(2012) Evie Undercover Read online

  Evie Undercover

  Liz Harris

  Copyright © 2012 Liz Harris

  Published 2012 by Choc Lit Limited

  Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB, UK

  www.choclitpublishing.com

  The right of Liz Harris to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  ISBN-978-1-78189-025-7

  Chapter 1

  A hotel bedroom in Umbria, Italy

  ‘Will you sleep with me?’ Evie Shaw stood on her dishevelled bed, spotlit by a sliver of moonlight that fell from the unshuttered window above her. The man who’d just started to walk out of her bedroom stopped sharply. He turned to face her. ‘Please sleep with me,’ she repeated, wriggling toes that were tipped with scarlet and holding clenched fists in front of her mouth.

  She lowered her head to let her long auburn hair fall across her face. Strands of hair drifted across eyelashes caked with thick black mascara, and stuck there. Damn! That wasn’t meant to happen. She raised a hand and tugged lightly on the wayward strands. A second, more forceful, tug freed the hair. The sharp pain made it easy to work a tremor into her lower lip.

  Leaving the bedroom door wide open, Tom Hadleigh took two or three steps back into the dimly lit room. He pulled the belt of his white towelling robe more tightly around him and cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry, Evie,’ he began, his voice firm but edged with embarrassment. ‘Attractive though you are, I don’t sleep with the people who work for me. It’s just not a good idea. In fact it’s a bloody awful idea and I’m sure you can appreciate that. Though of course I’m flattered you asked me,’ he added quickly.

  She opened her eyes wide, her face a picture of astonishment. She wrinkled her nose questioningly at him, then startled surprise gave way to dimpled amusement. Cute, dimpled amusement, she hoped.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean sleep with me, as in sleep with me. I certainly don’t want to sleep with you like that. God forbid!’ She threw back her head and laughed. ‘No, I just want you to lie next to me. Nothing more than that. Good Lord, no.’ She let the smile fade from her face. ‘It’s the scorpions.’ She made an exaggerated show of looking nervously around the hotel room. ‘There might be more of them hiding in here.’ She managed a theatrical shudder.

  One of the shoestring straps of her short nightdress slipped off her shoulder. Result! She left it there.

  Tom Hadleigh took another step into the room.

  ‘The scorpion’s gone, Evie, and I’m sure there aren’t any more.’ He gestured around the room. ‘You saw the staff thoroughly search the place before they left. There’s nothing for you to worry about, so why don’t you get down from the bed and let me go back to my room?’

  What was wrong with the man!

  OK, she was being a bit full on – well, maybe a little more than a bit, and that could be seen as a turn-off – but in the circumstances she was entitled to expect that she’d get more of a macho response to her quivering plea for help. So much for last week’s article in Glamour Puss which said that no man on earth could resist a damsel in distress; she seemed to have found the one man who could.

  She gave an inward sigh. She was just going to have to work harder to break down the barrier he seemed determined to keep between them. Their four days in Italy didn’t give her much time in which to find out what she needed to know, and although she’d be working for him for two more weeks once they were back in London, those two weeks would be a dead loss – he’d be in his Chambers all day and she’d be alone in his house. No, it was now or never, and the best way to make it now was to get him into her bed.

  Just between the sheets: nothing more.

  Him being next to her when they woke up in the morning would get them talking conversationally, and that was when tongues were more likely to loosen. His tongue, to be more precise. That was Plan A, and it had to work – there was no Plan B.

  Rearranging her features into fearful anxiety, she stared intently at the wooden beams of the roof rafters, which were throwing long, dark shadows across the whitewashed walls.

  ‘They’re in those beams.’ She shivered and hugged her arms across her chest. ‘I know I’ll never get to sleep – I’ll keep on thinking that something horrible’s going to fall from the ceiling and land on my head.’ She turned frightened eyes back to her boss, pleading with him. She’d audition for the National Theatre when she got back to England, she decided.

  ‘You’ll be fine, really you will.’ He sounded weary. ‘It’s past midnight and all good scorpions are in bed by now. As we should be. But not together,’ he added hastily. ‘Now, won’t you let me help you get down?’

  He moved closer to the bed and held his hand up to her. Ignoring the outstretched hand, she jumped down and landed lightly on the stone floor, her short nightdress flying up. The second shoestring strap slipped down.

  ‘I’m not worried about the good scorpions, Mr Hadleigh,’ she said, inching one strap back over her shoulder. ‘It’s the bad ones that frighten me, the ones that curl their little black tails in my direction, thinking evil thoughts. If you were next to me, I wouldn’t feel afraid.’

  If ever there was a time for a tear, this was it.

  In her head, she frantically conjured up the last few moments of Ghost, when the yummy dead hero said a final goodbye to the distraught wife he adored and left her forever, slowly walking into the glittering stars that were leading him into the heaven for good guys. Her eyes filled with tears. Success!

