CHAPTER TWO
LIFE could not be better, Jake happily decided, relaxing back into the large blue-grey leather chair which was perfectly contoured to give both comfort and support, lifting his feet onto his executive desk, linking his hands over his chest, his heart and mind feeling totally ******* with his world.
Mel, of course, disapproved of this unbusinesslike pose. Any minute now she would come in and stare at the soles of his shoes, refusing to greet him until he put them back down on the floor and sat up straight.
Mel had standards.
She’d make a good schoolmistress.
Or a nanny.
Which conjured up a number of enjoyable fantasies.
His gaze moved idly to the large picture window at the other end of his office. It gave a splendid view of theSydneyHarbourBridge and he spotted a group of climbers making their way to the top of the great coathanger arch for the view from up there. They had a great morning for it—blue sky, bright sunshine, no smog. Something he should do one day, Jake thought—climb every mountain…
The tune of the old song hummed through his mind. He’d mention it to the boffins in the back rooms later this morning—get the disc jockeys and the sound mixers listening to it for application possibilities. There had to be a recording of it in their music library. Could be some part of it they could work up for the older generations who didn’t like weird sound patterns for the call-tune on their cell-phones.
Now that he thought of it, that song came from the most popular musical of all time—The Sound of Musicby Rodgers and Hammerstein. Big favourite with the oldies. Signature Sounds needed much more penetration on that market.Lot of spending power there not being tapped. Problem was, older people didn’t use the Internet as readily as the kids, and that was where the sales were made. But if they could be reached through the kids…he had to get his computer guys thinking laterally.
Yep—got to climb every mountain.
Julie Andrews, who played the nun-nanny in the movie, was dancing around in his mind when the knock on his office door came and Mel waltzed in. She halted and stared at his shoes on the desk, just as Julie Andrews would have undoubtedly done when she playedMary Poppins , nose turning up in disdain at such an offence to proper standards of behaviour.
Respect, respect, respect, he silently chanted as he lifted his feet and swung them in a slow arc to the floor, grinning at Mel as he did so. She might act like a nanny but she sure didn’t look like a nun! In fact, Julie Andrews was comprehensively wiped from his mind as the vision in front of him took instant priority.
‘Ve…ry nice!’ he remarked, taking in the artful combination of colours, the in-your-face display of feminine curves, and the tantalising eroticism of the long, swirling, almost see-through skirt.Very hot , he was thinking, but if he said that to Mel, she’d probably regard it as some form of sexual harassment and take him to the cleaners.
‘Good morning, Jake,’ she said primly, ignoring his comment on her new outfit.
She was probably ticking off in her mind that she’d met theimage standard once again. Miss Efficiency never failed. But Jake had a challenge for her today.
‘It is, indeed, a good morning, Mel,’ he rolled out cheerfully. ‘I’ve had some ideas. Got your notebook with you?’ She was holding it in front of her like a shield, but Jake was just as good as she was at ignoring what he didn’t want to acknowledge.
‘Yes,’ she answered, refusing to be baited, as usual.
Always being correct was a shield, too. Jake dearly wanted to blow that shield apart and get to some really vulnerable part of Mel Rossi—revelations of the woman within. ‘Take a seat,’ he invited with relish.
Only bucket armchairs in blue-grey leather were available so she had to settle in one of them. Jake suspected she would have preferred a straight-backed wooden kitchen chair. Instead of relaxing into the chair, she perched on the front of the seat and crossed her legs so she could prop her notebook on her uppermost knee.
The fullness of her skirt fell on either side, and Jake discovered, with satisfaction, that he actually could see her legs through the floaty floral fabric. Not that he’d never seen them before. It was simply more alluring to view them this way.
‘I’m ready,’ she declared—a warning that he should stop looking at her legs and get on with business.
Jake lifted his gaze to hers and smiled. ‘Of course you are,’ he almost sang, overflowing with good humour. ‘Ready, willing and waiting for the challenges I’m about to put to you today.’
And his smile grew into a huge grin.
I hate him.
The thought burned through Merlina’s mind.
Jake Devila was never going to take her seriously as a person, or as a woman, or even as another human being who had feelings to be considered. He didn’t care about her. He simply amused himself playing with her.
It was just plain crazy to be sitting here with her heart thumping like mad and her stomach all gooey because he had looked her over with very male appreciation, and his dimples were winking at her. That grin on his face was a sure sign he had diabolical mischief on his mind.
