Neely slowly, firmly shook her head no. “We’re not just friends.” She lifted her eyes and met Sebastian’s knowing look. “He’s my father.”
“YOUR father?” Seb stared at her, poleaxed. His heart hammered, his body clamored, and he didn’t believe a word of it. “He is not.”
“He is. Max is my dad.” Robson insisted, her chin jutting as if she was daring him to take a poke at it.
Seb was sorely tempted, especially after he dragged in a desperate breath and looked at that chin more closely, spying something familiar in the shape of it as he did so.
God Almighty, was she really Max’s daughter? Was that the female version of Max’s chin he was seeing? He stared at her, stunned, still disbelieving.
Robson glared right back, eyes flashing. And the longer and harder he stared the more Seb realized that the color of her eyes was the same stormy blue of the man he’d just accused her of sleeping with.
Oh, hell.
The boss’s daughter. And he had just kissed her senseless.
Worse, it wasn’t only Neely Robson who’d been senseless with desire. He’d been right there with her—wanting her.
And now…now he wanted to kill her.
Ordinarily Seb went to ice when his emotions were frayed. He was all steely coldness when he needed to be. But his emotions were beyond frayed at the moment. And he went beyond ice and straight into meltdown.
“What the hell were you playing at?” he demanded.
“Me?” She arched her eyebrows in a way that annoyed him. As if she had nothing to reproach herself with.
“Never mind.” He cut her off before she could speak. “I know damn well what you were doing! You were baiting me, trying to get me to make a complete ass of myself!”
“You did that all by yourself,” she informed him airily. “And I did not bait you.”
“The hell you didn’t! ‘Max is very attractive…for his age’!” He flung her words back at her in a mocking tone. “That’s not baiting?”
“I was agreeing with what you said. You’re the one who called him a ‘stud’ first. You’re the one who accused me of having an affair with him! You’ve been accusing me practically since the day you met me!”
“And you’ve been acting like he was your long-lost lover!”
“Or my long-lost father.”
She said the words quietly, but Seb was too incensed to care. “You didn’t have to lead me on. You could have said, ‘He’s my father,’ anytime at all.”
“I could have,” Neely agreed. “But why should I?”
“Because it’s the truth!” he shouted.
At the fury of his explosion, Harm put back his head and howled.
“Now see what you’ve done!” Neely dropped to the floor and wrapped her arms around the dog, shushing him. He stopped howling and happily licked her chin.
“I didn’t do anything,” Seb said gruffly. “He was just yelling at you, too.”
“Was not.” Neely’s voice was muffled against the dog’s fur. She hugged him tightly.
Seb scowled down at her, still infuriated. “Stop hiding behind that dog.”
At the accusation her head jerked up, and she threw him a daggerlike glare. But when Seb just stood there staring at her implacably, she scrambled to her feet, threw her shoulders back. “I am not hiding behind anything—not my dog, nor my father. And I did tell you—just now.”
“Thanks a lot,” he said sarcastically. “Thoughtful of you. Got any more…revelations, Robson?” He arched a brow at her. “Is your mother the Queen of England maybe?”
“Who’s baiting whom now? And my mother is exactly who I said she was.”
“A hippie who just happened to have a fling with the most uptight workaholic in the western hemisphere?”
“She had a relationship with Max. They lived together.”
Seb’s eyes widened in surprise.
“They did,” Neely insisted. “They were young,” she said. “And in love.”
“Sure they were.”
“See?” Robson pretended to pout. Aiming those moist, luscious lips at him. “There you go again, making judgments, jumping to conclusions! That’s exactly why I didn’t say I was Max’s daughter in the first place. If I had, you would automatically have assumed that he’d given me the job because he’s my father.”
“And he didn’t?” Seb asked sceptically.
“No, he didn’t. He didn’t give me my job at all. He’s not even the one who hired me. Gloria Westerman in personnel hired me.”
“You never met with Max?”
She folded her arms across her chest now and leaned back against the bar between the kitchen area and the living room. “I never met with Max.”
“But you knew he was your father.” It wasn’t a question.
Robson nodded. “Yes, I knew. But he didn’t know who I was at all. I hadn’t seen him in years. We moved to California when I was four.”
“And you never saw him again?”
“Not until November when I came to work. And then I didn’t want him to know who I was. I use my stepfather’s last name. Max didn’t know it. I wanted to make it on my own before I told him.”
Seb rubbed a hand against the taut cords at the back of his neck. He was still ticked by her having gulled him with her pretense, but he could appreciate the reason she had given for not telling Max or anyone else who she was. If he was honest, he knew that in her shoes, he’d have been tempted to do the same.
“You’re not telling me he still doesn’t know, are you?” Because there was no way on earth he’d believe that.
“No, of course not. After I won the Balthus Grant and he invited me to work on the Wortman project with him, I knew I had to. If we were going to be working together, I wanted him to know. Besides by then I’d won the grant, so I knew and he knew—and so did everyone else—that I could do the job. See?”
Seb grunted. He rocked back on his heels, muttering under his breath. Yeah, he saw. It made sense, what she’d said. But it still annoyed him.
“You could have told me.”
“Like
