The Morning After the Night Before

THE FLAT IN NOTTING HILL

Love and lust in the city that never sleeps!

Izzy, Tori and Poppy are living the London dream—sharing a big flat in Notting Hill, they have good jobs, wild nights out … and each other.

They couldn’t be more different, but one thing is for sure: when they start falling in love they’re going to be very glad they’ve got such good friends around to help them survive the rollercoaster …!

THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE by Nikki Logan

Dear Reader

There’s really nothing like the friendships created with the people you first flat-shared with when you were freshly out of home. Especially if they were also your BFFs at school.

Poppy, Tori and Izzy come from different worlds, and have different hopes and aspirations, but they get each other completely. And wherever life takes them they know they’re there for each other. Even when their Notting Hill flat starts to fill up with testosterone these girls stick together.

I had a ball researching London and Notting Hill from the other side of the world in Australia, and I’m thrilled that Izzy gets to share her story with a handsome, secretive Aussie rogue.

I hope you enjoy a little workplace romance—Izzy and Harry definitely do.

May love always find you!

Nikki

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 theatre 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.

The Morning After the Night Before

Nikki Logan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Louisa, Joss and Charlotte.

Thank you for a fabulous few months living with you in Notting Hill.

First round of drinks at Ignite is on me.

Table of Contents

Cover

Dear Reader

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Copyright

PROLOGUE

WOULD SATAN WEAR eleven-micron wool?

Izzy Dean could tell, even from this side of her boss’s expensive desk twelve storeys up her firm’s London high-rise, that Harry Mitchell’s flash charcoal suit would be as soft as a kitten to touch. Her fingers practically itched to stroke the expensive fabric.

Maybe she could cop a feel as she leaned in to smack that smug grin off his designer-stubbled face.

‘Careful, Dean, you look like you want to deck me.’

‘Do I?’ Izzy feigned. Not that he’d believe innocence from her for one moment. He was way too used to sparring with her.

Lord, as career-enders went, wouldn’t that be a spectacular way to go? Bunch up all those muscles she’d developed cleaning fast-food kitchens as a kid and—pow—set Mitchell right on his sanctimonious, perfectly sculpted arse right here in his own fishbowl office. She’d storm out amid a standing ovation from the entire downtrodden department.

‘Hello?’

A large face loomed in her blurred vision and she snapped her focus back to steady blue eyes—oasis, according to the ‘what colour are his eyes?’ chart in her favourite battered old chick magazine. With flecks of cougar blue.

Not that she’d looked him up, specifically …*cough*

He even had eyelashes like thick, fringing palm trees to go with the whole oasis thing. Except there was nothing at all quenching about Harry Mitchell’s piercing stare. Instead, it smouldered like a volcanic spring that radiated heat towards her at the most inopportune moments.

Like right now.

‘You’re angry.’

‘And that’s why you get the big bucks, Mitchell,’ she simmered, ‘that incomparable attention to detail.’

‘Funny that you should mention detail—’

‘There is nothing wrong with my report!’

‘Not technically, no …’

She tossed her short hair back and stared him down. ‘Are the numbers right?’

‘You’re the go-to person in the office when your colleagues can’t solve something.’ He glared. ‘Of course they’re right.’

‘Then the report is fine. I see no reason to waste my time doing it again.’

He speared frustrated fingers through his hair and released a waft of something delicious and masculine into the small glass office.

Not delicious smell, she told herself. Boss smell. Bad.

‘Is “fine” really the way you’d like to be thought of up the food chain?’ he asked.

Oh, come on. ‘I’ve worked here a lot longer than you. They know my work.’

‘This work?’ He held up her most recent report. ‘Or this one?’

Izzy glanced at the plain folder he’d picked up with his other hand. ‘What is that?’

Though her bottom lip apparently knew exactly what it was. It snuck in between her teeth and surrendered to their gentle gnaw. Mitchell’s focus faltered for half a heartbeat.

But he was a fast rebounder. ‘I pulled one of your reports from your first months at Broadmore Natále. It’s outstanding.’

Finally! Some acknowledgement … Only twelve months in the making.

But he wasn’t done. ‘It’s nothing like today’s effort. How long do you imagine you’ll be able to continue trading on your early reputation, Dean?’

She flattened her hands on his desk and leaned closer. ‘I don’t recall a Pulitzer Prize being in the essential criteria for this role.’

The folder hit his desk with a thud and his accent grew more pronounced, the way it always did when he was bad-tempered. He moved around the desk to her side and glared down at her. ‘Your report is flat and dull and I want to know why.’

Izzy fought hard not to let the sexy Aussie twang distract her. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to write you a report on the subject?’

