How to Seduce a Billionaire by Portia Da Costa Read Free Book Online

part of her he’d rocked to her very foundations just couldn’t resist one last glance. She had to print him in her memory. Despite everything, she’d still draw him … and finally give Dream Lover a face.
    He didn’t look smug and macho. He was barely even smiling. He still looked a bit puzzled, at a loss. Had he expected things to go differently? It seemed as if he had.
    Yet his voice was confident and even. ‘My name is still “Ellis”, Jess, and thank you … thank you again for telling me your secret. You’re very brave.’
    Oh damn him, the devil. He was getting to her with niceness now, as well. Not that it mattered. She’d never see him again.
    ‘Goodbye, Ellis.’
    Before she could balk again, she opened the door and walked out, keeping her face as straight and composed as she could, and just nodding fleetingly to Jacobson’s secretary as she passed.
    ‘So, what’s he like? What did he want? Did he make a pass at you?’
    The questions came thick and fast over tuna salad in the canteen. Jess would have gone out and found somewhere to eat alone, away from her well-meaning but nosy work-mates, but she knew it was better to brave their curiosity sooner rather than later. And besides the rain was still pouring down outside.
    ‘No! Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said quickly, smiling in a way she hoped looked nonchalant when she was as far from nonchalant as it was possible to be. ‘He just wanted to make sure I didn’t catch a cold. I think he’s a bit eccentric, to be honest, a bit weird. Maybe not quite right in the head.’
    I couldn’t fake it with you, Ellis McKenna. You saw through me. You knew there was something. I’m going to have to try and pull the wool over everybody else’s eyes
    ‘Well, that’s a damned shame,’ said Pamela, who was in Jess’s section, ‘He’s the fittest thing I’ve seen in here for a long time. In fact
ever.
It’s disappointing that he didn’t make a move. Still, I suppose if he’s married and all that …’ Clearly every female in the place had immediately checked out his ring finger.
    Emma, the third girl at their table, piped up, ‘Well, I’d have made a pass at
him.
Even if he is married. He’s freaking gorgeous!’
    Jess stabbed at a cold green bean. Her appetite was non-existent. The only thing she fancied was hot chocolate and cookies, and she’d walked away from those, along with a certain other temptation. The one she didn’t want to get into with the women around this table. They were all buddies, like Cathy at home, and some of them told very wild stories about their sex lives, but Jess had always managed to dance around the subject of
her
sex life. Or total lack of it. It would’ve been far too embarrassing to reveal that she was still a virgin. She always talked vaguely of boyfriends that she’d had before she’d taken this job. It’d been all too easy to let her lunch buddies assume she’d done the deed with at least one or two of these mythical men.
    ‘He’s a widower, apparently,’ Jess pointed out, pushing her plate away.
    ‘Wahey, so he’s available! God, I hope he comes here again. Some of the rest of us might get a crack at him next time.’ Emma’s appetite appeared to be improved by the news of their visitor’s marital status, and she reached out to stab a choice bit of tuna from Jess’s plate. ‘Imagine it … He looks like a film star and he’s a billionaire. What’s not to like, eh, Jess? You missed your chance. You should have jumped all over him. He must have fancied you or he wouldn’t have invited you up to the inner sanctum.’
    ‘He
is
very handsome,’ Jess admitted cautiously. It was a lie, really. Ellis McKenna was far beyond simply handsome. ‘But it wasn’t anything like that. Honestly. He just singled me out because he’d given me a lift in the rain. I think he just wanted to quiz a typical employee about day-to-day life at the Windsor coalface. Nothing more than that.’
    Two sets of wide eyes