had to turn her head and look. His dynamic personality suffused his London headquarters like an energy bolt while his mercurial moods kept his employees on edge and eager to please. Valtinos Enterprises felt dead and flat when he was abroad.
When one of Angel’s personal assistants left and the position was offered internally, Merry applied, keen to climb the ladder. Angel summoned her to his office to study her with frowning dark golden eyes. ‘Why is a candidate with your skills working on Reception?’ he demanded impatiently.
‘It was the first job I was offered,’ Merry admitted, brushing her damp palms down over her skirt. ‘I was planning to move on.’
Rising to his feet, making her uneasily aware of his height, he extended a slim file. ‘Find somewhere quiet to work. You’re off Reception for the morning. Check out this business and provide me with an accurate assessment of its financial history and current performance. If you do it well, I’ll interview you this afternoon.’
That afternoon, he settled the file back on the desk and surveyed her, his wide, sensual mouth compressing. ‘You did very well but you’re a little too cautious in your forecasts. I enjoy risk,’ he imparted, watching with amusement as she frowned in surprise at that admission. ‘You’ve got the job. I hope you can take the heat. Not everyone can.’
‘If you shout at me, I’ll probably shout back,’ Merry warned him warily.
And an appreciative grin slashed his shapely lips, making him so powerfully attractive that for a split second she simply stared, unable to look away. ‘You may just work out very well.’
So began the most exciting phase of Merry’s working life. Merry was the most junior member of Angel’s personal staff but the one he always entrusted with figures. Sybil was thrilled by the promotion her niece had won but would have been horrified by the long hours Merry worked and the amount of responsibility she carried.
‘The boss has got the hots for you,’ one of her male co-workers told her with amusement when she had been two months in the job. ‘Obviously you have something all those long tall blondes he parades through here don’t, because he’s always watching you.’
‘I haven’t noticed anything,’ she said firmly, reluctant to let that kind of comment go unchallenged.
But even as she spoke she knew she was very carefully impersonal and unobtrusive in Angel’s vicinity because she was conscious of him in a way she had not been conscious of a man before. If she was foolish enough to risk a head-on collision with his spectacular liquid honey eyes, her tummy somersaulted, her mouth dried and she couldn’t catch her breath. Feeling like that mortified her. She knew it was attraction and she didn’t like it, not only because he was her boss, but also because it made her feel out of control.
And then fate took a hand when Merry firmly believed that neither of them would ever have made any sort of a move. A highly contagious flu virus had decimated the staff and as his employees fell by the wayside Merry found herself increasingly exposed to working alone with Angel. At the office late one evening, he offered her a drink and a ride home. She said no thanks to the drink, deeming it unwise, and yes to the ride because it would get her home faster.
In the lift on the way down to the underground car park, Angel studied her with smouldering dark golden eyes. She felt dizzy and hot, as if her clothes were shrink-wrapped to her skin, preventing her from normal breathing. He lifted a long-fingered brown hand and traced his fingertips along the full curve of her lower lip in a caress that left her trembling, and then, as though some invisible line of restraint had snapped inside him, he crushed her back against the mirrored wall and kissed her, hungrily, feverishly, wildly with the kind of passion she was defenceless against.
‘Come home with me,’ he urged in a raw undertone as she struggled to pull herself back together while the lift doors stood open beside them.
Her flushed face froze. ‘Absolutely not. We made a mistake. Let’s forget about it.’
‘That’s not always possible,’ Angel breathed thickly. ‘I’ve been trying to forget about the way you make me feel for weeks.’
Disconcerted by that blunt admission as he stepped out of the lift, Merry muttered dismissively, ‘That’s just sex. Ignore it.’
Angel stared back at her in wonderment. ‘Ignore it?’
As the lift doors began to close with her still inside it, he reached in and held them open. ‘Come on.’
‘I’ll get the Tube as usual.’
‘Don’t be childish,’ Angel ground out. ‘I am fully in control.’
Merry wasn’t convinced, remembering that mad, exciting grab and the slam of her body back against the lift wall, but that instant of hesitation was her undoing because without hesitation Angel closed a hand over hers and pulled her out of the lift. ‘I’ll drop you home.’
‘There are boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed,’ she told him with precision on the way to his car.
‘Don’t preach at me,’ Angel sliced back in a driven undertone. ‘I don’t have a history of making moves on my staff. You are a one-off.’
‘And it won’t happen again now that we’re both on our guard so let’s forget about it,’ Merry counselled, sliding breathlessly into a long silver low-slung bullet of a vehicle that she suspected was worth many times more than her annual salary. ‘I prevented you from making a mistake.’
‘You’re preaching again,’ Angel derided. ‘If I hadn’t stopped kissing you we’d still be in the lift!’
‘No. I would’ve pushed you away,’ she insisted with cool assurance.
She gave him her address, although he didn’t seem to need it, and the journey through heavy traffic was silent, tense and unnerving. He pulled up at the kerb outside the ugly building where she lived. ‘You could afford to live in a better area than this,’ he censured.
‘I have a healthy savings account,’ she told him with pride, releasing her seat belt at the same time as he reached for her again.
His wide sensual mouth crushed hers with burning hunger and no small amount of frustration. Her whole body leapt as though he had punched a button detonating something deep down inside her, releasing a hot surge of tingling awareness in her pelvis that made her hips squirm and her nipples pinch painfully tight.
Angel lifted his tousled dark head. ‘I’m still waiting on you pushing me away. You’re all talk and no action,’ he condemned.
‘I don’t think you’d appreciate a slap,’ Merry framed frigidly, her face burning with mortification.
‘If it meant that you ditched the icy control I’d be begging for it,’ Angel husked suggestively, soft and low, the growl of his accent shaking her up.
Merry launched out of his sports car as though jet-propelled, uncharacteristically flustered and shaken that she had failed to live up to her own very high principles on acceptable behaviour. She should’ve pushed him away, slapped him, thumped him if necessary to drive her message home. Nothing less would cool his heels. He was a highly competitive, aggressive male, who viewed defeat as an ongoing challenge.
His car stayed at the kerb until she stalked into the building and only then did she breathe again, filling her compressed
