How to Seduce a Billionaire Read Free Page A

dedicated to insurance, for the ‘royal’ visit: the arrival of the group’s new owner to inspect their very humble and fairly insignificant division. Which was weird, but apparently the VIP’s eccentric habit.
    And management doesn’t know the half of it.
She grinned to herself while she doodled the curve of his gorgeous lips on her pad.
That stuffy lot upstairs will have a fit when they see your flowered shirt with the tails hanging out.
    So, she’d actually met Ellis P. McKenna, international financier and general all-round filthy rich tycoon. One to one. He was the scion of a billion-dollar entrepreneurial family who’d bought out Windsor Insurance as part of a group along with a large number of other financial concerns, just like someone going out and buying three sweaters in different colours rather than only one. If actual whole companies were so easy to acquire and dispose of to him, it didn’t bode well for the little people like her who worked in them.
    We all might be just as disposable as cheap jumpers if you decide to keep this operation lean and mean, Mr McKenna.
    Jess shuddered. She needed her job, because she didn’t have any reserves. Ensuring that her gran had been comfortable at Baxendale Court in her final years had hoovered up every scrap of Jess’s modest savings, and she was still gradually paying off the loan she’d taken out to make up the difference. She didn’t regret a thing, and would do it again in a heartbeat, but it had left her finances since then a tad precarious, even long after Gran had passed on.
    Impatient suddenly, she flung down her pencil, breaking the point and attracting curious looks from Jim and Michelle, who shared her ‘pod’ of desks.
    Oh, come on, Mr McKenna, let’s see you again. We’ll all sit here tugging our forelocks for a bit, then we can get back to our normal drone activities … and I can be sure that Dream Lover is just Dream Lover, a man I once met for about thirty seconds.
    Would he even acknowledge her? Or just swan past, barely noticing the faces behind the desks? She pushed his box of tissues to a more prominent place. Perhaps that might remind him?
    Even as Jess was thinking that, there was a faint jumble of voices out in the corridor, a small commotion like a looming weather front. People around her sat up straight, fiddled with their ties or smoothed their hair. Michelle even pressed her lips together to refresh her lipstick. Ridiculous! The VIP would come blowing through the office, barely breaking stride, a self-identified deity amongst them, hardly bothering to acknowledge the individual insects he now employed.
    The minor hubbub intensified, still approaching. Unconsciously, Jess did the smoothing of the hair thing too. She’d drawn it back now in the best ‘do’ she could manage at short notice and with her clip smashed and gone, a ponytail at the nape of her neck, secured by a covered elasticated band she’d discovered at the bottom of her bag. She patted at her blouse too, the only part of her ensemble that had more or less avoided getting soaked. Unlike her skirt, which was soggy round the hem, and her shoes, which audibly squelched when she walked. She could have changed into her comfy shoes, but they were far too casual. Ah, the irony, considering that Ellis McKenna was more casually dressed than anyone here.
    Jess’s heart thudded. Some of those voices were distinct now – those of her bosses – but another one also sounded vaguely familiar.
    Oh holy shit, you
are
tall, dark and handsome, Mr McKenna!
    The potential candidate for Dream Lover met the height credentials too.
    Flanked by the Windsor Insurance bigwigs in their best dark suits, stringently ironed shirts and sober ties, the man with the vintage Citroën strolled into the room, looking like a shabby but dazzling peacock god surrounded by a scuttling murder of crows. Sharp aquamarine eyes scanned the desks and the people behind them, registering, summing up, and passing