask for it at your local library - anywhere in the world. It is also available to download as an eBook atAmazon, Mills and Boon or any other eBook provider for little more than the price of a daily newspaper - £1.31.
Sheikh Fayad and his lovely Princess Violet, who play an important part of this story, first appeared in Chosen as the Sheikh's Wife (with a guest appearance from my very first sheikh, Prince Hassan - His Desert Rose). I needed a country where the exiled Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Ansari could make his home and where better than Ramal Hamrah? Fayad is his cousin. The fort had been his maternal grandmother's home. Perfect.
Sheikh Zahir gets a passing mention. He first appeared in The Sheikh's Guarded Heart, then got his own story in The Sheikh's Unsuitable Bride.
