Business had been painfully slow recently—people generally didn’t think too much about social-media marketing campaigns when they were struggling to pay their bills—and she needed to make an impact with this commission. She’d promised the co-operative at least fifty thousand unique visitors in their first three months, which meant putting together a blog package with the wow factor.... And achieving that when the majority of your subject matter was organically grown potatoes was no mean feat.
Once she’d finished the preliminary designs, she began to rough in some of the copy they’d sent her for the launch. And pretended not to notice the insistent punch of her heartbeat every time she glanced at the clock—and another minute had crawled by.
* * *
Carter leapt up the steps to the loft apartment two at a time. He had exactly an hour till check-in closed on his flight to Savannah. With a major board meeting scheduled for five this afternoon in Georgia he couldn’t miss his plane. So what the hell was he doing getting his cab driver to detour to Brooklyn?
He guessed he was about to find out as he reached the second floor landing and pressed the door buzzer marked Carrington Web Designs.
If she was out, that would be all the answer he needed. He’d left it up to her to call and she hadn’t—but he figured she owed him an explanation. She’d approached him, she’d made the first contact, and then she’d blown his mind in that damn hotel suite, leaving him tense and edgy and unfocused for the rest of his trip when he should have been concentrating on business.
He’d drifted off during more than one important negotiation in the last week—eventually making the trip a wash with the Chinese clients he’d been pursuing for months, who now thought he was the next best thing to a narcoleptic.
He could have happily lived the rest of his life never having stirred up this hornet’s nest again. But she’d insisted on stirring it up, and then figured she could just unstir it again at her own convenience. Well, to hell with that.
He thumped on the security door, drew back his fist to thump again, when the door swung open. And the muscles in his gut cinched into a tight knot.
It was eleven ten on a Friday morning but she looked as if she’d just rolled out of bed. Her hair fell around her shoulders in big, fluffy, unkempt waves that made him want to plunge his fingers in and ruffle it up some more. Her clear, pale skin glowed, scrubbed clean without the benefit of the carefully applied make-up she usually wore, while the loose robe gave him a painful glimpse of a lacy camisole barely covering firm breasts.
‘Carter, what the...? You’re supposed to be in Savannah!’
She tightened the tie on her robe, and her breasts plumped up, threatening to spill out of the lace altogether. The knot in his gut sank lower, loosening muscles that had been too tight for days.
He dragged his gaze away from her cleavage—and suddenly knew the answer.
This wasn’t over, not till he said so. Not this time. But from now on he was playing the game on his terms. Not hers. And that meant getting the upper hand right from the get-go.
‘I’m on my way to La Guardia now, but I’ve got a proposition for you that I wanted to deliver in person.’
‘What proposition?’
He stroked a finger down her cheek, enjoying the way her lips parted and a sob of breath came out.
She was no more immune than he was to this thing. And it was a thing, however you wanted to call it.
‘I want you to come to Savannah for a couple of weeks.’
She blinked, the movement slow and tremulous, as if she were trying to process the invitation. ‘I can’t do that, Carter. We’re not kids any more and I don’t think...’
He pressed his finger to her lips, silencing the protest. ‘Now don’t go getting your panties in a twist again—that’s not the kind of proposition I’m talking about.’
‘Oh?’
He felt the surge of satisfaction at the catch of disappointment in her voice and the pucker of confusion on her brow.
You’re not the only one who can play hard ball, sugar.
‘As great as it was on Friday night, this is a business proposition.’ Mostly.
‘What kind of business proposition?’
The pucker got more pronounced, but he could see the spark of interest lurking behind the caution.
‘I’ve been giving it some thought.’ At least ten seconds anyway. ‘And I’d like to commission you to work on a social-media campaign for the mill. We’re expanding into a number of new markets and we need to up our profile—social media is a way to do that without breaking the bank.’
‘That’s... Really?’
‘Yeah, really, at the moment we only have a website—which we’ll need you to redesign—but we’re also looking to build a more comprehensive strategy across all the appropriate social-media platforms.’