Valentine's Day

EPILOGUE

THEY started out planning a small, simple wedding, but naturally, that didn’t last. In no time at all, it grew into something monstrous. So it was a good thing they knew a good caterer.

They decided to have the event out on the ranch. Cari wasn’t so sure at first, but once she saw the changes Max was already making, she was convinced. The driveway was lined with newly planted trees. The main farmhouse was still being renovated, but the lower floor was usable and a couple of the outer buildings, including the bunkhouse, were looking sturdy with new repairs to their structures and a couple of coats of new paint that left them gleaming. The sweeping area that made up the yard was green with new sod, creating a lawn where there hadn’t been one for decades. Tables were set up on it, and a radius of white chairs for the ceremony. White tablecloths and silver vases filled with tulips decorated each table. The scene was magical.

People from all around the area began streaming in an hour early. The ceremony itself was short, but touching. Handkerchiefs were liberally in use all around. And then came the reception.

Max and Cari stood in a seemingly never-ending receiving line, greeting old friends and meeting new ones. Jamie was with them when he was awake, and everyone oohed and aahed over him, which was just what he deserved. He’d grown ever closer to Cari, and she to him. As far as she was concerned, he was her baby, and that was all there was to it.

Her dress was a simple, strapless gown embedded with seed pearls. Her hair was piled high and the diamond necklace adorned her neck.

“You’re a gorgeous bride,” most people who passed told her. She knew it was traditional to say exactly that, but something in the eyes of the people saying it was beginning to convince her it might be true.

The food was spectacular—at least, that’s what everyone told Cari, though she didn’t have time to try any for herself.

“Does it occur to you,” she noted to C.J., who was responsible for most of it, “that you’ve found a new golden goose with your catering business, one that you are raising and nurturing yourself?”

“That’s right, go ahead and rub it in,” C.J. snapped. “You won. I lost.” But she smiled to soften her words and added, “I can take it. I’ve been kicked in the teeth a lot over the years. I must say, this is better. It’s nice to have a man who adores me.”

Cari nodded, watching Randy checking on the wedding cake. “He does do that.”

“Yeah. But then, you’ve got that, too, don’t you?”

Cari had to agree. She smiled at Max. He was making faces and gesturing and trying to convey something to her, but she couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. She looked at him questioningly, but his mother came up to say something to him, and he looked away, just as Mara appeared before her.

“Hey,” she said, beaming at her friend.

“Do you realize you would never have met Max if it wasn’t for me?” Mara demanded. “I think I deserve some recognition. A plaque would be nice.” She grinned at Cari.

“So you have to admit it has all worked out for the best,” Cari responded.

Mara nodded. “Although I’d rather have you in the family than that C.J.,” she told her with a sigh.

“Oh, C.J.’s okay. And she sure can cook.”

“My, yes. I would never dispute that.”

Cari turned away. One of the neighborhood girls who had been hired to help serve was tugging on her satin dress.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Angeli,” she said.

Cari thrilled to hearing her new name for the first time. “Yes?”

“There’s something wrong in the bunkhouse. Something broke. I was asked to get you to come right away.”

“Oh, dear.”

The bunkhouse was where they were storing most of the supplies. She looked at the receiving line and couldn’t find Max. Whatever it was, she would have to handle it on her own and she’d better do it quickly. Gathering her skirt, she dashed across the sod to the bunkhouse and hurried inside. As she did so, the door closed behind her, the lock snapped, and she was suddenly engulfed in gloom.

“What is it?” She turned quickly and found herself being dragged into the arms of her new husband. “Max!”

“I couldn’t wait any longer,” he told her, raining kisses on her upturned face. “You are the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen. Ripe for ravishing, I’d say.”

“Would you say that?” She laughed low in her throat as he began a slow, sexy seduction. “A quick ravishment sounds pretty good to me, too.”

She kissed him back, then sighed. “But we really can’t. We’ve got to cut the cake and lead the dance and…”

He said something in Italian and began to peel her dress away. Sighing, she gave in. The cake and the dance would have to wait. Right now, love had the right of way.

