www.millsandboon.co.uk

      In loving memory of Larry

       Chapter One

      “Happy New Year, Deanna. Hope you have fun tonight.”

      The farewell was echoed three times over as Deanna Gurney watched the last of her coworkers at Fortune Forecasting head out the office door.

      She sighed faintly and looked at the round watch on her wrist.

      It was nearly eight. Four more hours, and she could put the close on another year.

      She sighed again and slowly tapped the end of her red pen on the surface of her desk as she stared blindly at the article she was supposed to be proofreading.

      The tapping might as well have been a clock ticking.

      A new year was supposed to be the start of new things, wasn’t it?

      Unfortunately, she couldn’t help but think that the “new” was likely to turn out worse than the “old.”

      Depressed by her own thoughts, she shook her head and focused again on the article that her boss had decided just had to be completed before the office took their brief New Year break.

      Trust Andrew Fortune not to realize that his latest burst of creative, financial genius was inconveniently timed when it came to the rest of his staff.

      She corrected a spelling error and felt her gaze drifting upward to the opened doorway of her boss’s office.

      Drew wasn’t sitting at his desk. If he had been, she would have had a straight-on view of him. Instead, she only caught the occasional glimpse of him as he paced around his spacious office, passing behind his desk occasionally to stop and look out the windows that offered a near-panoramic view of San Diego. During the day, she knew he’d be able to see all the way to the coastline.

      Now the only thing he’d see out those windows was the night sky and city lights.

      Even as she watched, he paced past the doorway, completely oblivious—as he had been for most of the day, since he’d spread the word that he wanted this last project done before they shut down for the long weekend—to anything that was transpiring beyond his office doorway.

      He wore a Padres ball cap on his brown head, the bill pulled down low over his brow. A sure sign that his mood was just as dark as the grim set of his angular jaw suggested. When he was feeling particularly good-natured, that hat would have been turned backward with the bill scooting down his neck and there would have been a cocky half twist to his lips, a faint dimple in his right cheek and a wicked glint in his dark brown eyes. He’d have been holding a golf club in his hand, practicing his putting across the smooth, thick, beige carpet that lined his office instead of clenching the end of a baseball bat in his hand.

      The faint buzzing of her cell phone drew her attention and she picked it up off the desk, looking at the display.

      Gigi.

      She sighed again and set the phone down, unanswered.

      Her mother had already called her a half dozen times that day. Deanna had no desire to talk to her, yet again. Hard as it had been, she had already said what she’d had to say.

      But the vibrating phone reminded her that she did have work to do that didn’t involve lollygagging around, worrying about her boss’s state of mind.

      She had plenty of reason not to feel particularly celebratory. But Drew Fortune had the world by the tail. He was thirty-four years old—eight years older than she—and handsome as sin, plus he was poised to take the helm of the hugely successful trend analysis firm his father had founded decades earlier. And if not for the fact that she knew what his plans for that day were supposed to have been—flying to Texas—she was certain that he would have been heading out with one of his leggy, buxom blondes on his arm who’d have undoubtedly ensured that she rang in his new year in a major way.

      Deanna made a face and scratched her red pen through a redundant phrase.

      “Hell, Dee. That page looks like it’s bleeding.”

      She didn’t look up at her boss. “It’s one of the things you pay me for, remember?” She corrected another misspelling.

      Brilliant, he was. But a good speller?

      Not exactly.

      “Seems to me I’m also paying some other folks who ought to still be around.” Drew sat on the corner of her desk and picked up her cell phone as if he had every right to do so. He tapped the end of his baseball bat against the toe of his leather shoe.

      “We didn’t need the rest of the staff here to finish up the article.” Everyone had pulled together the data that he’d needed. The only thing left now was for her to finish proofing it, send it via email to their bazillion clients and then to the newspaper that was printing it in Saturday’s New Year’s Day edition.

      He made a low sound that seemed distinctly displeased. “So you decided who stayed and who went?”

      “Everyone stayed as long as they did because you asked them to,” she said evenly.