rolled over then inside him, and shook itself awake. Dangerously awake.
She shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other, reminding him as she did so that she was, in fact, a woman. Not a perfect robot built only to serve his needs as any good assistant should. That she was made of smooth, soft flesh and that her legs were perfectly formed beneath that sleek skirt. That she was not the ice sculpture of his imagination, nor a shadow. And that he’d tasted her heat himself.
He didn’t like that, either. But he let his gaze fall over her anyway, noting as if for the first time that her trim figure boasted lush curves in all the right places, had he only let himself pay closer attention to them. Something about her disheveled hair, the temper in her gaze, the complete lack of her usual calm expression was getting under his skin. His heart began to beat in a rhythm that boded only ill, and made him think of things he knew he shouldn’t. Those sleek legs wrapped around his waist as he held her against a wall in the old city. That mouth of hers hot and wet beneath his. That cool competence of hers he’d depended upon all these years, melting all around him …
Unacceptable. There was a reason he never let himself think of that night, damn it. Damn her.
“Calling you a force of nature rather takes away from your responsibility, doesn’t it?” she asked, as if she didn’t notice or care that he was bearing down on her, though he saw her fingers tighten around the shoe she still clutched in one hand. “You’re not a deadly hurricane or an earthquake, Mr. Vila. You’re an insulated, selfish man with too much money and too few social skills.”
“I believe I preferred you the way you were before,” he observed then, his voice like a blade, though she didn’t flinch.
“Subservient?”
“Quiet.”
Her lips crooked into something much too cold to be a smile. “If you don’t wish to hear my voice or my opinions, you need only let me go,” she reminded him. “You are so good at dismissing people, aren’t you? Didn’t I watch you do it to that poor girl not five minutes ago?”
He took advantage of his superior height and leaned over her, putting his face entirely too close to hers. He could smell the faintest hint of something sweet—soap or perfume, he couldn’t tell. But desire curled through him, kicking up flames. He remembered burying his face in her neck, and the need to do it again, now, howled through him, shocking in its intensity. And he didn’t know if he admired her or wanted to throttle her when she didn’t move so much as an inch. When she showed no regard at all for her own safety. When, instead, she all but bristled in further defiance.
He had the strangest feeling—he wouldn’t call it a premonition—that this woman might very well be the death of him. He shook it off, annoyed at himself and the kind of superstitious silliness he thought he’d left behind in his unhappy childhood.
“Why are you so concerned with the fate of ‘that poor girl’?” he asked, his voice dipping lower the more furious he became. “Do you even know her name?”
“Do you?” she threw back at him, even angling closer in outraged emphasis, as if she was seconds away from poking at him with something more than her words. “I’m sure I drew up the usual nondisclosure agreement whenever and wherever you picked her up—”
“Why do you care how I treat my women, Miss Bennett?” he asked icily. Dangerously. In a tone that should have silenced her for days.
“Why don’t you?” she countered, scowling at him, notably unsilenced.
And suddenly, he understood what was happening. It was all too obvious, and what concerned him was that he hadn’t seen this boiling in her, as it must have done for years. He hadn’t let a single meaningless night, deliberately ignored almost as soon as it had happened, haunt him or affect their working relationship. He’d thought she hadn’t, either.
“Perhaps,” he suggested in a tone that brooked no more of her nonsense, “when I asked you if there was a man and you denied it, you were not being entirely forthcoming, were you?”
For a moment she only stared back at him, blankly. Then she sucked in a breath as shocked, incredulous understanding flooded her gaze—followed by a sudden flare of awareness, hot and unmistakable. She jerked back. But he had already seen it.
“You are joking,” she breathed. She sounded horrified. Appalled. Perhaps a bit too horrified and appalled, come to that. “You actually think … You?”
“Me,” he agreed, all of that simmering fury shifting inside him, rolling over into something else, something he remembered all too well, despite his claims to the contrary. “You would hardly be the first secretary in history to have a bit of a sad crush on her boss, would you?” He inclined his head, feeling magnanimous. “And I will take responsibility for it, of course. I should not have let Cadiz happen. It was my fault. I allowed you to entertain … ideas.”
She seemed to pale before him, and despite himself, despite what he said and what he wanted, all he could think about was that long-ago night, the Spanish air soft around him as they’d walked back to their hotel from the bodega, the world pleasantly blurry and her arm around his waist as if he’d needed help. Support. And then her mouth beneath his, her tongue, her taste, far more intoxicating than the manzanilla he’d drunk in some kind of twisted tribute to the grandfather whose death that same day he’d refused to mourn. He’d kissed her instead. There’d been the wall. The sweet darkness. His hands against her curves, his mouth on her neck … All these years later, he could taste her still.
He’d been lying to himself. This was not just annoyance, anger, that moved in him, making him hard and ready, making his blood race through his veins. This was want.
“I would be more likely to have a ‘crush’ on the Grim Reaper,” she was saying furiously, her words tripping over each other as if she couldn’t say them fast enough. “That sounds infinitely preferable, in fact, scythe and all. And I was your personal assistant, not your secretary—”
“You’re whatever I say you are.” His tone was silken and vicious, as if that could banish the memory, or put it where it belonged. And her and this driving want of her with it. “Something you seem to have forgot completely today, along with your place.”
She sucked in a breath, and he saw it again—that flash of sizzling awareness, of sexual heat. Of memory. That light in her gray eyes that he’d seen once before and had not forgotten at all, much as he’d told himself he’d done. Much as he’d wanted to do.
More lies, he knew now, as his body hummed with the need to taste her. Possess her.
“I haven’t wasted a single second ‘entertaining ideas’ about your drunken boorishness in Cadiz,” she hissed at him, but her voice caught and he knew she was as much a liar as he was. “About one little kiss. Have you? Is that why you blocked me from that promotion? Some kind of jealousy?”
He wasn’t jealous, of course, it was a laughable idea—but he wanted that taste of her and he wanted her quiet, and there was only one way he could think of to achieve both of those things at once. He told himself it was strategy.
His heart pounded. He wanted his hands on her. He wanted.
Strategy, he thought again.
And he didn’t quite believe his own story, but he bent his head anyway, and kissed her.
It
