Risky Business Read online

  Risky Business

  Amy Andrews

  www.escapepublishing.com.au

  dpgroup.org

  Risky Business

  Amy Andrews

  From best-selling author Amy Andrews comes a new single-title romance about putting pleasure before business, and the things we risk when we find someone worth risking everything for.

  Samantha Evans’s life is going to hell. Not only has she rage-quit her beloved, high-powered job, but she is suddenly afflicted by hormones, free time, and an unavoidable, unignorable, undeniably gorgeous irritant in the form of Nick Hawke, her extreme sports star neighbour, who has come home to take over the reins of his grandmother’s second-hand bookshop. Sam needs something to keep her from begging for her old job back until she’s good and sure her boss understands how wrong he was, and taking a low-risk, low-stress job helping Nick at the bookstore might be just the thing.

  After all, it’s not like Nick is the right guy to help her with her hormones. He’ll just be fun to look at while she searches for the one.

  Nick has six months to get over an injury before Everest and a big, fat contract beckon. That means no sports, no danger and, above all else, no risks. It means playing it safe. And Nick Hawke doesn’t do safe. So he’s going to need something to stave off the boredom while selling books he doesn’t read to people who wouldn’t know a carabineer from a crochet hook. What could be safer than hiring a cranky, unemployed accountant to help run the bookstore? Sam is efficient and methodical and messing up her neat, post-it note world could be a fun way to pass the time….

  Risky Business mixes the classic romance of Philadelphia Story, the humour and wit of When Harry Met Sally, and a strong, contemporary Australian setting to create a delightful, irresistible, utterly satisfying treat of a novel.

  About the Author

  Amy Andrews is an award-winning, best-selling Aussie author who has written forty plus contemporary romances for both the traditional and digital markets. To date she’s sold 1.6 million books and been translated into over a dozen languages, including manga.

  She loves her kids, her husband, her dogs, cowboys, men in tool belts, cowboys in tool belts and happily ever afters. Please, DO NOT mess with the HEA! Also good books, fab food, great wine and frequent travel — preferably all four together.

  She lives on acreage on the outskirts of Brisbane with a gorgeous mountain view but secretly wishes it was the hillsides of Tuscany.

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  Acknowledgements

  This book was the first single title book I ever wrote and has had a long and winding path to publication. Nick and Sam have been with me for a long time and it is with great satisfaction that I finally get to see them reaching an audience.

  There are many people who read this book in various stages along the way and I’d like to thank them all for their thoughts and guidance. Particular thanks go to Ann Cleary, Rachel Robinson, Robyn Grady and Tina Clark, whose constant encouragement kept me going in the beginning when the book morphed from category romance into single title and scared the bejesus out of me. Also my best friend, Leah, who was one of the first to read the book and paid me the greatest compliment by laughing her head off throughout and my sister, Ros, who was also there from the start and is my biggest champion. More recently Fiona Marsden and Brooke katz Dell-Sewell whose enthusiasm for Nick and Sam gave me the prod I needed to put them out there again — your input was invaluable.

  Big thanks to Kate Cuthbert and the team at Harlequin Escape for having faith in the book. It’s nice to know that my long association with Harlequin continues.

  And finally to everyone who’s ever read and enjoyed one of my books. Thank you.

  To my father for showing me that a real man doesn’t have to be larger than life, he just has to be there.

  And for loving my mother well.

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  Contents

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Bestselling Titles by Escape Publishing…

  Chapter One

  ‘Hello…Bec?’

  ‘Sam?’

  Samantha Evans wiped her nose on a tissue and tried to muffle her distress, inordinately pleased her sister was home at the exact time her life had decided to fall apart.

  ‘Are you crying? What’s wrong? You never cry. Hang on for a sec — ’

  Hot tears welled in Sam’s eyes again as Bec yelled at her girls to turn the television down. General protesting could be heard but Bec overruled it all with threats to cancel Easter and the background noise dulled a little.

  ‘Sorry,’ she apologised. ‘Tell me what happened. Tell me who made you cry and I’ll go and beat the crap out of them.’

  Samantha could barely raise a smile at Bec’s don’t-mess-with-my-sister act. ‘I ran into Gary at a company function last night.’

  ‘Bloody hell. What was god-awful Gary doing at such a high-flying affair? A little energetic for him, surely?’

  ‘He was there with an accountant from a rival firm. He’s…marrying her. She’s pregnant.’

  ‘I thought Gary didn’t believe in marriage and kids?’

  ‘So did I.’

  There was a moment of sisterly silence. ‘Okay… But Gary’s a rat who dumped you twelve months ago in the middle of the tax season and gave you lousy sex and we hate him…remember? Why are you crying over that loser now?’

  ‘Because something strange happened last night. I suddenly realised I’m Sally.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Bec’s sigh was loud in Sam’s ear. ‘I should never have given you When Harry Met Sally for Christmas last year. You are Sam. And it is just a movie.’

