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Tempted by trouble…
The moment Tash Sinclair sets eyes on family rival Aiden Moore she knows she’s in trouble. His vendetta against her is bad enough, but the fact that she finds Aiden outrageously attractive makes everything a million times worse!
Tash and Aiden clash immediately, but everyone knows that the line between love and hate is paper-thin. As the fireworks fly will Tash and Aiden spontaneously combust—or will Tash do the unthinkable and fall for her own worst enemy? After all, you should keep your friends close, but maybe your enemies the closest of all…!
My Boyfriend and Other Enemies
“There’s something about you…” Aiden went on. “It’s hard to put my finger on.” But he did, tracing it along the top edge of her bodice.
Her throat tightened up immediately and the thing between them surged and swelled as a ball of heat low in her chest. There it was again…the connection. So ready to combust. “Two minutes ago you thought I was sleeping with your father.”
He shuffled closer. “But you’re not. And my relief about that is quite…disturbing.”
“Why relieved?” She didn’t dare ask why disturbed.…
“Because it means I can do this.”
The warmth of the cumulative coats hanging at her back was nothing to the furnace pumping off Aiden as he swooped down to capture her lips with his. They took hers with a certainty that stole her breath.
She wanted to respond to him—his size, his intensity and the sheer overwhelming maleness of him—but something told her if she gave an inch, she’d be lost. Aiden Moore was a man who knew what he wanted and how he wanted it.
And right now, the answer was her and here in the coatroom of MooreCo’s party.
My Boyfriend and
Other Enemies
Nikki Logan
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.
MILLS & BOON
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Excerpt
ONE
Tash Sinclair stared at the handsome, salt-and-pepper-haired man across the bustling coastal café as he exchanged casual conversation with a younger companion seated across from him. The electric blue of Fremantle harbour stretched out behind them. She should have been all eyes for the older man—Nathaniel Moore was the reason she was here, monitoring from across the café like a seasoned stalker—but she caught her focus repeatedly drifting to the modestly dressed man next to him.
Not as chiselled as his older friend, and closer to Tash’s thirty than Moore’s fifty-odd, but there was something compelling about him. Something that held her attention when she could least afford it.
She forced it back onto the older man where it belonged.
Nathaniel Moore looked relaxed, almost carefree, and, for a moment, Tash reconsidered. She was about to launch a rocket grenade into all that serenity. Was it the right thing to do? It felt right. And she’d promised her mother...kind of.
The younger man reached up to signal the waiter for another round of coffee and his moss-green sweater tightened over serious shoulders. Tash felt the pull, resisted it and forced her eyes to stay on Nathaniel Moore.
It wasn’t hard to see what first attracted her mother to the executive thirty years ago. He had a whole Marlon Brando thing going on, and if she couldn’t guess it for herself, Tash had dozens of diaries, decades of memories and reflections captured in ink, to spell out the attraction. Adele Porter—she’d abandoned the name Sinclair right after Eric Sinclair had abandoned her—might have had trouble living her feelings, but she had no difficulty at all writing them down in the privacy of her diaries once her divorce had come through.
Tash studied him again. Her mother had died loving this man, and he—from what she could tell from the diaries and family gossip only now coming to light—had loved Adele back.
Yet they’d been apart most of their lives.
She might never have thought to look at those diaries—to look for him—if not for the message she’d received from him on her mother’s phone. A fiftieth birthday message for a woman who would never get it made about as much sense as Tash maintaining her mother’s exorbitant mobile phone service just so she could ring and hear her voice message when she wanted to. When she needed to.
Because it was her voice. And apparently that was what they both needed.
Tash’s eyes returned to the man across the café.
Nathaniel’s head came up and he swept the diners vaguely with his glance, brushing past her table, past the nameless woman in dark sunglasses disguising her surveillance. That was when she saw it: the bruising beneath his eyes, the dark shadows in his gaze. The same expression Tash had worn for weeks.
Nathaniel Moore was still grieving, and she would bet all of her best art pieces that he was doing it completely alone.