How to Get Over Your Ex

Nikki Logan

Being rejected is one thing. Being rejected live on radio takes it to a whole new level!

After her on-air proposal is turned down by her commitment-phobe boyfriend, Georgia Stone must learn to survive singledom. Unfortunately, thanks to a clause in her contract, she has to do it under the watchful gaze of brooding radio producer Zander Rush.

And so begins the Year of Georgia! Lurching from salsa classes to spy school, Georgia discovers a taste for adventure. Her biggest thrill so far? Flirting with danger—aka the enigmatic Zander. But admitting she’s ready for more than just a fling…? Definitely Georgia’s scariest challenge yet!

Next month, look for the second book in this duet: The Guy To Be Seen With by Fiona Harper

HOW TO GET OVER YOUR EX

“Why are we here, Zander?” she breathed into the fading light.

He stared at her in the rapidly cooling, darkening evening. “Because you followed me up here?”

Half of her was terrified he’d just shrug and blame tradition. That this thing between them wasn’t mutual. But she wasn’t about to be put off so easily. “Here, by the twinkling water as the sun sets.”

“Do you want to leave?” he murmured, eyes locked on hers.

She should. “No.”

“Do you want to feel?”

Her lungs locked up. Suddenly the grass and cows and water around them seemed to grow as if the two of them had just hauled themselves over the top of a beanstalk, forcing them closer together and making the scant distance separating them into something negligible.

Her pulse began to hammer in earnest.

Zander raised his hand and slipped it behind her head, lowering his forehead to rest on hers. His heat radiated outward. His eyes drifted shut.

ABOUT NIKKI LOGAN

NIKKI LOGAN lives next to a string of protected wetlands in Western Australia, with her long-suffering partner and a menagerie of furred, feathered and scaly mates. She studied film and theater at university, and worked for years in advertising and film distribution before finally settling down in the wildlife industry. Her romance with nature goes way back, and she considers her life charmed, given she works with wildlife by day and writes fiction by night—the perfect way to combine her two loves. Nikki believes that the passion and risk of falling in love are perfectly mirrored in the danger and beauty of wild places. Every romance she writes contains an element of nature, and if readers catch a waft of rich earth or the spray of wild ocean between the pages, she knows her job is done.

For Aaron, who knows just how hard

the getting over part can be.

Give my regards to Broadway.

ONE

Valentine’s Day 2012

Close. Please just close.

A dozen curious eyes followed Georgia Stone into Radio EROS’ stylish elevator, craning over computer monitors or sliding on plastic floor mats back into the corridor just slightly, not even trying to disguise their curiosity. She couldn’t stand staring at the back of the elevator for ever, so she turned, lifted her chin...

...and silently begged the doors to close. To put her out of her misery for just a few blessed moments.

Do. Not. Cry.

Not yet.

The numbness of shock was rapidly wearing off and leaving the deep, awful ache of pain behind it. With a humiliation chaser. She’d managed to thank the dumbfounded drive-time announcers—God, she was so British—before stumbling out of their studio, knowing that the radio station’s output was broadcast in every office on every floor via a system of loudspeakers.

Hence all the badly disguised glances.

The whole place knew what had just happened to her. Because of her. That their much-lauded Leap Year Valentine’s proposal had just gone spectacularly, horribly, excruciatingly, publicly wrong.

She’d asked. Daniel had declined.

As nicely as he could, under the circumstances, but his urgently whispered, “Is this a joke, George?” was still a no whichever way you looked at it and, in case she hadn’t got the message, he’d spelled it out.

We weren’t heading for marriage. I thought you knew that...

Actually no, or she wouldn’t have asked.

That’s what made our thing so perfect...

Oh. Right. That was what made it perfect? She’d known they were drifting in a slow, connected eddy like the leaves in Wakehurst’s Black Pond but she’d thought that even drifting eventually got you somewhere. Obviously not.

‘For God’s sake, will you close?’

She wasn’t usually one to talk to inanimate objects—even under her breath—but somehow, on some level, the elevator must have heard her because its shiny chrome doors started to slide together obligingly.

