‘It’s just a shame about the machinery,’ she added, pulling awkwardly at the toner cartridge, and muttering under her breath as it stuck firmly in place.
‘Can I help?’ asked Rafe, bending down to peer into the machine.
‘Not unless you’d like to go out and buy a new photocopier,’ said Miranda as crisply as she could, but it was hard with him so close beside her. The room was airless enough to begin with, and with six feet of male looming over her she was feeling distinctly short of oxygen.
‘Is it broken?’
‘I can’t get the toner cartridge out.’
‘I like to make sure my staff have the equipment they need to do their jobs properly,’ said Rafe, ‘and I don’t want you to think I’m mean, but purchasing an entirely new machine when we just need to replace a cartridge does seem a touch extravagant.’
Miranda sucked in her breath, irritated anew by the undercurrent of laughter in his voice. ‘I wasn’t being serious,’ she snapped. Cautiously, she reached back into the innards of the copier. ‘If I could just…’ She grunted with effort, grimacing as her fingers felt for the catch once more. ‘Oh, come on, stop being so difficult!’
Rafe observed her with amusement as she sat back on her heels with a sigh of frustration. ‘Do you always talk to photocopiers?’
‘I’ve got this theory they’re like horses,’ Miranda told him. ‘When you’re a temp, you spend a lot of time wrestling with photocopiers. They’re always skittish at first, and they play up the moment they sense you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to get to know them every time, and let them know who’s boss.’
‘You mean you’re a sort of office equipment whisperer?’
‘Not a very effective one at the moment.’
Miranda sighed and gave up on the catch, but as she pulled her hand out, she caught her finger again. Same metal, same finger. ‘Ow!’ she said, shaking it. ‘Maybe I am serious about you buying a new one!’ she added to Rafe. ‘I could take a hammer to this one first, and then you’d have to replace it.’
‘Let me have a go.’
Rafe hitched up the trousers of his perfect Italian suit and crouched down beside her.
At close quarters, he was overwhelmingly male. Miranda scuttled crab-wise away from him as far as she could go, but there was very little room to manoeuvre between the table and the photocopier, and in the end she scrambled to her feet instead. At least that way she could breathe.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘You’re too well dressed,’ she told him bluntly, trying to ignore the way every cell in her body still seemed to be humming with awareness of the leashed power beneath the suave exterior. ‘Changing the toner cartridge can be a very messy business.’
‘So can letting temps loose with hammers,’ he said, glancing up at her with a grin that infuriatingly made Miranda’s heart skip a beat.
Scowling at herself, she watched as Rafe put his hand into the copier, grasped the cartridge, and jerked it sharply forwards so that it shot out of its slot at last.
‘There you go,’ he said. He unclipped the used cartridge and lifted it out.
‘Thank you,’ said Miranda reluctantly.
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Rafe. ‘I don’t often get the chance to make myself useful!’
She eyed him uncertainly, unsure if he was joking or not. On the whole, she thought not. He certainly didn’t have the air of a man used to menial tasks, and why would he? Few people could have led such a pampered and privileged life as Rafe Knighton.
‘Careful!’ she warned as he straightened with the cartridge still in his hand. Bitter experience had taught her that used toner had a tendency to leak badly, and Rafe wouldn’t be nearly so pleased with himself if he ended up with the fine black powder all over that immaculate suit. He looked the fastidious type, and she didn’t have time to deal with an executive’s wardrobe emergency this morning.
But it appeared that Rafe was more competent than he seemed. He set the cartridge down without so much as a particle of powder escaping. ‘I’m not as careless as I look,’ he told her, almost as if reading her mind, and then he smiled at her expression.
Miranda wished he would stop doing that. Her heart knocked into her ribs again, and, desperate to put a few more inches between them, she found herself backing into the table until it dug into the back of her thighs. She was grateful to him for fixing the copier, of course, but now he should just go away.
Close up, Rafe was less handsome than he seemed from a distance and in the glossy magazine photographs, she realised. It should have been reassuring, but the unevenness of his features and the faint prickle of stubble gave him a rough edge that paradoxically made the dark, glinting eyes and the mobile mouth more attractive rather than less, and all at once she was suffocatingly aware of him, of the clean, expensive smell of him, of the faint quiver of laughter she could sense vibrating beneath the suave exterior, of his massive, solid warmth so close to her.
Swallowing, Miranda turned away to busy herself inserting the new toner cartridge. Once it had clicked into place, she wiped around the copier to remove any spilt ink and closed the front of the machine with a snap.
‘Now, get on with it!’ she told it, relieving her feelings with a jab at the start button.
Obediently, the copier whirred into action.
‘That’s what I like to see,’ said Rafe, who had been watching her with amusement. ‘A firm hand! There’s no mistaking who’s boss around here, is there?’
‘Very funny,’ said Miranda mirthlessly, her eyes on the copies that were emerging from the machine. After all the hassle the copier had given her this morning, it was hard to believe that it was actually doing what it was supposed to do.
She couldn’t believe Rafe had actually joked about who was in charge. He seemed to have no sense of his own importance. He was unlike any boss she’d ever encountered before. He definitely wasn’t the kind of boss she had been in those last disastrous months at Fairchild’s.
In her experience, bosses maintained their distance from the staff, either because they were too busy, or because they were concerned about their own status. They certainly didn’t drift around the way Rafe Knighton evidently did. Miranda couldn’t think of any other boss she had known who would hang around in the copying room, winding up the new temp or attempting to fix a photocopier themselves. Didn’t he have anything better to do?
That unnerving awareness of him as a powerful male was fading, and she could dismiss him once more as little more than a clothes horse for expensive suits, an empty-headed celebrity wandering around his own company because he didn’t know what to do with himself.
‘Were you looking for anyone in particular?’ she asked repressively.
‘I was hoping to have a word with Simon,’ said Rafe, recalled to a sense of his original purpose. ‘Is he around?’
‘He’s out, I’m afraid. He’ll be back this afternoon. He’s got a meeting at two.’ Miranda nodded at the papers stacking up in the copier tray. ‘That’s what all this copying is for.’
‘I’ll catch him later, then,’ said Rafe easily.
‘Shall I ask him to call you when he gets back?’
‘You could do,’ he said, ‘or I’ll wander down again a bit later. I only took over a month or so ago, and I’m still trying to get to know everybody,’ he explained, seeing that Miranda was looking unim¬ pressed