The truth hovering on her tongue, Pru almost told him no. The only business she wanted to discuss with him was a fascination that wouldn’t go away. But he obviously wasn’t prepared to hear that, so she had no choice but to agree. “Of course,” she said as if she’d never thought of suggesting anything else. “We need to talk about some of the problems you’ve been having here on the site and I thought the discussion would be less tense on neutral ground.”
It was a plausible excuse and one that Pru thought sounded darn good. But she saw in a glance that Murdock wasn’t buying it. He just looked at her and said dryly, “Thanks, but no thanks. You know how guys talk. We go off together and it’s going to be all over the site that I’m kissing up to the inspector. If you want to talk, we can do it right here in my office.”
Pru wanted to object—spending time with him on the job was not what she wanted!—but he didn’t give her the chance. Turning, he jerked open the door to his cracker box of an office and patiently waited for her to precede him. Ruefully accepting defeat, she gave in gracefully and stepped into the small, portable building.
Pru had been in her share of site offices and knew from firsthand experience that they were usually crowded and messy, with hardly enough room to turn around. Murdock’s was no different except for the fact that paperwork littering the desk that took up most of the available floor space was neatly stacked and organized.
Impressed, she lifted a brow in surprise, amusement glinting in her eyes as she turned to tease him about his neatness fetish. But the door shut behind him as he followed her inside, and in the blink of an eye he was right in front of her, so close she could practically feel the sharp breath he drew in in surprise. Between one heartbeat and the next, the playful words hovering on her tongue turned to dust.
Trapped between the desk at her back and Murdock’s hard, lean body in front of her, Pru felt her heart start to knock against her ribs. Still, she couldn’t move, didn’t want to. Lord, how could she have known just standing this close to him could turn her knees to water? Light-headed, her blood racing through her veins with an anticipation she couldn’t explain, she found herself holding her breath, waiting, waiting for his arms to slip around her. Somehow she knew it was going to be the best thing that ever happened to her.
But he didn’t touch her.
He didn’t dare.
The air suddenly thick with sexual tension, Murdock stared down at her, his hands curled into fists at his sides. He never should have let her anywhere near his office, he thought too late. It was too small, too private, and she was much, much too close. If he leaned the slightest bit toward her...
He’d be in big trouble. Because something warned him that once he gave in to the need to touch her, she’d be nearly impossible to walk away from.
Fighting the outrageous need to reach for her, he abruptly stepped around her to get to his desk, his jaw hardening when his arm accidentally brushed against her. Just as when he’d been forced to shake hands with her, heat stirred, stealing the moisture from his mouth, stunning him. And her. Again. Her face an open book, she met his gaze wide-eyed, hiding nothing of her thoughts. And what he saw in her eyes shook him to the core. Dammit, didn’t she know better than to look at a man the way she was looking at him? As if he was the next best thing to sliced bread and she couldn’t get over the wonder of him? God Almighty, couldn’t she see he was too old for her?
He reached the comparative safety behind his desk, but it didn’t help. There just wasn’t enough room in the small office to put any real space between them. And how the hell was he supposed to keep his mind on business when that perfume of hers was guaranteed to drive him slowly out of his mind?
With a jerk of his hand, he motioned to the sturdy metal chair angled across from his desk. “Sit down,” he growled, then settled into the old leather office chair that he’d used at every building site for the last twenty years. “All right, you wanted to talk, so talk. What’s the problem?”
Any hope that Pru had had that they might, for once, have a nice, friendly conversation died a swift death at his cool tone. His eyes were dark with distrust, his mouth set and unsmiling. He even glanced pointedly at the clock, silently reminding her that she was wasting precious time. It shouldn’t have hurt—she’d known getting past the hostility he kept between them like a shield wouldn’t be easy—but it did.
Sternly ordering herself not to be so sensitive, she met his gaze unflinchingly. “I think it’s time you told me what’s going on around here, don’t you?”
In the process of reaching for a pencil, Murdock froze. “Going on? What are you talking about?”
“I would think that was obvious,” she retorted. “I’m not deaf, you know. I’ve heard the stories about the project and all the problems you’ve had. The tool thefts, the vandalism, the unacceptable materials—”
He stopped her right there. “Pick any building site in this city and you’re going to run into some type of theft and vandalism. It just goes with the territory, especially in today’s world. As for problems with materials, I don’t know what you’re talking about. True, there was a mix-up with the cement, but it was within the acceptable limits.”
Pulling a piece of the foreign-made wiring she’d found earlier out of her pocket, she tossed it onto his desk. “This has nothing to do with cement. You’d better look at this.”
A licensed electrician, Murdock knew before his fingers ever closed over the small length of wiring that it wasn’t anything he’d ordered for the Fort Sam project. “Where did you get this?” he demanded sharply, glancing up. “I didn’t buy this.”
“Then why are your electricians using it all over the site?”
“They’re not,” he snapped. “Roy ordered all American-made materials for this job, including the electrical supplies, then inspected them himself when they came in. If there’d been a problem, he would have told me immediately and corrected it.”
“Then someone’s pulled a fast one on the two of you,” she replied. “Because right now the east wing’s wired with this and I can’t pass it until it’s changed.”
“The hell it is!”
“I’m sorry, Murdock, but it is. If you don’t believe me, go look for yourself.”
He was already on his feet, stepping around his desk. “All right, I will. Let’s go.”
Following her outside, his long legs quickly carried him to the east wing where the electricians had started roughing in the wiring the second the cement had been approved. Another shorter woman would have had a difficult time keeping up with him, but Pru’s legs were only a few inches shorter than his and she matched him stride for stride. So when he stepped inside the shell of a building and inspected the wiring that was already in place and soon to be concealed behind Sheetrock, she was right there with him.
“Son of a bitch!”
The softly snarled curse echoed like a scream in the empty building. Watching him closely, Pru slowly released the breath she had been unobtrusively holding, any doubts that Murdock might have known of the subterfuge vanishing when she saw the fury in his eyes.
“Have you checked the rest of this wing?”
She jumped when he turned on her suddenly, his blue eyes dark and piercing. She saw in an instant that he wasn’t mad at her, but at whoever did this. And she didn’t want to be in their shoes when he caught up with them. The fur was going to fly.
She nodded. “It’s all the same.”
He cursed again, a low, fluent damnation of the bonehead who didn’t know the difference between American and imported wiring. “What about the material that hasn’t been installed, yet?” he asked tersely. “Have you checked that?”
“No, of course not. I only inspect the work in progress and