‘Hold the lift!’ a voice shouted.

She didn’t move. Her stomach plunged. Just as they’d nearly closed...

A hand slid into the sliver of space between the doors and curled around one of them, arresting and then reversing its slide. They reopened, long-suffering and apologetic.

‘You mustn’t have heard me,’ the dark-haired man said, throwing her only the briefest and tersest of glances, his lips tight. He turned, faced the front, and permitted them to close this time, giving her a fabulous view of the square cut of the back of his expensive suit.

No, you mustn’t have heard me. Making a total idiot of myself in front of all of London. If he had, he’d have given her a much longer look. Something told her everyone would be looking at her for much longer now. Starting with all her and Daniel’s workmates.

She groaned.

He looked back over his shoulder. ‘Sorry?’

She forced burning eyes to his. If she blinked just once she was going to unleash the tears she could feel jockeying for expression just behind her lids. But she didn’t have the heart for speech. She shook her head.

He returned his focus to the front of the elevator. She stared at the lights slowly descending toward ‘G’ for ground floor. Then at the one marked ‘B’, below that—the one he’d pressed.

‘Excuse me...’ She cleared her throat to reduce the tight choke. He turned again, looked down great cheekbones at her. ‘Can you get to the street from B?’

He studied her. Didn’t ask what she meant. ‘The basement has electronic gate control.’

Her heart sank. So much for hoping to make a subtle getaway. Looked as if the universe really wanted her to pay for today’s disaster.

Crowded reception it was, then.

She nodded just once. ‘Thank you.’

He didn’t turn back around, but his grey eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll be driving out through the gates. You’re welcome to slip out behind me.’

Slip out. Was that just a figure of speech or did he know? ‘Thank you. Yes, please.’

He turned back to the front, then, a heartbeat later, he turned back again. ‘Step behind me.’

She dragged stinging eyes back up to him. ‘What?’

‘The door’s going to open at Reception first. It will be full of people. I can screen you.’

Suddenly the front-line of the small army of tears waiting for a chance to get out surged forward. She fought them back furiously, totally futile.

Kindness. That was worse than blinking. And it meant that he definitely knew.

But since he was playing pretend-I-don’t, she could, too. She stepped to her left just as the doors obediently opened onto the station’s reception. Light and noise filled the elevator but she stood, private and protected behind the stranger, his big body as good as a locked door. She sighed. Privacy and someone to protect her—two things she’d just blown out of her life for good, she suspected.

‘Mr Rush...’ someone said, out in the foyer.

The big man just nodded. ‘Alice. Going down?’

‘No, up.’

He shrugged. ‘I won’t be long.’

And the doors closed, leaving just the two of them, again. Georgia sagged and swiped at the single, determined tear that had slipped down her cheek. He didn’t turn back around. It took only a moment longer for the elevator to reach the basement. He walked out the moment the doors opened and reached back to hold them wide for her. The frigid outdoor air hit her instantly.

‘Thank you,’ she repeated and stepped out into the darkened parking floor. She’d left her coat upstairs, hanging on the back of a chair in the studio, but she would gladly freeze rather than set foot in that building ever again.

He didn’t make eye contact again. Or smile. ‘Wait by the gate,’ he simply said and then turned to stride towards a charcoal Jaguar.

She walked a dead straight line towards the exit gate. The fastest, most direct route she could. She only reached it a moment or two before the luxury car. She stood, rubbing her prickling flesh.

He must have activated the gate from inside his vehicle, and the large, steel lattice began to rattle along rollers towards her. He nudged his car forward, lowered his window, and peered out across his empty passenger seat.

She ducked to look at him. For moments. One of them really needed to say something. Might as well be her.

‘Thanks again.’ For sanctuary in the elevator. For spiriting her away, now.

His eyes darkened and he slid designer sunglasses up onto the bridge of his nose. ‘Good luck’ was all he said. Then he shifted his Jag into gear and drove forward out of the still-widening gate.

She stared after him.

