Why was he here? It took everything to act casually as the din of chatting people died off when they entered the banquet room.
“Good afternoon,” Demitri greeted the crowd in French. “I’m stealing lunch. And Natalie. Fifteen minutes,” he added when she turned a startled look on him. “In my office. We’ll talk while we eat.”
Unable to protest in front of their audience, she waited until they’d gone up a floor with their filled plates to the accounting offices above the conference level, passing a few curious pairs of eyes along the way.
The administration offices devoted to the siblings’ workspace had a small executive lounge as its hub. Demitri walked her through it, then tagged his card on a reader before holding open the door with his name on it.
“What are you doing?” she asked as his office door clicked shut behind them. He was completely undermining the composure she’d worked so hard to put in place all morning.
He set his plate on the edge of his desk. She rattled hers onto the small circular table in the corner, but didn’t pull out a chair. A surge of defensiveness accosted her, making her keep her distance and stay ready on her feet.
“I don’t know,” he grumbled, pushing his hands into his pockets as he confronted her with a hard stare. “I never sneak around. This is new territory for me.”
What was that supposed to mean? She had reconciled herself to their thing being one night and him never talking to her again. His call last night had shocked her to her toes. This was even more baffling.
She had the sensation that her shoulders were up around her ears, locked with tension, but she couldn’t make herself relax. Her heart was pounding, her body flushed hot and cold, her ears filled with a rushing sound... All of her was reacting to him in conflicting signals of excitement and danger while her brain hammered with the knowledge that last night shouldn’t have happened. It had been self-delusional on an emotional level and just plain unprofessional.
“I don’t...” She had to clear her throat, completely out of her depth here. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
He frowned. “Do you want it in French? I’m saying that I’ve never tried to hide the fact that I’m seeing a woman, and I don’t like it. Don’t expect me to be good at it.”
“We’re seeing each other?” Her ears rang with a repetition of the phrase, trying to make sense of it.
“Having an affair, then. Whatever you want to call it.” He shrugged his big shoulders, the movement jerky and dismissive.
“Is that what you call it? I mean, do you even do that? See women more than once?”
“Not often,” he allowed, not flinching from her bewildered stare, utterly unfazed at being called a philanderer. “But you said you wanted an affair while you were here, and last night was good.” His eyes narrowed a fraction. “Very good. Wasn’t it?”
Her heart seemed to break through the thin skin of her throat, pounding in a state of painful vulnerability under his challenge. His statement was nothing so insecure as a request for confirmation. He knew damned well he’d rocked her world, and given the intensity of his gaze, he was one feminine sigh of surrender from doing it again.
“Is there any chance you’ll quit your job so we can do this in the open?” he asked gruffly.
“I... What? Ha!” The sound escaped her in a burst of disbelief as her consciousness landed firmly back on the hard floor.
She looked around, taking in weird details of his office that she couldn’t have known if she was dreaming, like a slanted drafting table with a big scratch pad splashed with various streaks of color, a whiteboard scrawled with uneven boxes and illegible labels, a wall strung with threads, magazine clippings pinned along them. The shelves held dozens of odd items from water bottles to smartphone cases to beach balls, all wearing the Makricosta logo.
“Have I got this right? Are you seriously asking me to make a permanent change to my life for something temporary? That’s not a demand for commitment,” she rushed to add, holding up a forestalling hand. “I’m just saying, do you hear yourself?”
She almost added, I’m a mom, but it really didn’t fit with the way she’d behaved last night and only made her more self-conscious with what was happening now. Especially because there was a small part of her that thought, in another life... She would never, ever wish away her daughter, but a wistful desire to see what might have been had underpinned all her very sound reasons for taking this assignment in France.
And here was the answer. This was what she could be: an independent woman who was carefree enough to take up a man’s exceedingly frivolous offer of... What was he even suggesting?
“How would that even work?” she quizzed with bemusement. “I’d quit my job and you’d set me up somewhere, pay my bills?”
He barely moved, just offered a cool nod of assent. “You’d travel with me if I required it.”
“Oh, my God.” She’d been joking. Ridiculing the suggestion.
A gush of icy cheapness went through her as she absorbed the full impact of the scenario. This was what happened when you thought the grass was greener on the neighbor’s lawn. Turned out it was actually an overflow of the septic tank.
She headed for the door.
Before she could turn the knob, his hand was over the crack, his body looming next to hers in a radiation of heat and crackling male energy.
“Why does that offend you? I want to see you again and not on the sly. Whatever the obstacles are, I want to remove them.”
She glared over her shoulder, trying to hang on to her insulted indignation, but he was so obviously uncomfortable it gave her pause. Her senses took a hit of his male energy at the same time, flooding her with memories of how yummy it had felt to be stroked and possessed and drawn into shared climax. Her breathing changed and so did his.
“Why?” she demanded. There were thousands of other women out there. He should know. He’d bedded most of them. Was he running out? Was that what motivated him to chase her?
“You know why. We didn’t even make it to the bed, for God’s sake.”
Do not think he’s calling you exceptional, Natalie. She had never been at the top of any kind of list, not even Most Reliable. She was straight-up, middle-of-the-road, work-hard-for-second-place stock.
But he was staring at her mouth like a kid at the penny-candy window, making her lips tingle and her insides twist in anticipation. She shook her head in disbelief, but he took it as refusal.
“Damn it, Natalie!” He shoved back from the door, crossing the room in a few steps, then swinging around to confront her. “Why the hell not?”
The feminist in her said, I don’t have to have a reason, but she was so astonished by his reaction she could only speak the truth.
“Demitri, I don’t do this. Forgive me for being lousy at this, but I don’t go home with men. I thought...” She winced inwardly, not wanting to sound as though she was okay with a one-night stand. It made her sound as cheap as he was treating her. “I had this vision of getting away and being someone different, maybe having a fling since I haven’t...” No. She would not admit it had been years. “Being away from home allowed me to behave in a way I wouldn’t normally, but I can’t continue doing it,” she asserted. “Last night was just...”
What? An opportunity? An experiment? A much-needed climb back into the saddle of a horse she’d learned the hard way was expensive and ornery?
“It was a fantasy,” she said, repeating what she’d told him last night. “One that shouldn’t have played out, but I did it, and now I’m awake and it’s time to be sensible.”
* * *
Funny, Demitri thought. He’d spent the night coming to the realization that, for once, something real was happening to him. Being with her hadn’t been an escape. It had been somewhere he wanted to go. That worried the hell out of him, but it had also pushed him to find her this morning and negotiate how they could continue seeing one another. And now he was remembering why women with standards were a pain in the butt.
“What’s wrong with continuing the fantasy?” he demanded.
“You own the company I work for,” she reminded.
A wash of relief went through him as he quickly dismissed that as an obstacle. “We’ve covered that. You work for my brother. And if you want to keep your job, fine. We’ll work around it,” he said, reluctant but resigned to that inconvenience. At least with that concern out of the way, he could give in to the pull between them and saunter into her space, brushing past her anxious “Demitri—” with a firm promise of “I’ll show you a fantasy fling you won’t forget.”
“Don’t.” She pressed herself into the door, avoiding his touch. “Please don’t touch me. I have to face people when I leave here and—”
“You don’t want to go back there obviously aroused?” he challenged, needing to hear it. To see it in the helpless flush and disconcerted cast of her gaze around the room before she brought it back to his, eyes deeply shadowed with painful desire.