“As luck would have it, I’ve got a temp on the books who might do to replace Emily. She’s a little older, but extremely efficient—”
“No.”
Zara blinked and plowed on. “Harriet has a long work record and an extremely good skill set—”
“I don’t want Harriet,” he said in a flat, cool voice. “I want you.”
A pang of heat shot clear to Zara’s toes, despite the fact that she knew Damon could only be referring to his need for an assistant. Even so, memories flickered, vivid and earthy, drawing every muscle of her body tight. She swallowed against a coiling tension that should not exist and desperately willed her body to return to normal. “Why?”
Damon’s darkened gaze locked with hers for a piercing moment, and the reason she’d succumbed to a wild, irresponsible fling with him when she had known it was a huge mistake to sleep with the boss was suddenly crystal clear: chemistry. It shimmered in the air and ran through her veins like liquid fire, the pressure of it banding her chest, making it hard to breathe. For some unknown reason Damon had wanted her and, against all common sense, she had wanted him too.
Damon frowned and dragged lean fingers through his hair and she received the indelible impression that for a long, stretched-out moment he had actually forgotten what he was going to say. “Uh, the McCall takeover. Before you disappeared, you did a lot of the groundwork—”
She stiffened at the mention of the McCall takeover. McCall Electrical being the company that had belonged to Tyler McCall. If there was ever a project she did not want to work on, it would be that one!
“I didn’t disappear—I resigned without notice.” Then she had disappeared. She’d had to get out of town quickly, because she had known that if she had tried to have a normal, aboveboard relationship with Damon, the press would have become interested in her. Even though they had no clue what Angel Atrides looked like, it would only have been a matter of time before her true identity was uncovered, then all the careful work she had done to invent a normal life and career would have been for nothing.
“Resignation?” he muttered in a low growl. “You sent a text.”
Warmth rose in her cheeks. “But I did resign.”
She knew she shouldn’t belabor the point, but a combination of her anxiety over Damon walking into her office and her extreme physical response to him were having a bad effect on her. She couldn’t seem to stop arguing with him, which was counterproductive. She needed to concentrate on getting rid of him before Rosie woke up.
Swallowing the exhilarating desire to argue some more, she reached for calm. “I agree that texting was not the ideal way to finish.” It had just been necessary at the time, because she had not wanted Damon to have her private email address. Email addresses opened too many online doors, some of which led back to her old life, and she knew how adept Damon was at utilizing those sorts of opportunities.
Damon’s thoughtful gaze seemed to burn right through her. “Whatever. Before you left without any notice or forwarding address, you did the groundwork for the McCall takeover. Despite a hitch in the proceedings, I’m now on the point of closing the deal, so I would prefer to have someone who knows their way around the issues.”
Zara had the sudden, suffocating sense of being entangled in a sticky web from which she could not escape. “I had thought you would have completed that months ago.”
“There’s been an unexpected complication, a missing block of voters’ shares that could jeopardize the takeover. And I’ve had...other things that have needed attention.”
A picture of the gorgeous blonde he’d been dating lately, heiress to a media empire, Caroline Grant, flashed into Zara’s mind. That image was instantly followed by a snapshot of the reed-slim redhead he had started seeing on a regular basis not long after Zara had left. Another hot dart of anger unsettled her further.
She did not want to admit that the anger could be linked with the fact that Damon had started dating less than a month after she left his bed. Wining and dining beautiful women while she had been hiding out in her aunt’s country cottage, feeling exhausted and nauseous in the first trimester of her pregnancy. Because, if she was angry, that meant Damon was still important to her, or worse, that she was jealous.
Another small sound drew Damon’s attention back to the door of the interview room. Zara’s heart rate increased another notch. Rosie was definitely awake.
The vibration of a cell, thankfully, distracted Damon. Despite her clear need to get rid of Damon fast, a sudden intense curiosity manifested itself as he extracted the phone from his coat pocket and checked the screen.
Jaw taut, she watched as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. She wondered if the call had been from Caroline Grant, and suddenly her mind was made up.
“No. Working for you is out of the question, I have—”
“I realize you have a business to run,” Damon cut in smoothly. “But I only need you for three weeks, four at most, until the negotiations are completed. And you do have a part-time assistant who could fill in for you.”
Damon offered a fee that was so generous it would cover her agency costs for the next year. More, she would finally be able to afford to fly to Medinos to check out a mysterious safe-deposit box she had recently discovered her mother had obtained not long before she died.
But, as tempting as the money was, as much as she needed it, she could not risk being that close to Damon. As it was, she was kicking herself that she had allowed financial desperation to hold sway when she had accepted him as a client.
“I’m sorry. I can’t work for you.”
Walking briskly to her front door, she yanked it open. She had to get Damon out of her office before he discovered Rosie. He would take one look at her coal-black hair and eyes that were changing by the day to look eerily like his and would instantly know she was his daughter.
Cold, damp air flowed in, making Zara shiver, but instead of taking the hint and walking through the door, Damon paused and she made the fatal mistake of looking into his eyes.
Long, tense seconds later, Damon’s gaze dropped to her mouth and the heady tension she had so far failed to control tightened another notch.
“Damn,” he muttered, “I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
Zara froze as he cupped her jaw, unwillingly riveted by the tingling heat that radiated out from that one point of contact, the unbearably familiar masculine scents of soap and skin. Despite the cold air, she could feel herself growing warmer by the second. Damon’s touch was featherlight; all she needed to do was step away, so why couldn’t she do that one simple thing?
It was a bad time to discover that, despite everything that had happened, the heady excitement that had been her downfall a year ago was still just as potent, just as seductive.
It shouldn’t be, she thought a little desperately. She had changed; she had moved on. When she did decide to allow a man back into her life it would not be because of an off-the-register sexual attraction. This time she would choose carefully. She needed steady and reliable, not—
Damon’s mouth slanted across hers and any idea that the day was cold was blasted away by a torrent of heat. Her heart pounded so hard she found it difficult to breathe and her legs suddenly felt as limp as noodles.
This was why she had made “the mistake,” she thought dimly. Her palms slid up over Damon’s chest; her fingers convulsively gripped the lapels of his coat, as a familiar, guilty pleasure flooded her. Damon’s hands settled at her waist, molding her more firmly against him and she found herself responding with an automatic, mindless pleasure, lifting up on her toes as she pressed into the kiss, clutching at his shoulders as if she couldn’t get enough of him.
It was moth-to-the-flame stuff,