It seemed an odd thing to say in lieu of goodbye but maybe he knew something she didn’t.

Maybe he knew how much she was going to need that luck.

* * *

Hell.

That was the longest elevator ride of Zander’s life. Trapped in two square metres of double-thickness steel with a sobbing woman. Except she hadn’t been sobbing—not outwardly—but she was hurting inwardly; pain was coming off her in waves. Totally tangible.

The waves had hit him the moment he nudged his way into her elevator, but it was too late, then, to step back and let her go down without him. Not without making her feel worse.

He knew who she was. He just hadn’t known it was her standing in the elevator he ran for or he wouldn’t have launched himself at the closing doors.

She must have bolted straight from the studio to the exit the moment they threw to the first track out of the Valentine’s segment. Lord knew he did; he wanted to get across town to the network head offices before they screamed for him to come in.

Proactive instead of reactive. He never wanted someone higher up his food chain to call him and find him just sitting there waiting for their call. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. Or the power.

By the time he got across London’s peak-hour gridlock he’d have the right spin for the on-air balls-up. Turning a negative into a positive. Oiling the waters. The kind of problem-solving he was famous—and employed—for.

The kind of problem-solving he loathed.

He blew out a steady breath and took an orange light just as it was turning red in order to keep moving. None of them had expected the guy to say no. Who said no to a proposal, live on air? You said yes live and then you backed out of it later if it wasn’t what you wanted. That was what ninety-five per cent of Londoners would do.

Apparently this guy was Mr Five Per Cent.

Then again, who asked a man to marry her live on radio if she wasn’t already confident of the answer? Or maybe she thought she was? She wouldn’t be the first to find out she was wrong...the hard way.

Empathy curled his fingers tight on the expensive leather of his steering wheel. Who was he to cast stones?

He’d recognised that expression immediately. The one where you’d happily agree for the elevator to plunge eight storeys rather than have to step out and face the world. At least his own humiliation had been limited to just his family and friends.

Just two hundred of his and Lara’s nearest and dearest.

Georgia Stone’s would be all over the city today and all over the world by tomorrow.

He was counting on it. Though he’d have preferred it not to be on the back of someone’s pain and humiliation. He hadn’t got that bad...yet.

He eased his foot onto the brake as the traffic ground to a halt around him and resisted the urge to lean on his horn.

Not that he imagined a girl like that would suffer for long. Tall and pale and pretty with that tangle of dark, short curls. She’d dressed for her proposal—that was a sweet and unexpected touch in the casual world of radio. Half his on-air staff would come to work in their pyjamas if they had the option. But Georgia Stone had worn a simple, pale pink, thin-strapped dress for the big moment—almost a wedding dress itself. If one got married on a beach in Barbados. Way too light for February so maybe public proposals weren’t the only thing the pretty Miss Stone didn’t think through?

Or maybe he was just looking for ways that this wasn’t his fault.

He’d approved the Valentine’s promotion in the first place. And the cheesy ‘does your man just need a shove?’ angle. But EROS’ listeners were—on the whole—a fairly cheesy bunch so it had been one of their most successful promotions.

Which had made the lift ride all the more painful.

Something about her pale, wide-eyed courtesy. Even as her heart ruptured quietly in its cavity.

Thank you.

She’d said it four times in half the minutes. As though he were a guy just helping her out instead of the guy that put her in that position in the first place. It was his contract she’d signed. It was his station’s promotion she’d put her hand up for.

Her life was now in shreds around her feet but still she thanked him.

That was one well-brought-up young woman. Youngish; he had to have at least fifteen years on her, though it was hard to know. He reached for his dash and activated the voice automation.

‘Call the office,’ he told his car.

It listened. ‘EROS, Home of Great Music, Mr Rush’s office. This is Casey, can I help you?’

Christ, he really had to have their company-wide phone greeting shortened.

‘It’s me,’ he announced to his empty vehicle. ‘I need you to pull up the contract with the Valentine’s girl.’

‘Just a tick,’ his assistant murmured, not taking offence at his lack of acknowledgement. She knew life was too short for pleasantries. ‘OK, got it. What do you need, Zander?’

