Page 1 of Single Dad Christmas

CHAPTER ONE

LOUISA HAD KNOWN MEN like him before. Well, notexactlylike him. Noah Fox was the first Australian billionaire she’d met, but he was not the first man who was tall, dark, ruggedly handsome, and worth a fortune who’d crossed her path.

Having dated a King for two years, she should have been immune from nerves when it came to the opposite sex. Was there anyone more potentially intimidating than a royal? Only…Ares hadn’t been intimidating. He’d been a friend first, and something like a friend the whole way through their relationship. It hadn’t been his fault that she’d ended it.

On paper, he was perfect.

On the one hand, she had no doubt they would have been perfectly content if she’d stayed with him, and they’d gotten married in some big, over-the-top, royal wedding.

But the thought of living her whole life in that gilded cage had turned Louisa’s blood to ice, and so she’d run away.

And she’d been ashamed of that—because Ares had deserved better. She’d angsted over how she’d let him down—and after all he’d lost in life. Only to have him fly in a week ago specifically totell her that not three months after their breakup, he’d met the love of his life and was planning to propose.

Talk about being blindsided.

She’dlefthim.

She’d dumped him and flown to the other side of the world, to take up a client management role for a blue-chip advertising agency that was owned by one of her father’s friends. She’d come here to lick her wounds and escape the press. She’d wanted Ares to be happy—but she had been shocked that he’d found happiness, with someone else, so soon after their breakup.

“It’s not good enough,” Noah Fox leaned forward, elbows braced on the table as he stared across at her in a way that was both intimidating and addictive. Not for the first time, she cursed her direct boss for failing to show up for the meeting.

The text message he’d sent as she’d walked into this boardroom had been about as unhelpful as it got:

Sorry, can’t make it. You’ll be fine. Remember, flatter, flatter, flatter, agree to everything, promise the world. I’ll sort it out later.

Louisa wasn’t sure she liked the idea of promising the world if the flighty Donovan was going to be left in charge of delivering on said promises. She was someone who valued the truth of her word, and the same couldnotbe said for Donovan.

“You’re unhappy,” she said, trying to thinklessabout Ares, andlessabout the incredibly symmetrical, angular face of the man across from her, and how much he reminded her of some kind of mountain range, andmoreabout the fact he was one of the agency’s biggest clients, and her job was to make sure he didn’t take his business elsewhere.

“Damn straight.” His Australian accent was broad and gruff. It made her think of the outback—a place she hadn’t admittedly been but had fantasised about in her mind often enough to just somehow know that this man would be right at home in thebroad, sweeping plains of dust and dirt, the anemic trees casting eerie silhouettes against a strikingly blue sky. “I was told my ROI would be here,” he gestured with his hand. “And it, quite clearly, is not.”

“No,” she admitted, glancing down at the graphs Donovan had emailed her the night before, thankful she’d thought to print them out and bring them with her. “A few things haven’t gone quite according to plan,” she said, pulling her glossy brown hair over one shoulder.

“You can say that again.”

He was clearly annoyed, and she couldn’t blame him. He’d entrusted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to the agency, to launch his new chain of hotels, and several key angles had failed.

“The competition was badly run,” she conceded.

“You hired an influencer who was on charges for drink driving. Hardly an association I appreciated. Every paper across the country included my name in the first paragraph of the articles about her arrest, as though I’d hand-picked her.”

No one senior had hand-picked her, that was the problem. Donovan had left one of the interns to decide key matters, because ‘she’s young, she understands what’s going to work’. Otherwise known as: he couldn’t be bothered, and so he’d staffed out decisions he absolutely should have been making himself.

“That was regrettable.”

“Regrettable,” Noah’s barked laugh was a deep, throaty sound of disbelief. Raw and real. It made Louisa’s stomach roll, and possibly not from nerves. Beneath the table, she dug her fingernails into her palm. “It was a disaster, from beginning to end.”

“Yes.”

His eyes narrowed as he studied her face, almost as if for the first time. It was like he hadn’t really registered her before now, but rather had seen her as just a suit, a representative for an agency he was on the brink of firing.

“You’re not making excuses.”

Donovan would have. No doubt her boss would have had several handy little lies at his disposal, ready to save his own butt. But Louisa was not Donovan. She may have been hired because of nepotism, but she was good at managing people. Two years as a potential future Queen had taught her more than a thing or two about unruffling feathers and keeping her cool whilst doing it. She also knew how to read emotions, and she could tell that Noah Fox was not going to be impressed by smooth lies. He was no idiot, and there was no excuse for this.

So, she told him that.

“We stuffed up.”

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