Her Favorite Rival (7 page)

How ’bout that.

Zach threw another folder into his briefcase, trying to work out if he was flattered by Audrey’s insanely inaccurate take on who he was or if he was, in fact, supremely pissed at being dismissed as a trust-fund playboy dabbling in a career for fun.

He’d grown up with nothing, in both material and spiritual senses. Any money that came into the household had gone straight up his mother’s arm, and the only reason he was still alive today was because of the people in his mother’s life—various hangers-on and fellow addicts and the few persistent, stubborn family members who had persevered in maintaining contact with his mother over the years, despite her many, many abuses of their trust.

His school uniforms had been secondhand; his textbooks, too. He worked after school and earned himself scholarships and held down two part-time jobs to support himself while at university. No one had handed him anything, ever.

Yet, according to Audrey, he came across as a snotty-nosed rich kid. Someone who’d had every good thing in life gifted to him on a silver platter.

How...bizarre.

It had never occurred to him that anyone might take him for anything other than what he was—a poor kid who’d made good. He liked nice things, but he hadn’t bought his car or his watch or his suit because he wanted other people to look at him and think he was something he wasn’t. He’d bought them because he could. Because he’d admired and wanted them, and he’d had more than enough of missing out in his life. Seeing something beautiful and fine and knowing he could make it his own was a power he would never, ever take for granted and never, ever tire of exercising.

Screw it. Who cares what she thinks? Let her believe what she wants to believe.

An excellent notion, except for one small problem: he did care what Audrey thought of him. And not only because he wanted to get her naked.

She was smart. She was determined. She was funny. There was something about her, a tilt to her chin or a light in her eye or...
something
that spoke to him. He wanted to know more about her. Where she came from, who her parents were, what her school years had been like, if she was all about chocolate or if vanilla was her poison of choice. He wanted more of her.

I’m the only person in the world I can rely on, and if I don’t make things happen, they don’t happen. I’m not going to apologize for that.

They were her words, but the huge irony was that he could just as well have spoken them himself. Certainly they reflected his philosophy in life.

Audrey might not recognize it, but they had a lot in common.

He mulled over the other things she’d said as he drove home, especially the stuff about him laughing at her. Did he really always smile when he saw her? He thought back over their recent interactions, but couldn’t remember what he’d been doing with his face when he’d been talking to her. Certainly, he always relished the opportunity to be in the same room as her. Was it possible his enjoyment manifested itself in the form of a gormless grin?

He shook his head in self-disgust. He really, truly needed to get a grip on himself if that was the case, for his own personal dignity if not for sound business reasons. The last thing he wanted was to be cast as the unrequited desperado in their little office drama.

Not a look he’d ever been keen to cultivate.

By the time he got home he’d decided the best thing he could do—the smartest thing—was to get through this project as quickly and painlessly as possible. Do his bit, keep to himself, keep things purely professional. And make sure he was aware of what his mouth was doing when he was around her.

Simple.

Which didn’t explain why he woke at two in the morning and spent twenty minutes rummaging through dusty old boxes in the back of his closet until he’d found what he was looking for: the official grade two school photograph from Footscray Primary, circa 1989. The corners were curled, but there was no missing his scrawny, scrape-kneed seven-year-old self in the front row. He stared at the image for a long moment. The thin, unsmiling kid in the photo had been grappling with both his mother’s and his father’s destructive lifestyles at the time the picture was taken, learning that the things other kids in his class took for granted—meals, loving supervision, care—were only ever going to be sporadic features in his own life.

Happy times. Thank God he’d survived them.

Pushing the carton back into the depths of the closet, he crossed to his briefcase and slipped the photograph into a pocket.

The thought of it burned in the back of his mind the whole of the next day as he debated the wisdom behind the urge that had driven him out of bed in the early hours.

He didn’t want Audrey to mistake who he was. He didn’t want her to misunderstand him. Probably a futile, dangerous wish, given their work situation and the pressures they were both currently facing, but her misconception of him was eating away at his gut and he was almost certain he couldn’t simply suck it up and move on.

