Access All Areas: HarperImpulse Contemporary Fiction
Sexy, addictive and just pure fun, don’t miss the next instalment in the Do Not Disturb series!After losing her elderly parents, portrait photographer Anna will do anything to avoid losing the family home – the only thing she has left of her perfect childhood.When a friend who works at the exclusive boutique hotel, The Lavington, provides a hot tip – an A list film star is staying there with her rumored toyboy lover – Anna comes up with a plan. A photo of them together could be the answer to all Anna’s money problems.Unfortunately, she’s the worst paparazzi photographer on the planet and Joe, the hotel’s new head of security, back in England after globetrotting as bodyguard to the stars, isn’t about to allow a picture on his watch. No matter how cute the photographer might be…
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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2015
Copyright © Charlotte Phillips 2015
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Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780008119379
Version 2015-04-30
In memory of my fantastic Dad. I love and miss you.
Anna Clark tried for the third time to squeeze her fingernails under the stupid sash window of room 214 of Londonâs Lavington Hotel, and prise it open. With each failed attempt, panic had increased its attempt to throttle her and panic was the last thing you needed when you were two floors up and on the wrong side of the sodding window.
What she needed now was a cool head. And possibly nail extensions, not that sheâd ever so much as crossed the threshold of a beauty salon. Long nails might be great for opening ridiculous sash windows that shut by themselves, but when you earned a living as a photographer, long nails were the last thing you needed. Not that it was earning her anywhere near a living at the moment, which was actually the whole point of her being here.
It had all sounded so easy two days ago back in the sunny little kitchen at home. Exclusively her home now since her father had died, nearly six months to the day after her mother. Sheâd only just emerged from the crushing grief and shock, taking comfort in holding on to what remnants of family life she had left, to find it wouldnât be her home for much longer if she didnât find a swift and sizeable cash injection.
Her old school friend Lucy had offered some straight talking, mainly because she couldnât offer money.
âIâd love to help,â she said on the phone, âbut they pay peanuts at the hotel and Iâm still having no luck with auditions.â
Lucy liked to describe herself as a jobbing actress who filled in the gaps by working as a waitress at the Lavington. Lately it was more the other way round. Her last acting job had been seven months ago, an advert for crisps which had required her to say the line âLove That Crunch.â Hollywood was an elusive animal.
âItâs fine. Iâve got lots more people I can ask,â Anna had lied. âI just need to find enough to buy me some extra time with the bank. Then maybe I can get a second job, get things back under controlâ¦â
Selling her soul was beginning to sound appealing. Her photography work had petered out somewhat these last months and it would take time to build her client base back up. Time she didnât have. Sheâd been so preoccupied with her fatherâs failing health that all the day-to-day stuff, including work, had fallen by the wayside. Little had she known the mess she was already in.
The bank hovered over her like a large and very ugly vulture, ready to swoop in and whip away the only thing that she had left of her family, and all because her father had remortgaged the house to buoy them up through her motherâs illness two years earlier. Of course heâd expected to have years left in him to work and pay the loan off. He hadnât even mentioned it to Anna until the very end and she only discovered the full extent of the mess when she finally steeled herself to sort through her fatherâs papers after heâd gone. By then the repayments had quietly lapsed for months. Brown envelopes had been stuffed away as he refused to accept that he wouldnât beat the illness and turn things around. No one could have guessed that heâd follow his wife so quickly to the grave, leaving Anna alone.
Well, not alone exactly. She had the bank for company.
