Authors: Christina Lauren
Beautiful Beloved (10 page)
Our meeting room was lined with a wall of windows, each looking out onto the fairly busy road below. My morning walk to work had been relatively dry, but as it did most days here, rain had begun to drizzle from a sky heavy with clouds. It was the kind of rain that looked like a harmless haze, but I’d learned not to be fooled: three minutes outside and I’d be soaked through. Even if I’d grown up somewhere rainier than southern California, I could never have been prepared for the way the London air, between October and April, felt almost saturated with water, heavy and damp. Like a raincloud had wrapped itself around my body, and seeped straight into my bones.
Spring had just begun in London, but the little courtyard across Southmark Street was still dismal and bare. I’d been told that in summer it was filled with pink chairs and small tables belonging to a restaurant near the back. Right now it was all concrete and mostly-naked branches, damp brown leaves blown across the stark ground.
Around me, people continued to voice their displeasure with the weather as they opened up their laptops and finished their tea, and I blinked away from the window in time to see the last few stragglers rush in. Everyone wanted to be seated before Anthony Smith—my boss and the firm’s Director of Engineering—made his way down from the sixth floor.
Anthony was . . . well, okay, he was a bit of a jackass. He ogled the interns, loved to hear himself speak, and said nothing that sounded sincere. Every Thursday morning he relished making an example of the last person to walk in, sharply commenting with a saccharine smile on their outfit or their hair so everyone in the room would have to watch in leaden silence as they found the last empty seat and sat down in shame.
The door squeaked as it opened.
Emma.
Emma lingered, holding the door open for someone.
Gah. Karen.
Voices sounded from outside the room, growing louder as they came in.
Victoria and John.
And then, there he was.
“Showtime,” Pippa muttered next to me.
I saw the top of Niall Stella’s head as he stepped in just behind Anthony, and it was as if the air had been sucked from the room. People and chatter blurred around the edges and then it was just
him
, expression neutral as he seemed to instinctively take in who was there and who was missing, his shoulders wrapped in a dark suit, one hand tucked casually into the pocket of his dress pants.
The urgent, fiery feeling in my chest grew.
Niall Stella was the man you noticed the moment he walked into the room. Not because he was boisterous or loud, but because he wasn’t. There was a quiet confidence about him, a way he carried himself that demanded attention and respect, and a feeling that while he wasn’t talking, he was watching everything, noticing everyone.
Everyone except me.
Having come from a family of therapists that discussed
everything
, I’d never been the silent type.
So the fact that I of all people couldn’t manage a single articulate thing when he was in touching proximity made absolutely zero sense. What I felt for him was a distracting kind of infatuation.
He didn’t even have to attend Thursday meetings; he just
did
, because he wanted to make sure there was ‘cross departmental consensus’ and so his planning division ‘could at least have a working engineering vocabulary’ since it was Niall Stella’s responsibility to coordinate engineering with public policy and his own planning division.
Not that I’d memorized everything he’d ever said at this meeting.
Today he wore a light blue shirt beneath a dark charcoal suit. His tie was a mesmerizing swirl of yellow and blue, and my eyes moved from the double Windsor knot at his neck to the smooth skin just above, the heavy curve of his Adam’s apple, the sharp jaw. His normally impassive mouth was turned down in consternation and when I made it up to his eyes . . . I registered with horror that he was watching me eye-fuck him like it was my job.
Need more Niall? Of course you do. . .
BOOKS BY CHRISTINA LAUREN
Wild Seasons
Sweet Filthy Boy
Dirty Rowdy Thing
Dark Wild Night
Wicked Sexy Liar
The Beautiful Series
Beautiful Bastard
Beautiful Stranger
Beautiful Bitch
Beautiful Bombshell
Beautiful Player
Beautiful Beginning
Beautiful Beloved
Beautiful Secret
Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners/besties/soulmates and brain-twins Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the
New York Times
,
USA Today
, and #1 international bestselling authors of the Beautiful Bastard and Wild Seasons series and
Sublime
. You can find them online at
christinalaurenbooks.com
,
Facebook.com/ChristinaLaurenBooks
, or at
@ChristinaLauren
,
@seeCwrite
, and
@lolashoes
on Twitter.
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Pocket Star Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Pocket Star Books ebook edition February 2015
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ISBN 978-1-4767-9165-4
