A Beauty Uncovered

He didn’t respond, but a moment later, the silver drawer shot out. Sam rose slowly from her chair and walked over. There was a lone bottle of ibuprofen in it. That wasn’t quite going to cut it. Apparently Mr. Eden was not afflicted with migraines. But his answer was clear. No, she couldn’t go home. She took the pills out and swallowed a couple. It was better than nothing. Maybe if she caught it before it was full-blown, she could keep it from getting too bad.

“I ordered Italian delivery for lunch,” he said as though they hadn’t had the previous discussion and the issue was resolved. “They should be in the lobby in about fifteen minutes.”

It took everything she had not to reply, “And?” He didn’t care that she didn’t feel well. He didn’t even bother to ask her to go get it for him, much less say “please” or “thank you.” It was just implied. He never asked her if she wanted to order, either. If she felt better, she might want to smother her irritation with a layer of mozzarella cheese, but she was never given the option.

Sam couldn’t quite figure out if he was some kind of genius who was thoughtless of others or if he just didn’t consider her worthy of his attention.

“Put it through the drawer when it arrives,” he added as though there were another option. He wasn’t going to let her bring it to him, so in the drawer it had to go.

Without responding, Sam reached for her purse, pulled out a couple dollars and picked up the laundry bag he’d left by her desk that morning. If she wasn’t going home, she might as well carry on as best she could. While she was downstairs, she’d drop off his dry cleaning and grab a turkey wrap from the deli next door. Maybe some caffeine would help. If she left now, she’d have enough time to run over and get back before the deliveryman arrived.

Her timing was perfect. As she strolled back into the lobby, she saw the delivery guy at the desk with a sack of food. Sam grabbed it from him and headed through the ridiculous layers of security to get back to her desk. She set both sacks on the desk and then walked over to the minibar where Agnes stored supplies to get a cup for her drink. She was about halfway there when she heard his growling voice over the intercom.

“Uh...my lunch, Miss Davis?”

“One damn second,” she said as she snatched a cup and slammed the cabinet door. She hadn’t spoken through the speakerphone, but unless the walls of his office were made of soundproof material, he certainly heard her. She didn’t care. Her head hurt, she was cranky and she’d reached her personal breaking point. There was no reason for him to be this rude.

Back at her desk, she clutched the paper sack with his food in her fist, ready to sling it in the drawer. Then she stopped. This whole thing had gotten old, quickly. He wasn’t concerned about her headache, so she wasn’t going to be concerned about his empty stomach. If he wanted food on his own timetable, maybe he should come get it. She brought it upstairs. He could come the last ten feet.

Sam slid the sack to the edge of her desk and looked up at the camera with an expectant arch of her brow. A moment later the metal drawer slid out to her. Nope, she thought.

She unplugged the cord from her phone, switched off her monitor and slipped out of her black Michael Kors cardigan. Walking to the closest camera, she whipped the sweater over her head, covering the lens. The other camera couldn’t see her desk from its angle, so she returned to her seat and pulled her lunch out of the bag.

She needed this job, but he also needed her. If he wanted his lunch, he was going to come out and get it. If he wanted her to do something, he was going to ask nicely. Sam wasn’t working here to be abused. If he didn’t like it, he could fire her, but she was pretty certain he wouldn’t.

He had no one to interview a replacement.

Five minutes passed. She could hear instant messages chiming on her computer, but with the monitor off she couldn’t see them. Another five minutes.

Then she heard it. The click of a lock and the turning of a doorknob. She’d roused the beast from its den. She was getting what she wanted.

And suddenly, she was nervous. She tried to go through everything in her mind that Agnes had told her. Scarred...don’t react...ignore it... She braced herself for his appearance and her non-response.

The door flung open, and her stomach tightened into a knot. She expected him to charge angrily at her, but instead, she only saw his profile as he walked over to the surveillance camera and tugged down her sweater.

It must be the other side of him that was damaged because what she could see was...nice. Really nice. He was tall and strongly built, which was surprising for a computer geek. His expertly tailored navy suit stretched across wide shoulders. He had dark brown, almost black hair that was short but a little shaggy and curling at the collar. And his strong jawline, high cheekbones and sharp nose gave him quite a regal and aristocratic air.

He was actually quite an attractive man. He almost had a movie star quality about him. Sam preferred her men tall, dark and handsome, and he seemed to fit the bill. She didn’t understand what he was...

Then he turned to face her. Sam struggled to hold a neutral expression as he walked to her, but it was hard. The whole left side of his face was horribly scarred. The skin was puckered and twisted from his temple to his jaw and down his neck. It extended back to his ear, warping the cartilage and pushing his hairline back about an inch from where it was on the other side of his face. His eye, nose and mouth were unscathed, but as he reached out to hand her back her sweater, she saw why.

His left hand was scarred, as well. You could almost see the outline on his face where he had reached up to protect himself from something. She didn’t know what, but it must have been horrible.

She swallowed hard and accepted her sweater, refusing to break eye contact. That part was easier because he had the most amazing blue eyes. They were dark blue like the most expensive sapphires, and they glittered just as brightly, fringed by thick black lashes. Sam could easily lose herself in those eyes and forget about everything else.

