CHAPTER ONE

      ‘WHY was I under the impression you were a man?’ Zak’s mouth tightened as he stared at the woman standing outside his hotel suite.

      Her brows rose over eyes so deep a brown they were like smooth melted chocolate. ‘I have no idea, why were you?’ she retorted.

      He scowled, knowing exactly who was responsible for his erroneous impression. ‘My brother Nik had something to do with it, I suspect!’

      ‘Do I look like a man?’ the woman teased.

      In a word—no!

      But, then, Zak hadn’t known what she was going to look like, had he? He had simply been informed by Nik that he had agreed, on Zak’s behalf, for a reporter named Tyler Wood to spend a week with him doing an exclusive interview. Nik, with his usual arrogance, had forgotten to mention that the reporter was young, beautiful, and female!

      ‘Not in the least,’ Zak allowed dryly, not knowing who he was angrier with, his brother, or this beautiful woman. ‘Nik also forgot to mention that you’re American.’ He frowned, knowing he was going to find it much harder to keep a fellow countrywoman at a distance than he would have the typical English male hack he had been expecting.

      Tyler Wood shrugged. ‘Obviously your brother is a man of few words.’

      Obviously.

      And Zak hated being wrong-footed, damn it!

      Despite the fact that Tyler Wood was dressed in green combat trousers, and a fitted black tee shirt, her short dark hair moussed into the spiky asexual style that was the fashion at the moment, there was no way she could be mistaken for anything other than female. Those mesmerizing long-lashed dark eyes apart, she had beautiful gamine features, with a small, snub nose and full, pouting lips, and her petite five foot two frame was definitely that of a woman, the trousers resting low on curvaceous hips, her breasts full—and obviously braless!—beneath the clinging material of her tee shirt.

      ‘What’s an American doing working for an English newspaper?’ Zak was curious, knowing there were more than enough newspapers and journals in America to keep a reporter busy, without going to the trouble of crossing the Atlantic.

      Tyler Wood stared at him for several minutes before answering rather casually, ‘The same as an American actor in England, I suspect—working. Do you think I might come in?’ she added pointedly.

      Zak was aware that he couldn’t keep her standing outside in the hotel corridor all morning, but he was still acclimatizing himself to the fact that the reporter who was to follow him around for a week was a gorgeous American woman.

      He hadn’t exactly been overjoyed when Nik had told him of the agreed interview, although he had accepted the reasons for it when his brother had explained to him that it had been done to protect Nik’s new wife Jinx from the barrage of publicity that had been about to break over her unsuspecting head.

      Tyler Wood had been the initial reporter to leak the story, but after several conversations with Nik she had agreed to back off for a while in exchange for a week of interviewing Zak, an actor rarely out of the headlines, anyway.

      But Zak had been expecting a man, and had thought the two of them could just spend a week together on the town. The reporter could then write up his interview, and everyone would go away happy. Discovering that Tyler Wood was a woman certainly put an end to that idea.

      He drew in an impatient breath. ‘I suppose you had better come in,’ he allowed ungraciously as he opened the door wider for her