On that piece of comeback brilliance, she turned and slammed out of the glass door of Mitchell’s office—everyone in the place had probably lip-read the entire discussion anyway—and crossed straight back to her desk, slumping into her comfy chair, where she did her best thinking.

Infinitely better than whenever she was caught up in Harry Mitchell’s orbit, anyway.

Autocrat.

No one in this office was spewing out works of sublime prose in the endless reports he tasked them to produce. Maybe, once, she’d been about the technique of it all but she was all about bottom lines and pound symbols now. The facts and only the facts, because that was what got the job done and the salary paid, right?

Her shoulders slumped.

Since when was adequate enough for Isadora Dean? She hated that her malaise was clearly starting to leak through in her work but she absolutely loathed that it was Harry Mitchell calling her to attention on it.

As if he needed anything further to pick at.

She glanced around the office at all her fellow employees doing a dreadful job of pretending they weren’t interested. Mitchell was right: they all brought their documents to her for a quick check over. Because she was good.

But good did not automatically equal happy.

No matter how many times you did the maths.

She flicked the little ornamental hedgehog on her desk and sent its head nodding madly. Then she snapped off the ID card pinned to her jacket and stared at it. At the bright, optimistic, enthusiastic, first-day-in-a-new-job face that stared back at her. And she remembered how she’d once felt about what she did. How grateful she was to have a good job at such a prestigious firm. How she’d totally ignored her parents’ concerns when they’d replied to her emailed news. How drunk she’d got with the girls to celebrate.

What had happened to all that enthusiasm?

She clipped her ID card back on her jacket. Next to the hedgehog, her phone dinged to let her know she had a message. She absently flicked it open and scanned to the top.

WHEN YOU’RE THROUGH SULKING COULD YOU RETURN SO THAT WE CAN FINISH OUR DISCUSSION, PLS?

The whole building pitched as if London were built on a fault line, and her free hand clutched the edge of her desk. But, with those few typically supercilious and irritating words, something indefinable shifted in Izzy’s brain. Everything just went … left … an inch and a half, and she saw her life more clearly than she had in years.

This wasn’t petulance. This was pure, unadulterated misery.

Mitchell was right. She had lost her mojo. And she didn’t even notice it going.

No one wanted a lacklustre employee on their hands. Maybe she should just suck it up and go in there and promise to do better. Work on ways of getting a bit of reward back in this job.

Her phone dinged again.

She lifted her focus past her colleagues and straight to Mitchell’s office. All six feet of him leaned, ankles crossed, on his desk-edge, his phone still in his hand, those blazing eyes fixed steadily on her. And, as it always did, his regard boiled her blood even as it heated less willing bits of her, too. And she realised that this was part of why she even bothered coming to work.

The daily zing she got from sparring with Prince Harry through the glass of his high-altitude corporate eyrie. Or on email. Or in team meetings.

Like a caffeine hit for her soul shooting straight through the numbness of the eight-till-six grind.

Reminding her that she was, in fact, still alive.

Part of his job involved telling her how to do hers. It wasn’t personal. So why was she making it that way? Yes, he was a pain and, no, he wasn’t the most supportive leader she’d ever had but it was hardly Mitchell’s fault that she’d cast him as her own personal defibrillator.

For the numb days.

Maybe she could work with him instead of against him and find a happy place again deep within the relentless wheel of corporate finance.

Maybe he’d make a better ally than enemy?

But, as she stared, something in the way she was regarding him—or the reluctant acceptance he could see in her, maybe—caused three little lines to appear between his brows and he pushed away from his desk slightly, one hand half reaching towards her.

Almost beseeching.

Her gaze dropped to her phone.

BEFORE THE ICE AGE RESUMES, DEAN!

Her fingers began trembling immediately and she eased the phone onto her desk before it slipped onto the plush carpet.

So much for allies …

Then, as she sat there, seething, the most brilliant idea bloomed to life in her mind.

So brilliant, she couldn’t for the life of her think why it hadn’t struck earlier. She’d wasted so much time and energy.

And all the time she could be doing this!

She pushed to her feet a little unsteadily, smoothing her pencil skirt demurely down her thighs, and lifted her gaze back up to Mitchell’s. Then she channelled every bit of Scarlett Johansson she could muster into the slow-motion glide over to his office and up the carpeted steps to the glass wall where he still stood, tense with irritation, and she stopped the toes of her strappy heels directly in front of his Italian leather. So they’d be touching if not for the glass divider.

She held his gaze the whole way.

Every person in the room watched her, not least Harry Mitchell, whose frustrated annoyance had been replaced by suspicious confusion. And something else. He’d watched her Scarlett-walk with incredibly satisfying interest.