He rolled his chair forwards and lay his forearms on the desk, leaning towards her, his eyes twinkling, and she waited like a besotted fool to hear his brilliant ideas, then ran around like a maniac to meet whatever challenges he threw at her today.
I’m just a puppet on a string dancing to his tune, she told herself. Which probably wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t the only tune in her life but it was. And she had to move on from it. Her sense of self-worth insisted it was the only way to survive as an individual. But right now he had her locked into this moment, almost breathless with anticipation for what would come next.
‘We need a think-tank meeting later this morning,’ he said. ‘All departments to attend. I want to throw around ideas for targeting the older market.’
It was a relief to hear him talking business. ‘What time for the meeting will I put on the memo?’ she asked matter-of-factly.
‘Eleven-fifteen. After morning coffee to get their brains active and before lunch so they can then chew over what’s been discussed,’ came the prompt reply.
‘Right!’ she said, making a note of the time.
‘Get that memo out first, Mel.’
‘Will do. Anything else before I attend to it?’
‘Yes. Yes, there is,’ he drawled, a wicked gleam in his eyes.
She concentrated on keeping her composure while waiting for him to elaborate.
He sat back in his chair, waving one hand casually as he said, ‘My grandfather’s birthday is coming up.’
So is mine,she thought.
‘He’ll be eighty.’
I’ll be thirty.
‘I want to do something special for him.’
He paused, watching her like a hawk, waiting to see which way its prey would jump.
Merlina patiently returned his gaze with limpid eyes, deliberately emptied of all emotion. She wasn’t going to let him feed off her this morning! However, he paused for so long, she finally said, ‘Are you asking me for suggestions?’
He laughed. ‘Oh, I doubt very much you’d be tuned into what entertains my grandfather, Mel. He still drinks champagne at breakfast. In fact, when I was a little boy, he told me to call him Pop instead of Grandpa because he was such an expert at popping corks.’
Her tightly guarded mind had a malfunction and lost control of her tongue, letting wayward words roll off it. ‘Perhaps you also have an equally pertinent reason for calling me Mel instead of Merlina.’
‘Lethal weapon,’ he rolled out, grinning at her again.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The movie,Lethal Weapon . Stars Mel Gibson.’
‘You associateme with a male actor?’
Granted Mel Gibson always gave great performances in his movies, but hewas a man, and how on earth could Jake Devila look her over the way he did if he thought of her as a man? Merlina wished she hadn’t opened up on this sore point. She was just sick to death of being called Mel instead of her proper name. That particular thorn had been in her side throughout the whole period of her employment at Signature Sounds and obviously the urge to take it out and deal with it had got the better of her.
‘Never mind,’ she muttered, raising her guard again. ‘I apologise for deviating from your grandfather’s birthday. Please go on.’
‘Believe me…the image I have of you has nothing to do with Mel Gibson’s masculinity,’ he said provocatively.
‘I’m relieved to hear it.’ Though she didn’t want to hear any more. Clearly he was enjoying himself at her expense and frustrating him by not rising to the bait was the safer course. However, she couldn’t resist a hit back before dismissing the subject. ‘I was beginning to wonder how perverse your perception was. But again I apologise. Totally irrelevant. You were saying you wanted to do something special for your grandfather,’ she reminded him with determined purpose.
‘You don’t want your curiosity satisfied?’ he teased.
‘I’m quite sure I don’t,’ she said dismissively.
‘Because curiosity killed the cat and you won’t risk it?’
His eyes danced mockingly.
Her brain overheated. Retaliation steamed straight out of it. ‘When you were a little boy, Jake, someone should have taught you not to toy with cats. They have claws.’
‘You’re right,’ he agreed. ‘I should have had a nanny just like you, Mel. No doubt you would have turned me into a fine upstanding man.’
He was loving this exchange. Absolutely exulting in it.
She kept her mouth firmly shut. Not another word was going to escape her lips until he got back to business.His lips were twitching with amusement and his dimples were flashing devilment. She couldn’t stop herself from glowering back at him but she did keep her mouth firmly shut.
He pointed a finger at her. ‘Now that’s just what I mean…why you remind me of Mel Gibson. Lots of pent-up energy that you know is going to explode into action when its fuse is lit.’
His eyes were dancing with excitement at the prospect of her losing her cool and blowing up. Merlina was sizzling inside but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a steaming reply. That would mean he’d won his point. She grimly maintained her dignity and he finally sighed his surrender to her brick wall defence.
