Lucy Ellis - Pride After Her Fall

‘We’ve got a lot in common.’ He settled back, angled in his chair, all shoulders and lean, muscular grace. ‘I like to compete. You’re a serious trophy.’

‘Pardon me?’

He gave her a lazy once over she should have found insulting after the ‘trophy’ description, instead she felt it like a direct hit to her sleeping libido.

‘You’re smart and seriously sexy and I haven’t been bored since I sat down with you. Like I said, you’re a serious trophy.’

Lorelei inhaled sharply.

She knew it, this was how some men saw an attractive woman, she had just never met a man who had the nerve to say it to her in so many words.

‘Nash, a trophy is an inanimate object you sit on a shelf.’

‘A trophy can be anything you want to win,’ he countered, sitting forward and Lorelei had to remind herself not to edge back. He emanated thumping male entitlement. ‘I don’t get in the race, Lorelei, unless I’m confident of the outcome.’

For a breathless moment she considered asking him exactly how confident he was of her? But deep down she feared the answer.

‘How am I doing so far?’

Lorelei paused long enough to take another sip of her drink.

‘Oh, I think you’re in the race.’

LUCY ELLIShas four loves in life: books, expensive lingerie, vintage films and big, gorgeous men who have to duck going through doorways. Weaving aspects of them into her fiction is the best part of being a romance writer. Lucy lives in a small cottage in the foothills outside Melbourne.

Recent titles by the same author:

THE MAN SHE SHOULDN’T CRAVE

UNTOUCHED BY HIS DIAMONDS

INNOCENT IN THE IVORY TOWER

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Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

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For Bridie

NASH as a rule didn’t court publicity, so meeting with a publicist went against the grain. But this was for a charity event and he couldn’t very well say no.

‘I’ll meet her at the American Bar in the Hotel de Paris.’

He checked his watch as he approached his low slung Bugatti Veyron.

‘I’ll be with Demarche until one. I can give her a couple of minutes in the bar. I’ll try to make it, but she may have to cool her heels.’

It was one of the few perks of fame. People would wait. He hooked the door of the Veyron and idled for a moment, looking out over the calm Mediterranean water.

Cullinan was talking about seating.

‘No, mate, don’t book a table. This is a five-minute job. Nobody will be sitting down.’

Blue’s management team was headed up by John Cullinan, a savvy Irishman Nash had used in his early racing career when he was thrust onto the world stage. John had protected him from the worst of the media for over a decade and he trusted him to deal fairly with the public and handle the professionals.

He’d need him in the coming weeks. There was already intense speculation about his future. He hadn’t said a word during the running of the Grand Prix here in Monaco in May, but somehow just his presence trackside with current Eagle heavyweight Antonio Abruzzi had sent the media into a frenzy. Not that it took much. Meat in the water and the piranhas swarmed. That was why this meeting with the construction firm Eagle was taking place in the privacy of a hotel room and security barracudas on both sides had elaborate lock-down procedures in place.

He ended the call and jumped into the Veyron, keen to get out of town.

The flip of a wrist and he had the engine purring. His deep-set blue-grey eyes, which one female sports commentator had called ‘lethal blue’ as if they not only needed colour coding but branding, assessed the traffic and he pulled away from outside the corporate offices of the business that had been his heart and soul for five years.

He had just tied up a deal with Swiss-based car manufacturer Avedon to produce Blue 22, and whilst every vehicle design was a rush this was the car he’d first conceptualised back in his racing days, when nobody would have taken him seriously if he’d spilled his guts on his future plans.

Fortunately he’d never been overly chatty. Being raised by a mean drunk who’d seen a kid’s prattle as an excuse to deal out backhanders had bred in him the habit of silence. To the public he was notoriously impenetrable. ‘Self-contained,’ one journalist reported. ‘A cold sonafabitch,’ countered a disenchanted former lover.

But, however else he was perceived, the world took him seriously nowadays even when they weren’t intrusively curious. At thirty-four, he’d survived as a professional in one of the most dangerous sports in the world for almost a decade before retiring in a blaze of glory—and unlike so many sports pros he’d parlayed his expertise and a passionate love of design into a second career.

An extremely successful second career.

One that overshadowed whatever fame he’d had as a driver—which had been his intention. He could command any price for his work and right now he was in demand—at the top of an elite field of specialists.

Yet he was restless, there was no denying that, and several times in the last year he’d caught himself asking the fateful question: What next?

But he knew the answer to that question. It was why the Eagle head honchos had flown in last night.

Yeah, he wanted back in the game, but this time on his own terms. His twenties had gone past in a rush of track groupies and speed as he’d raced against the world’s best and outraced his own demons. He’d known when it was time to stop. He also knew this time it would be different. He wasn’t a boy any more. His feelings about racing had undergone a change. He had nothing to prove.

