Page 2 of Suddenly Desired (APEX Billionaires’ Club #2)

ELLIE

Something weird was happening.

Ellie Mae Woodward looked up from her notepad and adjusted her glasses to see a line of people walking swiftly past. They all looked panicked, and for a moment she wondered if the fire alarm had gone off.

But it would have to be the world’s worst fire alarm, because there was no noise other than the hushed, frantic whispers of the crowd — that and the constantly ringing phones from the wide, curved reception desk on the other side of the lobby.

A man and a woman were sitting there, red-faced and flustered as they fielded call after call.

Maybe it wasn’t weird, she thought. Maybe this was just how it was here every day. This was the world headquarters for Heartbook, after all. It would be unusual if it wasn’t a hive of activity. Wasn’t that one of the reasons she’d always wanted to work here?

But she was Ellie Mae Woodward. Things had a habit of turning weird as soon as she got involved.

“Ah, nuts!” said the man who was sitting two seats away from her in the large, sun-drenched lobby.

He was staring at his phone with an expression of angry disappointment, and with another grumbled curse he stood up and walked out.

There were seven other people there all looking at their phones too.

Three of them packed up their things and left silently, joining the throng of people exiting the building.

Ellie dropped her pink notebook into her handbag.

It was full of neatly written notes for her job interview today, as well as just about every other thought that had entered her head recently.

It took her a while to find her phone in the clutter, and when she did, the ancient Samsung didn’t have a signal — even though they were smack bang in the heart of the city.

Ellie called out to another young woman, with a face like an A-list actress and clothes to match, who was trotting out of the lobby.

“Excuse me, do you know what’s going on? ”

Either her quiet voice didn’t register, or the woman was too rude to answer. She pushed through the doors and disappeared into the crowd that was forming on the plaza outside.

This is really weird , Ellie thought, wondering if the Ellie Mae Curse really had struck again.

She swallowed her nerves and picked up her bag, clutching it to her chest as she walked to the reception desk.

Both receptionists were speaking into their headsets and she listened to them while pretending to study a Heartbook welcome pack in the rack by the desk.

“. . . I’m very sorry, all tours are cancelled today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, if you send us an email we’ll be able to refund the cost. I’m very sorry . . .”

“. . . not in today, all meetings have been rescheduled. No, you’ll have to talk to Mr Fielding, and I’m afraid he’s not in right now, and if you print that without comment then you’ll have to answer to our legal team.”

The man pressed the button on his headset and looked wearily at Ellie.

“Can I help you?” he asked, the phone already ringing again.

“Um, yes.” Ellie tucked a strand of honey-blonde hair behind her ear. She gave him her best smile, the only thing she ever seemed to be complimented on. “I’m here for the interview, for the design team post. We were told to wait in reception.”

The man laughed, but there was no humour there.

“Sweetheart,” he said, the word instantly causing her hackles to rise.

“Look around you. And maybe check your phone. Do you honestly think we’re recruiting right now?

” He pressed the button on his headset and waved her away like she was a fly.

“Heartbook HQ, how may I direct your call?”

Ellie hesitated, stunned by his rudeness.

After taking a steadying breath she turned and walked across the lobby, wanting nothing more than to get away.

She squeezed through the cluster of people by the doors, all of them speaking furiously into their phones, then stepped out of the crisp, air-conditioned building into a blast of hot summer sunshine.

This was typical. She’d worked so hard to get the interview with her dream company.

She’d spent weeks preparing her application, writing at least seven drafts of the cover letter that she had attached to her CV.

Hundreds of people would be going for the job, and with her complete lack of experience and failed academic career she really only had one thing going for her — her enthusiasm.

Well, that and the fact that she had spent the last few years designing her own social network, LifeWrite, which was based around her love of books.

This interview was her one opportunity to show Heartbook just how perfect she was for the job, and how valuable she would be to the company, and it might even give her the chance to pitch LifeWrite to the boss. And now it didn’t even look like she was going to get past reception.

“You really are cursed,” she told herself as she pushed and mumbled her way through the crowd.

Several times she tried to catch people’s eyes as she went, hoping that somebody would explain the situation to her.

But everyone was too busy, and she was far too shy to make herself heard.