  ‘How can you be so scared of them?’ he asked, his amazement unmistakably tinged with irritation. ‘You must be used to them – the agency said you were part Italian.’

  So much for chivalry and damsels in fear and distress. The man had a heart of stone. She was going to have to try another tack, and fast.

  ‘Only a tiny part,’ she said. She followed her words with a slight smile. ‘My grandmother was Italian. It’s the English bit of me that’s scared of scorpions.’ The smile became stronger, more cajoling. ‘Please, Mr Hadleigh, or I’ll never get to sleep.’

  He gave a loud sigh: loud and frustrated. ‘I suppose I could stay in here until you fell asleep – if you didn’t take too long about it, that is.’ He glanced around the room. ‘Look, there’s a chair over there. I can sit there till you’ve dropped off.’ He raised his arm and pointed to a cane chair in the corner of the room. His towelling robe fell open above his belt and Evie saw a line of dark hair snaking into the belt.

  A rush of adrenaline shot through her, and her stomach jumped.

  Fuck! she thought. She tore her eyes away and fixed them on the chair. Being turned on by him wasn’t part of the plan. He was a job and nothing more. Fuck. No, not fuck. That definitely wasn’t on the cards.

  Biting her lower lip – a sure sign of deep concentration – she fixed her eyes on the chair and tried to look as if she was considering his suggestion.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think that would help. Deep down, I’d know
that you were going back to your room as soon as I fell asleep, and that’d kill any chance of me dropping off.’

  God, what a wimp she sounded – she couldn’t keep this up for much longer. If she didn’t get a result soon, she’d have to give up. In desperation, she tried out a range of different expressions, hoping that one of them would strike a chivalric nerve.

  Apparently immune to the panoply of performances being played out before him, Tom Hadleigh sat down heavily on the edge of her bed and sighed wearily.

  ‘Just remind me why I employed you, will you?’

  ‘To do some interpreting for you, and to help you with paying bills and sorting things out in London – the sort of personal things you wouldn’t ask your work secretary to do.’

  ‘Exactly. You are meant to be helping me, not the other way round, and the best way you can help me at this precise moment is to let me get some sleep. Which I can’t do until you get back into bed. It’s not as if I’m miles away – I’m only in the room opposite. You shouted out for me before, so if necessary you could shout out again.’

  What a man! She’d have one last shot at trying to find a streak of gallantry somewhere deep inside him, and if that failed, she’d go to bed alone and spend the night working on a Plan B.

  ‘I know I’m being a nuisance and I’m really sorry, but I know that I won’t be able to get that scorpion out of my mind. I’m worried that if I don’t get some sleep, I’ll forget all the Italian I know. If you were next to me, I’d fall asleep at once.’

  ‘How highly flattering,’ he murmured dryly.

  A giggle escaped her and she quickly smothered it. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  She stared at him, widening her eyes with hope. Annoyingly, they began to water and she was forced to blink.

  ‘Oh, all right then. I suppose I’ll have to if I want to get any sleep before tomorrow – and I do. I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter.’

  Eureka!

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice shaking with relief. And no wonder – she’d totally run out of ideas for simpering helplessly. She directed a heartfelt smile of gratitude towards her boss for rescuing her plan from the jaws of defeat at the eleventh hour.

  He stood up. ‘I’ll go and lock my door.’ He crossed the room in long strides and went out into the corridor.

  She stared after him, her heart beating fast. This could turn out to be the worst plan she’d ever had in her life – and she’d come up with some pretty dire plans in her time – or it could turn out to be the best.

  Tom leaned back against the door of his room and slowly released his breath. How the hell had he let himself be manoeuvred into sharing a bed with Evie Shaw?

  He hadn’t often been lost for words in his life, but as he’d stared across the room at the girl he’d hired the week before, her white nightdress translucent in the moonlight, it had been one of those rare occasions.

  And that had only been the start of the rapid downhill slope. Things had speedily gone from being downright awkward to bloody impossible, with the result that he was now about to spend the night in an employee’s bedroom. Entirely her choice, not his. For someone who prided himself on always being in control of the situation, he hadn’t managed things too well just now. Somehow or other, Evie Shaw had wrong-footed him.

  Muffled by the thick stone walls, he heard the sound of Evie moving around in her room. He went quickly to his chair, picked up his boxer shorts and stepped into them. Sleeping naked as he usually did was not an option. He pulled his robe around him again and tied up his belt as tightly as he could.

  She’d seemed such a good secretary, too. Admittedly she’d only been with him for a week, but she’d got to his house on time every morning, and she’d always succeeded in getting through the list of things he’d left her to do whilst he was in his Chambers. He’d swiftly seen how efficient she was, and had been able to concentrate on bringing his junior up to speed about his ongoing cases and making sure that the junior would be able to deal with anything that came up in his absence.

