“Emmy.”
She jumped, spinning around, one hand plastered over her suddenly pounding heart. Nick was standing a bit behind and to one side of her, just out of her peripheral vision before she’d turned around. The sight of him didn’t do a lot to calm her down, the upheaval just affected different parts of her. “How long have you been there?” she asked when she could manage to string words together and make them sound normal.
He shrugged, smile polite, eyes distant. “Couple of minutes.”
No wonder the death glares she’d been getting from the employees were worse than usual.
“Penny for your thoughts,” he said.
She turned and set the pad on top of the pallet. Bad idea.
Nick came over to stand beside her. He wasn’t touching her, or looking at her, or smiling, but the parts of her that hadn’t gone all soft and melty were tensed so tightly she was on the verge of a head-to-toe charley horse. Not that she was complaining, because the tense parts of her were keeping the other parts from jumping him.
His comment about kissing her when she least expected it was getting to her. Not only was she expecting it constantly, she was on the verge of kissing him so she could get it over with before she went completely insane. Okay, that wasn’t the only reason she wanted to kiss him. The more she thought about it…
And that was exactly what he wanted. Her thinking about it, wondering, giving in to the inevitable. He had no idea just how stubborn she could be.
She blinked a couple of times to get her eyes to focus, unlocked her jaw and opened the file. “R-raw materials,” she stuttered out, her body slower to get with the program.
Nick moved closer, still not touching her. But she could tell he was amused. And smug.
It was that last reaction that put the steel into her backbone. “I’ll need a list of your raw materials, where they come from, how they’re ordered, how much at a time and how they’re delivered.” She made the mistake of looking up at him. Eye contact had always been big with Emmy, but she forgot that eye contact with Nick was dangerous to her self-control.
Nick wasn’t immune, either. “Emmy…” he said, leaning in, voice low, all his employees stopping what they were doing to gawk like commuters at a traffic accident.
“You’ll need to increase sales,” Emmy continued, writing down Increase Sales next to 1 on her pad. “Either spend more time yourself or hire someone to focus exclusively on selling.”
“Can’t afford that,” Nick said, frowning but not moving off.
Emmy cut her eyes to their audience, and Nick got the idea. More importantly, he took a step back.
“If you don’t want to increase your payroll, you could send out a mailing,” Emmy said. “Or you could do it yourself. Face-to-face is best anyway, and you’re so personable and persuasive, all you have to do is waltz in with that face and that smile—”
Nick grinned wider with each compliment.
“—and you shouldn’t have any trouble increasing your sales,” Emmy finished. “Especially if you’re selling to a woman.”
The grin only got wider. “Is that jealousy I’m hearing?”
Emmy caught herself on the verge of denial, and shrugged instead. “If it increases your sales, do whatever you’re comfortable with.”
“So if I wanted to flirt with them?”
She looked him straight in the eye, and so what if she didn’t like the thought of him flirting with other women. “No harm in that.”
“What if I take them out to lunch?”
“Lots of people do business lunches.”
“And dinner?” He eased toward her, crowding her back between the pallet of boxes she’d been leaning against and another about two feet away.
She held her ground—okay, there was a wall behind her, but refusing to back off was more of a statement that she could resist his charm. So what if he’d come so close she was practically nose-to-chin with him, and she caught herself thinking about how easy it would be to raise up onto her toes, lay her mouth on his and put herself out of her misery? She looked around but the place was devoid of workers, break-time being more attractive than spying on the boss and his loathsome efficiency expert.
“And business dinners,” she said, telling herself to get a grip. “And sporting events, and concerts, although those are kind of expensive undertakings with your current budget constraints.”
“What if we had dinner at my house?”
Her gaze shot to his, but she was seeing him in candlelight, with another woman. Mere feet from his bedroom. “Do you always have trouble drawing a line between business and personal?”
“I was trying to get a rise out of you,” he said.
“I know.” And she’d been trying to deflate him. They’d both been successful. She was still struggling with resentments toward strange and completely innocent women, and for once Nick looked something other than laid-back and foolishly happy with life. He looked angry.
Emmy started forward. He stepped in front of her, trapping her in the narrow aisle. She couldn’t go around him, and she couldn’t get by him. She wanted to keep right on going until she ended up against that nice, firm chest she remembered—or at least her palms remembered, judging by the way they were tingling. And the tingle was spreading so fast she was in danger of becoming one big mess of quivering nerve endings.
There’s a remedy for that, a little voice whispered, a little voice she wouldn’t shush because she was a realist. She wanted him to kiss her, there was no getting around it. But you didn’t always get what you wanted, and even if you did, what you wanted wasn’t always good for you. She’d learned that a long time ago. Apparently, what she hadn’t learned was how to hide her feelings.
“You want me to kiss you,” Nick said.
“No. Absolutely not. No way.”
“All week you’ve been waiting for me to try to kiss you, but I haven’t and you’re disappointed.”
“I am not disappointed,” she said with absolute conviction because what she was was ticked off. Maybe when she got past that she’d have room for disappointment, but at the moment she was riding high on outrage and pure unadulterated lust. Who did he think he was anyway, getting her all stirred up and then not coming through? “I don’t want you to kiss me.”
“But you want me to try.”
She huffed out a breath and crossed her arms. Yeah, absolutely she wanted him to try. But that was only ego. And libido. And she certainly wasn’t telling him that.
“You don’t want me to try?”
Emmy stayed mum, but the reason she didn’t have an answer was because Nick sounded so…hurt. And she felt guilty. Even though she hadn’t exactly welcomed his attentions, outright rejection just seemed cruel.
“Nick—” Emmy began.
This time Stella saved her from saying something she’d regret, which was probably the last thing Stella would have wanted to do. Emmy caught movement out of the corner of her eye, and when she turned around there Stella was, standing by the shipping counter where Emmy had left her briefcase.
“Can I help you?” Emmy asked her.
Stella’s hands shot to her hips, and her eyes narrowed. Clearly she wasn’t happy, and she wasn’t talking to Emmy. “You have a phone call, Mr. Porter,” she said to Nick.
“Take a message.”
Stella downgraded her expression to sour-pickle. Emmy considered throwing herself into Nick’s arms just to see how cranky Stella could get,