tonight.’ Oh, prosaic words, but his gaze held a different story. ‘Perhaps a casserole, so it can cook while we work.’ He made his suggestion without meeting her gaze. ‘There’s a pre-set function on the oven.’
Broad shoulders and slender hips receded from her view while Soph stood there, silent. She told herself to wake up, stop watching, to resist the lure of an interest that couldn’t be allowed to grow.
Already she liked him, was intrigued by him, felt more towards him than she should. That had to stop.
Grey buried himself in work for the rest of the afternoon. He seemed intent on maintaining distance. Those two things were good, Soph decided as she clacked away on the computer keyboard and assured herself that that earlier aberration of feeling was now firmly in the past.
While Grey scattered his emails about the universe, Soph worked her tail off on his tapes.
‘I need to check on the casserole now.’ She took a deep breath and suggested he sit on the veranda in the sunshine. ‘It won’t last much longer, and Vitamin D is good for you. Or is it Vitamin E? Whichever is right, just give it ten minutes. That’s all I’ll need, and I’ll bet it makes you feel good.’
He muttered under his breath as he hobbled out there, taking his dictation recorder with him, but he went. Soph managed the food issues in seven minutes and spent the other three with a lonely and disgruntled Alfie.
‘Taking a “smoko” break?’ Grey asked from the kitchen when she rushed back inside. She almost jumped out of her skin.
‘I’m certainly not. I don’t do that. That is, my sisters would have flayed me if I’d ever decided to try it, and once I grew up I didn’t want to anyway.’ She snapped her jaws shut before any more babble could escape.
‘I just took a breath of fresh air.’ Soph sidled inside. He couldn’t have seen Alfie’s cage, even if he had looked all the way through and out the laundry room door. She moved to step past him and return to the office. ‘You don’t smell cigarette smoke on me, do you?’
What a dumb question. Did she want him to grab her and sniff her hair, her clothing? Not to mention that would be far too close for comfort—witness the problems she’d had after lunch when she’d helped him do ankle stretches.
‘You smell like flowers,’ he pronounced and turned his back and started towards the office once more. ‘I don’t need to get close again to know that.’
Well, certainly not, and no doubt he didn’t want to get close, either. She was simply the hired help, and short-term help at that.
So not in his league, Sophia.
He wasn’t in hers, either.
Nope. Grey Barlow was not ordinary, not a safe bet.
Yet he had noticed the subtle scent she wore. Soph had only dabbed the tiniest bit behind each ear and on her wrists before she’d left home this morning.
So what? She had simply leaned too close to him on the sofa. He couldn’t help but smell her perfume, and probably didn’t even like it.
‘The casserole is doing nicely.’ She needed to get back to matters at hand. ‘It’s a curry, since you enjoy spicy food. I’ll serve rice pilaf with it.’ As though he would even care, but the silence yawned and Soph talked on. ‘You…you smell quite nice, yourself.’
That stopped her, even if it was a little late. With a sharp breath she bustled past him and subsided into her office chair. From then on she focused her attention on her work!
She did, however, draw the line at six o’clock. With a determined air she shut down her computer and tidied the remaining work on her desk. Then she faced her employer and waited until he gave up on whatever he was typing one-handed and lifted his head reluctantly to look at her.
‘It’s after six o’clock. You must have worked since at least seven this morning to churn out so many tapes before I got here. That’s an eleven hour day and far more than you should take on.
‘Would you like your bath before or after dinner, and would you like me to shut down your computer for you while you make your way to the living room and start your next set of physio exercises?’ She asked it all in one stream of words and then waited, arms crossed in front of her.
‘There’s still work for me to do before I finish for the day.’ He gestured towards the computer screen.
‘I think your company can probably survive without your input until tomorrow morning.’ Most of the employees would have gone home by now, wouldn’t they? ‘Unless you work your people in around-the-clock shifts, none of this is going anywhere at this hour, anyway.’
‘Be that as it may…’ he started.
‘I’ll just help you with this.’ Soph leaned across, saved his email into his drafts folder, clicked out of the program and shut his computer off.
He made a half startled, half disbelieving sound and pushed his chair back. It had the unfortunate result that his shoulder brushed against the inside of her outstretched arm and across her breast.
Soph froze. He froze. And then they both hurriedly shifted away from each other.
He got to his feet, swung to face her, wincing as he did so, and the movement put pressure on his ankle. He cradled his arm against his body.
Irritated green sparks shot at her from his eyes.
‘Don’t bother to say anything.’ She held up her hand. ‘You left me no other choice.’
Had the man heard of backing off a little, rather than needing to be right in the thick of everything that happened in his working world? Yes, he appeared to have a project in trouble, but what about all the reports that things were going perfectly well in other departments? Did he really need to be so hands-on and go into such detail with all of that?
Soph poked a finger into the air in front of him. ‘Your ankle is causing you pain. For the last two hours you’ve favoured your arm. I suspect it should be in a sling, but would you answer me when I asked about either of those things earlier? No. I got the death glare while you continued to speak into Bear Growling.’
‘Bear Growling?’ He stepped closer until they were almost nose to nose.
The intensity in his gaze made her catch her breath. ‘I…uh…it’s how I think of your voice program.’
Because he had a gorgeous growly voice that she would like to listen to, snuggled at his side…
No. She wanted no such thing.
Irritation crept through his tone even now. ‘It’s not my fault the voice program doesn’t work properly. I trained it at the start, exactly as instructed.’
‘Yes, but did you snarl at the time, because if you didn’t, it wouldn’t recognise snarl-speak now, would it?’ Soph said absently, still caught in the thought of having him growl just for her. When she realised what she had said and glanced at his face, she almost laughed at the look of surprise there.
‘You—’ he took her upper arm into his free hand as he stared with aggravation and something else