‘Right! To get back to my grandfather…’
Ah, yes, Merlina thought, still glowering. The champagne cork-popping Byron Devila was notorious for his numerous marriages, just about rivalling King Henry the Eighth on that score. Jake probably took after him in the playboy stakes. The only difference was his grandfather married his playthings. Probably a generational thing. It wouldn’t have been so socially acceptable to have a string of temporary bed-partners in the years ofhis prime.
‘…I want you to organise a cake.’
‘A cake,’ she repeated, tearing her smouldering gaze from the twinkling mischief in his and assiduously writing the word in her notebook.
‘A very special cake. Eight tiers should do it,’ he went on. ‘One for each decade of his life.’
Merlina wrote8 tiers . She thought it a bit excessive, but…hers not to reason why, hers but to do or die!
‘And I want eighty candles spread around the edge of the tiers.’
‘That’s going to make it hard for him to blow them all out,’ she remarked.
‘You’d be surprised how hale and hearty my grandfather is,’ came the bland reply.
She flicked a derisive glance at him. ‘Do you really want to give his lungs such a demanding workout on his birthday?’
He smiled. ‘Good of you to care about him, Mel, but I didn’t mean for the candles to be real.’
‘Just decorative candles? They’re not to be lit?’
‘Decorative, yes. Very decorative.’
She rolled her eyes and wrotedecorative only .
‘They won’t be real, any more than the cake will be real,’ Jake said helpfully.
It didn’t help. Merlina felt her mind moving towards meltdown. Her hand tightened its grip on the solid reality of her pen and very slowly she lifted her gaze from the notebook on her knee, intent on staring her tormentor down until he behaved himself as a proper boss should. ‘Please explain,’ she said in a dead-pan voice.
He laughed, setting off fireworks in her head—fizzy Roman candles and rockets that zoomed up and exploded.
She hated him, hated him, hated him.
Most of all, she hated how deeply he affected her.
Every cell in her body was jangling with awareness of him, the rippling joy in his laughter and the brilliant vivacity it brought to his all too handsome face.
I’m possessed by the devil,she thought,and somehow, somehow, I have to expunge him from my consciousness and be totally free of him.
‘I’m afraid a call to Cakes for Special Occasions won’t do it, Mel,’ he drawled, having finally sobered up enough to speak.
She remained silent, waiting for appropriate instructions.
‘You’ll have to scout around, but I’m guessing that stage prop people could supply what I want.’
A fabricated cake, not a real one.
She refocussed her scattered mind and asked, ‘What height do you have in mind and how wide should the bottom tier be?’
‘I think six feet high should do it. And the top tier should be wide enough for a woman to emerge from the top of it.’
A woman!
‘The tiers should graduate down to complement that width and provide steps for the woman to descend.’
He wanted a woman coming out of the cake!
‘Inside, there should be some mechanism that opens the lid of the cake and slowly lifts the woman up to her full height above the top tier. Like a mini elevator.’
No doubt a woman in spangles and a G-string!
‘And the cake should be on rollers so it can be wheeled out to my grandfather at the optimum moment.’
A gift of a woman to his playboy Pop!
‘You’re not writing any of this down, Mel,’ he chided.
‘It’s being imprinted on my brain,’ she answered truthfully.
‘As long as you get it right.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll get it right.’
‘Okay! Now the woman…’
Oh, yes, having unwrapped the decorative cake, what precisely was to emerge on cue?
‘She has to be a blonde.’
Of course. Jake had obviously inherited his taste in blondes from his grandfather.
He grinned at her. ‘And curvy like you, Mel. A Marilyn Monroe type.’
A treacherous thrill ran through her entire body. Jake was comparing her to the number one sex goddess of the movie world.
‘Pop doesn’t like his women skinny,’ he went on, bursting her bubble.
Jake did like his women skinny. No doubt about that. Every one he took up with was pencil-thin. She had no chance at all of ever being taken up by him. Only her family thought she was skinny. Besides, she obviously had Mel Gibson’s dangerous edge—Lethal Weapon—which wasn’t sexy to a man who liked his women easy come, easy go, no complications.
‘You should be able to hire one from the models who do photo shoots for Playboy-type magazines,’ Jake suggested.
Merlina was goaded into speaking out. ‘You realise this cake act is very old-hat stuff. And male chauvinism at its worst.’
