hands into the side pockets, and came up with nothing. She had no greater luck with the breast pocket, although her fingers detected a bulge through the fabric. She turned the jacket to the inside and tried the inset pocket. Her heart bounded in her chest. There was no envelope in there. Only a passport.
She slipped it out, then put it straight back in. This would be an unforgivable invasion of the man’s privacy. But then, how concerned was he about respecting hers?
With a bracing breath, she squashed down her scruples and took out the alluring little red book.
Probably it was her imagination, but the covers felt warm to her touch, as if the book vibrated with some vital energy. It was such a temptation. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to examine the photo. Almost at once she gave in, opening straight to the ID page to be faced with Connor O’Brien.
She might have known. Other people took ghastly mugshots, but not him. She stared, riveted, as his face looked out at her, stern and unsmiling, but still with the faint possibility of amusement breaking out on his sardonic mouth. He was thirty-four, according to his birthdate. She flicked to the back pages, and widened her eyes in surprise. Connor was a frequent traveller. And a recent one, going by the last stamp in the book. He’d only just arrived in the country.
She’d heard of workaholics, but this was an extreme case, surely, if he came to work straight off a plane without going home first to shave. Unable to resist one more look at his picture, she flipped back to the identity page. Was it her imagination, or were his eyes piercing her now with that infuriating mockery as if he knew what she was doing and could see right through her?
Her heart suddenly thumping too fast, she snapped the book shut. She held it between her palms, swept by a confused mixture of conflicting instincts about Connor O’Brien. They couldn’t all be true. Was she going insane?
She gave an alarmed start as the sound of approaching voices alerted her that she was about to be caught red-handed, and the passport slipped from her fingers.
She dived to pick it up as bumps and grunts began to issue from the reception office, suggestive of several men hefting some bulky piece of furniture through a narrow aperture.
In her haste to slot the little book into the pocket, she knocked the stationery pile askew, and sent manilla folders sliding across the desk and onto the floor.
She dropped to her knees, and as she scrabbled to gather the files and stack them back on the desk the activity outside ceased. Her heart nearly seized as she caught sight of the briefcase. Quickly she dashed it onto the floor. For a panicked instant she considered hiding in the tea-room, then dismissed the action as cowardly.
She could do this, she thought, her heart slamming into her ribs. She’d just brazen it out. She straightened up and faced the door, steeled for the worst.
There was a brief exchange of conversation outside. She was straining to hear what was being said when the door to the room burst open. At almost the identical moment her horrified gaze fell on the passport, still lying on the corner of the desk.
She snatched it up, whipping it behind her back just as Connor strode in. When he saw her, he stopped short, an initial flare of astonishment in his dark eyes changing nearly at once to cynicism. Almost as if catching her there was no real surprise.
Without a word he stepped past her, seized a pen from the desk, and turned back to the outer room, where he signed something on a clipboard presented to him by one of the delivery men.
With no time to return the passport to his jacket, and nowhere to hide it, she popped it down the front of her shirt, just as Connor turned to stroll slowly and purposefully back into his office.
If he saw her surreptitious movement, he didn’t show it. He shut the door gently behind him, then paused to examine her, his black eyebrows raised.
He looked taller, grimmer and more authoritative when he was annoyed. It was harder to imagine him plunging through the pond.
No. No, it wasn’t.
Her mouth became uncomfortably dry, and she smoothed her skirt with moistening palms.
He didn’t appear to be imagining her in as favourable a light. His speculative gaze swept over her while she waited in an anguish of suspense, realising from the hard glint in his eyes he wasn’t about to let her off lightly.
‘Did you want something?’ His deep voice was polite, with just a tinge of incredulity lapping at its edges.
As if he didn’t know. The sheer duplicity of the man.
She tried to assume a cool, poised demeanour. ‘Oh, look, er, I should apologise. I probably shouldn’t have walked in. I came to—speak to you. The door was open, so I just—’ she made a breezy gesture ‘—wandered in.’ Her voice wobbled a little, but she kept her head high and forced herself to keep meeting his eyes, all the time conscious of her pulse ticking like a time bomb.
His eyes flicked to his desk, over the once rigidly neat pile of stationery, now listing dangerously to one side, and on—to her conscious eyes at least—to the neon-flashing space where she’d rested the briefcase.
In a brilliant move inspired by adrenaline, she did the only possible thing, and sat on the desk in the telltale space, stretching a hand back so she could lean, and once again knocking over the wonky pile.
‘Oh, damn,’ she said, trying to sound careless, ‘that’s the second time I’ve done that.’
Connor O’Brien didn’t look fooled. His acute dark eyes slid over her in sardonic appreciation. She grew uncomfortably conscious of her breasts and legs, accentuated by her posture, and hoped the red passport didn’t blaze through her shirt.
‘What can I help you with, Sophy?’
She smiled, but her sexual sensors, to say nothing of the others, were all madly oscillating on panic alert. Somehow, though, the danger she was in gave her a reckless sort of courage. She hadn’t spent lonely years of her life watching old black-and-white movie reels into the small hours for nothing. She knew how Lana Turner would have played this scene.
‘Ah, so you’ve found out my name,’ she said throatily, crossing her legs.
His glinting gaze flicked to them. ‘I described you to the Security guy. He had no trouble recognising you.’
Something in his voice told her the conversation he’d had with the man had been a loaded one. She could just imagine the sort of things they’d said about her. If his passport hadn’t been burning a hole in her midriff, she might have been incensed. As it was, her major concern for the moment, apart from escaping unscathed, was how she was to return it to its pocket. It was one thing to be suspected of snooping, another to leave behind glaring evidence.
What if he accused her of stealing? He could have her up before the courts. Her boss would be forced to sack her. Perhaps, though, if she owned up and produced the passport at once…
She examined Connor’s face for signs of softening, but his eyebrows were heavy and forbidding, his mouth and jaw stern.
Lana would have known what to do. If ever there was a man who needed beguiling, here was the man. Her skirt had ridden up a little on her thigh, and she discreetly tugged it down.
Connor O’Brien didn’t miss the movement. He
