www.millsandboon.co.uk

      One

       This time she’d gone too far.

      Max Preston looked from the newspaper spread before him to the glittering sea beyond the window and made up his mind. This time he wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to ignore his calls. To ignore him.

      His chair scraped across the parquet flooring of the Beach and Tennis Club’s breakfast restaurant as he stood from his table. Leaving a tip for his waitress and his just delivered omelet untouched, he took one last sip of his coffee and left.

      So much for the first Saturday off he’d had in months.

      He hadn’t known he was going to fill his morning. He did now.

      A search on his phone as he strode to his car turned up her address. Tossing the parochial, two-bit rag she worked for—the proverbial thorn in his side—onto the passenger seat, he slid into his seat and eased the Maserati out of the club’s parking lot.

      The first time he’d seen Gillian Mitchell’s picture and byline in the Seaside Gazette and realized that she was here in Vista del Mar, he’d felt an unexpected surge of pleasure and triumph, like when he found something he didn’t realize he’d lost and was missing. A hundred-dollar bill in his coat pocket—but better.

      It only took the seconds he’d needed to read her first biting paragraph for those feelings to vaporize.

      Since that moment, he’d been trying to view her presence here and her articles with purely professional detachment.

      Clearly, she wasn’t doing the same. Her attacks on Cameron Enterprises and, in particular, Max’s boss, Rafe Cameron, might, to the uninformed reader, appear objective, but they were personal and directed at Max. He was sure of it.

      On the seat beside him, her opinion piece lay face-up. At the first set of lights he flipped the paper over so that he didn’t have to see the one-sided article that constituted her opinion.

      A call came through on his cell. “Max speaking,” he said into his earpiece.

      “Have you seen it?” Rafe wasted no words.

      “I’m dealing with it.” As head of PR for Cameron Enterprises it was Max’s job to smooth the waters, to make sure the people of Vista Del Mar saw Rafe’s takeover of Worth Industries—a microchip manufacturer and one of the town’s biggest employers—in the best possible light.

      And Gillian, it seemed, was doing everything in her power to achieve the opposite result.

      “Is it libel?” Rafe asked.

      “It’s close. I’m on my way to see her now. I’ll let her know how seriously we’re taking this. That our lawyers will be examining this piece as well as every word she’s written to date, and every word she will write in the future on anything related to this subject.”

      “Good.” Rafe rang off.

      At one time, Max had nothing but the highest respect for Gillian’s doggedness. But when she started making his boss the repeated target of her campaign, that doggedness looked a lot more like intransigence and plain old sour grapes.

      Because she and Max had history.

      But the way he remembered it, it had been good history. And it had ended cleanly. Six months into their relationship, when she’d casually dropped the words children and marriage into a conversation, he’d known he had to end it. It was only fair. He didn’t do marriage and kids, they hadn’t been in his plans. Still weren’t. And till that moment he hadn’t thought they’d been in hers.

      So he’d broken it off with her. On the spot. It was the only honest thing to do. And he’d thought she’d taken it well. There had been no drama. She’d calmly agreed with him that they clearly had different needs from a relationship, and walked away without so much as a backward glance.

      He hadn’t heard from her or of her in the three and a half years since then. Till these opinion pieces and her supposed factual, objective articles. So now he was thinking maybe she hadn’t taken it well. Maybe she had merely bided her time till the opportunity to strike back arose.

      The ten-minute