Only the loud click of the phone cord being plugged back in pulled her away. She looked down in time to see him snatch up his lunch. He paused for a moment, narrowing his eyes at her with a mix of irritation and confusion.

Unsure of what else to do, Sam smiled widely. She knew she was probably in trouble, but she’d used her brilliant smile on more than one occasion to smooth over her mistakes.

He didn’t smile back. Instead, he turned and stomped back into his office without speaking. He slammed his office door so forcefully that Sam leaped in her seat.

And then...silence.

She kept waiting for a scolding from the speakerphone. An email telling her to pack up her things. Certainly she was due for a tongue-lashing via instant messaging at the very least. But it was silent in the office.

Maybe she did know how to handle him. Agnes certainly wasn’t the kind of woman to take orders barked at her. Perhaps he needed to know what his boundaries were with her. His boundaries were abundantly clear and she’d respect them. For now.

Finally she was able to relax and eat her own lunch. Or at least she tried. A few bites into her wrap, the headache and nausea from earlier had faded, but something else seemed to be gnawing at her.

Her mind kept straying back to those beautiful, deep blue eyes.

Given the stern warning from Agnes about his face, Sam had expected him to be...ruined, somehow. But he wasn’t. Yes, he was scarred terribly. It made her sick to her stomach to think of what he must’ve gone through to have scars like that. But that was only a part of him. The other side of his face was strikingly handsome. He was tall and muscular. She could easily imagine running her hands down the hard muscles of his arms and pressing her body against the wall of his chest.

And those eyes...

The tingle of anxiety from earlier had now become a tingle of another variety. Sam twitched uneasily in her seat and took a deep breath to wish away her misplaced desire.

“Enough of that,” she said aloud. “We are not doing this again.” Picking up her wrap, she took another bite and tried to force her mind onto her lunch and off of her boss.

If the fiasco of her last job taught her nothing else, it was that work relationships were bad. Relationships with your boss were catastrophic. Especially when they were married and conveniently left that fact out of every conversation they’d ever had.

Sam was naive when she had let herself fall for her boss, Luke. She’d let her guard down for the handsome, charming liar. But she’d learned a hard lesson she wasn’t about to repeat. Given the circumstances of this job, she never thought it would be a problem. Brody was a grumpy, scarred recluse. Not exactly sexual fantasy material. But now she had seen him and things had changed. Which was frustratingly pointless. Agnes said Brody wasn’t married, but he was as off-limits as any other employer.

Disgusted, Sam flopped her lunch back onto its wrapper. She needed to start focusing on work and maybe she’d forget about the whiff of his cologne and the full curve of his lips. Or not.

Maybe she should’ve just let him stay in his office.

* * *

Brody shouldn’t have gone out there. He knew it, and yet he did it anyway.

Now he sat at his desk, silently brooding. He hadn’t been able to touch his container of baked spaghetti for the past hour. It was his favorite, but he’d lost his appetite the minute he came face-to-face with Samantha Davis.

The surveillance cameras hadn’t done her justice. She was absolutely breathtaking in person. She had a glow of confidence—a radiance—that didn’t translate through the lens. Neither did her scent. Her sweater had left the smell of her floral perfume on his hands. When he got closer to her, he also picked up a hint of what he assumed was her cherry lip gloss. It had made her full pink lips shiny and alluring.

Brody was suddenly very warm. He kept his office cool to offset the heat produced by all his computer equipment, but it wasn’t enough. He leaned forward and shrugged out of his suit coat, tossing it aside. It barely helped.

He wanted to kiss her and taste those lips more than he had wanted to kiss another woman in his life. His body had quickly reacted to being so close to her. His pulse raced, his groin tightened and his grasp of the English language vanished. It was an instantaneous reaction. One that forced him back into his office before he made a fool of himself.

Samantha would never kiss him. At least not because she thought he was attractive and wanted to kiss him. On the one occasion in the past where a woman had appeared interested, it was his bank account, not his body that drew her in. Once she got what she came for, she was gone.

Truthfully, Brody had enough money for women to overlook the scars. He’d known women to put up with worse for access to the black American Express card. Every billionaire in Forbes magazine had some busty blonde twenty years younger than him clinging affectionately to his arm in photographs. It didn’t matter how old or ugly or unpleasant the men were because they were rich. But that’s not what Brody wanted.

He wanted more than arm candy or a trophy wife. He wanted more out of a relationship than what he could buy. He might get sex in a dark room. He might get companionship in exchange for expensive gifts. But Brody would never have love and he knew it. It only took one time getting burned to learn that lesson.

But Samantha gave him hope. She hadn’t reacted the way he expected her to. There was the initial draw of air into her lungs, but there the reaction stopped. Or changed, he should say. Instead of her gaze running over his scars, it had found its focus in his eyes. There had been a softness there, a comfortable warmth in her dark brown eyes. And then...she had smiled.

No disgust. No pity. No irritation. If he didn’t know better, he might think it was actually attraction. He’d seen the same look in a girl’s eyes as she admired one of his brothers in high school. Or the way his foster mother, Molly, looked at Ken. But it had never been directed at him.