The Secret Valtinos Baby

Rising to his feet, making her uneasily aware of his height, he extended a slim file. ‘Find somewhere quiet to work. You’re off Reception for the morning. Check out this business and provide me with an accurate assessment of its financial history and current performance. If you do it well, I’ll interview you this afternoon.’

That afternoon, he settled the file back on the desk and surveyed her, his wide, sensual mouth compressing. ‘You did very well but you’re a little too cautious in your forecasts. I enjoy risk,’ he imparted, watching with amusement as she frowned in surprise at that admission. ‘You’ve got the job. I hope you can take the heat. Not everyone can.’

‘If you shout at me, I’ll probably shout back,’ Merry warned him warily.

And an appreciative grin slashed his shapely lips, making him so powerfully attractive that for a split second she simply stared, unable to look away. ‘You may just work out very well.’

So began the most exciting phase of Merry’s working life. Merry was the most junior member of Angel’s personal staff but the one he always entrusted with figures. Sybil was thrilled by the promotion her niece had won but would have been horrified by the long hours Merry worked and the amount of responsibility she carried.

‘The boss has got the hots for you,’ one of her male co-workers told her with amusement when she had been two months in the job. ‘Obviously you have something all those long tall blondes he parades through here don’t, because he’s always watching you.’

‘I haven’t noticed anything,’ she said firmly, reluctant to let that kind of comment go unchallenged.

But even as she spoke she knew she was very carefully impersonal and unobtrusive in Angel’s vicinity because she was conscious of him in a way she had not been conscious of a man before. If she was foolish enough to risk a head-on collision with his spectacular liquid honey eyes, her tummy somersaulted, her mouth dried and she couldn’t catch her breath. Feeling like that mortified her. She knew it was attraction and she didn’t like it, not only because he was her boss, but also because it made her feel out of control.

And then fate took a hand when Merry firmly believed that neither of them would ever have made any sort of a move. A highly contagious flu virus had decimated the staff and as his employees fell by the wayside Merry found herself increasingly exposed to working alone with Angel. At the office late one evening, he offered her a drink and a ride home. She said no thanks to the drink, deeming it unwise, and yes to the ride because it would get her home faster.

In the lift on the way down to the underground car park, Angel studied her with smouldering dark golden eyes. She felt dizzy and hot, as if her clothes were shrink-wrapped to her skin, preventing her from normal breathing. He lifted a long-fingered brown hand and traced his fingertips along the full curve of her lower lip in a caress that left her trembling, and then, as though some invisible line of restraint had snapped inside him, he crushed her back against the mirrored wall and kissed her, hungrily, feverishly, wildly with the kind of passion she was defenceless against.

‘Come home with me,’ he urged in a raw undertone as she struggled to pull herself back together while the lift doors stood open beside them.

Her flushed face froze. ‘Absolutely not. We made a mistake. Let’s forget about it.’

‘That’s not always possible,’ Angel breathed thickly. ‘I’ve been trying to forget about the way you make me feel for weeks.’

Disconcerted by that blunt admission as he stepped out of the lift, Merry muttered dismissively, ‘That’s just sex. Ignore it.’

Angel stared back at her in wonderment. ‘Ignore it?’

As the lift doors began to close with her still inside it, he reached in and held them open. ‘Come on.’

‘I’ll get the Tube as usual.’

‘Don’t be childish,’ Angel ground out. ‘I am fully in control.’

Merry wasn’t convinced, remembering that mad, exciting grab and the slam of her body back against the lift wall, but that instant of hesitation was her undoing because without hesitation Angel closed a hand over hers and pulled her out of the lift. ‘I’ll drop you home.’

‘There are boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed,’ she told him with precision on the way to his car.

‘Don’t preach at me,’ Angel sliced back in a driven undertone. ‘I don’t have a history of making moves on my staff. You are a one-off.’

‘And it won’t happen again now that we’re both on our guard so let’s forget about it,’ Merry counselled, sliding breathlessly into a long silver low-slung bullet of a vehicle that she suspected was worth many times more than her annual salary. ‘I prevented you from making a mistake.’

‘You’re preaching again,’ Angel derided. ‘If I hadn’t stopped kissing you we’d still be in the lift!’

‘No. I would’ve pushed you away,’ she insisted with cool assurance.

She gave him her address, although he didn’t seem to need it, and the journey through heavy traffic was silent, tense and unnerving. He pulled up at the kerb outside the ugly building where she lived. ‘You could afford to live in a better area than this,’ he censured.

‘I have a healthy savings account,’ she told him with pride, releasing her seat belt at the same time as he reached for her again.

