Beautiful Secret (Beautiful Bastard #4) (2 page)

I tried to look indignant.

I tried to look horrified and come up with some sort of argument.

I had nothing. In the past six months, I’d logged so many covert glances in Niall Stella’s direction that if anyone was a qualified expert in the topography of his crotch, it would be me.

I tucked my purse in the bottom drawer of my desk and pushed it closed with a resigned sigh. Apparently my
covert glances hadn’t been quite as covert as I thought. “Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure his junk hasn’t ever, and won’t ever, be that close to me.”

“It won’t if you never speak to him. I mean, look, as soon as I get the chance I’ll snog that ginger in PR till he cries. You should at least
talk
to the man, Ruby.”

But I was already shaking my head and she snapped me with the end of her scarf. “Consider it research for your Structural Integrity class. Tell him you need to test the tensile strength of his steel girder.”

I groaned. “Great plan.”

“Okay, then someone else. The blond chap in the mailroom. Always has his eye on you.”

I made a face. “Not interested.”

“Ethan in contracts, then. He’s short, all right, but he’s
fit
. And have you seen him do that tongue trick at the pub?”

“God, no.” I sat down, slumping under the weight of her inspection. “Are we really having this conversation now? Can’t we just pretend my enormous crush is not a thing?”

“Afraid not. You’re not interested in any of the other lads, but won’t make a play for Mr. Uptight, either.” She sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. Stella’s fit as fuck, but he’s a bit on the prim side, wouldn’t you say?”

I ran a nail along the edge of my desk. “I sort of like that about him,” I said. “He’s steady.”

“Stodgy,” she countered.

“
Restrained
,” I insisted. “It’s like he’s stepped right
out of an Austen novel. He’s Mr. Darcy.” I hoped that would help her understand.

“I don’t get that. Mr. Darcy is short with Elizabeth to the point of rudeness. Why would you want someone who’s so much work?”

“How is that more work?” I asked. “Darcy doesn’t lavish her with false praise or compliments that mean nothing. When he says he loves her it’s because he
does
.”

Pippa plopped down into a chair and turned on her computer. “Maybe I like a flirt.”

“But a flirt is that way with everyone,” I argued. “Darcy is awkward and hard to read, but when you have his heart, it’s yours.”

“Sounds a lot like work to me.”

I knew I’d always been a touch on the romantic side, but the idea of seeing the restrained hero unleashed in a way no one else did—uninhibited, hungry, seductive—made it hard for me to think about anything else when Niall Stella was within a four-foot radius.

The problem was I became genuinely stupid when he was around.

“How can I ever hope to have an actual conversation?” I asked her. I knew I would never actually act on it, but it felt good to finally talk about this with someone who knew him, someone other than London and Lola, who were half the world away. “You know, one where we both know we’re
having
the conversation? During last week’s
meeting, Anthony asked me if I could present some data he’d had me organize from the Diamond Square project, and I was kicking
ass
until I looked up, and saw him standing behind Anthony. Do you know how hard I worked on that?
Weeks
. Then one look from Niall Stella and my concentration was shot.”

For some reason I was unable to call him by only his given name. Niall Stella was a two-name honor, like Prince Harry or Jesus Christ.

“I stopped speaking midsentence,” I continued. “When he’s near me, either I blurt out ridiculous things, or I turn into a mute.”

Pippa laughed before her eyes narrowed and she looked me up and down. She picked up the calendar and pretended to scrutinize it. “Funny thing, I just realized it’s
Thursday
,” she sang. “That explains why your hair looks particularly sexy, and you’re wearing that minxy little skirt.”

I ran my hand through my chin-length, choppy hair. “It looks like it does every day.”

Pippa snorted. In truth, I’d spent way too long getting ready this morning, but I needed the confidence today.

Because just like she said, today was Thursday, my favorite day of the week.

On Thursdays I got to see him.

In most respects, Thursdays
shouldn’t
have been anything to get excited about. That particular Thursday’s to-do list included such mundane chores as watering the sad little ficus Lola insisted I smuggle the 5,400 miles separating San Diego from London, typing up a bid proposal and sending it out in the mail, and putting the recycling out on the curb. A life of glamour. But pinned to the top of my Outlook every Thursday was also Anthony Smith’s engineering group meeting, where, for one hour every week, I had an unobstructed view of Niall Stella, Vice President, Director of Planning, and, Holy Hell, The Hottest Man Alive.

If only I could add him to my to-do list, too.

An hour of prime Niall Stella time was both a blessing and a curse, because I
was
interested in what was happening in our firm, and found most of the discussions that took place between the senior partners to be absolutely fascinating. I was twenty-three, not twelve. I had a degree in engineering and would be
their
boss one day if I had anything to say about it. That a single individual had the power to hijack my attention was beyond mortifying. I wasn’t usually flighty or awkward and I
did
date. In fact, I’d dated more since moving to London than I had back home because, well, English Boys. Enough said.

But this particular English Boy was, unfortunately, beyond my reach. Almost literally: Niall Stella was over six and a half feet tall and effortlessly refined, with perfectly styled brown hair, soulful brown eyes, broad muscled
shoulders, and a smile so gorgeous, on the rare occasion it made an appearance at work, it brought my train of thought to a screeching halt.

