Chapter 1

She looked even more dangerous than beautiful up close. Rex Kalada's mouth left opened with shocked. She was drop dead gorgeous, yes...but faded. Like a rose which had been plucked fresh for a man's buttonhole before a wild night of partying, but which now lay wilted and drooping across his chest.

She was still fast asleep, she laid wasted on top of a white leather sofa. She was wearing a white hoody, which curved over her breasts and bottom, ending midway along amazingly long legs which seemed to go on forever. Beside her lay an empty wine glass the finger-marked crystal upended and glinting in the spring sunshine. A faint breeze drifted in from the open windows leading onto the balcony, but it wasn't enough to remove the faint smell of cigarette from the room, along with the musky scent of incense. Kalada made a barely perceptible click of distaste and anger. Cliché after cliché were all here embodied in the magnificent body of Chioma as she laid on the bed with her head on her hands as a pillow and her black hair pouring over her beautiful body.

Kalada couldn't help but think if it had been one of his male staff he would have knocked his head till he got up, but Chioma wasn't one of his male staff. She was a woman. A spoilt brat who had let her beauty and rich lifestyle get to her head a spoil brat who was now his responsibility and for some reason he didn't want to lay his hands on Chioma. He didn't dare.

Damn her father, he thought viciously, remembering the old man's continuous appeal to him. "You've got to save her from herself, Kalada." "You have to show her she can't carry on like this for her sake and that of her future." And curse his own stupid conscience, which made him agree to this crazy deal between him and the old man.

He decided to listen to find out if the apartment was empty and the apartment was silent but maybe he should check if truly it was empty. He moved around and found no other bodies scattered in one of the many rooms.

He moved from room to room, among all the wreckage of cold pizza lying in greasy boxes and half-empty bottles of vintage wine, he could find no one. Only once did he pause when he pushed open a door of a spare bedroom, clustered with books and clothes and a dusty-looking exercise bike. Hidden behind a velvet sofa was a stack of paintings and he walked over to them, his natural collector's eye making him flick through them with interest. The canvases were filled with swirls and splurges of paint, some of which had been highlighted with a sharp edge of black ink. He studied them for several minutes, until he was forced to remember that he was here for a purpose and she turned away from the pictures and returned to the sitting room, to find Chioma lying exactly where he'd left her.

'Get up,' he growled. And then, when he received no response, he repeated it more loudly this time. 'Get up, I say.'

Finally she moved, one of her arm reached up to brush aside the thick sweep of her black hair which covered most of her face, showing Kalada a sudden clear view of her face. Her cute little pointed nose and the natural thickness of her soft red lips. Her thick lashes were open and as she slowly turned her head to look at him he realized

That her eyes were the most beautiful shade of blue he'd ever seen. They made the breath in his lungs dry completely, those eyes. They made him momentarily forget what he was doing there.

'What's going on?' she questioned, in a subtle voice. 'And who the hell are you?'

She sat up, blinking as she looked around but not creating the kind of fuss as he might have expected. As if she was used to being woken by strange people who had walked into her apartment at midday. He felt another feeling of distaste and disgust. Maybe he was.

'My name is Kalada Rex,' he said, looking at her face for some kind of recognition, but seeing only a blank and poker expression filled with boredom on her frozen features.

'Oh, yeah?' Those amazing eyes swept over her and then she yawned then proceeded to stretching her body before asking her. 'And how did you get in, Kalada Rex?'

In many ways Kalada was the most old-fashioned and principled of men—an accusation thrown at him many times by disappointed women in the past and in that precise moment he felt his temper begin to flare because it confirmed everything he'd heard about her. That she was careless. That she didn't care about anything or anyone, except herself. And anger was safer than desire. Rather than allowing himself to focus on the way her breasts jiggled as she moved. Or to acknowledge that as she rose to her feet and walked across the room she moved with a natural grace and poise he had never seen, which made him want to stare at her and keep staring. Which made his groin begin to harden and his blood began to get hot with an unwilling kind of lust.

'You left the door open so I decided to let myself in,' he said, not bothering to hide his disapproval.

'Oh. Right. Someone must have left it open on their way out.' She looked at him and smiled the pretty kind of smile which probably had most men eating out of the palm of her hand but not him he's seen women like her before women who cover their incompetence with seduction. 'I had a party last night.'

He didn't smile back at her. 'Doesn't it worry you that someone could have walked right in and burgled you, rape you or worse?'

She shrugged his question off and said. 'Not really. Security on the main door is usually very tight. Though come to think of it you seem to have got past them without much difficulty. How did you manage to do that?'

'That's because I have a key,' he said, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger so that it shined in the bright spring sunshine.

She was walking across the room the hoody moving across her bottom to draw her unwilling attention to the attractive shape of her ass. But his words made her jerk her head back in surprise and a faint frown appeared on her brow as she extracted a pack of cigarettes from a small beaded handbag which was lying on a coffee table.

'Wait what you mean by, you have a key?' she questioned, pulling out a filter tip and jamming it in between her lips. 'I'd rather you didn't light that,' said Kalada sternly.