Sapphires are a Guy's Best Friend: a friends to lovers romance by Nicola Marsh

Author:Nicola Marsh [Marsh, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parlance Press
Published: 2022-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

SAPPHIRE LASTED a whole three days without succumbing to the temptation of seeing Patrick.

Then he sent her a text citing an urgent meeting and she caved.

Purely business, of course. Spending ten minutes primping in front of a mirror was the usual routine she'd do before any work meeting. The part where her palms grew clammy as she swiped on mascara and scrubbed off her lipstick twice before settling on the perfect shade was pure feminine preening and not an attempt to impress him. At all. Right?

She had four more days before he made good on his promise. Just the two of them and a decadent weekend. With boxes.

She'd been a smart-ass, taunting him at the conclusion of their last face-to-face meeting, but deep down she was a quivering mess of confusion and nerves and lust. The kind of lust she'd never experienced. The kind of lust guaranteed to turn her into an idiot.

She didn't suffer fools lightly and respected hard work and dedication in comparison with deceitful women who faked helplessness in order to score points with men. The type of women Patrick usually hung out with if the internet was anything to go by.

It had been a stupid, spur-of-the moment decision to check out his recent past, spurred by two glasses of Chardonnay and a rampant curiosity. It had been the end of a long eighteen-hour day—the day after she'd seen him, a day in which she'd determinedly buried herself in work to erase the lingering memory of his touch, and her response.

The wine had helped her wind down but it hadn't taken the edge off her curiosity and she'd succumbed to temptation. The online search had been enlightening, to say the least, and had provided her with a plethora of images and articles. Usually depicting Patrick with a stunning supermodel on his arm, laughing into the camera, with a different country landscape in the background. From Santorini to Monte Carlo, Nice to Barcelona, Patrick was there, partying his way through Europe.

She'd given up after the tenth page. The endless hits had been rather depressing. He'd lived such an exciting life amid glamorous people while she'd spent the last ten years devoting hers to Seaborns.

She didn't regret a single moment—discounting the last year when she'd been an idiot in shouldering the burden alone—and still experienced a thrill when she walked into their amazing showroom. But seeing pictorial evidence of Patrick's lifestyle reinforced what she'd always felt around him: gauche, prim, floundering a little.

And envious. She'd always been a tad jealous of his ability to charm people, his ease to cruise through life without a care in the world, his natural exuberance that made everyone around him smile.

If anything, those online images had reinforced what she already knew: that Patrick was very different to her and always had been. Back in high school he'd annoyed her, so what had changed now? He was still brash and cocky and charming, and had waltzed into this new Fourde Fashion with the ease of a practised CEO.

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