The Dare Collection September 2019. Stefanie London

       CHAPTER ONE

       Ellie

      I WIPED MY palms surreptitiously down my black trousers and adjusted my black suit jacket, briefly touching my head to make sure the chauffeur’s cap was in place. Mentally, I went over the address the chauffeur company had given me: The Gustave Eiffel Suite of the Shangri-La, Paris.

      Yep. I was in the right place.

      I took a deep breath.

      Okay, here went nothing.

      It had taken me a month of careful planning to get to this point—including relocating from Australia to England—but now I was here I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip through my fingers.

      I had two days to convince one of the UK’s most difficult billionaires to give my father more time before withdrawing the venture capital his firm had invested in our family’s company. It was capital we desperately needed in order to stay solvent. And it was not going to be easy.

      Ash Evans, billionaire property developer, investor and slave driver, was as famous for his ruthlessness as he was for his temper, not to mention his unapologetic pride in the fact that he came from a poor background.

      He was also notorious for never forgiving a debt.

      Still, I liked a challenge and, apart from anything else, this was for Dad’s sake and for Australis, our super car company, and that was more important than any qualms I had about confronting some self-important rich guy.

      Not that I had qualms. I was a Little, and Littles were tough. We could get through anything. The key was to put your head down, not make a fuss, and keep going.

      Keeping my fuss-making to a minimum, I gave my jacket another tweak then raised my hand and knocked sharply on the suite door.

      There was no response.

      There was also no one around, which was unusual.

      I’d been driving for the rich and famous for a couple of years now—a second job to supplement my position as a designer at Australis because I liked driving—and I knew they tended to be always surrounded by people. Assistants, bodyguards and all kinds of hangers-on.

      Apparently not Mr Evans.

      But then, given what I knew about him from the research I’d done, that wasn’t completely unexpected.

      He was a self-made man who’d grown up in one of London’s most notorious council estates and who’d risen to the top through a combination of ruthlessness, hard-headed business sense and a fight-to-the-death attitude that people whispered had come from his days as a street fighter.

      A scary dude by all accounts.

      Took a lot to scare me, though—I had four brothers after all—and I was prepared to do what I had to do in order to keep the company solvent. Dad was counting on me since he didn’t want my brothers to know the true state of the company finances, and I was very conscious of the fact that I didn’t want to let him down.

      Mine was a ropey plan, but it was the best I could come up with: sign myself on with the chauffeur company that Mr Evans used and hope that I would be assigned to him. It had taken a month for that to happen, but a combination of luck and the fact that he was enough of a prick that no one wanted to drive for him had worked in my favour and I’d been given the assignment of driving him in Paris for two days.

      It was a sneaky move, but I’d run out of options, not to mention patience. I’d tried all the usual ways to get a meeting with him to talk about the investment face-to-face, but apparently that was impossible and all I’d managed to score were a couple of interviews with some minor flunkey who hadn’t given a shit about either me or my dad.

      Driving for him was the only way I could think of to meet with him in person, to convince him somehow to give us more time before withdrawing his money, because, with the current state of Australis’s finances, we would go under the moment he withdrew.

       Yeah, and you know whose fault that is.

      I ignored that thought and glared at the shut door instead, raising my hand to knock again.

      It was suddenly jerked open.

      A man stood on the threshold, the height and breadth of him filling the entire doorway.

      I blinked, getting a confused impression of an expanse of bare skin and hard-cut muscle. Then a pair of fierce blue eyes met mine and all the air in my lungs mysteriously vanished.

      He stared at me suspiciously for a second and it occurred to me that every single aspect of me had just been observed, catalogued and filed away for future reference.

      Then, just as suddenly as he’d opened the door, the man turned and strolled back into the suite, talking to someone on his phone as he went, his voice a deep, gritty rumble. He appeared to be wearing only a pair of worn blue jeans that sat low on his lean hips, leaving his massively muscled shoulders and back bare. A Chinese dragon had been inked into the smooth olive skin, the colours all brilliant blues, reds and greens.

      I blinked again, staring, oddly shaken though I had no idea why. Because it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen a shirtless man before. I’d also seen a fair number of tattoos in my time—my brothers all had them, plus I was involved in the car industry where it was practically de rigueur. Still, I hadn’t seen anything quite as beautiful as that one.

      I swallowed, for a second unsure whether to follow him or wait. But since I wasn’t the waiting type I stepped into the suite, shutting the door behind me as I followed him into the lounge area.

      He stood with his back to me, still talking on his phone and so I took a moment to study him.

      Okay, so this was the scary Ash Evans.

      I’d seen pictures of him—who hadn’t? He was built like a heavyweight boxer with the height of a basketball player, his face scarred all to hell from an encounter with the wrong end of a knife back when he’d been a teenager. He was an absolute beast of a man—at least according to one gushing female journalist who’d been granted the rare privilege of an interview and had obviously been bowled over by him.

      I’d scoffed at all the over-the-top language in the article—honestly, the way some women got when it came to men, I couldn’t understand it. But being in his presence now, I could see what she was talking about.

      Even though he had his back to me, he stood in the middle of the lavishly appointed room as if he owned it. No, more as if he owned all of Paris. A fierce kind of energy radiated from him, kinetic and masculine and utterly compelling.

      I knew what it was. Two of my brothers were race car drivers and they both had it in spades: pure male confidence.

      Luckily, I’d had plenty of practice in dealing with it and my solution was simply to be as confident and in-your-face as they were.

      I waited patiently for Mr Evans to wrap up his conversation, staring at his beautiful Chinese tattoo until finally he’d finished and turned to face me.

      Intense blue eyes met mine and my breath caught for the second time that day.

      The pictures of him were one thing, but the reality was a whole different ball game. His features were blunt, but roughly handsome and somehow made even more compelling by the famous scars that bisected them. One scar narrowly missed his right eye, while another caught one end of his mouth and twisted it, making it look as if he was sneering. A third highlighted his hard, square-cut jaw. But it was those eyes that really dominated his rough-hewn face. They were so blue, electric almost, reminding me weirdly of lightning in a thunderstorm.

       Hot.

      The thought came out of nowhere, hitting me like a gut punch. Because he was, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even noticed a guy in that way.