twinset-and-pearls as you’d have me believe, Cathy.’
‘Twinset and pearls?’
‘Prim and proper.’
A strangled sound escaped Catherine, and Max looked at her sharply.
She quickly schooled her features into an appropriately offended expression. ‘I do own a twinset and pearls, actually,’ she said, with the hint of a sniff. Of course nobody who’d seen her fire-engine-red cashmere twinset had ever described it as anything other than ‘hot’. And the pearls were exotic black pearls, interspersed with eye-popping turquoise.
They’d been given to her on her twenty-first birthday, five years before, by her hang-gliding, motorbike-riding brother, Luke, and had cost half the impressive advance he’d received for his second crime novel. To describe those pearls as anything other than dazzling would be ludicrous.
Max dipped his head in that way he had when he wanted to look her in the eye. And look he did—as though trying to dive into her brain through her pupils.
‘I wonder why that’s so amusing to you?’ he asked softly. ‘And what you’re not telling me?’
Any desire Catherine had to giggle was gone. Sucked out of her by the arrested tone of Max’s voice. His utter stillness. That look... So intense...
As though he knew...
No, he couldn’t know.
Not about her. And not about the book. She’d been so careful to look like, act like, be the quintessential strait-laced wallflower. She’d even changed her perfume from dark musk to lemon-scented, to reinforce the impression that she was tart and astringent and not to be touched. And the book was nowhere to be seen. Safely secret.
So if Max thought he was going to dig below her carefully constructed surface with a keen look and a so-soft question he had another think coming.
‘Shall we get started?’ she asked briskly.
But Max’s eyes had dropped, all the way to her feet, and Catherine almost groaned. She’d stuck her nail through her last pair of black tights putting them on in a rush this morning, and—of course—hadn’t wanted to take the time to stop and buy more on her way to work. So her legs were bare, and she’d gone all ‘what the hell?’ and was wearing open-toed shoes, with her red toenails on display.
‘Huh,’ he said, as if he was saying it to himself.
Catherine fought off a blush. ‘Well? Shall we? Get started?’
Max shoved a hand through his already dishevelled hair. His hair was regularly subjected to an unceremonious scrabbling of his hands through it. When he was thinking hard. Or coming up with a brilliant idea. Or exasperated. Or bored. Or... Well, anything.
‘Yes, if you can hurry the hell up,’ he said, and went striding back into his office.
For the next hour Max talked. About the company’s diamond-themed African development, new hotel and shopping complex in Canada and eco-resort in Brazil. Catherine knew how Max worked—his rhythms, his style, his expectations—and could second-guess him as she made notes about actions he wanted put in place, meetings to be arranged, documents to chase up. She took a little old-fashioned dictation for some correspondence, but Max always expected her to finesse his letters using her own words, so she didn’t get too strict with the transcribing, even though she was pretending to get every single syllable verbatim—because that way she could keep her eyes very deliberately on her notepad, and off her boss.
Which was not easy. Because Max was drop-dead gorgeous.
Just under the too-tall threshold, with the promise of athlete-grade strength under his immaculate suits; black hair on the long side, and always, always bed-head tousled; vivid blue eyes fringed with thick, black lashes; that lopsided grin that would turn a female ice sculpture into a puddle.
The whole package—the looks, the sense of humour, the ace brain, and that elusive factor X that made him seem unattainable without any apparent aloofness—was droolworthy.
There was a good side and a bad side to having a hot-as-Hades boss.
The good side? Max had women throwing themselves at him with a frequency and ardour that was embarrassing. He didn’t have to grope or flash or proposition an unwilling employee to get his sexual thrills. And what a blissful realisation that had been after the hell of her last boss—the despicable RJ Harrow.
But the bad side—and it was very, very bad!—was that a month into the job Catherine had started wondering what Max would do if she groped or flashed or propositioned him! And she just could not get her head around how she could think like that. The last thing Catherine needed was another boss-related fracas, ending in her ignominious departure from a job she was good at.
Not that Max would ever give her the chance to grope or flash or proposition him. Because he might be the flirt of the century—as the whole office knew!—but Catherine North wasn’t his type. Tall, leggy, blonde—dared she say horsey?—that was his type.
She swallowed a giggle as she pictured the shock on Max’s face if starchy-knickered Ms North were to roll a prurient eye in his direction. They’d need a defibrillator! Or maybe she could give him mouth-to-mouth...
‘Something funny, Cathy? Because you’re allowed to laugh here, you know.’
She looked up. ‘Nothing’s funny.’
He did that through-the-pupils stare, then leaned back in his chair and loosened his tie with three sharp tugs. ‘Onto the problem child—Kurrangii, our luxury resort in Queensland.’
He nudged the report he’d taken from her in-tray earlier and smiled at her—and Catherine’s heart started knocking into her ribs again as she hastily dropped her eyes and started taking notes.
‘Our’ luxury resort. And it did feel as if it was theirs—his and hers—because they’d worked so closely on it together.
That night two weeks ago, when they’d stayed late to finish preparing the main report, Max had loosened his tie with those exact three tugs. Her memory of that night was so clear. Just the two of them, bouncing ideas back and forth, writing and rewriting. They’d ordered in Thai food and worked while they ate. It had struck midnight, but they’d worked on. Neither of them had been happy with the end result, so they’d decided to call it a night and do it all over again the next day—into the night if required.
But Max hadn’t turned up the next day. Or the next, or the next, or... Well, he hadn’t shown up until today. And in the interim the only contact they’d had was via email or through his deputy, Damian.
It had driven Catherine a little bit crazy.
She’d figured she had two options for dealing with the situation: she could gnash her teeth at her own stupidity for mooning over her boss, of all people—and, moreover, one who liked tall, skinny, amenable blondes, not short, curvy, argumentative brunettes—or she could take affirmative action to get her out-of-control hormones back in their cage before he returned.
In the end she’d gone hybrid and started writing Passion Flower. A teeth-gnashing way of exploring her secret fascination with Max and hopefully getting it out of her system before she did something really insane—like
