‘Yes—coming.’ Ruthlessly morphing back into strait-laced assistant mode, Catherine grabbed her compact out of her bag to check her face. She wanted so badly to at least fix her hair. Well, she would just have to be extra buttoned-up tomorrow, so Max would think today’s unprofessional appearance was a figment of his imagination. And she would not make the mistake of coming into the office minus her camouflage gear ever again.
‘How long are you going to keep me waiting?’
Max’s bark brought her thoughts to an abrupt halt.
‘Just one minute,’ Catherine said soothingly as she turned off the printer as a shortcut to stopping the job—a feat she accomplished with such suddenness a page jammed.
She cleared the paper tray, swearing under her breath with a fluency that was very unlike Ms North Prudish Secretary—but she was stressed, dammit! She looked like this, Max was waiting, she was wasting precious moments unjamming the printer, and she had yet to save the changes she’d made to her manuscript and get it onto the flash drive and off the screen.
At last the sheet pulled free.
‘Catherine!’
‘Two seconds.’
She spun towards the computer, but before she could lower a finger towards the keyboard she heard the unmistakable sound of Max cursing as he pushed back his chair.
He was always so impatient!
Reacting on instinct, she simply hit the off switch, trusting the computer to do a back-up save. Then she pulled out the flash drive and thrust it to the back of her top drawer, snatched up her notepad, grabbed a pencil and hurried towards Max’s office—managing to run straight into him.
Catherine was too shocked at the sudden contact even to recoil as Max’s hands shot out to steady her.
It was the first time Max had touched her—and the fact that it was purely accidental did nothing to stop the heat that sizzled through her body in a fierce surge.
For one moment Max froze. Then his hands dropped. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I told you I was on my way in,’ she said, staring at his chest so he wouldn’t see how rattled she was. ‘You didn’t have to come barrelling out like a rodeo rider on a bull.’
‘You were taking too long.’
‘You’re too impatient,’ she said.
Pause. And then, ‘What’s so interesting about my shirt?’
Catherine sucked in a breath, thinking fast. ‘Actually, it’s your tie,’ she said.
‘Is there something wrong with my tie?’
She managed a sorry-but-you-did-ask look up. ‘Yes. It’s mauve. Isn’t mauve a bit poncy?’
He hooted out a laugh, and Catherine’s breath became all jammed up because she wanted to laugh, too, whenever he did.
‘Ouch! Weight-lifting tonight, then, to get my macho back.’
Another laugh. Delighted.
Catherine’s fingers went for the top button of her shirt—her first line of defence in reminding herself of exactly who she was in this office. But, encountering skin above fine wool instead, her fingers hovered there ineffectually.
‘No button today,’ Max observed. His eyes followed her hand as it fluttered up to her earlobe, searching for her second line of defence. ‘And no little gold hoops. What are you going to do now?’
Well, what she was not going to do was get into a discussion about the way she looked! ‘Work, I assume, Mr Rutherford,’ she said.
‘Max,’ he said.
Catherine blinked at him. ‘I know what your first name is.’
‘Then use it, dammit.’
Catherine’s resistance to calling her boss by his first name had become quite a bone of contention. It just felt too...too personal. And she didn’t like personal in the office. Personal could move into unsafe territory if you weren’t on your guard. And she was already teetering on the edge with Passion Flower.
But she decided not to antagonise him with another ‘Mr Rutherford’ for the rest of the day.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Max.’
He looked shocked for a moment—but then he nodded, satisfied. Too satisfied.
‘But please don’t swear at me,’ she added, very saintly, and almost gave herself away by giggling as his satisfaction gave way to bemusement.
‘But I didn’t sw—’ He broke off, and slowly his bone-melting lopsided smile appeared. ‘Oh, the “dammit”.’ He laughed. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re really as twinset-and-pearls as you’d have me believe, Cathy.’
‘Twinset and pearls?’
‘Prim and proper.’
A strangled sound escaped Catherine, and Max looked at her sharply.
She quickly schooled her features into an appropriately offended expression. ‘I do own a twinset and pearls, actually,’ she said, with the hint of a sniff. Of course nobody who’d seen her fire-engine-red cashmere twinset had ever described it as anything other than ‘hot’. And the pearls were exotic black pearls, interspersed with eye-popping turquoise.
They’d been given to her on her twenty-first birthday, five years before, by her hang-gliding, motorbike-riding brother, Luke, and had cost half the impressive advance he’d received for his second crime novel. To describe those pearls as anything other than dazzling would be ludicrous.
Max dipped his head in that way he had when he wanted to look her in the eye. And look he did—as though trying to dive into her brain through her pupils.
‘I wonder why that’s so amusing to you?’ he asked softly. ‘And what you’re not telling me?’
Any desire Catherine had to giggle was gone. Sucked out of her by the arrested tone of Max’s voice. His utter stillness. That look... So intense...
As though he knew...
No, he couldn’t know.
Not about her. And not about the book. She’d been so careful to look like, act like, be the quintessential strait-laced wallflower. She’d even changed her perfume from dark musk to lemon-scented, to reinforce the impression that she was tart and astringent and not to be touched. And the book was nowhere to be seen. Safely secret.
So if Max thought he was going to dig below her carefully constructed surface with a keen look and a so-soft question he had another think coming.
‘Shall we get started?’ she asked briskly.
But Max’s eyes had dropped, all the way to her feet, and Catherine almost groaned. She’d stuck her nail through her last pair of black tights putting them on in a rush this morning, and—of course—hadn’t wanted to take the time to stop and buy more on her way to work. So her legs were bare, and she’d gone all ‘what the hell?’ and was wearing open-toed shoes, with her red toenails on display.
‘Huh,’ he said, as if he was saying it to himself.
Catherine fought off a blush. ‘Well? Shall we? Get started?’
Max shoved a hand through his already dishevelled hair. His hair was regularly subjected to an unceremonious scrabbling of his hands through it. When he was thinking hard. Or coming up with a brilliant idea. Or exasperated. Or bored. Or... Well, anything.
‘Yes, if you can hurry the hell up,’ he said, and went striding back into his office.
For the next hour Max talked. About the company’s diamond-themed African development, new hotel and shopping complex in Canada and eco-resort in Brazil. Catherine knew how Max worked—his rhythms, his