Tess leant forward, and of their own accord his eyes strayed to the cleavage she revealed as she reached for the paper.
With a sigh of pure frustration Matt rubbed his eyes and half swivelled his chair, so that he was facing the vast windows of the library, framed with their heavy velvet curtains. It was a safer sight than the one his rebellious eyes had been absorbing.
‘This is too much, Mr Strickland. I couldn’t possibly accept.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Annoyed with himself for his uncustomary lapse of self-control, Matt made his voice sharper than intended. He reluctantly turned to look at her. ‘It’s perfectly reasonable. You’re being asked to do a hugely important job, and for that money…well, consider yourself on a learning curve as far as overtime goes. There’s just one more thing. You’ll have to dress the part.’ He flushed darkly at the confusion on her face. ‘Looser clothing. It’s more practical in this heat. Particularly if you intend on doing…er…outdoor activities.’
‘But I don’t have any loose clothing.’
‘Then you’ll have to buy some. It’s not an insurmountable problem, Tess. You will have access to an account for all expenses to do with the job. Make use of it.’ He stood up, back in control of his wayward body, and waited as she scrambled to her feet, gathering her satchel which she slung over her shoulder.
‘Now it’s time for you to meet my daughter. She’s upstairs in her bedroom. I’ll show you to the kitchen. You can familiarise yourself with it. Make yourself a cup of coffee. I’ll bring her down.’
Tess nodded. After her gruelling interview, from which she was still reeling, the prospect of meeting Samantha wasn’t as daunting as she would have expected. What could be more full-on than her father had been?
The apartment, sprawling in all directions, occupied the entire top two floors of the building. Matt showed her into a kitchen which was as stunningly modern as the rest of the apartment was shamelessly and opulently old. Granite surfaces positively gleamed, and were completely bare of any of the normal clutter associated with day-to-day life. Tess foresaw problems should she attempt to do any cooking with her charge. She would be terrified of ruining the show home look.
‘Make yourself at home,’ he insisted, while she continued to look around her with the lost expression of someone suddenly transported to foreign territory.
For a few seconds Matt watched her with rare amusement. ‘It doesn’t bite,’ he said, and Tess flushed. ‘There’s tea and coffee in one of the cupboards, and in the fridge…’ he indicated something sleek that was camouflaged to look like the rest of the kitchen ‘…there should be milk. My housekeepers make sure that the kitchen is stocked, especially now that Samantha’s around. If you’re lucky, you might even locate some biscuits somewhere.’
‘You mean you don’t know where things are in your own kitchen?’
Matt grinned, and Tess had a disconcerting window into what this man would look like shorn of his arrogance. Not just beautiful, but dangerously, horribly sexy.
She lowered her eyes as a new, prickly feeling undermined her still shaky composure.
‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ He was still grinning and moving towards the door. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Maybe you could work that one into the next speech you give me about my shortcomings.’
Tess smiled weakly back, but somewhere in a part of her she hardly recognised warning bells were beginning to ring—although what that meant she had no idea.
CHAPTER TWO
‘WELL? Well? What did you think? Have you got the job?’
Claire was waiting for her. Tess had barely had time to insert her key into the front door and there she was, pulling open the door, her face alight with curiosity.
What did she think of Matt Strickland? Tess tried her best to sum up a guy who represented everything she so studiously avoided. Too rich, too arrogant, too stuffy. When her mind strayed to the peculiar way he had made her feel, she reined it back in.
‘Can you believe he didn’t want me showing up in tight clothing?’
‘He’s your boss. He can dictate your wardrobe. Do you think we’re allowed to show up to work in ripped jeans?’ Claire pointed out reasonably. ‘Move on. Impressions of the apartment?’
‘Barely had time to notice.’ Tess sighed. ‘I’ve never had such a long interview. I could tell you all about his office, but that’s about it. Oh—and the kitchen. I did notice that his apartment is the size of a ship, though, and I’m not sure about his taste in art. There were lots of paintings of landscapes and random strangers.’
‘That would be his family,’ Claire surmised thoughtfully. ‘Classy.’
‘Really? You think?’
‘And finally impressions of the daughter?’
No one had known that he even had a daughter, so private was Matt Strickland, and so far he hadn’t brought her into the office once!
Tess wondered what there was to tell—considering she hadn’t actually met the child. She had waited in the kitchen for what had seemed an unreasonable length of time, and Matt had finally returned in a foul temper and informed her that Samantha had locked herself in her bedroom and was refusing to leave it.
Tess had sipped her tea, distractedly helped herself to her fifth biscuit, absentmindedly gazed at her feet, which had been propped up on a kitchen chair in front of her and pondered the fact that, however powerful, self-assured and downright arrogant Matt Strickland was, there was still at least one person on the face of the earth who was willing to ignore him completely.
‘You shouldn’t have locks on the doors,’ she had informed him thoughtfully. ‘We were never allowed to when we were growing up. Mum was always petrified that there would be a fire and she would have no way of getting in.’
He had looked at her as though she had been speaking another language, and only later had she realised that he would have had no real experience of all the small details involved in raising a child.
‘So, Monday looks as though it’s going to be fun,’ she finally concluded now. ‘Samantha doesn’t want to know, plus I have to be there by seven-thirty. You know how hopeless I am at waking up early…’
Which earned her a look of such filthy warning from Claire that she decided to back off from further complaints on the subject. Of course she would do her very best to wake at the crack of dawn. She would set her alarm, and she would set her phone—but she knew that she might easily sleep through both. What if she did?
She still remembered all the choice words he had used to describe her, and her fact was still worrying at the problem when, the following evening, she answered the landline to hear Matt’s dark, smooth voice at the other end of the phone.
Immediately Tess was hurled back to his apartment and that first sight of him, lounging against the doorframe, looking at her.
‘You’ve probably got the wrong sister,’ Tess said as soon as he had identified himself—as though there had been any chance of her not recognising that voice of his.