According to the office gossip, he had finished school practically as an infant and was some sort of legendary urban planning mastermind. I hadn’t realized that was an Actual Thing until I started working in the engineering group at Richardson-Corbett and saw him advise on everything from Building Control guidelines to the chemical composition of concrete additives. He was the unofficial final word in London on all bridge, commercial, and transport structure blueprints. To my utter heartbreak, he even once left in the middle of a Thursday meeting to direct a construction team when a panicked city worker called because another firm had botched a foundation design and concrete had already been poured. Virtually nothing got built in London without Niall Stella’s hand in it somewhere.

He took his tea milk first (no sugar), had an enormous office on the third floor—far from mine—clearly never had time for television, but was a Leeds United man through and through. And although he was raised in Leeds, he went to school at Cambridge, then Oxford, and now resided in London. Somewhere along the way Niall Stella had developed quite the posh accent.

Also: recently divorced. My heart could barely take it.

Moving on.

Number of Times Niall Stella Had Glanced at Me
During Thursday Meetings? Twelve. Number of Conversations We’d Had? Four. Number of Either of These Events He Might Actually Remember? Zero. I’d been wrestling with my Niall Stella crush for six months, and I was pretty sure he still didn’t know that I was an employee at the firm rather than a regular takeout delivery girl.

Surprisingly, because he was almost always one of the first to the office, the man in question wasn’t here yet. I’d checked—
a few times
—craning my neck to see through the mass of bleary-eyed people filing in through the conference room door.

Our meeting room was lined with a wall of windows, each looking out onto the fairly busy street below. My morning walk to work had been relatively dry, but as it did most days here, rain had begun to drizzle from a sky heavy with clouds. It was the kind of rain that looked like a harmless haze, but I’d learned not to be fooled: three minutes outside and I’d be soaked through. Even if I’d grown up somewhere rainier than Southern California, I could never have been prepared for the way the London air, between October and April, felt almost saturated with water, heavy and damp. Like a rain cloud had wrapped itself around my body and seeped straight into my bones.

Spring had just begun in London, but the little courtyard across Southwark Street was still dismal and bare. I’d been told that in summer it was filled with pink chairs and small tables belonging to a restaurant near
the back. Right now it was all concrete and mostly naked tree branches, damp brown leaves blown across the stark ground.

Around me, people continued to voice their displeasure with the weather as they opened up their laptops and finished their tea, and I blinked away from the window in time to see the last few stragglers rush in. Everyone wanted to be seated before Anthony Smith—my boss and the firm’s director of engineering—made his way down from the sixth floor.

Anthony was . . . well, okay, he was a bit of a jackass. He ogled the interns, loved to hear himself speak, and said nothing that sounded sincere. Every Thursday morning he relished making an example of the last person to walk in, sharply commenting with a saccharine smile on their outfit or their hair so everyone in the room would have to watch in leaden silence as they found the last empty seat and sat down in shame.

The door squeaked as it opened.
Emma
.

Emma lingered, holding the door open for someone.
Gah. Karen
.

Voices sounded from outside the room, growing louder as they came in.
Victoria and John
.

And then, there he was.

“Showtime,” Pippa muttered next to me.

I saw the top of Niall Stella’s head as he stepped in just behind Anthony, and it was as if the air had been sucked from the room. People and chatter blurred around the
edges and then it was just
him
, expression neutral as he seemed to instinctively take in who was there and who was missing, his shoulders wrapped in a dark suit, one hand tucked casually into the pocket of his dress pants.

The urgent, fiery feeling in my chest grew.

There was something about Niall Stella that made you want to watch him. Not because he was boisterous or loud, but because he wasn’t. There was a quiet confidence about him, a way he carried himself that demanded attention and respect, and a feeling that while he wasn’t talking, he was watching everything, noticing everyone.

Everyone except me.

Having come from a family of therapists that discussed
everything
, I’d never been the silent type. My brother, and even Lola probably, would start calling me a chatterbox when I really got going. So the fact that I of all people couldn’t manage a single articulate thing when Niall Stella was within touching proximity made absolutely zero sense. What I felt for him was a distracting kind of infatuation.

He didn’t even have to attend Thursday meetings; he just
did
, because he wanted to make sure there was “cross-departmental consensus” and so his planning division “could at least have a working engineering vocabulary” since it was Niall Stella’s responsibility to coordinate engineering with public policy and his own planning division.

Not that I’d memorized everything he’d ever
said at this meeting.

Today he wore a light blue shirt beneath a dark charcoal suit. His tie was a mesmerizing swirl of yellow and blue, and my eyes moved from the double Windsor knot at his neck to the smooth skin just above, the heavy curve of his Adam’s apple, the sharp jaw. His normally impassive mouth was turned down in consternation, and when I made it up to his eyes . . . I registered with horror that he was watching me eye-fuck him like it was my job.

Oh, God
.

I dropped my gaze to my laptop, the screen blurring out with the intensity of my stare. The flurry of telephones and printers from the outer office flowed in through the open door, seeming to reach a crescendo of chaos, and then someone closed the door, signaling the start of the meeting. And as if the room had been vacuum sealed, all noise came to an abrupt stop.

“Mr. Stella,” Karen said in greeting.

I clicked on my mail folder, ears ringing as I strained to hear his reply. One breath in, one breath out. Another. I typed in my password. I willed my heart to slow down.

“Karen,” he said finally in his perfect, quiet, deep voice, and a smile spread unconsciously across my face. Not just a smile, a
grin
, like I’d just been offered a giant slice of cake.

Dear God, I am in so deep
.

Biting the inside of my cheek, I worked to straighten my expression. Judging from the way Pippa’s elbow connected with my ribs, I was pretty sure I failed.

She leaned toward me. “Easy, girl,” she whispered. “It was only two syllables.”