The Love List. Eve Devon
Nora King,’ she said, introducing herself.
‘Ethan Love. I—’
‘Hey, I see you two found each other,’ Fern said, as she breezed in with the requisite cardboard tray of hot drinks. ‘Sorry I wasn’t here to do the formal introduction, but when I couldn’t find you,’ she added, looking at Nora, ‘I assumed you’d gone on the coffee run. I thought I’d catch you up by taking the lift, but you must have got back first.’ Fern whizzed over to her desk to set down her purse and the tray. Casting Ethan a brief look, she said, ‘Nora has a little thing about waiting for the lift and usually takes the stairs.’
Nora felt heat creep up her neck to tinge her cheekbones. ‘Er, that’s your boss you’re labelling as pernickety and impatient. Not sure your boyfriend and I know each other well enough for you to divulge all my endearing qualities.’
‘My boyfriend?’ Fern looked from Ethan to Fern with a funny look on her face. ‘Holy crap. You haven’t done the introduction thing?’
‘Of course I have. He’s Ethan Love. Your boyfriend.’
‘He is Ethan Love. He is not my boyfriend. He’s Daisy’s uncle.’
Nora felt a spike of something that might have been relief that he wasn’t Fern’s boyfriend before confusion set in. ‘Daisy who?’
‘Daisy, your niece,’ Fern said, speaking extra slowly and looking at her as if she had left her brain somewhere.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Jared is Daisy’s uncle.’
‘Jared King is your brother, right?’ Ethan said patiently. ‘Well, my brother is Ryan Love…your sister Sephy’s ex and Daisy’s dad.’
‘No, Daisy’s dad is called—’ Love-Rat. At least that was what Nora had privately labelled him when he’d run out on her sister. She managed to stop herself from saying the words out loud. Ethan Love…Ryan Love. The dots got closer together until they joined up. Wow. But why was his brother here? Nora tried to process his presence and suddenly could only think it must have been something huge to have brought Ethan Love to visit. ‘Oh no, please tell me your brother isn’t—’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the words. She might not have ever understood the bad-boy draw of her sister’s ex and she might have been pleased when he’d upped and moved away so that her sister didn’t have to see him around town doing a very passable Peter Pan impression while managing only haphazard interest in his daughter, but Nora didn’t want her sister to go through another bereavement.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ethan was quick to reassure. ‘I should have thought about what it would look like dropping by so unexpectedly. I simply need your help to run something past your sister.’
Nora stared at Ethan. Why did she get the feeling that this wasn’t going to be simple? With a sinking heart she really didn’t see how she could possibly juggle one more thing, but if this had something to do with her sister—if her sister needed her help, she would find a way.
Plan A, to meet with Eleanor Moorfield minus her shoe appendage slipped out of the window and sloped off into the distance, where, the way her day was going, it would undoubtedly be joined by Plan B and Plan C.
‘Would you like me to reschedule your 8 a.m. for later today?’ Fern asked, looking at Nora with concern.
‘I can wait until your meeting is finished,’ Ethan said, mildly. ‘I just got off a plane so I could do with checking in to a hotel and sleeping. I only stopped here first to make an appointment. I’m afraid I didn’t realise how early it was.’
Nora was so busy wondering how he’d managed to charm security into letting him through to her offices that she only caught the tail end of Fern’s repeated offer to reschedule her breakfast meeting with Eleanor. Hand clenching within the confines of the bag, she said, ‘Thanks, Fern, but you’d better cancel it altogether. Something else has come up, which means I couldn’t have made it today, anyway.’
‘Something else? Since when? You were so pumped for the meeting. You’re ready. The pitch is ready.’ Fern glanced down at Nora’s feet. ‘Wait. Those aren’t the shoes. Where are the shoes? Don’t tell me you forgot to bring them in with you. Not you, The Shoe Princess.’
Nora felt Ethan’s gaze drop to the four-inch black stilettos she was wearing before slowly moving up the length of her legs to the hem of her black pencil skirt and then up further, across her cream jacket before finally coming to rest on her face. Fern and Nora knew each other, warts and all, but somehow with Ethan standing there, taking everything in, it was really hard not to feel exposed. And warm. Very, very warm. ‘I can be interested in shoes without being a “princess” about it,’ she said, trying unsuccessfully not to pout.
‘Right, so what’s with the shoe bag?’
Nora glanced guiltily down at the bag clutched across her midriff. It had the name of a well-known Italian boot-maker emblazoned across the front. Of all the ironies… Nora felt her grip on reality slipping as she admitted, ‘Actually, I do kind of need your help.’ She blew out a breath. There, that hadn’t been so very difficult. Doing her best to ignore Fern’s snort of incredulity, she rushed on, ‘Yes, this is really me, really asking for help, which you can tease me for later, but right now I need you to help me come up with a Plan B—a suitable excuse for postponing my 8 a.m. with,’ Nora looked at the wall clock and blanched, ‘with only one hour’s notice.’
‘Just for the hell of it, what happened to Plan A?’ Ethan interjected, pulling out one of the chairs in front of Fern’s desk and obviously settling himself in for the duration.
‘Forget Plan A. I am so beyond Plan A it’s not even funny,’ she answered, a tad more irritably than was perhaps wise, given that it was she who was asking for help and not the other way around.
The heartbeat-altering grin made an appearance. Ethan seemed to find her waspishness more amusing than insulting. He probably never found himself in embarrassing situations.
Taking another deep breath, Nora focused solely on Fern. ‘The problem is, I can’t do my pitch today, on account of a little accident, which doesn’t need a whole Q and A,’ she insisted as Fern stepped forward with a frown on her face, ‘I’m absolutely fine—I simply…need to cancel. And come up with a suitable excuse. I mean I know fact is stranger than fiction,’ when Nora heard her voice rising alarmingly she began pacing, to try and outdistance herself from her own stupidity, ‘but in this case fact sucks. Fact turns me into a laughing stock and I can’t afford that—’
‘Is she always this hyper?’ Ethan asked Fern, as if she wasn’t there.
‘No way. Only when she’s done something…oh, good grief, Leonora, have you been multi-tasking again?’
‘Only a little bit,’ Nora shot out defensively, before squeezing her eyes shut in mortification, because really, who had ever heard of a CEO not being able to multi-task?
‘We’ve talked about this. You know nerves and multi-tasking and you don’t mesh. I swear, for someone so ultra-efficient in every other aspect of life, it beggars belief. What’s happened and why on earth don’t you put the bag down?’
Nora winced.
It seemed a show-and-tell was on the horizon.
‘It is kind of shoe-related,’ she whispered as she started lowering the bag from where her arm was hidden inside, ‘it’s kind of a,’ she gulped and went for broke, ‘help, I’ve super-glued my shoe to my hand, kind of a mess.’
The bag floated silently to the floor and the next thing she knew, Ethan was standing in front of her turning her hand one way and then another, as if she were some sort of interactive museum exhibit.
‘How on earth..?’
‘Oh, by all means, let’s share.’ Nora’s head bobbed up and down as if she couldn’t wait. What was one more ounce of mortification? ‘Let’s see. Well, this is one half of a pair