  ‘No, see, Sally had a point.’ Samantha couldn’t keep the wobble out of her voice. ‘It wasn’t that Gary didn’t want to get married and have kids, he just didn’t want to do it with me.’

  ‘Okay, I don’t know who this is but you better put me on to my sister right now,’ Bec joked. ‘You know the single-minded, career girl hell bent on a corner office?’

  Samantha didn’t say anything, too depressed by her sister’s summation of her life.

  ‘Since when is marriage and children part of your equation, Sammy?’

  ‘It’s not, they’re not,’ she denied. ‘But then last night…’ A hard ball of emotion lodged in Sam’s throat and she struggled to contain it. ‘Why didn’t he want to marry me? What’s the matter with me, Bec?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter with you. You’ve just been a little too focussed on your career to notice your appalling taste in men.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m too career orientated. I get up, I go to work, I come home late, I feed Godzilla, I go to bed. God…I’m so boring,’ she groaned.

  ‘No, you work hard. Of course you’re tired at the end of the day. You’re…sensible.’

  ‘I’m staid.’

  ‘They depend on you at work,’ Bec insisted in her bossy older sister way. ‘You’re reliable.’

  Sam groaned inwardly. Sensible? Reliable? ‘Oh, god. I sound like a Volvo. I suck,’ she wailed.

  ‘No, babe. Your life sucks. That’s different.’

  Samantha could always count on Bec to tell it like it was and she sniffed at the truth in her sister’s words. Being a good girl all her life, studying hard, working frenetically, climbing the ladder hadn’t left her much time for a life. For goodness sake, her two closest relationships were with an octogenarian bookshop owner and an obese fish!

  Oh, she had reached the pinnacle of her career, was financially secure and living the life of a young, urban, modern woman. Supposedly. She was exactly where she wanted to be…so why did it suddenly feel so lonely?

  ‘Sounds to me like running into Gary tripped your clock. Your eggs have decided it’s time to fulfil their biological purpose.’

  ‘My…eggs?’

  ‘Sure. If you listen closely, I bet you’ll hear them cheeping.’

  Cheeping? Crap. That was all she needed — noisy eggs. ‘I don’t have time in my life for cheeping eggs, Bec. How do I make it go away?’

  Bec chuckled. ‘Find a man and have some babies.’

  ‘Impossible. I’m overseeing the Adams account until 2016.’

  Bec laughed again. ‘You do realise they can be demanding little critters? It may be kind of hard to sleep over the noise.’

  Samantha could hear her nieces laughing in the background and was hit by a sudden desire to hug them close and kiss their sweet faces. They’d grown up so much but she could still remember holding them as newborns, marvelling at their little fingers and perfect bow mouths.

  ‘I suppose I could jig things around a bit. Let go of the Adams account ahead of time, say, 2015.’

  ‘Cheeping eggs wait for no man,’ Bec insisted. ‘Not even Mr Adams. And you can’t slot love and babies around a career that consumes your every waking moment.’

  ‘Why not?’ Samantha asked. If she must be afflicted with mutinous eggs, why couldn’t she have both? ‘Plenty of women hold down jobs and have babies. I’ve worked too hard to sacrifice my career because my eggs have taken temporary leave of their senses. I thought we could have it all these days? I mean, I’m organised and efficient. I juggle multimillion dollar accounts for a living. I work hard. Often late at night. It can’t be harder than that, surely?’

  Bec snorted. ‘It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. If you go down the whole mummy route it’s all or nothing. Babies don’t fit in well with work schedules. In fact babies throw up all over your Donna Karen suit a second before you have to leave the house.’

  ‘I’ll get a nanny.’

  ‘Trust me Sam, babies become your whole life. And I know you — you’re a perfectionist. You don’t believe in delegation. You won’t want a nanny.’

  Sam heard the conviction in her sister’s voice and knew she was right — she hated delegating tasks. Knew that no-one could do her job like she could. ‘Why didn’t you tell me being thirty was this hard?’

  ‘I thought you were fine with turning the big three zero.’

  ‘I am. I was. I just didn’t realise my ovaries were going to revolt. This wasn’t in my plan, Rebecca.’

  Bec laughed again. ‘Maybe it’s time for a new plan?’

  Samantha blew her nose. ‘I like the old one.’

  ‘Well…life has a way of throwing egg in your face when we least suspect it.’

  Sam groaned at her sister’s bad pun. ‘Is it too late to become vegan?’

  The second blow came a week later. Birdie died. Samantha stood outside the little second-hand bookshop in total disbelief. This morning when she had passed by, it was business as usual and Birdie had waved at her. And in the afternoon an ambulance, a police car and a coroner’s van had greeted her as she’d rounded the corner. And Birdie was gone.

  ‘What happened?’ Samantha asked Dulcie Reardon, her arm automatically going around the stooped old shoulders of another of Birdie’s faithful customers.