His colleague pushed his chair back and stood, sliding the empty espresso cups to the side for collection by the passing staff. A small kindness that would make someone’s job that tiny bit easier. He excused himself to Nathaniel and headed towards the restrooms, crossing within feet of her table. As he passed, his eyes brushed over her in the way that most men’s did. Appreciative but almost absent, as though he were checking out produce. A way that told her she’d never be going home to meet his family. That said she might get to wear his lingerie at Christmas but never his ring.
The story of her life. Ordinarily she would steadfastly ignore such a lazy appraisal, but today...the chance to see what colour his eyes were was too good to resist. She turned her head up fractionally as he passed and crashed headlong into his regard. Her breath caught.
How had she, even for a moment, thought he was the lesser of the two men? Not classically handsome but his lips were even and set, his jaw artistically angled. And those eyes...bottomless and as blue as the rarest of the priceless cobalt glass she’d worked with.... They transformed his face. Literally breathtaking.
She ripped her stare away, chest heaving.
He kept walking as if nothing had happened.
Her heart tugged against her ribs like a nagging child and she took a deep, slow breath. She wasn’t used to noticing men beyond their mannerisms, their social tells, the things that told her who they really were. With him, she’d been so busy studying the shape of his mouth and the extraordinary colour of his irises she’d failed to notice anything else. She’d failed to think of anything else.
Like the reason she was here.
Her focus dragged back to the water’s edge and the man sitting there alone, staring out.
Do it.
The voice came immediately. Not her mother’s and not her own. A weird kind of hybrid of both. But it was the reason she was here today and the reason she’d paid particular attention to a newspaper article in which Nathaniel Moore was captioned in the photograph. The reason she was able to find out where he worked and, then, how to contact him. The voice that was just...planting seeds. Inspiring particular actions. Pushing when she needed a nudge. Kind of like a guardian angel with an agenda, prompting from off-stage.
Do it now.
Tash’s hand reached for the call button on her mobile even as her eyes stayed glued on the greying man across the alfresco area. He reached into his suit pocket casually, tugging his tie a little looser, winding down a notch further. She was about to dash all of that against the rocks of the harbour side they sat on. Tash very nearly pressed the ‘end’ button but he flipped his phone open as she watched.
‘Nathaniel Moore.’ Deep and soft.
Tash’s heart squeezed so hard she couldn’t speak and a frown formed between elegant eyebrows.
He lowered the phone to check the caller ID. ‘Hello?’
Speak! Her mouth opened but the tiny sound she uttered was lost in the café noises. He shook his head and started to close his phone. That was the shove she needed.
‘Mr Moore!’
He paused and lifted his eyebrows, speaking again into the phone. ‘Yes?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Mr Moore, I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch—’ Damn! She wasn’t supposed to know where he was. But he seemed to miss the significance. She narrowed her eyes and looked closer. In fact, he seemed to have paled just slightly. His hand tightened noticeably around the phone.
‘Mr Moore, my name is Natasha Sinclair. I believe you knew my mother.’
Nothing.
Tash watched expressions come and go in his face like the changing facets of good glass. Horror. Disbelief. Grief. Hope.
Mostly grief.
His free hand trembled as he fidgeted with a napkin. He didn’t speak for an age. Tash watched his panicked glance in the direction of his lunch partner and she twisted slightly away as his gaze dragged back past her table.
Eventually he spoke, half whispering, ‘You sound just like her.’
It sickened her to be doing this to a man her mother had loved. ‘I know. I’m sorry. Are you all right?’
He reached for the water pitcher and poured a glass. She heard him take a sip even as she watched him raise a wobbly glass to his lips. ‘I’m...yes. I’m fine. Just shocked. Surprised,’ he added, as though realising he’d been rude.
Tash laughed. ‘Shocked, I think.’ She took a breath. ‘I wanted to call you, to touch base. To make sure you knew...’ Yes, he already did know; his expression spoke volumes.
Silence fell as Nathaniel Moore collected his emotions. He glanced towards the restrooms again. ‘I did hear. I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the funeral. It was...not possible.’
