Page 23 of Love to Loathe Him

Lizzie sighs, flopping back against the couch cushions. “I’m no delicate porcelain doll. I need a man who isn’t scared to dislocate a shoulder. Flip me around a little.”

I chuckle. “Yeah, I think I work with a few ofthosetypes.”

Her eyes light up. “I really must tag along to your next office happy hour. Share the sausage, Gemma. No-one likes a sausage hog.”

I roll my eyes. “Okay, first of all, I’m not ‘partaking’ in any office sausage, thank you very much.” I shudder. “HR are the last people who should be having office affairs. We’re supposed to be the ones preventing that shit, not enabling it. And second of all, the bankers look down on HR. They think we’re glorified assistants at best, and completely redundant at worst. To them, we’re just there to clean up their messes and make sure they don’t get sued for sexual harassment every other week.”

“You’re such a goody-two-shoes,” she teases. “If I had your job, I’d probably be fired within a week for banging half the office. Aren’t you ever tempted to mix business with pleasure?”

I pause, my traitorous mind immediately conjuring up an image of McLaren throwing me over his desk and having his wicked way with me. My cheeks heat.

“I’m not even sure what type of guy I want anymore,” I confess, shaking my head to clear the disturbing mental images. “I’m surrounded by all these alpha male banker types day in and day out. Maybe what I really need is a guy with a softer side, you know? Like a teacher or something.”

She laughs. “Boring. I stopped fancying teachers when I was seventeen.” She sits up, eyes wide. “Okay, I need you to do me a little favor. I want to check if the static thing was believable. Can you go in the other room, and I’ll call you and do the phone rubbing thing again?”

“You know, most well-adjusted women in their thirties send a polite ‘thanks but no thanks’ text.”

“Please, Gem?” she begs, giving me the puppy-dog eyes.

“Fine,” I grumble, snatching up my phone and stalking into the bedroom.

A minute later, my phone rings. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Lizzie,” Lizzie says, her voice tinny through the speaker.

“I know it’s you, you fool.”

“Can you hear me okay?”

“I can hear you. In fact I can hear two of you. You’re in the next room, not Wales.”

“Okay, great. Now I’m going to start the cushion rubbing bit, and you tell me if it sounds convincingly like I’m losing signal, yeah?”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Fine.”

I listen as Lizzie reenacts her one-woman show, complete with vigorous sofa rubbing sound effects. In the background, I can hear Winnie’s offended meows.

When she’s finished, I hang up and come back into the living room.

“Well?” She looks up at me, slightly breathless. “Believable? Like I was in the underground?”

I roll my eyes. “No, Lizzie. You sounded like you were shagging my poor couch cushions. But don’t worry, love, I’m quite confident your little performance was more than enough to convince him that you’re a complete and utter nutter. I’m pretty sure he won’t want to date you after that.”

She beams. “That’s a relief. Thanks, Gem. You’re the best fake dead friend a girl could ask for. I owe you big time.”

I snort, shaking my head in amused disbelief. “Yeah, yeah, just add it to the ever-growing list of favors you owe me.”

This whole ludicrous situation perfectly captures the glaring contrast between my two drastically different worlds.

CHAPTER 7

Liam

“He’s not getting aLamborghini,” I growl, my patience hanging by a thread.

I’m sitting at the head of the boardroom table with my board of directors. It’s eight a.m., right before the all-staff meeting when we hand out bonuses for the top performers.

“The guy’s carried the whole team this quarter, Liam,” Ollie whines, his face scrunching up. “After numbers like that, he’s earned a nice toy.”