Hired: The Boss's Bride. Элли Блейк

      

       Mills & Boon® Romance brings you a fresh new story from Australian author

       Ally Blake

       Indulge yourself with this vibrant, witty and fabulously flirtatious novel!

       Praise for Ally’s Romances:

      ‘This book speaks not only to your imagination

      but also to your heart, it goes that extra mile

      and gives the reader what they crave—romance…’

      —Cataromance on MEANT-TO-BE MOTHER

      ‘Ally Blake’s MILLIONAIRE TO THE RESCUE has

      a solid plot with a built-in conflict, and features two

      well-handled characters with a lot of chemistry.’

      —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

      Having once been a professional cheerleader, Ally Blake’s motto is ‘Smile and the world smiles with you.’ One way to make Ally smile is by sending her on holidays—especially to locations which inspire her writing. New York and Italy are by far her favourite destinations. Other things that make her smile are the gracious city of Melbourne, the gritty Collingwood football team, and her gorgeous husband Mark

      Reading romance novels was a smile-worthy pursuit from long back. So, with such valuable preparation already behind her, she wrote and sold her first book. Her career as a writer also gives her a perfectly reasonable excuse to indulge in her stationery addiction. That alone is enough to keep her grinning every day!

      Ally would love you to visit her at her website www.allyblake.com

       Ally Blake also writes for Modern Heat™!

       Recent books by the same author:

      FALLING FOR THE REBEL HEIR

       (Romance)

      THE MAGNATE’S INDECENT PROPOSAL

       (Modern Heat™)

       Dear Reader

      Locations play a huge part in my stories, and for that I only have my home town of Melbourne to blame. Take this story, for example…

      On the very day I planned to sit down and decide what my next book would be about I received an invitation to attend an art auction in which a friend of mine had a painting listed. It sounded like too much fun to pass up, and I wasn’t disappointed. The gallery was slick and glossy, the inhabitants even more so. The prices on the artworks took my breath away. And the hushed chatter over pink champagne and catalogues created enough energy to give a girl serious goose-bumps. Within five minutes there was no doubt where I would be setting my next book: Melbourne’s High Street, Armadale.

      High Street is a long thoroughfare, bordered by mature trees light on delicate foliage, cluttered by four-wheel drives, imported luxury cars and clattering trams, and famous for its run of graceful antiques shops and auction houses.

      My darling hero, Mitch Hanover, grew from this sophisticated location without my breaking a sweat. All I had to do was throw in Veronica Bing, a flashy, exuberant, rebellious heroine, who would make the elegant people of Armadale and my Mitch stand up and take notice. My beautiful Melbourne did the rest.

      If you can, do visit her one day. If you can’t, I only hope my books make you feel as though you have.

       Ally

      www.allyblake.com

      HIRED: THE BOSS’S BRIDE

      BY

      ALLY BLAKE

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      I wholeheartedly dedicate this tome to

      Mark, Leon, Beverley, Susan, Leith, Dennis and Alli,

      without whom my gorgeous little girl

      might never have brightened my world.

      CHAPTER ONE

      WHEN Veronica Bing was a little girl, her grand plan in life was to have blue eyes and blonde hair.

      Long blonde hair down to her waist and the kind of baby-blue eyes that made a girl able to get away with anything. And to be a fairy princess with wings. And braces on her teeth and divorced parents as all the kids at school had them. Oh, and she’d wanted a hot-pink car.

      Not too much to ask, right?

      Instead, her hair had grown thick, wavy and dark, and after six months in her late teens, when she’d fulfilled her lifelong dream of being blonde, she’d realised she’d looked like a fruitcake and gone back to her natural brunette. Alas her eyes had also remained muddy brown from shortly after she was born and she’d had to learn to find other ways to get what she wanted.

      The wings had never appeared. In fact, she’d soon discovered she was allergic to flying—if nausea, sweating palms and shortness of breath could be classed as signs of an allergy. Funnily enough mangoes, apricots and tall, dark handsome men who saw her as the answer to all their connubial dreams produced the same symptoms. Hence the fact that she as yet remained prince-free, making the princess dream also null and void.

      Her teeth had grown spectacularly well, unfortunately without help of braces. And as she’d been a happy accident, a late and only child of Don and Phyllis Bing who’d been about to hit their fifties at the time she was born and by that stage had been married thirty years already, her parents had never divorced. Instead her father had died of a heart attack while Veronica was still in high school and her mother had taken her time passing away from a broken heart. Though the medicos had claimed it was Alzheimer’s, Veronica had left university to care for her mum and thus knew better.

      And as to the hot-pink car? Well, one out of seven wasn’t bad!

      Cruising the backstreets of inner-east Melbourne in her very hot, very pink, very expensive-to-maintain Corvette, Veronica slipped down a gear, slowed, pushed her sunglasses onto her forehead, and made sure she was in the right place before curving neatly and noisily onto High Street, Armadale.

      Her hair flapped about her ears as she trundled at a snail’s pace behind a tram. Together they passed historic shopfronts, antique stores, upmarket boutiques and art galleries nestled comfortably next to one another along the elegant oak-lined street. Four-wheel drives lined up nose to tail with German-made luxury cars and the people stepping in and out of them all looked as if they’d just come from the salon via a shopping trip in Milan.

      ‘You’re not on the Gold Coast any more, Ms Bing,’ Veronica said out loud, before sliding her sunglasses back into place.

      The tram creaked to a stop, and so did her Corvette. Veronica let her head fall against the headrest and looked up into the bright blue sky. A web of tram cables glittered over her head and she had to blink against the bright sunlight flickering through the wide gaps.

      She sniffed deep, letting the sights and sounds of Melbourne, the town in which she’d been born, come back to her after a good six years away. She wondered how it would treat her return: with wide-open arms, or with a cliquish turn of its graceful head?

      She hoped the former because the job she was in town to interview for—in-house auctioneer for an established and esteemed art gallery—sounded just perfect. It was temporary, it was immediate and it meant working with a close friend she hadn’t seen in yonks. And super especially it was located at the other end of the country from her last job. And thus her last boss.

      Thoughts of her dash from Queensland with nothing but a suitcase and her car and the exultant resignation message