The Love List
Falling in love is just not on Nora King’s To Do List…Neither is accidentally super-gluing her shoe to her hand right before the biggest presentation of her life!With all the hard work she’d put into securing the family business after her father’s death, Nora has no choice but to accept help from a knight in shining armour.Disaster relief worker Ethan Love is still haunted by his last deployment, and desperate for distraction. He’s in town to ask Nora for a major favour, and swooping in to save her presentation is a sure way to get her on side.As Ethan sticks around and helps Nora through her grief, her barriers tumble down…but will she dare to swap her To Do lists for a How to Fall in Love list?
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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2014
Copyright © Eve Devon 2014
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Eve Devon asserts the moral right
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available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
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Ebook Edition © October 2014
ISBN: 9780007558469
Version 2014-09-11
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For Rachel—my fellow Chiari ZipperHead Club member, because you understand not only what it is to be creative, but to be courageous too.
Contents
‘What the..?’ Nora King strung together a stream of amazingly coherent swear words for so early in the morning as she flapped her hand around in a wide circle, trying in vain to dislodge the shoe she had just managed to superglue to her hand. This was so not happening.
‘Okay. It’s okay. Breathe,’ she instructed with an edge of panic when it became apparent she was going to do herself a serious injury if she continued to wang her arm about so insanely.
She counted to ten.
Then, calmly and without any sense of drama, lest the shoe somehow suspected she was going to try and wrench it free again, she placed her free hand on top of the harbinger of doom and pulled. Gently at first, then harder, as tears of frustration pooled at the outer rims of her eyes.
‘Damn it, budge, why don’t you?’ Desperate, she glanced around the private bathroom that connected to her office, looking for something to prise it off with. This was what she got for trying to be clever and fix her beloved shoes; the ones with the magical confidence-boosting properties, on the morning of her eight a.m. breakfast meeting with Eleanor Moorfield—designer of the shoe now attached to her hand—instead of the night before, where it had been clearly scheduled on her To Do list. But last night, after getting in late from a day of meetings, followed by an uncomfortable visit with her sister, Sephy, she had bypassed the shoe-fixing in favour of a large glass of red and some sleep.
‘A-hah,’ she exclaimed in a light-bulb moment. One-handed she upended the contents of her bag and rummaged for a nail file. Locating one and holding it aloft triumphantly, she smiled at her genius in the mirror, before trying to slide the file between the sole of the stiletto and the palm of her hand.
No deal.
A trickle of hysteria bubbled its way to the surface.
It was now one hour and fifteen minutes before she was due to deliver the pitch of her life. She’d been working on the presentation for six weeks. Six weeks of silly hours. Six weeks of devising, developing, practising and polishing. She had it on super-secret authority that Eleanor Moorfield, ex-model turned award-winning shoe designer, was looking to relocate her headquarters from Italy back to England. The Moorfield brand was right up there with Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, and all the other ‘have to have’ shoes women salivated over. Securing a contract to provide business premises for the Moorfield headquarters, shop units and manufacturing set-up would be a real coup for the King Property Corporation. Not to mention prove to herself that she hadn’t lost her touch. That she still had what it took to get out there and get the business in.
On her own. Without help.
KPC had been, and always would be, her life.
By the time her father had retired and she’d stepped up as CEO, KPC had over three hundred commercial buildings it owned and leased out and Nora’s first challenge had been to secure the company’s future against an economic downturn. Confidence had come from her passion for KPC, her unwavering dedication, and the knowledge that she could always get guidance from her father if needed.
But when her father suffered a major health crisis she’d been forced to approach her brother Jared in New York, and persuade him to return to the family he hadn’t been part of for ten years and the company he had declined to run—the company she loved, for help.