  ‘Heart attack,’ Dulcie whispered.

  Dulcie, no spring chicken herself, leaned heavily into Samantha, her hand over her mouth and they stood and watched as two official looking men pushed a trolley loaded with a black body bag and slid it into the back of the waiting vehicle. Samantha’s regulation cup of hot chocolate from Starbucks grew cold, completely forgotten.

  Just like that. In a flash, an instant, life could be over.

  What was she going to do without Birdie? Every morning, every afternoon, every weekend for five years the old lady had been a part of her life. But more than that, Eddie Hawk — Birdie to her friends — had been a Brisbane institution for over fifty years! She and her husband, Burt, had bought and lived in the apartment building Samantha now called home and Birdie had operated her beloved bookstore from a shopfront on the ground floor.

  She’d stubbornly refused to bow to pressure from city developers after her husband’s death and had kept the building and her livelihood unchanged for six decades. The building on Elizabeth Street was now considered to be one of the finest examples of retro chic architecture in Brisbane.

  And Samantha was eternally grateful for Birdie’s strong sense of tradition.

  How many Sundays had she spent in Birdie’s dinky little shop combing the shelves for her favourite romance novels? Who else but Birdie knew or even cared about her passion for Rita Summers books and her pirate heroes. Who else but Birdie would keep them aside especially for her as customers traded them in?

  How many times had Birdie cooked her a hot dinner? Dished up the most divine food along with her bumper-sticker advice? Birdie had dispensed her homespun wisdom as easily as the mints she had kept near the cash register, and Samantha had loved her for it.

  Sure, Bec was good at it too, but she was a busy mum with four kids who lived a million miles away out beyond Woop Woop. Birdie had been just downstairs and had always made time.

  But not anymore.

  It didn’t seem right the next morning to come out of the sliding doors and see Birdie’s shop all shut up. Samantha stopped in front of Birdie’s pristine, highly polished glass, still feeling the loss. There were no lights, no movement, no little wave to start her day on the right foot. Birdie had been up with the sparrows every day of her life and it didn’t seem to matter how early Sam left for work, the shop was always open.

  It was only her sombre reflection that stared back. She eyed herself critically as she always had and found herself just as wanting. A Versace-clad size 14 plain Jane stared back. Average height, brown hair twisted back into a sleek knot, a bit too hippy and way too curvy.

  Average, average, average.

  More Janeane Garofalo than Uma Thurman. An athletic-looking man jogged past and didn’t spare her a glance.

  She sighed as she glanced back at her reflection disparagingly, seeing the same faults she always saw. The Truth about Cats and Dogs was the Uma’s of the world would win every time. If she’d been an Uma the athlete would have run into the nearest pole trying to cop a second look.

  She’d never had a high opinion of her figure but this morning the designer briefcase and Bluetooth earpiece were depressingly asexual. Her four-inch sling-back Choo’s were her only concession to femininity. She looked like a man-hating, kick-ass business woman and she heard her eggs murmuring their disapproval before she turned away and strode purposefully to work.

  For once the majestic, heritage listed Moreton Bay Figs didn’t register. Even the sight of the sleek skyscraper, all shiny steel and mirrored glass, failed to rouse her flagging spirits as she rounded the corner to encounter a gentle early morning river breeze on her face. The exclusive Riverfront Place address had been a badge of honour only a week ago. But today, as she entered the ornate foyer, it felt as empty and as cold as the slabs of Italian marble clicking beneath her designer heels.

  Samantha spent the morning in meetings with two of the firm’s most high-powered clients. As the youngest senior accountant on staff at the Brisbane headquarters of one of the planet’s most prestigious investment agencies, the world was her oyster. She stood at the full-length window absently assessing the view from her thirtieth floor office. The other buildings loomed large and threw shadows at each other. The river sparkled and twinkled in the sunshine below and snaked away in the distance. Her grey eyes tracked the busy path of a Citycat speeding its ant-like passengers to the other side of the river.

  This is what she’d wanted. This was what she’d worked so hard to achieve. Yes, the incident with Gary had thrown her and Birdie’s death had affected her but there was no need to let them impinge on her goals. She had arrived, damn it! More than arrived. She was one step away from a coveted corner office and there was no way she was going to let recalcitrant eggs or a slight wobble in her convictions derail her stellar career.

  There was only one thing that could do that.

  ‘Sam, can I talk to you about something?’

  And his name was Ray.

  She dragged her gaze away reluctantly from the view. The boss’s moronic nephew, the bane of her life, stood in her doorway looking as clueless as ever. Today of all days she wanted to say, Ray, you are a fuckwit. Go away. But she didn’t.

  Instead she sighed and nodded at the man who had been nothing but a complete pain in the arse since he’d wheedled his way into his uncle’s favour a year ago. He’d been incompetent from the get-go. She’d been picking up his slack and fixing his stuff-ups for long enough now to know that nepotism was the only way he was ever going to be employable.