‘Absolutely,’ he agreed, then waved his hand in an appeal for understanding. ‘My grandfather still believes in marriage. Can you believe it?’ He shook his head. ‘Very old-hat. He’ll love this. It’s a scene from his favourite movie, made in 1966.’
She arched her eyebrows, aiming to get a hit at him. ‘You seem to have movies on the brain this morning.’
‘They mirror life,’ he flipped back at her.
‘Right!’ Her teeth snapped. She ground them open enough to ask, ‘What is the title of this movie? If I can find it in a video shop, I’ll watch it in order to know exactly what you’re describing.’
‘It’s calledHow to Murder Your Wife , starring Jack Lemmon and Virna Lisi.’
‘I can understand why it’s your grandfather’s favourite movie,’ she remarked with silky savagery. ‘He’s had seven wives so far, hasn’t he?’
‘Divorce from his seventh is about to come through,’ Jake confirmed.
And how many playmates are you up to? Seventy-seven?
The problem was, she’d probably become the seventy-eighth if he focused that kind of interest on her. But he wouldn’t. She knew he wasn’t going to. Ever. Yet sometimes when he looked her over…
‘There’s no real murder in it,’ Jake informed her. ‘It’s a comedy. Jake Lemmon is at a bachelor party and the cake is wheeled in. Virna Lisa pops out of it, their eyes meet, andchoong! ’ He raised his arms in mock despair. ‘It’s the end of his swinging bachelor life.’
What she needed was somechoong -power over Jake Devila. Before she rode off into the sunset of employment elsewhere, she would really like to sock it to him. Just once. Ending his swinging bachelor life was probably in the realm of pure fantasy. Maybechoong -power was, too, but…a wild idea was dawning in her mind, spreading light in the dark places she had nursed for the past eighteen months.
‘Just for the record, in case I can’t get a copy of the movie, what was Virna Lisi wearing when she emerged from the cake?’ It couldn’t have been too risqué, she thought. Not in an American film made back in the sixties.
‘A bikini.’ His brow wrinkled as he worked on the recollection.
A bikini…
To Merlina’s whirling mind, it represented the final liberation, absolutely appropriate as the cut-off line to the Jake Devila experience which had served to break many conservative shackles from her upbringing. Wearing one in such a public spotlight would definitely be a mark of the confidence she would take with her when she left him. And her family would never know. It would just be for herself.
‘I think it was made out of flowers. Very feminine,’ he said.
She smiled, liking the description.
Quite acceptable.
And achievable.
Jake’s frown deepened, his eyes sharply scanning hers, suspicious of her sudden good humour.
Her smile broadened as she uncrossed her legs and rose to her feet. ‘Now that I’ve got the full picture, I’ll go to work on it.’
He looked surprised at her willingness to proceed.
‘What date is your grandfather’s birthday?’ she asked, since he hadn’t yet given it.
‘Next month. Fourteenth of February. St Valentine’s Day.’
‘Then maybe we should have the tiers of the cake shaped like hearts instead of circles,’ she blithely suggested.
He jolted forward, leaning his forearms and his elbows on the desk again, his gaze trying to penetrate the workings of her mind. Apparently she’d given him a reaction he had not anticipated and Merlina felt giddily triumphant.
‘St Valentine’s Day is for lovers,’ she trilled at him. ‘Hearts and flowers. Agreed?’
He sighed and slumped back in his chair, sardonically muttering, ‘Agreed. I take it you’ll do this for me.’
‘Oh, yes. I’ll do it, Jake. Trust me. I’ll do it.’
She was grinning as she sailed towards the door, gleefully knowing she’d beaten him at his own game this time. It didn’t occur to her that she might have just been sucked more deeply into the whirlpool. Her exhilaration said she was on top of it, making her way out. With a bang!
‘Don’t forget the memo,’ he threw at her grumpily.
She opened the door before looking back to resoundingly declare, ‘I never forget.’
Jake broodingly watched her step out of his office and close the door behind her, punctuating her exit-line.
Somehow she’d turned the tables on him.
Mel Rossi was, without a doubt, the most provoking woman he’d ever met!
He’d had her simmering, even boiling, on the edge of blowing her top, then Kaput! —all sweetness and light, ready to play ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’
He’d have to come up with another idea because he refused to be defeated by her. He was going to break into the woman she was inside. It was just a matter of time.
09-10-07, 08:10 PM
The PlayBoy Boss's Chosen Bride- Emma Darcy (2006)
Chapter 1
2
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