Probably that made him an idiot, but so be it. He’d been called worse things in his time.

Still, he was undecided about what he was going to do with the photograph right up until the moment he joined Audrey in the meeting room. She’d beaten him to the punch—again—and was writing something in her notebook when he entered, a small frown wrinkling her brow, her glasses balanced on the end of her nose. Her head was propped on one hand, the chestnut silk of her hair spilling over her shoulder. She looked studious and serious and shiny and good, and something tightened in his chest as he looked at her.

Then she registered his presence and her expression became wary and stiff. She slid off her glasses. “Oh, hi. I was about to grab a coffee. Do you want one?”

In that second he made his decision, for good or for ill. Placing his briefcase on the table, he flicked it open and pulled the photograph from the inside pocket.

“Thanks. But there’s something I want to show you first.”

Then, even though he knew it was dumb and that it would serve no purpose whatsoever, he slid the photograph across the table toward her.

* * *

A
UDREY
STARED
AT
the photograph Zach had pushed in front of her. Why on earth was he giving her a tatty old class photo?

“Is this something to do with the analysis?” she asked stupidly.

Then her gaze fell on the small, dark-haired boy in the front row and she understood what this was and who she was looking at. Zach was smaller than the other children. He was also the only one who wasn’t smiling. Both his knees were dark with gravel rash, and his hair very badly needed a cut. Her gaze shifted to the plaque one of the children was holding: Footscray Primary School, Grade Two, 1989.

Slowly she lifted her gaze to his.

“You went to Footscray Primary?” She could hear the incredulity in her own voice. She
felt
incredulous—there was no way that this polished, perfect man could have emerged from one of Melbourne’s most problematic inner-city suburbs. It didn’t seem possible to her. Although Footscray had enjoyed a renaissance in recent years thanks to the real estate boom and its proximity to the city, for many, many years the inner western suburb had been about stolen cars and drug deals and people doing it tough.

“Footscray Secondary College, too,” Zach confirmed.

She blinked as the full import of what he was saying hit home. All the assumptions she’d made about him and all of the niggling little resentments and moments of self-conscious inadequacy that had sprung from those assumptions... All wrong.

All of it.

Oh, boy.

She’d judged him from day one, slotting him neatly into a tidy little box that accorded with her view of the world. All because she’d looked at his expensive suits and smooth good looks and fancy car and decided he was one of God’s gifted people. But it hadn’t only been about him—about her perception of him, anyway. It had also been about her, about the chip she carried on her shoulder because no matter how hard she worked and how far up the food chain she climbed and how carefully she colored in between the lines, there was a part of her that would always feel like an impostor thanks to the lessons of her childhood and the mistakes of her teenage years.

“You know, I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you truly stumped for a response,” Zach said.

“Hardly.” It seemed to her that she was all too often speechless and incoherent when he was around. “I’ve made a lot of assumptions about you, haven’t I? I’m sorry. That was...really dumb and rude of me.”

“I didn’t set the record straight because I wanted an apology. I figured if we were working together it would be good if we were on the same page.”

Very decent of him. Not that she deserved it. When she thought of all the different ways she’d misjudged him... It literally made her toes curl inside her shoes. When had she become such a horrible, narrow-minded, threatened person?

“I feel like an enormous idiot, if it’s any consolation to you.” Along with a lot of other things—petty, smug, stupid, to name a few.

“To be fair, I do own a Patek Philippe watch.”

She realized a little dazedly that he was smiling, and she understood that he was very generously letting her off the hook.

“Don’t forget your Hugo Boss shoes,” she said after a short pause.

“And my Armani suit. Although today it’s Ermenegildo Zegna.”

“Pretty impressive.” She meant it, too. Not because she was impressed by luxury brands, but because he’d clearly shaken off a behind-the-eight-ball start in life to get to a point where he could buy himself such beautiful things. That kind of commitment and hard work and determination took gumption and smarts and whole host of other damned fine characteristics.

