The Dare Collection: February 2018. Anne Marsh

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       CHAPTER ONE

      OLIVIA NOBLE WALKED behind the elderly professor, passing through the chrome-and-glass doors etched with the name of the swanky restaurant on the thirty-first floor of The Shard, London’s tallest building. Her belly, jittery enough from the long, hair-raising elevator ride, flipped at the panoramic views dotted with the city’s iconic landmarks. As a native New Yorker she accepted gravity-defying skyscrapers as part of life, but she avoided ones of this magnitude wherever possible.

      ‘Ah, the others are still at the bar.’

      Professor McBride gestured Libby ahead of him, towards the party of suits. Libby’s legs wobbled on her four-inch heels as she crossed the plush carpet, trying to master the hold adrenaline had on her body. Her poor adrenal glands were wrung dry. This sophisticated, elegant restaurant might as well have been a roadside diner for all she noticed.

      Head of her own marketing business in New York, she was used to public speaking. That didn’t mean she enjoyed it, or that nerves hadn’t gripped her for the whole forty-minute presentation she’d given this morning at the London Business School. In fact, she’d been blown away when invited to speak at such a prestigious seminar, unaware that anyone across the pond had even heard of her small up-and-coming company.

      The rest of the speakers were clustered at the bar, forming small huddles, deep in conversation. Several glanced up as Libby and Professor McBride approached—faces she recognised from the seminar, and one face in particular that demanded more than a fair share of her attention. A face that was hard to ignore.

      Alex Lancaster.

      His stare lifted from the conversation taking place before him, settling on her over the tops of the heads separating them and practically stripping her bare. A shiver originated in her ovaries and snaked south to join the wobble in her legs. Those eyes… The intensity with which they pierced the recipient of his undivided attention…

      Wow. Close up he was… Wow. A movie-star bad boy, a gentleman rogue and a geeky surfer dude all rolled into one mouthwatering package. Not that he had much of the surfer dude on display at the moment, attired СКАЧАТЬ