[4 Seasons 01] Seducing Summer by Serenity Woods

beneath his breath. He
couldn’t imagine anything more delightful than his laces being loosened at that
moment. But it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, and when it did, Callie
Summer certainly wouldn’t be the one to do it.
     

Chapter Eight
    The meeting at Hollywell’s didn’t go as
well as Callie had hoped.
    After she’d walked out of the store
manager’s office, she stopped at the ladies’, went to the loo, then stared at
herself in the mirror as she washed her hands.
    “You only have yourself to blame.” Her
too-loud voice rang through the small bathroom. Thankfully, the other cubicles
were empty.
    She lowered her gaze to the basin, seeing
her knuckles white where she’d clutched hold of the ceramic edge, and she
forced herself to relax her grip. It wasn’t the end of the world. She was long
past blaming herself for every little thing that went wrong in her life. It
wasn’t her fault that she’d been distracted by Gene’s brooding blue eyes and
his deep, sexy voice.
    I was teasing.
    Were you?
    His words bloomed in her head like
beautiful roses. It wasn’t even a sentence, and yet just that fraction of a
phrase told her he found her attractive.
    She was flattered, and couldn’t stop a glow
spreading through her, but that didn’t mean anything would happen. Clearly, he
was determined to remain aloof, and although she was sure it would be fun to
keep teasing him, she didn’t want to make a fool of herself.
    She slid her hands beneath the dryer and
turned them in the hot air. She’d be an idiot if she let a glint of sexual
attraction ruin the tour she’d planned all year. The success of Four Seasons
depended almost singlehandedly on her. That wasn’t an egotistical way of
looking at things—it was fact. Rowan was an exceptional designer, but she had
zero business sense and, if she’d been left to her own devices, would still have
been designing dresses for her dolls. Bridget was great at running the shop,
but had no vision in terms of expanding the business. Neve had some brilliant
promotional ideas, but they tended to be just that—ideas rather than practical
applications.
    It was Callie who had the business degree,
the personal skills, and the ambition to make the business more than the one
shop making a profit just large enough to keep them all above the breadline.
She wasn’t expecting to surpass Victoria’s Secret or Triumph or Berlei, but she
didn’t see why Four Seasons couldn’t become one of the best brands in New
Zealand and possibly Australia, and she knew Rowan’s designs were pretty enough
to expand even beyond that.
    Besides, life would be dull if she saw the
limits of their shop as the outskirts of Wellington. She might open shops in a
dozen New Zealand towns and half of them might fail, but so what? Better to
have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.
    The same could be said about her personal
life, she thought as she opened her handbag, took out her lipstick, and applied
a new coat. She didn’t wish she’d never met Jamie. She did wish she’d noticed
the signs that he was cheating on her before she’d walked in on him in bed,
because the image of the skinny brunette sitting astride him, her hair tumbling
down her back as his hips thrust up into her, had seared itself onto Callie’s
brain and refused to come off, even though she’d done the mental equivalent of
scrubbing the inside of her skull with a scouring pad. But although he’d hurt
her terribly, she couldn’t wish they’d never gotten together. She’d tried a
long-term relationship and she’d failed, but that was okay. It didn’t mean the
next one wouldn’t work.
    When she was a child, her mother had shown
her how to color a page with wax crayons, in any patterns, using every color in
the box. Then she’d told Callie to go over the whole page with thick black
paint. Puzzled, Callie had done so, even more confused when her mother had
given her a cocktail stick and told her to draw something on