“The point has never been to impress anyone.”

She believed him. He’d never been ostentatious about his belongings. If anything, he’d been understated—to the point where she’d assumed his nonchalance stemmed from contempt bred from familiarity.

She picked up the photograph, studying seven-year-old Zach again. How she could have gotten it so wrong for so long was a question that was going to keep her awake into the small hours, squirming with discomfort. Which was as it should be.

“It’s not a big deal, Audrey. I just wanted to clear the air.”

She looked at him, studying him through the prism of her new understanding. The bump in his nose took on new significance, as did the breadth of his shoulders and the bright directness of his gaze. It struck her that she’d been right when she’d judged Zach as being different—she’d simply misunderstood the why of it.

The beep of her phone registering an email broke the silence. She blinked and looked away from him, suddenly aware that ninety-five percent of the reasons she’d used to keep him at arm’s length had just dissolved in a puff of smoke.

Instead of being an arrogant, overprivileged pretty boy with cockiness to spare, Zach was suddenly an approachable, high-achieving man with a very hot body and the world’s most delicious aftershave.

And she was stuck in a meeting room with him for the foreseeable future.

“Well. We should probably get stuck into this, or we’ll be here all night,” she said.

They launched into work, reading over each other’s proposals and suggesting areas where more research might be required. Zach was sharp and focused, and her pride demanded that she bring her A-game, too, no matter how off-balance she felt. By seven-thirty they’d agreed to the parameters of the report and identified the data they would require to complete it.

“Right. I guess we need to write up our separate parts and then meet again sometime next week to go over everything,” Zach said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms over his head.

She did her damnedest not to notice the way his shirt pulled across his belly and chest, but wasn’t sure she succeeded.

“What day suits you? I’ve got late meetings Monday and Tuesday.”

“We leave for conference Friday. Will Wednesday be cutting it too fine?” he asked.

She called up the calendar on her phone and checked her schedule. If they had a first draft written by Wednesday night, they’d have Thursday night to finesse things into some kind of coherent presentation. A close call, but not impossible, and maybe they could find some time during the conference itself to do a dry run so they were prepared to present to Whitman when they returned.

“I think it’s doable,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll block out Wednesday and Thursday nights.”

She sighed. Sleep and downtime were obviously going to be scarce commodities in the next week or so.

“It could be worse. Gary could have asked someone else to do it,” Zach said.

She couldn’t help grinning. He was totally on the money—she would be so ticked off if someone else had won this opportunity instead of her.

“True.”

They packed up their things in comfortable silence, the first Audrey could ever remember them sharing. Together they walked back to the merchandising department, both of them loaded down with files and laptops.

“To infinity and beyond,” Zach said when it was time for them to part ways.

It wasn’t until she was back in her office that Audrey recognized his words as a quote from Buzz Lightyear. It made her think of the photograph he’d shown her, of that skinny, raw-kneed boy with the too-long hair and too-serious expression.

It was strange, knowing so much about him. What he looked like as a child. Where he grew up. The fact that he’d earned everything he had with his own efforts.

And yet they weren’t friends. Not by a long shot. She wasn’t sure what they were.

Not enemies anymore. Rivals? Colleagues? Both words didn’t feel quite right.

Audrey gave herself a mental shake. It was late; she was tired and hungry. It was time to go home and pretend she had a life.

* * *

Z
ACH
SPENT
THE
bulk of his spare time for the rest of the week working on the competitor analysis. He pulled company reports from Mathesons off the internet, paid for a media search, and spoke to various suppliers and industry bodies. He spent Saturday pulling all the information he’d gathered into some kind of shape, staring at his laptop until he was bleary-eyed. The only upside of any of it—apart from the potential payoff at the end when Whitman was blown away by the report—was knowing that Audrey was in the trench with him.