Tash knew all about the fall-out between their two families; she’d seen the after-effects repeatedly in her mother’s diaries. ‘You didn’t get to say goodbye.’
He looked desperately around the café and then turned his face away, out to the harbour. His voice grew thick. ‘Natasha. I’m so sorry for your loss. She was...an amazing woman.’
Tash took a deep breath and smelled a heavenly mix of spices and earth. She knew, without looking, who was passing her table again. Broad, moss-green shoulders walked away from her towards Nathaniel Moore. He spared a momentary, peripheral glance for her. It was the least casual look she’d ever intercepted.
Her heart hammered and not just because her time was running out.
‘Mr Moore,’ she urged into the phone, ‘I wanted you to know that regardless of how your family and mine feel about each other, my door is always open to you. If you want to talk or ask any questions...’
The younger man reached his seat, recognising immediately from the expression on the older man’s face that something was up. Nathaniel Moore stood abruptly.
‘Uh...one moment, please...will you excuse me?’
Was that for her or for his colleague?
Nathaniel moved unsteadily from the table, indicating the phone call with the wave of a hand. Concerned blue eyes followed him and then looked around the café suspiciously. Tash threw her head back and mimed a laugh into her mobile phone as the stare sliced past her. Not that he’d have a clue who was on the other end of Nathaniel’s call but she absolutely didn’t want to make difficulties for the man her mother had died loving.
Not for the first time since finding the diaries, Tash imagined how it would feel to be loved—to love—to the depths described in such heart-breaking detail on the handwritten pages. Her eyes drifted back to the younger man now sitting alone at the waterside table.
‘Are you there?’
‘I’m sorry, yes.’ She found Nathaniel where he stood, back to her, half concealed in giant potted palms. She groaned. ‘Mr Moore, I just wanted you to know that...my mother never stopped loving you.’ The Armani shoulders slumped. ‘I’m sorry to speak so plainly but I feel like we don’t have time. Her diaries are full of you. Her memories of you. Particularly at...the end.’
Her heart thumped out the silence. His posture slumped further.
‘You’ve lost so much.’ His voice was choked. ‘Endured so much.’
She glanced back to the table. Hard blue eyes watched Nathaniel from across the café, narrowing further.
Tash shook her head. ‘No, Mr Moore, I had so much.’ More than you ever did. More than just one extraordinary night together. She sucked in a breath. ‘As hard as it has been to lose her, at least I had her for my whole life. Thirty years. She was a gift.’
The greying head across the alfresco area bowed and he whispered down the phone. ‘She was that.’
Silence fell and Tash knew he was struggling to hold it together. ‘You should go. I’ve called at a bad time.’
‘No!’ He cleared his throat and then glanced back towards his table, sighing. Blue-eyes stared back at him with open speculation. The hairs on Tash’s neck prickled. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. This isn’t a good time. I’m here with my son—’
Tash’s focus snapped back to the younger man. This was Aiden Moore? Entrepreneurial young gun, scourge of the social scene? Suddenly her physical response to his presence seemed tawdry, extremely un-special, given that half the town’s socialites had apparently shared it.
‘I have your number in my phone now.’ Nathaniel drew back to him the threads of the trademark composure she’d read about in business magazines. ‘May I call you back later, when I’m free to speak?’
She barely heard the last moments of the call, although she knew she was agreeing. Her eyes stayed locked on the younger Moore, realisation thumping her hard and low. He couldn’t be compelling. He couldn’t smell as tantalising as an Arabian souk. She couldn’t drown in those blue, blue eyes.
Not if he was Nathaniel Moore’s son.
The Moores hated the Porters; and the Sinclairs, by association. Everyone knew it, apparently. Why should the heir be any different?
It took Tash a moment to realise two things. First, she’d let down her guard and let her eyes linger on him for too long.
Second, his ice-blue gaze was now locked on her, open and speculative.
She gathered up her handcrafted purse, slid some money onto the table and fled on wobbly legs, keeping her phone glued to her ear as though she were still on it even after Nathaniel had returned to the table.
