Her Enemy With Benefits. Nicola Marsh

and she was ready to face him.

      This was how she’d envisaged their first meeting after a decade: with her power-dressed, strutting into his office, demonstrating her control and confidence and savoir-faire.

      Considering he’d seen her in her oldest yoga pants and a crop top yesterday she’d kinda lost her advantage.

      Then she remembered the look in his eyes when he’d first seen her, as if he’d wanted to gobble her up and come back for main and dessert…Maybe she still held the upper hand after all.

      Not that she’d stoop so low as to use her sexuality to seal a business deal, but knowing the great and powerful Patrick found her attractive made her walk that little bit taller.

      ‘Wish me luck,’ she said, snatching up her bag and smoothing her hair one last time.

      Karma gave a lazy swish of his tail. No problem. When she stalked into Patrick’s office shortly armed with a presentation to wow him, she’d have all the good karma she needed.

      She’d make this Fashion Week deal happen.

      Let him try to stop her.

      ‘The pieces are good. Really good.’

      The fact that Sapphire sat close to Patrick on his office sofa, her stockinged leg within tantalising touching distance, was not so good.

      How was a guy supposed to concentrate?

      The moment Sapphire had strolled into his office, looking as if she’d stepped off the pages of a fashion mag, he’d been befuddled.

      There was nothing revealing in her outfit but the cut of the fabric and the way she wore it made him think of the screen sirens of old. Beautiful, curvaceous women who were proud of their bodies and weren’t afraid to flaunt them in understated elegance.

      And stockings…He loved them—the sheerer the better. None of those thick opaques for him. The way they added a sheen to Sapphire’s legs, highlighting their shape…and the possibility that she might be wearing suspenders to hold them up…

      Another thing he’d discovered since she’d arrived: hard-ons were distracting and guaranteed to scuttle a business meeting.

      His plans to take the Melbourne fashion scene by storm would be derailed before he’d begun if he started thinking with the wrong head.

      ‘These pieces are some of Ruby’s best work, but she’s willing to design whatever you want—depending on the concept you come up with.’

      Her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm and he wondered if they darkened when she was aroused.

      Hell. Still thinking with the wrong head.

      ‘The show’s next month. Sure you can deliver?’

      He hated how abrupt he sounded, but he needed to refocus and stifle the urge to readjust his pants.

      ‘Definitely. We’ll work nights, do whatever it takes.’

      ‘You want to be on the runway alongside Fourde that badly?’

      A flicker of fear shimmered in her defiant gaze before she blinked, leaving him wondering if he’d imagined it.

      ‘Yeah, I want Seaborns to be featured with your designs. I’m a savvy businesswoman and, as you know from the suitors bashing down your door, any jeweller in this city would give their last diamond tennis bracelet to accessorise your clothes.’

      He admired her honesty. But she was right. He’d had back-to-back meetings all day in which he’d been systematically wooed and impressed by the calibre of jewellers in Melbourne.

      The city might not have the same joie-de-vivre as Paris but it had certainly come a long way since he’d lived here.

      The fashion scene thrived, with worldwide designers setting up shop, which was the only reason his folks had deemed it prudent to launch a branch of Fourde Fashion here.

      With Jerome, his older brother, heading Milan, and his younger sister Phoebe heading New York, he’d been the only one left to thrust into a makeshift CEO position.

      Not that he was complaining. He’d been desperate to prove he could do this. The disaster of his first campaign had seen to that.

      He knew they thought he was only a figurehead, a puppet whose strings they could yank at will. They’d even installed Serge, the manager of Fourde’s flagship store near the Champs-Élysées, alongside him.

      Apparently Serge ‘had the expertise’ and was ‘worth his weight in gold’ despite the fact he and Serge, his best mate, had cut a path through Paris, Monte Carlo, Nice, Barcelona and most of the other cities in Europe together, living the high life, partying their way through each country.

      He’d done it in an attempt to shrug off the taint of his first showing, wanting to be known for something other than his notorious failure.

      It had worked too. His socialising antics had been diligently reported and the press had soon forgotten the savaging he’d received at their hands following a mistake that had cost Fourde Fashion megabucks.

      He’d eventually returned to the company in different roles, learning what he could without being given any real responsibility.

      It had suited him. Given him time to re-evaluate personally what had gone wrong. But no matter how many times he tried to analyse it, no matter how many angles he considered, it all came back to one thing: he’d tried to take an established brand and create something new that wouldn’t fit.

      His parents had given him free rein for his first showing, wanting to see what he came up with, and he’d been determined to show them what he could do.

      Correction: he’d wanted to wow them. He hadn’t had their attention in years—they’d moved to France for their precious business when he was still a teenager, had barely acknowledged their late-life ‘mistake’ for years before that—and he’d wanted to make a major impression.

      He’d done that all right. For all the wrong reasons.

      He’d swapped the Forde designs for ones he’d planned as part of a small group of designers. A catastrophic move that had cost the company a small fortune and pretty much sealed his career where his parents were concerned.

      He’d been a fool to think Fourde Fashion was ready for cutting edge contemporary, and the fact his folks had distanced themselves from him—‘to protect the company,’ apparently—still burned after all this time.

      It shouldn’t have come as any great surprise. They’d been emotionally distant for as long as he could remember. Not from any deliberate cruelty but for the simple fact that their business came first. Always.

      Birthdays and Christmases were spent having snatched lunches and the obligatory presents before they headed back to the office. Phoebe and Jerome were used to fending for themselves and his parents had expected him to do the same despite their fourteen-year age-gap.

      He’d been the baby they’d never expected to have in their mid-forties. He got it. He’d grown used to their absence early on.

      But when he’d finally joined the fold and wanted them to sit up and take notice of his talents, of him, it had been a flop.

      Their continued lack of appreciation of his efforts, their distrust of his talents, all stemmed from his first failure, and despite how hard he’d worked since they couldn’t forget it.

      Well, the success of Melbourne Fashion Week would make them forget.

      He’d make sure of it.

      ‘What can you offer me that the other jewellers can’t?’

      Her eyes widened imperceptibly before her gaze dipped momentarily to his lips, and for one crazy, irrational second he wished she’d make an offer that had nothing to do with business.

      ‘One hundred percent commitment.’ She tilted her