The Playboy Boss's Chosen Bride. Emma Darcy

that you know is going to explode into action when its fuse is lit.’

      His eyes were dancing with excitement at the prospect of her losing her cool and blowing up. Merlina was sizzling inside but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a steaming reply. That would mean he’d won his point. She grimly maintained her dignity and he finally sighed his surrender to her brick wall defence.

      ‘Right! To get back to my grandfather…’

      Ah, yes, Merlina thought, still glowering. The champagne cork-popping Byron Devila was notorious for his numerous marriages, just about rivalling King Henry the Eighth on that score. Jake probably took after him in the playboy stakes. The only difference was his grandfather married his playthings. Probably a generational thing. It wouldn’t have been so socially acceptable to have a string of temporary bed-partners in the years of his prime.

      ‘…I want you to organise a cake.’

      ‘A cake,’ she repeated, tearing her smouldering gaze from the twinkling mischief in his and assiduously writing the word in her notebook.

      ‘A very special cake. Eight tiers should do it,’ he went on. ‘One for each decade of his life.’

      Merlina wrote 8 tiers. She thought it a bit excessive, but…hers not to reason why, hers but to do or die!

      ‘And I want eighty candles spread around the edge of the tiers.’

      ‘That’s going to make it hard for him to blow them all out,’ she remarked.

      ‘You’d be surprised how hale and hearty my grandfather is,’ came the bland reply.

      She flicked a derisive glance at him. ‘Do you really want to give his lungs such a demanding workout on his birthday?’

      He smiled. ‘Good of you to care about him, Mel, but I didn’t mean for the candles to be real.’

      ‘Just decorative candles? They’re not to be lit?’

      ‘Decorative, yes. Very decorative.’

      She rolled her eyes and wrote decorative only.

      ‘They won’t be real, any more than the cake will be real,’ Jake said helpfully.

      It didn’t help. Merlina felt her mind moving towards meltdown. Her hand tightened its grip on the solid reality of her pen and very slowly she lifted her gaze from the notebook on her knee, intent on staring her tormentor down until he behaved himself as a proper boss should. ‘Please explain,’ she said in a dead-pan voice.

      He laughed, setting off fireworks in her head—fizzy Roman candles and rockets that zoomed up and exploded.

      She hated him, hated him, hated him.

      Most of all, she hated how deeply he affected her.

      Every cell in her body was jangling with awareness of him, the rippling joy in his laughter and the brilliant vivacity it brought to his all too handsome face.

      I’m possessed by the devil, she thought, and somehow, somehow, I have to expunge him from my consciousness and be totally free of him.

      ‘I’m afraid a call to Cakes for Special Occasions won’t do it, Mel,’ he drawled, having finally sobered up enough to speak.

      She remained silent, waiting for appropriate instructions.

      ‘You’ll have to scout around, but I’m guessing that stage prop people could supply what I want.’

      A fabricated cake, not a real one.

      She refocussed her scattered mind and asked, ‘What height do you have in mind and how wide should the bottom tier be?’

      ‘I think six feet high should do it. And the top tier should be wide enough for a woman to emerge from the top of it.’

      A woman!

      ‘The tiers should graduate down to complement that width and provide steps for the woman to descend.’

      He wanted a woman coming out of the cake!

      ‘Inside, there should be some mechanism that opens the lid of the cake and slowly lifts the woman up to her full height above the top tier. Like a mini elevator.’

      No doubt a woman in spangles and a G-string!

      ‘And the cake should be on rollers so it can be wheeled out to my grandfather at the optimum moment.’

      A gift of a woman to his playboy Pop!

      ‘You’re not writing any of this down, Mel,’ he chided.

      ‘It’s being imprinted on my brain,’ she answered truthfully.

      ‘As long as you get it right.’

      ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get it right.’

      ‘Okay! Now the woman…’

      Oh, yes, having unwrapped the decorative cake, what precisely was to emerge on cue?

      ‘She has to be a blonde.’

      Of course. Jake had obviously inherited his taste in blondes from his grandfather.

      He grinned at her. ‘And curvy like you, Mel. A Marilyn Monroe type.’

      A treacherous thrill ran through her entire body. Jake was comparing her to the number one sex goddess of the movie world.

      ‘Pop doesn’t like his women skinny,’ he went on, bursting her bubble.

      Jake did like his women skinny. No doubt about that. Every one he took up with was pencil-thin. She had no chance at all of ever being taken up by him. Only her family thought she was skinny. Besides, she obviously had Mel Gibson’s dangerous edge—Lethal Weapon—which wasn’t sexy to a man who liked his women easy come, easy go, no complications.

      ‘You should be able to hire one from the models who do photo shoots for Playboy-type magazines,’ Jake suggested.

      Merlina was goaded into speaking out. ‘You realise this cake act is very old-hat stuff. And male chauvinism at its worst.’

      ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed, then waved his hand in an appeal for understanding. ‘My grandfather still believes in marriage. Can you believe it?’ He shook his head. ‘Very old-hat. He’ll love this. It’s a scene from his favourite movie, made in 1966.’

      She arched her eyebrows, aiming to get a hit at him. ‘You seem to have movies on the brain this morning.’

      ‘They mirror life,’ he flipped back at her.

      ‘Right!’ Her teeth snapped. She ground them open enough to ask, ‘What is the title of this movie? If I can find it in a video shop, I’ll watch it in order to know exactly what you’re describing.’

      ‘It’s called How to Murder Your Wife, starring Jack Lemmon and Virna Lisi.’

      ‘I can understand why it’s your grandfather’s favourite movie,’ she remarked with silky savagery. ‘He’s had seven wives so far, hasn’t he?’

      ‘Divorce from his seventh is about to come through,’ Jake confirmed.

      And how many playmates are you up to? Seventy-seven?

      The problem was, she’d probably become the seventy-eighth if he focused that kind of interest on her. But he wouldn’t. She knew he wasn’t going to. Ever. Yet sometimes when he looked her over…

      ‘There’s no real murder in it,’ Jake informed her. ‘It’s a comedy. Jake Lemmon is at a bachelor party and the cake is wheeled in. Virna Lisa pops out of it, their eyes meet, and choong!’ He raised his arms in mock despair. ‘It’s the end of his swinging bachelor life.’

      What she needed was some choong-power over Jake Devila. Before she rode off into the sunset of employment elsewhere, she would really like to sock it to him. Just once. Ending his swinging bachelor life was probably in the realm