She felt the bite of Aiden Moore’s stare until she stumbled out into the Fremantle sunshine.
TWO
The woman in front of him was barely recognisable from the one he’d seen in the café, but Aiden Moore had learned a long time ago not to judge a book by its cover. She may have looked fragile enough to shatter last time, but watching her wield the lance with the molten ball of glass glowing on its tip, watching the control with which she twisted it and lifted it closer into the burning furnace, and he was suddenly having doubts about the likelihood of her caving to a bit of his trademark ruthlessness. That strong spine flashing in and out of the light coming off the blazing magma ball didn’t look as though it lacked fortitude.
His plan changed on the spot.
This woman wouldn’t respond to one of his calculated corporate stares. She wouldn’t sell out or be chased off. Waiting her out might not work either. The focused way she persuaded the smelted glass into the shape she wanted with turn-after-agonising-turn of the rod spoke of a patience he knew he didn’t have. And a determination he hadn’t expected her to.
She lifted the glowing mass—whatever the hell it was going to be when finished—and balanced the long tool on an old fashioned vice, then reached forward with something resembling tin-snips and started picking away at the edges of the eye-burning mass of barely solid glass.
She was tiny. She’d peeled down her working overalls in the heat and tied the arms around her waist, leaving just a Lara Croft vest top to protect her against anything that might splash or flare up at her from her dangerous craft. Incredibly confident or incredibly stupid. Given how hard she’d worked to catch his father’s attention, he had to assume the former. He’d bet his latest bonus that her eyes would hold an intelligence as keen as the rapidly cooling shards she sliced away from her design—if they weren’t disguised behind industrial-strength welding goggles. In the café, it had been oversized sunglasses. She’d used them well to disguise her surveillance, but he’d finally twigged to how much attention the stranger across the restaurant was paying to his father. And how hard she was working to hide it. The moment she realised her game was up she took off, but not before he got a good look at the line of her face, the shape of her lips, the elfin shag of her short hair. Enough to memorise. Enough to recognise a week later when she turned up in the park across from MooreCo’s headquarters.
And met his father there.
She plunged the entire burning arrangement into a nearby bucket of water and promptly disappeared in a belching surge of steam. It finally dissipated and Aiden realised that her body was still oriented towards her open kiln, but her face had turned to where he stood in the doorway, those infuriating goggles giving her the advantage. Tiny droplets of steam clung to every one of the light hairs on her body, making her look as if she were made from the same stuff she was forging.
But this woman was a mile from fragile glass.
‘Mr Moore. What can I do for you?’
It took him a moment to recover from the brazen way she immediately admitted to knowing who he was. She didn’t even bother faking innocence. More than that, the soft, strained lilt of her voice; nervous but hiding it well. He found it hard not to give her points for both.
How to play this? ‘You can end your affair with my father,’ was hardly going to effect change. Except maybe to set those tanned shoulders back even further.
He cleared his throat. ‘I was hoping to purchase a few pieces for our lobby. Something unique. Something natural. Got anything like that?’
She could hardly say no, he knew; everything she had was like that. He’d taken the trouble to search the web before coming here. Tash Sinclair had quite the reputation in art circles.
She pushed the enormous tinted goggles up into pale, sweat-damp hair. ‘That’s not why you’re here.’
Aiden sucked in a slow, silent breath. The goggles left red pressure marks around the sockets of her eyes but all he could look at were the enormous chocolate-brown gems shining back at him, as glorious as any of her glass pieces. And full of suspicion.
Immediately, a ridiculous thought slipped into his mind. That they had each other’s eyes. He had his mother’s dark, European colouring and her blue, blue eyes. Whereas Tash Sinclair was practically Nordic but with brown eyes that belonged in his face. The combination was captivating.
‘It may not be why I came, specifically, but I do mean it. Your work is amazing.’ He wandered permission-less into her studio and examined the pieces lining the shelves. An array of tall, intricate vases; turtles and manatees and leafy sea-dragons, extraordinary jellyfish detailed in fine glass. This wasn’t where she displayed her works but it was where they were born. The genesis of her expensive pieces.
