Reluctantly Charmed by Ellie O'Neill Read Free Book Online Page B

would end.” I crossed my arms belligerently. He might have been tall and handsome, but he didn’t know me to judge the uselessness of my job.
    “This is an advertising agency, not the UN.”
    “That doesn’t mean that what I do isn’t important.”
    “I never said it wasn’t.” He smirked slightly, and a dimple imploded on his left cheek.
    “Christ, you’re condescending,” I said in an uncharacteristic burst of aggression.
    “I’m not. I just—” He furrowed his brow and his voice grew softer. “Here he is.”
    And then a small gray horse, a small smelly horse in the shape of a dog so tall it skimmed my waist, bounded into the lift.
    “Good boy, Setanta.” He crouched down to the dog, an Irish wolfhound, and rubbed his head affectionately. “I wouldn’t leave without you.” He threw me a smile, teasing.
    Setanta’s brown eyes looked up sadly at me from beneath his gray bushy eyebrows.
    “Sorry,” I said to the dog. I’m a sucker for sad eyes.
    As the lift started to descend, a penny in my brain proceeded to drop. The porn client! Marjorie had said he had a dog. But he wasn’t “repulsive.” He was knee-shakingly handsome. Even if Marjorie and I had differing parameters of what was attractive, I was pretty sure that this guy was undeniably handsome. Even if you didn’t fancy him, you would still have to recognize his attractiveness. Why had Marjorie said he was repulsive? Maybe it was the porn thing— that was repulsive. Eugh. How gross. Porn. Images of blow-up dolls, greased bodies, and filthy old men playing with themselves flashed before me. And there I was in an enclosed space with him. Eugh.
    He cleared his throat and, in a heavy country accent, said softly, “I didn’t mean that the work here isn’t important . . .”
    My moral compass was pointing straight toward fire and brimstone and the path of the righteous Jesus. “It’s a lot more important than your work,” I muttered very quietly to myself.
    “Sorry?” He looked at me, confused. “I didn’t catch that.”
    “Nothing.” I pursed my mouth and shook my head disapprovingly, in the manner of a disgruntled fifties housewife seeing Elvis dancing with swinging hips for the first time.
    Ding. The doors opened, and I marched out with my head held high, shaking my hair free, victoriously. Porn nil, Kate one.

    I was meeting the girls that night for sushi. We regularly met on a Friday night to let off steam. We were all on diets and sushi practically burned the calories off the bottle of wine we’d drink with it.
    On this particular occasion I needed their advice. I trusted them—Fiona the practical and Lily the romantic. The three of us had met in college, accidentally walking into the wrong lecture in the first week of first year. Lost on campus, we found the bar and crashed a freshers’ week free-drinks reception. Within forty minutes we’d formed our own relay team for a beer and crisps race. We came in last, but we did it with a lot of laughs and a lot of spills. Nothing cements a friendship like freshers’ week. Over the years we’d done what really true friends do for each other: held hair back, wiped up the tears, borrowed and lost each other’s clothes, laughed, agreed that no men were worth it, lied for each other, and held disastrous dinner parties.
    That night, we never got to talk about Jim. Fiona stormed in, her pale skin red with anger and her dark hair flapping behind her like a cloak. She was raging. She had a work drama of high importance.
    Fiona worked for an investment banker. She’d started on the phones part-time through college and in the past eighteen months had made it onto the trading floor. This was all she’d ever wanted. She put in long hours, sacrificing her family andsocial life. “I’ll fall in love when I’m forty,” she’d say. “I don’t have time for it now. Now I work.”
    A few months earlier her team had been restructured and she got a new boss, a woman whose main agenda