Reluctant Mistress
Playing With Fire… Robert Buchanan was tough and ruthless - a publishing magnate extraordinaire. He was also an international playboy, and a formidably charismatic man… and he was Liza's new boss! Liza wasn't interested in a no-strings-attached affair.But local flooding had left her trapped in Robert's country hom, and, as the water continued to rise, she felt her temperature rise with it! Liza knew it was only a question of time before passion would overwhelm them… .
Читать Reluctant Mistress онлайн беплатно
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
ROBERT BUCHANAN was everything she had expected him to be. Cool, aloof and as arrogant as the media proclaimed.
Liza observed him through the glass panel of her office, her green eyes calculating every move he made as he toured the editorial offices with John Standish, the editor of Leisure Days magazine.
Standish was sweating. Buchanan the cause. With a deep sigh Liza turned away from the sickening scene of the staff flapping and trying to court favour with the new owner, the all-powerful Buchanan, whose reputation for pulping magazines like theirs into sawdust went before him like a flagship of destruction.
They were all scared, including Liza. As advertising director she knew she had nothing to fear as far as her work was concerned, but she had reluctantly to admit that lately it had become more and more difficult persuading advertisers to take space in the magazine. She had succeeded because she was skilled at her job, but how long would it last with Standish taking such an outdated stand on the editorial side? And what were Robert Buchanan’s plans for their future? He was fast becoming Europe’s top publisher, scooping up ailing periodicals and mutating them till they became clones. All the same, just in a different language.
‘Whose head will be the first to roll?’ Liza’s assistant Julia muttered ruefully from her desk.
Unconciously rubbing her neck, Liza stared bleakly out of the window. ‘Whose indeed?’ was all she could offer in consolation.
‘Do you believe all they say about him in the papers?’ Julia asked, her bright eyes looking decidedly interested.
Liza turned to her and smiled, knowing the tangent her man-mad assistant’s mind was veering off at. ‘Well, there’s no smoke without fire, Julia,’ she teased. ‘Flash your eyes at him the way you do at most men and you just might save your job.’
With a snort Julia tapped away at her computer. ‘Would that it were that easy. It’s always redheads with him, isn’t it? Perhaps I should whisk to the hairdresser’s lunchtime and swap my mouse-brown mop for Titian gold like yours.’
‘Are you implying mine comes from a bottle?’
‘Of course not!’ Julia laughed. ‘But seriously, he’s always being photographed with some gorgeous redhead. You’d better watch out, Liza...’ She stopped in mid-sentence as the door opened and the Buchanan entourage stepped into Liza’s office.
Julia stumbled to her feet, flushed, and pulled at her sweater nervously. Liza stood where she was, coldly unemotional, her hair brightened to flame by the light from the window behind her. If she had consciously stage-managed her impact on Robert Buchanan she couldn’t have done it more successfully. His dark penetrating eyes devoured her from head to toe, and came to rest on the aureole of marmalade frizz that cascaded around her shoulders.
It was easy to give Robert Buchanan a wide smile of welcome, easy to lift her hand and hold it out to him as John stammered out his introductions. Handsome he might be, powerful in publishing he undoubtedly was, but he wasn’t a gift from the gods as most women thought. He was a man like any other: ruthless, cold, a taker, just like another she knew.
He even resembled her former lover. He had the same jet hair as Graham, the same tall muscular build. They shared the same characteristics too, if all the papers said about the publishing giant was true: cold, calculating and a heartbreaker where women were concerned. But, whereas Robert Buchanan had maintained his bachelor existence, Graham had fallen prey—to her own sister of all people. They’d been married a year now, a year in which the pain of betrayal was still edged with a sharpness that cut into Liza’s very soul at the thought of the two of them, cosily cocooned in their Welsh cottage. Yvonne happily baking and housekeeping while Graham’s literary prowess prospered as it never had all the two years they had been lovers.
‘So, you are Liza Kay, without whose advertising sales skill this dreary magazine would have bitten the dust months ago.’
His brutal words, so softly, yet deeply, delivered with the faintest of a Scots burr, stunned everyone in the room. There was a long silence, followed by the uneasy shuffling of feet. Poor John looked waxy and gaunt. Liza held her smile with all the loyalty to John she could muster.
‘If that was a compliment, Mr Buchanan, I relinquish it on the grounds of bad taste.’ She withdrew her hand from his, yet maintained her sweet smile.
He raised a dark brow, that was all, turned from her, and left the office, his minions following, flustered and apologetic.
To Liza’s surprise she experienced a tremor through her body, a peculiar frisson she couldn’t explain away. Slumping down on to her chair, she murmured, ‘That was dumb, really dumb!’
‘You can say that again!’ Julia breathed with a mixture of admiration and awe. ‘You’ll be the first to go.’