Izzy wet her lips, knowing he was the only one who could see, and then leaned more closely into the glass and let her breath mist over on it.

Mitchell’s voice box lurched.

She lifted her index finger to her lips and sucked it gently into her mouth, then dragged it back out down her full, moist bottom lip.

His chest rose and fell. Blue eyes remained riveted on hers. Full of the usual heat. Full of new speculation and anticipation.

And she wrote seven letters backwards in the mist on the glass.

Just two words.

One of them bad. One of them very bad.

Mitchell’s smouldering gaze flickered down to the glass and then flared as he read her backwards statement.

‘I trust that is prosaic enough for you, sir,’ Izzy said without raising her voice.

His left brow arched high. No question that her latest written submission was unambiguous in its brevity. And no question that she was through at Broadmores regardless of whether she’d just quit.

Which she had.

She erased the misty evidence with her jacket sleeve and turned from all the sex simmering between them, ignoring the open-mouthed stares of her stunned colleagues, and crossed back to her desk on winged feet.

Three bits of scrunched-up paper tumbled out of her upended waste-paper basket and bounced across the floor only to be replaced with her phone, keys, hand lotion, still-nodding hedgehog and a photograph of herself, Tori and Poppy at school.

And then she just … walked out.

There was no ovation from her fellow downtrodden, and if anyone said goodbye she didn’t hear it through the furious rush of blood past her eardrums.

She stepped into the lift and turned to the front, giving her a direct view of Harry Mitchell, still standing, agape, in his glass fishbowl, staring at her with a complicated mix of creases on his face.

Disappointment—the kind she was used to from her parents.

Stunned disbelief—the kind reserved for anyone who stepped off the rooftop of their career as she just had.

Loss—the kind …

She frowned. The kind she felt right now, for something she couldn’t begin to understand, as the lift doors whispered shut on everything she’d thought she’d wanted from life.

CHAPTER ONE

‘WHAT AM I?’ Izzy murmured, wedging her shoulder and elbow in closer to the mirror propped up next to the tiny boxroom window to finish applying her mascara. ‘A flipping boy wizard?’

She wouldn’t mind a few magical skills if it meant she could just wave a wand to make herself beautiful in moments. Or her boobs bigger. Or her bank balance bigger. But the only part of the whole wizarding deal she had was the ‘tiny room under the stairs’ thing where, up until three days ago, she and her sibling flatmates had kept their miscellaneous junk.

Never mind that they were quite fancy stairs leading up to a delightful mezzanine floor she’d once adored. Never mind that it had, in fact, been an actual room before it was their boxroom. It was unquestionably tiny.

A poor girl’s room.

Bad enough that she’d had to ship most of her belongings to her parents’ council house back in Chorlton, but her impulsiveness had put everyone out because Poppy and Alex had to relocate their thirds of the overflow, too, and couldn’t move it into Izzy’s old room because that now needed to be let to meet the repayments.

Sigh. Her room … Her beautiful room.

Someone else’s soon.

She swapped the mascara to the other hand and tried for a better result from the left.

‘The price of freedom,’ she reminded herself aloud.

And of self-respect. Everything she’d done in her life was about treating herself with more respect than the world had ever treated her.

‘Izzy …’ Poppy rapped on the door then stuck her head in, skilfully avoiding taking an eye out on the various clothes hangers hooked over the door frame. ‘How much of your own party are you planning on missing?’

Was all of it a wise thing to admit?

She normally loved a party, loved being the centre of attention—she had a lifetime of non-existent parties to make up for—but Congrats, you’re unemployed was not her preferred theme. Even if Poppy had typically gone with the more positive, Congrats, you’re out of the job that was draining your soul. There certainly was something to be said for spin. Izzy pushed back from the ridiculously ornate dresser wedged awkwardly between the wall and the single bed.

Single …

This was what she’d become—a half made-up pauper sleeping on a child’s bed.

The price of freedom.

‘Did I hear Tori’s laugh?’ Izzy quizzed, brightly. And by ‘laugh’ she meant the carillon of flirtatious bells that was their best friend’s weapon of choice. ‘How long has she been here?’

Poppy arched a single, elegant brow. ‘I think the more pertinent question is how long have you been in here? It’s just gone eight.’

‘Oh.’

The boxroom was too crowded for a clock and Izzy never wore a watch. ‘Time to come out, then.’

Why on earth had she thought being unemployed was worth celebrating?

Because that decision had been made two days ago. Today she’d changed her mind. Two days from now she’d probably feel differently again. Par for the course with her wildly swinging thoughts lately.

Wildly swinging, dissatisfied thoughts.

So dissatisfied that she’d even considered ringing her mum to talk things through. Until she remembered that she didn’t do that anymore.

