Turning the Good Girl Bad

‘Lots of men are engineers,’ she said.

Uh-oh, little squeak there.

‘Shall we start eliminating the ones with brown or green eyes? The fair-haired engineers? The short ones? And the engineers who—?’

‘Look, Alex Taylor is a figment of my imagination,’ Catherine said shortly, and walked stiffly past Max to put her bag in the cupboard. She sat in her chair, whipped her hair back, coiled it into as tight a knot as she could and stuck a pencil through it to hold it. Better. ‘Now, are you going to sack me or not?’

‘Huh?’ He stared at her. ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course I’m not going to sack you.’

She closed her eyes, just briefly, to savour the relief of that. ‘Then shall we get back to work? You did say I was going to be busy.’

Max leaned over her desk, arms straight, hands flat on the wood either side of hers, where they were clutching the nearest thing she could find—which happened to be a stapler.

‘He’s me, isn’t he?’ Max asked.

Catherine laughed, as though that were too silly to consider.

But Max apparently wasn’t going to be sidetracked, and she didn’t blame him after that unconvincing titter.

‘Well?’ he prompted.

‘The book is fiction,’ she said. Well, that was actually the truth! ‘The characters are made up.’ Okay—that part was a lie. ‘Now, can we get back to reality?’ And that was the important thing.

Max leaned closer. Catherine could smell his spicy cologne. Vanilla, a touch of sandalwood, a hint of amber. Heaven.

‘Sure we can,’ he said. ‘Fiction is fun, Catherine, but the real world is where it’s at.’

Catherine accidentally stapled her thumb, but didn’t feel it.

The real world... The world RJ Harrow had opened her eyes to. Where bosses tried to get their assistants into bed and if the assistant said no her life became a living hell. Where she got waylaid in corridors and shoved against walls and mauled in hotel rooms and there was nothing she could do about it because apparently it was her own fault for looking the way she did.

The real world sucked—hello, word of the day! That was the whole point of Passion Flower. So there was no confusing reality with fantasy. Because in Passion Flower the assistant could say whatever she damned well wanted: yes, no, maybe, drop dead.

But of course in Passion Flower, bespectacled, hazel-eyed personal assistant Jennifer said a passionate yes to tall, black-haired, blue-eyed Alex the engineer.

And now Max had read all about that passionate yes. Max knew she was Jennifer. Knew he was Alex. Did that mean...? Did Max think Catherine was asking for it? Because of what happened in the book? Because of the way she looked today? Because of that night, two weeks ago, when she’d let her guard down?

Max was doing that through-the-pupils-into-the-brain stare while he waited for her to say something, but she was incapable of speech.

And then he leaned a smidgeon closer. ‘Cathy, there’s one thing. About Alex. He’s not quite—’

‘You’ve completely misunderstood,’ she said, cutting him off.

She calmly removed the staple from her thumb, as though she regularly stapled a body part, and repositioned the stapler back on the desk.

‘Alex Taylor is a...a composite. The black hair comes from a man whose name is Luke. And then there’s my neighbour, Rick, who has the most amazing amber eyes—because, you see, I am in the process of changing Alex’s eyes from blue to amber; it’s a much more unusual colour, you know. And the engineer part is from all the Rutherford Property guys—you, of course, and Damian, and Carl.’

‘Carl?’

‘Yes, Carl—who is brilliant if only you’d look past his shyness. Really brilliant—and kind, and creative. Did you know he paints?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Max snapped. And—thank God—he removed his hands from her desk and straightened. He plucked a ruler off her desk and started flexing it.

There was silence as Max stared at her, flexing the ruler. Flexing, flexing. And then it snapped, and he looked at it as though he had no idea how it had ended up in his hands.

Her with the stapler, him with the ruler. God help the paperclips, the way they were going!

‘Right—composite—got it,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to have to play the boss card, Catherine, and tell you to direct your attention to something worthwhile while I’m in Queensland for the next week. Like the...the filing. I’d like the old files sorted and archived.’

Catherine’s eyes shot to his. She wanted to protest that he’d only just got back after too long away, but she swallowed the words. It wasn’t her job to question the boss about his comings and goings—just to book them. And then do the filing while she imagined him with a horse-faced blonde bimbo in his hotel room.

Long, silent growl.

‘When would you like your flight booked?’ she asked tightly.

‘Tomorrow. First flight to Cairns.’

Catherine sat looking at him, wanting to call back the whole disastrous day.

Max’s gaze tangled with hers for endless moments.

Suddenly he seemed to come to a conclusion. Forking one hand through his hair, he turned on his heel, broken ruler clenched in one fist, went into his office, and quietly closed the door.

* * *

Max had said he’d be gone a week. But he was now two days overdue. And it was driving Catherine nuts.

Once Max had left for Queensland he’d reverted to passing on his instructions via Damian, responding to her phone messages via text or email and not once actually speaking to her.

Catherine tossed another pile of old files onto her desk for sorting. She hated filing! She hated everything. Her head was aching because she’d been pinning her hair too tightly for a week and two days. She was wearing thicker tights and they were making her itch. She’d bought new shirts that buttoned so high they were choking her. All to counteract the Passion Flower effect.

The least Max could do was show up and appreciate her new take on ultra-conservatism, and get it through his thick head that she knew the difference between fantasy and reality.

Catherine threw herself into the fray and it wasn’t long before she was tackling the ‘home run’—the top drawers of Max’s ten ancient filing cabinets. The oldest, mustiest files. And they were hard to reach for someone who was only five feet four.

She was standing on an upturned wastepaper basket when the accident happened.

She’d tugged one of the drawers open, hands buried blindly in it to extract the first few files, when the wastepaper basket slid out from under her. She fell backwards, pulling one file with her and scattering papers in an airbound muddle. The filing drawer, tugged along by the force of Catherine’s other flailing hand, slid fully out, disengaged from the cabinet and started a heavy descent to the floor.

‘Cathy?’

She heard Max’s herald from the lift lobby as she hit the floor almost simultaneously with the drawer, which landed next to her as she let out a mangled ouhmph sound.

Winded. Great! How was she supposed to look ultra-conservative lying on a carpet of loose pages, gasping for breath, next to a filing drawer?

Well, the filing alcove was tucked away. Hopefully Max would think she’d left the office on some errand and go into his own office. She could wait out the diaphragm spasms in peace, then get up, straighten her clothes, and walk back to her desk as though nothing had happened.

‘Cathy?’ he called again, obviously having reached her desk and found her missing.