And the kiss, her mental memory box reminded her. Don’t forget the kiss!
No, God help her, she couldn’t forget the kiss. Try as she would she’d never been able to forget entirely the moment she and Christo Savas had locked lips. It had been the most blazingly hot kiss of her then twenty-two years. The most blazingly hot anything of her entire life—even up to this very moment.
It had been the impulse that had spurred on her unutterably foolish action that night three years ago.
Action she was not about to repeat no matter what Christo Savas thought. And it was no secret, Natalie knew, staring at him now, what he thought.
“All right,” she said abruptly. “Go ahead and put in the bookshelves.”
He was kneeling on the floor, about to measure. But he slanted her a quick glance, and in it she saw the instant wariness she expected.
She gave him a saccharine smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay completely out of your way. Won’t bother you at all. Won’t invite you to my bed and won’t turn up in yours. You’re perfectly safe.” She made her tone sound mocking.
But they both knew she wasn’t mocking him. She was mocking herself, the hopelessly naive girl who had taken a summer’s working relationship, a sense of kindredness that was, in retrospect, obviously one-sided, and a single spontaneous kiss to celebrate a triumph in the courtroom as an indication of something far deeper. A girl who had thought he must love her the way she imagined she loved him—and who had actually gone to his bed to prove it.
She made herself smile and hold his unblinking jade-green gaze, willing him to believe it because, God knew, it was the truth. There was no way on earth she would ever make a fool of herself like that again!
“If you’re sure…” Christo began.
“Of course I’m sure.” She gathered her laptop case and the suitcase up into her arms, fleetingly aware that she was probably using them as armor, even as she carried them into the room. “I was just…surprised to see you. In here,” she qualified because she didn’t want him thinking she’d been intending to avoid him—even if she had been.
She set the laptop case on her mother’s dining-room table. “I’ll just put this away.” She nodded down at the suitcase, then turned toward the bedroom. “And I’ll come back and help you measure.”
“I don’t need any help,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Which meant that, even though she’d pretty much spelled it out, he still didn’t entirely trust her not to fling herself at him even now.
“Fine. Suit yourself.” Natalie shrugged and carried the suitcase into the bedroom, only sagging down onto the bed and letting out a shuddering breath once she got there.
She could, of course, just leave the suitcase on the bed and deal with the contents later. But rushing back into a room where she clearly wasn’t wanted—and didn’t want to be—was not the best idea.
And there was a whole lot to recommend staying right where she was. She could use the time to put her clothes away—and regain her equilibrium in the process.
She hadn’t wanted to run into Christo at all. She’d done her best to avoid him for the past three years because she still writhed in mortification every time she thought about that night in his apartment.
That night she’d waited for him in his bed.
Even now her cheeks burned at the memory.
That he’d been shocked to find her there when he got home from a business dinner that night went without saying. She’d expected that.
But she’d also expected he’d be pleased. Delighted, in fact. And happy to join her.
Wrong. A hundred thousand times wrong. And if the circumstances had been mortifying, it was how badly she’d misread the situation that she still had trouble facing. She wasn’t used to being a fool.
Well, he needn’t worry, she thought as she got up and began taking her clothes out of the suitcase, hanging them in the closet, trying not to hear every sound he made as he moved in the living room.
She certainly wouldn’t be jumping into his bed again.
But it would be a whole lot easier if her earlier humiliation and subsequent hard-won maturity were complemented now by total indifference to the man in the other room.
Sadly, they weren’t.
Something about Christo Savas still had the ability to make her heart quicken in her chest. His thick dark hair perhaps? His chiseled jaw and sculpted cheekbones? His sharp straight nose and fathomless green eyes? His rangy but muscular body that looked as appealing today in faded jeans and a gray T-shirt as it had in tropical-weight wool suits, starched long-sleeved shirts and ties?
All of the above?
Unfortunately, yes.
But it was even more than that. Always had been.
If Christo’s arresting good looks had first attracted Natalie’s attention the summer she’d been a clerk in the firm where her father was a partner, it had very quickly become more than his hard body and handsome face that held her interest.
His quiet intensity, determined hard work and steel-trap mind were equally appealing. So were his incisive arguments and his way with words. She’d been dazzled by the young litigator and it hadn’t taken long to become smitten.
She’d been raised on the story of her own parents’ courtship and marriage—He was a young lawyer and I was working in the office. It was love at first sight, Laura used to tell her children. So Natalie hadn’t found it hard to believe in a variation on the same theme for herself and Christo.
Bolstered by her own family history, and aware of a certain electricity in the air every time she and Christo Savas looked at one another, Natalie had seen their relationship as fate.
And she’d done her best to make history repeat itself.
It hadn’t been easy. Christo had been consumed with work, not with the summer clerk in the securities department. They had rarely been in the same room as each other, though she did help out with extensive legal research in a securities case he was trying.
She might never have fallen into the trap of her own illusion if she hadn’t found him in the law library late one afternoon flipping through books, and scowling as he made furious notes and muttered under his breath.
“Something wrong?” she’d ventured.
“Not something,” he’d said grimly. “Everything.”
He’d just been appointed guardian ad litem for a seven-year-old boy named Jonas in the middle of a nasty billion-dollar divorce and custody case. “I don’t know anything about family law! I don’t know anything about kids! I don’t even know where to start.”
That wasn’t true, of course. He knew plenty, and certainly enough to figure out where to start. He was just frustrated, overwhelmed. Momentarily vulnerable.
And Natalie, heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings, had offered, “I could do some research if you’d like. On my own time. It would be good practice,” she added, smiling hopefully at him. And then she’d felt it again, that current of electricity arcing between them, when he met her gaze and nodded slowly.
“Yeah,” he’d said. “If you wouldn’t mind. I’ll tell you what I need.”
For the next three weeks, she had worked her tail off for him. Lunch hours, evenings, weekends. She’d spent every waking moment that she wasn’t being a clerk with her nose in a book or scowling at a computer screen scribbling furiously, then reporting her findings to Christo who was almost always in his office just as late.
“You’re a star,” he’d told her when she found some