Only her eyes followed as he moved around her space. In his periphery, he saw her lift trembling fingers to her messy hair, then curl them quickly and shove them out of sight behind her back. His eyes narrowed. Despite working on his father, she could still find time to be concerned about whether she looked okay for him.
Charming.
But it gave him an idea. If Little Miss Artisan here was hell-bent on hooking up with his father, perhaps the most effective weapon in his arsenal wasn’t from his corporate collection of steely glares. Or his chequebook. Perhaps it was something more personal.
Him.
If she was after the Moore name or Moore money, he had both. Maybe she’d allow herself to be diverted from his father—his married-thirty-years father—in favour of the younger, single model. Long enough for him to do some good.
If she cared what he thought when he looked at her, then he had something to work with.
Mind you, if she knew what he really thought when he looked at her she’d probably run a mile. She might work with fire every day but she didn’t look as if she regularly played with it. Not the way he had. He liked it rough and he liked it short and blazing with volatile, brilliant, ambitious women. About as far from a tiny, tomboyish artsy type with big, make-up-less eyes as you could possibly get.
Which would make it all the easier to remember not to blur the lines. He was the toreador and she was the bull. His goal was to keep her eyes on him long enough that she’d forget her obsession with his father. To keep dancing around her in big flamboyant circles drawing her farther and farther from the family he was so desperately trying to protect.
His mother had sacrificed her life raising him. The least he could do was repay the favour and help keep her husband faithful.
If it wasn’t too late.
‘Make yourself at home,’ she mocked, one eyebrow raised, stripping off protective wrist covers and tossing them on her workbench.
He swallowed a smile and glanced at the still-steaming bucket. ‘What are you working on?’
‘It was a practice piece for an ornamental vase. I wasn’t happy with it.’ She pulled the rod and the inadequate creation on the end out of the nearly evaporated water. The glass had completely shattered. She nodded to a series of coloured glass sticks laid side by side on the workbench. ‘Those will be lorikeets mounted around its mouth.’
‘I’ll take it.’
‘It’s not for sale until I’m happy with it.’ She laughed as she tossed the waste glass into a recycling bin off to one side. The two sounds melded perfectly. ‘Besides, you don’t strike me as someone who would appreciate a pink lorikeet vase.’
‘I appreciate quality. In all its forms.’ He lifted his eyes intentionally and locked onto hers. Classic Moore move.
Doubt-lines appeared between her brows, drawing them down into a fine V. But where he’d expected a blush, she only looked irritated. ‘If you still like it when it’s done, I’ll make you a pair for your reception desk. At a price.’
‘I’m not expecting mates’ rates.’
‘That’s good, because we’re not mates. I don’t even know you.’ Her dark eyes shone. ‘But you know me, it seems. What really brought you here?’
Aiden used silence to best advantage in boardrooms. The speed with which an opponent rushed in to fill a thick silence said a lot about them. But the one he unleashed now ticked on for tens of seconds and the diminutive woman before him simply blinked slowly and waited him out, serenity a shimmering halo around her.
Well, damn...
He broke his own rule. ‘You were watching us at the café.’
Those eyes widened just a hint. She took a careful breath, shrugged. ‘Two good-looking men...I’m sure I wasn’t the only one looking.’
The blank way she said it made it feel like the opposite of a compliment. ‘You met my father last week.’
She took a careful breath. ‘Across the street from your offices. Hardly clandestine. Does your father know he’s being monitored?’
‘I was passing by.’ Liar!
‘Does he know I’m being monitored, then?’
Aiden blinked. The woman was wasted in an art studio. Why wasn’t she working her way rapidly up one of MooreCo’s subsidiaries? For the first time he got a nervous inkling that his father’s interest in the pretty blonde might not just be connected to those full lips and innocent eyes. Natasha Sinclair had a brain and wasn’t afraid to use it.
‘Have dinner with me.’
Her instant laugh was insulting. ‘No.’
