still wanted a nice ordinary guy—hello? Fine, so maybe Rick did have a degree of niceness. His career outlook made him totally out of bounds for her.
Maybe he’s a total playboy, she thought with a hint of desperation, remembering the Julia lunch date that hadn’t involved lunch. A cad, a womaniser, a toad on a lily pad on a pond full of scum.
You don’t think you’re judging him ever so slightly on Michael Unsworth’s record without getting to know the man first? Without even knowing just who this Julia is to him?
No. She didn’t think that, and she wasn’t grasping at mental straws to keep her hormones under control either. Rick Morgan wasn’t for her. She’d road-tested one corporate man and decided that brand didn’t suit her, and that was all there was to it.
‘Sit here beside me.’ He held the chair for her while the six men in the room glanced their way. ‘You know what to do with the notes.’
She nodded to acknowledge the others’ presence and Rick’s words, and tried not to notice the brush of his hand against her back as he pushed her chair in for her.
The boss simply had nice manners, and so did a lot of accountants and shop assistants.
Butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers.
Marissa jabbed her pencil onto the page and locked her gaze onto its tip. ‘I’m ready.’
To get the meeting over with. To go home for the day and log onto Blinddatebrides.com and read at least ten new profiles, answer any invitations she’d received and be really positive about them. And she had been positive to this point. It wasn’t her fault if no spark of true interest had happened when she’d met any of her dates so far.
Unlike the spark that immediately happened when she’d met Rick Morgan.
Not a helpful thought!
The meeting went beyond long.
‘So we find a way to meet the changes to the fire safety code without compromising on design integrity.’ Rick referred to a skyscraper monstrosity the company was building on the city’s shoreline. ‘We’ll simply present our clients with choices that surpass what they wanted initially.’
He raised several possibilities. While general discussion ensued, Marissa snatched at the momentary respite in note-taking. She should have eaten something more substantial than a salad for her lunch. Instead, she drew one of two bottles of raspberry lemonade from her tote bag and consumed half of it in a series of swallows. She’d planned to take both bottles in her bag home but at least it gave her an energy burst.
The conference moved on. Marissa consumed the rest of the drink, continued her work. Wished she could get up and walk around. Her right foot wanted to go to sleep. Another sign of impending old age?
There is no old age occurring here!
‘It seems to me Phil’s presented you with a workable resolution to the issue with the reservoir, Fred.’ Rick caught the stare of the man at the other end of the oval table.
Marissa vaguely noted that Rick’s beard shadow had really grown in now. Did he shave twice a day? Would he have a mat of dark hair on his chest as well? Her skin tingled in response to the thought.
What was wrong with her? She needed to focus away from the man, not so solidly on him that she noticed almost everything about him and wondered about the rest!
Rick’s face showed no sign of fatigue, though the grooves on either side of his mouth did seem a little deeper.
It wasn’t fair that men just developed character while women fought gravity. Women wrinkled sooner, got older faster. And people had coined entire sayings around the thirtieth birthday. It’s all downhill after thirty …
‘If you don’t want to accept the plans,’ Rick went on, ‘I need to hear a good reason for that. Otherwise, I think we can move onto the next issue.’
Marissa nodded in silent agreement.
Just then Rick glanced her way and their gazes locked before his dropped to her mouth. He stilled and a single swift blast of awareness swept over his face and, very, very briefly, he lost his concentration and stopped speaking.
It was only for a second and probably no one else would have thought anything of it, but in that single moment she had all of his attention—an overwhelming degree of attention, as though he could only focus on her. And, right down to her marrow, she responded with a depth of warmth and interest, curiosity and compulsion that … stunned her.
A moment later his face smoothed of all expression and he carried on with the meeting, and Marissa did her best to pull herself together.
Her lungs chose to function again after all, and she sucked in a deep breath and couldn’t—simply couldn’t—think about the strength of the response he’d drawn from her just then.
A burst of note-taking followed and when it ended she gulped down the second bottle of lemonade and tapped her foot incessantly. It was almost a relief to focus on her exhaustion and discomfort.
‘Anything else?’ Rick sent the words down the length of the table. He wanted the conference over with. It was eight p.m. and his secretary was wilting, her fluffy hair sticking out in odd places and the pink lip-gloss, that made him think of snatching kisses, all but chewed off.
Her shoulders were curved, her left elbow propped on the table while she pushed the pencil across the page with grim determination with her other hand.
He had the oddest desire to protect her from the workload he had inflicted on her—even while he’d noted her pleasure in it. He had the oddest desire for her, period. It had stopped his concentration earlier, had simply shut down all channels until he’d pulled his attention forcibly away from her. No person had had the power to disrupt his thoughts so thoroughly before.
It was more than simply a blast of lust, Morgan. Maybe you should admit that to yourself.
Yet what else could it have been? He didn’t experience any other feelings. Just look at the way he’d run the one and only time he’d linked up with a woman who wanted more from him. More than his father could give, more than Rick knew if he could give. At least he chose to go forward honestly, not let anyone down …
Around the table, people scooped up folders and files.
Rick nodded. ‘Then that’s a wrap. Anything else, get it to me in writing tomorrow.’
The room cleared while Marissa continued to write. In the end, he reached out and stilled her hand by placing his over it. Gently, because for some reason she drew that response from him whether he wanted it to be so or not.
Touching her was a mistake. Her skin was warm, soft, and the urge inside him to caress more of it was unexpectedly potent.
Wouldn’t his youngest sister gloat about this fixation of his? Faith had tried to convince him to fall for the ‘right kind’ of woman for years, to take the leap into emotional oblivion and surrender and believe he’d like it.
What was he thinking, anyway? This was all completely irrelevant. He’d done the not-getting-involved-life-alone mental adjustment
