Page 1 of Fighting Mr. Knight

1

Bonnie

You can tell a lot about a man by his nostrils. Pay attention and they’re full of clues. If his nostrils flare and his lips part, he’s picturing you naked.

The nostrils of the guy in the sharp blue suit at the top of the boardroom are fat with anger.

Max, my boss.

He checks his watch as the team piles in, taking the seats around me. Technically, they’re on time, but they’re on Big Ben’s clock rather than Max’s, which is five minutes slower.

Twenty of us—architects, interior designers, planners—make up Bradshaw Brown, one of London’s smaller architecture firms.

As far as design firms go, we’re not sexy.We don’t design shiny pointy things in the London skyline shaped like shards of glass or walkie-talkies and if I listed ten of our projects to the public, eyes would glaze over.

Restoration of old abandoned heritage buildings, that’s our bag.

The two sales guys take seats at the front.The Antichrist to us creatives.Their strategy is to pimp us out for deadlines that we can’t meet, then they ignore our calls because they’re too busy on the phone, selling us to new clients.

Max hooks up his laptop, and the boardroom screen comes to life.

But this morning, it’s not displaying the Bradshaw Brown team agenda.

Twenty jaws drop to the floor as we stare at an attractive blondeposing seductively on sand while rocking a red bikini and Santa hat.

Then slowly, like dominoes, nineteen slack jaws swivel to stare at me.

Well,shit.

My body stiffens in defence, and I shoot them back death glares.

I force my horrified eyes back to the screen.

The photo is in a message from aDanielle. To summarise our boss’s emailedresponse in big print: Danielle in a Mrs. Claus outfit makes his dick hard.

It’s not even Christmas.

Danielle smiles playfully at us with wide eyes as she lives her best life on a beach somewhere.

Max is too busy checking something on his laptop to notice that he’s broadcasting his digital masturbation bank to the design team.His inability to pick up on the tension in the room is astounding.

“Uh, Max,”Nisha, Bradshaw Brown’s contracts manager and my close friend, says sharplybeside me. “That’s not the agenda you have on-screen.”

Confused, Max pivots and then flinches as if Danielle jumped out and slapped him in the face. “Shit!” Choking painfully on his own saliva, he frantically yanks the cable from his laptop.

We watch gobsmacked. Awkward sniggers sprinkle the room.

Max levies us a glare as if it’sourfault. “Moving on.”

Nisha cocks a brow at me in a ‘you okay?’as Max recovers, plugs his computer back in and replaces sexyMrs. Clauswith the meeting agenda.

I plaster a bright smile on my face. Mortified is the understatement of the century.

So Max is dating again.

Max, the man I spent the past four years with. I was a fresh architecture graduate wet behind the ears when he was a qualified architect at Bradshaw Brown. He took me under his wing and became my mentor. Then he became my boyfriend, my fiancé and eventually my boss. Then my ex-fiancé. But still my boss.

Not an ideal sequence of events.

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