His wide sensual mouth crushed hers with burning hunger and no small amount of frustration. Her whole body leapt as though he had punched a button detonating something deep down inside her, releasing a hot surge of tingling awareness in her pelvis that made her hips squirm and her nipples pinch painfully tight.

Angel lifted his tousled dark head. ‘I’m still waiting on you pushing me away. You’re all talk and no action,’ he condemned.

‘I don’t think you’d appreciate a slap,’ Merry framed frigidly, her face burning with mortification.

‘If it meant that you ditched the icy control I’d be begging for it,’ Angel husked suggestively, soft and low, the growl of his accent shaking her up.

Merry launched out of his sports car as though jet-propelled, uncharacteristically flustered and shaken that she had failed to live up to her own very high principles on acceptable behaviour. She should’ve pushed him away, slapped him, thumped him if necessary to drive her message home. Nothing less would cool his heels. He was a highly competitive, aggressive male, who viewed defeat as an ongoing challenge.

His car stayed at the kerb until she stalked into the building and only then did she breathe again, filling her compressed lungs and shivering as though she had stepped out of a freezing snowstorm. She felt all shaken up, shaken up and stirred in a way she didn’t appreciate and almost hated him for.

The feel of his mouth on hers, the taste of it, the explosive charge of heat hurtling at breakneck speed down into her belly and spreading to other, more intimate places she never ever thought about. How dared he do that to her? She would lodge a complaint of sexual harassment! Didn’t he know what he was risking? But being Angel, he wouldn’t care, wouldn’t even stop to consider that he was playing with fire. Indeed, the knowledge would only energise and stimulate him because he loved to push the limits.

She curled up tight in her bed that night, overwhelmed by her first real experience of sexual temptation. When he kissed her she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. A kiss had never had that effect on her before and she was unnerved by the discovery that a kiss could be that influential. She toyed with the idea of complaining about sexual harassment, pictured Angel laughing fearlessly in the face of such a threat and finally decided that she didn’t want the embarrassment of that on her employment record. Particularly when such a claim would fail because she hadn’t pushed him away, hadn’t given him an immediate rejection.

The next day she was very nervous going into work, but Angel didn’t do or say anything that was different and she was strangely irritated by that reality: that he could act as though he had never offered to take her home to bed for the night and, afterwards, simply treat her like everyone else. But those same moments of intimacy had carried a higher price for her. It was as though he had stripped away her tough outer layer and chipped her out of her cautious shell to ensure that she began feeling physical and emotional responses she had comfortably held at bay until she’d met him.

During the week that followed she was feverishly aware of Angel to a degree that sent her temperature rocketing. When he looked at her, it was as if a blast of concentrated heat lit her up inside and her bra would feel scratchy against her tender nipples and a dull ache would stir between her thighs, her every tiny reaction in his presence like a slap in the face that shamed her. It was a terrible destructive wanting that wouldn’t go away. He had lit the spark and she seemed stuck with the spread of the fire licking away at her nerves and her fierce pride.

At the end of that week, Angel asked her to stay behind after everyone else had left to go for drinks.

‘Next on the agenda...us,’ Angel murmured sibilantly.

Merry shot him a withering appraisal. ‘There is no us.’

‘Exactly,’ Angel pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Scratch the itch and it goes away and dies, ignore it and it festers.’

‘Your seduction vocabulary needs attention,’ Merry quipped, standing straight in front of him, grudging amusement dancing in her crystalline eyes.

Angel grimaced. ‘I don’t do seduction.’

‘I don’t do one-night stands.’

‘So if I make it dinner and sex I’m in with a chance?’ A sardonic ebony brow elevated.

‘No chance whatsoever,’ Merry contradicted with pleasure. ‘I’m a virgin and I’m not trading that for some sleazy night with my boss.’

‘A virgin?’ Angel was aghast. ‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously,’ Merry traded without embarrassment, reflecting on how her mother had fallen pregnant with her and determined to make every choice that took her in the opposite direction. ‘Sex should mean something more than scratching an itch.’

Angel sprang upright behind his desk, all supple, graceful motion, the fine, expensive fabric of his suit pulling taut over powerful thigh muscles and definable biceps. Her mouth ran dry, her eyes involuntarily clinging to his every movement. ‘It’s never been anything more for me,’ he admitted drily. ‘But I take offence at the word “sleazy”. I am never sleazy and... I don’t do virgins.’

‘Good to know,’ Merry breathed tightly, watching his shirt ripple ever so slightly over his muscular chest as he exhaled while cursing her intense physical awareness of him. ‘May I go home now?’

‘I’ll drop you back.’