‘Come on, Iz,’ Poppy urged, reading her expression and holding the door wide. ‘You’ll enjoy it once you get out there.’

She certainly wouldn’t without a champers in hand. One look at the thronging mass in their flat reinforced that. All friends, but somehow still overwhelming. Would it be rude to go to a movie instead? To reward the kindness of all their friends who’d rallied for her with her absence?

She paused in the doorway. They wouldn’t be the first kind people she’d abandoned.

But tonight was not the night to be thinking about her parents or her dysfunctional childhood. Tonight was a night for stoic smiles and fellowship.

She followed Poppy into the kitchen, keeping her eyes down until she had the familiar comfort of a glass in her hand. ‘Please tell me there’s Lanson.’

‘Dunno. Brother dearest ordered the booze.’

There was—thank God—and Izzy polished off her first glass while rinsing the used party glasses already accumulating in the kitchen. She took care of a second while chopping up a platter of out-of-season veg.

Their extended circle of friends fell like Brighton seagulls onto her choppings.

‘God, I love this stuff,’ a tall brunette cooed, scooping a big dollop of dip onto some capsicum and then shoving the lot into her mouth and speaking past the crunching mess. ‘Yours?’

‘Speciality of the man of the house,’ Izzy said. And, no, dip wasn’t an odd thing for a military man to be good at. No more odd than Alex’s weirdly nocturnal habits, anyway.

‘Tash, Sally.’ She nodded, extending the platter for their grazing pleasure. ‘Thanks for coming. Hi, Richard.’

‘Love the pauper’s catering, Izzy,’ he gushed, drowning a sprig of broccolini in dip. ‘Very on-theme.’

Huh. If being poor was so entertaining why hadn’t she smiled more as a kid?

She shuffled forwards through the crammed-in guests, keeping herself and the veg creeping steadily towards the far side of the bright, eclectically decorated industrial conversion. Guests greeted and commiserated and dipped the whole way.

‘So what’s next?’ one of her downstairs neighbours shouted over the music and chatter.

‘Not sure,’ Izzy hedged. ‘Consolidation period?’

The pretty face folded. ‘Oh, I assumed you had something already lined up.’

Nope. Not a thing lined up. Though reasonable that her friends would expect that, because that was absolutely what normal Izzy would do. The Izzy they all knew.

Corporate, clever Izzy.

Top of the class and best in her department Izzy.

But new Izzy, it seemed, was channelling her mother, all of a sudden. Choosing principle over plenty. New Izzy was all about the moment and dramatic, flourishing statements. And nothing about reality.

She paused against one of the apartment’s large windows and caught her breath ready for another pass with the half-decimated tray. The sea of people momentarily parted and she caught a glimpse of Tori’s distinctive tri-coloured hair. She was perched happily in a man’s lap, her ‘take me’ heels kicked back, his strong hands the only thing stopping her from toppling backwards onto the floor in front of all their friends. Not her boyfriend’s slim, pale, slightly creepy hands. These were strong, tanned, non-Mark hands.

Uh-oh … trouble in paradise? Already?

The throng closed in once more, ending her worrying Tori sighting, and Izzy pressed on with her vegetables back towards the kitchen. Appeasing the masses.

Ooh … perhaps waitressing could be her new job. Apparently she had a knack for it and maybe the café down on street level would hire her, then she’d have no commute costs. Of course there was the whole issue of zero appreciable waiting skills.

The only after-school job she’d managed never to have in her long, exhausting childhood.

The final stick of courgette disappeared just before Izzy hit the kitchen doors. Of course it did. Because she’d cut just enough for the size of the crowd she’d unconsciously counted, and she’d shuffled forward in subliminal accordance with the diminishing supply.

Quantities. Numbers. They were her thing. Estimates and value assessment and principles of return. Whether it was Broadmore Natále’s investments or a pile of crunchy veg, the theory was much the same. Leverage all available resources and minimise waste.

Yawn.

No wonder she’d left. Her job gave her a fantastic income and that gave her a fantastic, inner-city lifestyle, but there wasn’t much else to recommend it. Not the fiddly commute, not the irritating, God’s gift boss, not the groundhog-day workload.

Job security just wasn’t enough anymore. Who had she been kidding convincing herself that achieving budget was the kind of professional achievement she’d been craving her whole life?

Sigh.

She dumped the empty tray into the sink and reached for the chopping knife.

When he’d set out tonight to get his way with a woman it wasn’t this woman he’d had in mind. And not this kind of way, either.

Still, Harry considered as he flattened his palm against the firm ass presently resident in his lap, things could definitely be worse. Maybe he could indulge Matahari, here, just ten more minutes. Spend a bit of time with a flesh-and-blood woman.