By the time she reached the path that led back to the car park, she was convinced that there was no way she could have done the job anyway, because surely you needed a backbone to work for a company like this.

Never mind. Her current job wasn’t exactly awful, was it?

There wasn’t a great deal of stress in waiting tables in a café, and she’d just been promoted to assistant manager with twice the responsibility and an extra pound for every hour.

And her intensely irritating ex-boyfriend Josh only turned up once a day — sometimes twice — to beg her to come back to him. It could be so much worse. Couldn’t it?

She sighed, kicking a pebble across the path. Who was she kidding? This had been her one chance to escape, and somehow she’d blown it without even really getting inside.

The Heartbook campus was right next to the river, and Ellie took a detour on her way back to the car park so that she could walk beside the water.

She wasn’t quite ready to head home yet, where her empty flat and empty bed and empty fridge were waiting for her.

She was here now, so she might as well enjoy the sights, because she knew she wouldn’t be back.

Besides, there was nobody down here other than the ducks.

The river gurgled, the trees swaying in the gentle breeze.

Her button-down dress, printed with hearts wearing glasses and bought especially for today, swished about her knees, and for a moment she almost managed to convince herself she was on holiday, strolling down the promenade with a gorgeous man by her side.

As if, Ellie , she told herself. She was as cursed with men as she was with her career.

The daydream was demolished by the sound of her phone bleeping from her tote bag, and she pulled it out, seeing that she finally had a signal. A message from her mum was waiting for her:

Good luck, I know you can do this!

“Sorry, Mum, evidently I can’t.” She opened the internet browser and searched ‘Heartbook’. It seemed to take an hour for the results page to load, and her eyes widened as she took in the headlines.

HEARTBOOK CEO UNDER FIRE FOR DISGUSTING POSTS

Blake Fielding denies calling women “bitter, stupid, and greedy” on his Heartbook profile as shares plummet.

She tried clicking on a link, but her phone was too old to be able to load it. Grunting in frustration, she slid it back into her bag, so focused on what she was doing that she collided with a man walking in the opposite direction. Her bag fell to the floor, its contents spilling over the grass.

“Oh! I’m so sorry.” She ducked down to pick up her belongings, and he did the same. She was so embarrassed she couldn’t even look at him. Could this day get any worse?

“I was just on my phone,” she said, grasping for her purse. “I wasn’t even looking. Please, I can manage, you don’t have to.”

She dropped the purse into her bag. He held out her keys, the plush Hello Kitty keyring she’d found in a cracker last Christmas dangling from his hand. They landed with a jingle next to the purse.

“I was just, you know, not with it at all, with everything that’s going on,” she said, blurting out the words almost at random, in true Ellie Mae fashion. “I was supposed to be interviewing for this job, then it got cancelled, so I was just thinking about what to do next. Oh, thank you.”

She took her hairbrush from the man, both of them reaching for her makeup bag at the same time. For a moment their hands touched, and he pulled away. Ellie’s glasses were in danger of falling off her nose and she pushed them back into place.

“It’s just my luck,” she went on, laughing. “Get a chance at the job of a lifetime then the CEO turns out to be a sexist, woman-hating monster.”

She tucked the makeup bag back into her handbag, finally letting herself look up at the man who had helped her.

“Oh,” she said again.

The first thing she noticed was how impossibly handsome he was.

The second thing, really, after his height, and maybe the way his shoulders were moulded into his well-cut grey suit.

A little older than her, his dark hair had been tousled by the breeze, making him look like he’d been racing to get to where he now stood.

His skin was perfectly tanned, his blue eyes so bright in the sun that she decided they must be coloured contact lenses because nobody’s eyes were that gorgeous in real life.

When he smiled, little dimples cut through his cheeks and she felt suddenly warmer, as if the summer sun had flooded her internal organs.

His suit may have fit like it was hand-stitched around his biceps, but he seemed uncomfortable in it, tugging at his tie like it was a noose. He passed her a handful of loose change that had scattered on the grass, and it was then that she noticed the third thing.

“Oh,” she said for a third time, drawing out the vowel, her brain finally making the connection. “Blake Fielding?”

“The very same,” he said, the smile wavering. “The sexist, woman-hating monster, at your service.”