  And her Italian was excellent. On her second morning, he’d asked her to phone the hotel in Italy to confirm their reservation, and he’d hung on at the house in case there were any problems. As soon as she’d started talking to the receptionist at Il Poggio, the small hotel he used whenever he visited the Italian house he’d bought a few months earlier, he’d known that her Italian was as good as the agency had promised.

  It had been a massive relief that the agency had been able to find an Italian speaker at such short notice. His regular interpreter had pulled out of the trip a week before they were due to leave as his wife had had to go into hospital. He’d thought at first that he might have to postpone his visit, which he was desperately anxious to avoid doing. He had a high-profile libel case beginning two weeks after his return from Italy, so he wouldn’t have been able to reschedule his trip for any time in the immediate future.

  The restoration of his house was almost complete. He was going to be free for the whole of August and he wanted to spend the month at the house. What’s more, he hadn’t seen his parents for a while and he’d invited them to come for a couple of the weeks that he would be there. If he left it any longer to order the furniture, it would be impossible for any of them to stay there.

  Finding Evie had been a godsend as it meant that the planned trip could go ahead.

  Ideally, she could have been easier on the eye – thick-rimmed glasses and a severe hairstyle, along with downright dowdy clothes, didn’t really do her any favours. But her appearance was irrelevant. What mattered was that on his first visit to Umbria he’d fallen in love with the place and had bought a house on a whim. No one in the area spoke English, and he didn’t speak Italian. Evie did.

  And there was another good thing about her – she wasn’t the sort of woman who spoke merely for the sake of saying something. She hadn’t attempted to force a conversation during the flight from Heathrow to Rome Fiumicino, nor on the journey from the airport to Umbria. Instead, she’d been content to stare out of the window, occasionally exclaiming in delight at the views.

  Admittedly he hadn’t tried to start up a conversation with her. If he remembered rightly, ‘Lunatic drivers!’ was about the only thing he’d said during their one-and-a-half-hour drive to the hotel. Nevertheless, unlike Evie, a lot of women would have found it virtually impossible to hold their tongues in check. Uncontrolled tongues made him a great deal of money every year, but he wouldn’t have wanted one in the car with him.

  They’d reached Il Poggio with time only to wash their hands before the evening meal, and although she’d made one or two general comments while they were waiting for their food to be served, she’d soon fallen silent, respecting his unspoken need to check his emails.

  When he’d wished her goodnight after dinner, he’d gone to his room and congratulated himself on having hired a female who wasn’t totally superficial and self-obsessed. She was a plain, but pleasant, woman, who wouldn’t make a fuss about a broken nail, and who’d be an excellent interpreter for the week.

  So where had the other Evie come from!

  The Evie who’d screamed in fear at the sight of a tiny insect halfway up her wall; the Evie without glasses, whose hair hung gloriously about her face; the Evie who’d stood on her bed looking …

  He stopped himself. He wasn’t going to go there. He didn’t want to remember how she’d looked. Suffice it to say, her behaviour over the scorpion had shown a very different side of her, and he’d been put in an impossible position. He must keep that in the back of his mind and be more alert in the future, but for the moment, all he was going to think about was getting through the night as quickly as possible, or what was left of the night.

  He picked up his watch from the wrought-iron bedside table, walked out of his room and closed the door firmly behind him.

  Evie was lying in the middle of the bed, holding the sheet up to her chin, when Tom came back into her room. There was a look o
f grim determination on his face.

  ‘You can have whichever side you want,’ she offered.

  ‘I’m usually on the left,’ he said, and he walked to the far end of the large iron bed, his eyes firmly on the floor in front of him.

  ‘I didn’t realise you were married,’ she said, shifting to the right-hand side of the bed.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Oh.’ She stared up at the ceiling, her heart thumping. This was more embarrassing than she’d thought it would be. Much more. Plan A hadn’t gone into trivial details like the sides of the bed and what it’d actually be like when he lay down next to her.

  And suppose she reached out unconsciously for him during the night, forgetting in her sleep that this was strictly a non-sex thing. Aargh! Just thinking about it was scary. She slid deeper into the bed and fervently wished it was morning. And by the look on his face when he’d come in, so did he.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him drop his towelling robe on the floor and pull back the corner of the sheet, making sure that he didn’t uncover so much as an inch of her body. She turned her head and looked towards the door. The mattress moved beneath her as he slid into the bed and immediately rolled on to his side. She surreptitiously glanced at him – his back was towards her and she could only see the side of his face.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Sleep. Goodnight, Evie.’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘Goodnight, Mr Hadleigh.’

  He opened them again. She quickly looked away.

  ‘I really don’t think you can “Mr Hadleigh” me when I’m in bed next to you, even if I am only here as a sort of sleeping pill. I’m sure it won’t hurt us to drop some formality whilst we’re in Italy. You can call me Tom. But only whilst we’re here.’

  ‘Goodnight, Tom,’ she said, and she smiled at the dark rafters above her.

  Chapter Two

  In the scheme of things …