‘Age?’

Her silence said she was scanning the document. ‘Twenty-eight.’

OK, so he had nine years on her. And her skin was amazing, then. He would have said twenty-two or -three, max. ‘Duration of contract?’

Again a brief pause. ‘Twelve months. To conclude with a follow-up next February fourteenth.’

Twelve months of their lives. That was supposed to include engagement party, fully paid wedding, honeymoon. All on EROS. That was the fifty-thousand-pound carrot. Why else would anyone want to make the most private, special moment of their lives so incredibly public?

The carrot was cheap in international broadcast terms, for the kind of global exposure he suspected this promo would get. Even more so now, given it had probably already gone viral. Exposure brought listeners, listeners brought advertisers, and advertisers brought revenue.

Except that follow-up twelve months from now wasn’t going to make great radio. At all. His mind went straight to the weakest link.

‘Casey, can you send that contract to my phone and then call Rod’s assistant and let her know I’m about half an hour away?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He rang off without a farewell. Life was too short for that as well.

A year was a long time to manufacture content, but if they played their cards right they could salvage something that would last longer than just the next few days. Really make that fifty thousand pounds work for them. He still expected EROS to directly benefit from the viral exposure—maybe even more now—but that contract locked them in for the next year as much as her.

A black cab cut in close to his bonnet and he gave voice to his frustration—his guilt—finally leaning on the horn the way he’d been wanting to for twenty minutes.

He spent the second half of his drive across town formulating a plan. So much so that when he walked into his network’s headquarters he had it all figured out. A way forward. A way to salvage something of today’s mess.

‘Zander...’ Rod’s assistant caught his ear as he breezed past into her boss’s office. He paused, turned. ‘He has Nigel in there.’

Nigel Westerly. Network owner. That wasn’t a good sign. ‘Thanks, Claire.’

Suddenly even his salvage plan looked shaky. Nigel Westerly hadn’t amassed one of the country’s biggest fortunes by being easily led. He was tough. And ruthless.

Zander straightened his back.

Oh, well, if he had to be fired, he’d rather it be by one of the men he admired most in England. He certainly wasn’t going to quail and wonder when the axe was going to fall. He pushed open the double doors to his director’s office with flair and announced himself.

‘Gentlemen...’

TWO

Thank goodness for seeds. And quiet lab rooms. And high-security access passes.

Georgia’s whole National Trust building was so light and bright and...optimistic. None of which she could stomach right now. Her little X-ray lab had adjustable lighting so it was dim and gloomy and could look as if she were out even when she wasn’t.

Perfect.

She’d called in sick the day after Valentine’s—unable to crawl out of bed was a kind of sick, right?—but she’d gone tiptoeing back to work, her Thursday and Friday an awful trial in carefully neutral smiles and colleagues avoiding eye contact and a very necessary and very belated inter-departmental email to Kew’s carnivorous-plant department.

It was also very short.

I’m so very sorry, Daniel. I’ll miss you.

She knew they were done. Even if Dan hadn’t concurred—which he had, once he’d cooled down enough to speak to her—she couldn’t spend another moment in a relationship that just drifted in small, endless circles. Not after what she’d done. Conveniently, it also meant she didn’t have to explain herself, explain something she barely understood—at least not for a while. And she was nothing if not a master procrastinator. She’d see Dan eventually, apologise in person, pick up her few things from his place. But this way they were both out of their misery.

Relationship euthanasia.

You know, except for the whole intensive public interest thing...

And now it was Saturday afternoon. And work was as good a place as any to hide out from all those messages and emails from astounded friends and family. Better, probably, because there were so few staff here with her and because she worked alone in her little X-ray lab behind two levels of carded access restrictions. The world wasn’t exactly interested enough in her botched proposal to have teams of paparazzi on her trail but it was certainly interested enough to still be talking about it—everywhere—a few days later. She didn’t dare check her social media accounts or listen to the radio or pick up a paper in case The Valentine’s Girl was still the topic de jour.