The road cleared. He changed gear and took off up the hill.

He had a date this morning up on the Point, with a genuine glamour-girl car who had it all over this newer model he was driving, and even the stumbling block of dealing with meetings all afternoon couldn’t dull the edge of what promised to be a very nice find. She was reported to be a sweet little number, with curves aplenty, an all-original and he was finally going to see what the fuss was about.

She’d only recently come on the market, and Nash knew he’d have to move quickly, but he didn’t buy without handling the merchandise.

He’d flown in to Monaco that morning after twenty-four hours in the air to hear the news that the owner had loaned her out but she’d be available to look at this afternoon. With the morning to kill he’d decided to take the opportunity to run up the hill and possibly rescue the poor thing from whatever indignities had been visited upon her overnight.

The place overlooked the bay—nice and exclusive. But what address wasn’t exclusive in this town? The house had a little fame for being a silent-film actress’s hideaway in the twenties and he was a little curious to see it. He’d driven past many times, but this was the first occasion he’d had to turn in, idling at the gates—which, to his surprise, were wide open. Security was usually pretty tight in this neck of the woods.

As he eased the sports car down the linden lined gravel drive he slowed to a creep, taking in the state of disrepair. Masses of flowering bougainvillaea couldn’t hide the fact that the old place needed a face-job.

And then he saw her.

Nash barely had his car at a standstill before he was out, slamming the door, advancing on the object of his desire.

Sticking out of a flowerbed.

A 1931 Bugatti T51, currently upended in a parterre of small flowered bushes. As if to add to the indignity one of its doors was hanging open.

Every muscle in his body stiffened. He wasn’t angry. He was beyond anger.

He was appalled.

But he was a man who had made self-control a byword. He reined in the fury—knew it needed to be directed where it could do some good.

Coming towards him was a rotund man in garden greens, shaking his arms towards the sky as if inviting divine intercession.

‘Monsieur! Un accident avec la voiture!’

Yeah, that was one way of putting it.

And that was when the shouting started.

LORELEI St James came awake with a languorous stretch, sliding her bare arms over silken sheets, revelling sensuously in the luxurious comfort. She made a ‘mmph’ sound, rolled over and buried her face in the pillow, prepared to sleep away the day, if that were possible—only to hear a deep male voice raised in anger somewhere outside her bedroom terrace.

Ignore it, she decided, snuggling in.

The voice lifted.

She snuggled a bit more.

More shouts.

She wrinkled her nose.

A crash.

What now?

Sighing, Lorelei pushed her satin sleep mask haphazardly up her forehead and winced as she copped an eyeful of bright Mediterranean sunshine. The room did a rinse-cycle spin around her—no doubt the product of too much champagne, inadequate sleep and enough financial trouble to sink this house around her ears.

She shoved thoughts about the latter to the back of her mind even as her heart began to beat the band, and she felt about for a glass of water to ease the Sahara Desert that was her throat this morning. She was greeted by a clatter as she clumsily knocked her watch, her cell phone and a tangle of assorted jewellery to the stone floor.

Easing herself into a sitting position, pushing the fall of chin-length blond curls out of her eyes, Lorelei wrinkled her nose and held on to the mattress as the room did another gentle spin.

I will never drink again, she vowed. Although if I do, she revised, only champagne cocktails … and at a pinch G&T’s.

As if sensing she was at her most vulnerable, the phone on the floor gave a judder and began to vibrate. Her heart did that annoying leap and race thing again. She made a pained face. When the phone rang nowadays there was usually somebody angry on the other end …

To dissuade her from getting out of bed it stopped, but the muted sound of male voices coming up from below her terrace lifted to a crescendo. This was what had woken her. Men shouting. Some sort of altercation going on.

Surely she didn’t have to deal with this, too? Not today …

But without the catering staff from last night there was only Giorgio and his wife, Terese, and it was unfair to expect them to deal with interlopers. They’d had a lot of them in the past few weeks—all of them creditors, hunting her down now that her father Raymond was banged up in a low-security prison.

As if she had a cent to her name after two years of legal fees.

It wasn’t that she was exactly ignoring her problems—she preferred to think of it as delegating responsibility. She’d deal with the phone calls later, and the emails and the lawyers who wanted her signature on a mountain of documents. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. It was just such a nice day. The sun was shining. She shouldn’t ruin it. One more day in paradise and then she’d pay the piper.

Just one more day …

And then she remembered. Not only did she have a client booked in at noon, she had an appointment this afternoon at the Hotel de Paris. It was about her grandmother’s charity: the Aviary Foundation. Every year they hosted an event to raise money for cancer research.