‘Then teach me to blow glass.’
The shocked look on her face told him he’d just asked her for something intensely personal. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Make some custom pieces for MooreCo.’ That was work; she was a professional artist. She couldn’t refuse.
He hoped.
Those dark eyes calculated. ‘Would I be required to go to your offices?’
It was a risk, putting her so close to his father, but he’d be there to run interference. Moreover, it would allow him to keep her close; where all enemies belonged. Win her over. And gather more information on what this thing between her and his father was all about. ‘For consultation, design and installation.’
She wavered. His own brilliance amazed him, sometimes.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Will you be there?’
Oh, that was just plain unkind. ‘Naturally. I’m the commissioning partner.’
If a humph could be feminine, hers was. ‘When do you want me there?’
He mentally scanned through the appointments he knew his father had, and picked the most non-negotiable one. One taking his father halfway across the city. He named the date and time.
Nothing wrong with stacking the deck in his favour. It was what he did for a living. Find opportunities—make them—and turn them into advantage.
She reached up for her goggles. ‘Okay. I’ll see you then.’ Without waiting for his answer, she re-screened her soul from his view, pressed her steel-caps onto a pedal on the floor and turned towards a brace-mounted blowtorch that burst into blue-flamed life.
Aiden let his surprise show since she was no longer looking. He’d never been so effectively dismissed from his own conversation. Firm yet not definably rude. Had he even had control of their discussion for a moment or was that just a desperate illusion?
Still, at least he’d walked away with what he’d set out for, albeit via a circuitous route. Whatever Natasha Sinclair and his father had going on was thoroughly outed. And he was now firmly wedged in between any opportunity for her to engage with his father.
Couldn’t have worked out better, really.
* * *
If not for his already monumental ego, Tash would have kissed Aiden Moore.
He’d handed her the perfect excuse, the other day, to get closer to her mother’s lost love with his transparent commission. She’d been hit on enough times to know the signs. And the likely outcome. Every guy she’d ever dated had started out by buying something of hers. Or expressing interest in it. She’d lost interest in those kinds of sales—those kinds of men—no matter how lucrative.
She knew from firsthand experience that men with Aiden Moore’s charisma and social standing didn’t plan lifetimes with women like her. Women like her made terrific mistresses or fascinating show-and-tell at boring dinners or boosted your standing in local government in an arts district.
She’d met—and dated—them all.
Not that she cared. Aiden was a Moore and she was a Porter-by-proxy and if he hadn’t already joined the dots he soon would and that would be that. Their families’ feud would only add to the antagonism he so clearly felt towards her.
Because that had to be what was zinging around the room when he was in it.
Nathaniel had told her to put their family differences out of her mind. But it was easy to be dismissive of a family feud when you were the cause of it. She had simply inherited it. So had Aiden.
She jogged up the railway-station steps into daylight and wandered towards the Terrace, her trusty sketchpad under her arm. The excitement of a new commission bubbled away just beneath the surface, hand in hand with some anxiety about seeing Nathaniel again. So publicly. He’d changed an important meeting when he’d heard she was coming in, embracing the opportunity to get to meet her in a work capacity. To legitimise all the sneaking around they’d been doing.
She was sure they both considered it worth it. They spent hours chatting about her mother, about their families, their lives. Nathaniel Moore wasn’t a man to regret his choices but he was human enough to need to set some ghosts to rest. And she was motherless enough to want to hang onto Adele Porter-Sinclair no matter how vicariously.
‘Natasha. Welcome.’
The silken tones drifted towards her from the kerbside taxi in front of the MooreCo building just as she approached it. Aiden leaned in to pay the driver, then turned and escorted her into his building with a gentle hand at her back. She ignored it steadfastly.
The first time she’d been here, she’d been too nervous to appreciate her surroundings. Now the enormity of this opportunity struck her. MooreCo’s lobby was high, modern and downright celestial with the amount of West Australian light streaming in the glass frontages. Tiny dust particles danced like sea-monkeys in the light-beams. The best possible setting for glasswork.
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