A Bride For The Boss

“Laura could have told you this.”

“Laura’s not speaking to me.”

“You scared her, didn’t you,” Andi said, shaking her head.

“I’m not scary.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“Maybe I should,” he muttered, then shrugged. “I’m also here because I wanted to get a look at what you left me for.”

“You make it sound like I’m your cheating wife.” She sighed. “I didn’t leave you. I left my job.”

But she had left him, Mac thought. It didn’t feel like an employee walking out, but a betrayal. Damn it, she’d taught him over the years to count on her. To depend on her for too many things—and then she was gone. How the hell else was he supposed to feel?

“Same thing.” His gaze fixed on her and for the first time he noticed that she wore a tiny tank top and a silky pair of drawstring pants. Her feet were bare and her toenails were painted a soft, blush pink. Her hair was long and loose over her shoulders, just skimming the tops of her breasts.

Mac took a breath and wondered where that flash of heat swamping him had come from. He’d been with Andi nearly every day for the past six years and he’d never reacted to her like this before. Sure, she was pretty, but she was his assistant. The one stable, organized, efficient woman in his life and he’d never taken the time to notice that she was so much more than that.

Now it was all he could notice.

Dragging his gaze from her, he took a deep breath and looked down the short hall toward the back of the house. “Do I get a tour?”

“No.” She really wanted him out of there. He had to wonder why. “I painted all day. I’m tired. So—”

He looked back at her and thought she didn’t look tired to him. She looked downright edible. “You don’t have to do it all yourself, Andi. I could have a crew out here tomorrow and they’d be done with the whole place by the end of the week.”

“I enjoy painting.”

He shot her a speculative look. “You enjoy hacking your way through jungles, too? A team of gardeners could tear out those briars growing wild by the front porch.”

“I don’t want to hire someone—”

“I said I would hire them.”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?” He could understand stubbornness. Hell, he sort of admired it. But this was pure mule-headedness. There was no reason for her to work herself into the ground trying to prove a point. “People who own houses hire people to work on them all the time.”

“You don’t get it, Mac,” she said. “I want to do the work.”

“You obviously need the help.” He gave another quick look around. He could see what his sister had meant. The house did seem to be practically void of any kind of personal decoration or warmth. “You’ve been here—what? A year? As organized as you are, it shouldn’t have taken you nearly that long to whip this place into shape. But it looks like you’ve hardly touched it.”

Insult shot through her tone. “Seriously? When was I supposed to do any of that? I spend—spent—all of my time at the office. And on those extremely rare—I’m talking bigfoot-sighting rare—occasions when I did get an entire weekend off, I tried to squeeze in a little family time. See people. Go outside.”

Mac rubbed one hand across the back of his neck and wished he could argue with her, but he knew she was right. He had pretty much monopolized her every waking moment for the past six years. But it wasn’t as if he’d held her hostage. She’d made a hell of a lot of money thanks to the job she’d walked away from so easily.

“You don’t have to make it sound like you were in prison,” he pointed out in his own defense. “You love the work as much as I do.”

“I do enjoy the work, and I’m good at it,” she added as if he needed reminding. “But I want more out of life than closeting myself up in an office.”

“And painting your house yourself, digging out briars and a mountain of weeds like I’ve never seen before, is ‘more’?”

She frowned and he felt her irritation coming at him in thick waves. “For now, yes.”

“You really must be desperate if you call painting and gardening a vacation,” he said, watching her. “I really expected the rumor about you and Jamaica was true and you were off having silly drinks in coconut shells.”

That mental image of Andi in a bathing suit rose up in his mind again, and now, thanks to seeing her out of her normal buttoned-down attire, his imagination was doing a much better job of filling out that dream bikini.

She huffed out a breath, folded her arms over her middle, unconsciously lifting her breasts high enough that he got a peek at the tops of them thanks to the scoop-necked tank she wore. A buzz of electricity zapped Mac and he had to work to keep his own hormones in line. How had he spent six years with this woman and not noticed how nicely she was put together?

She’d always worn her long, straight brown hair pulled back in a businesslike knot or ponytail, so until tonight he never would have guessed that it was wavy when she let it down around her shoulders—or that lamplight brought out hidden golden streaks among the dark brown. Andi had always worn sensible, straitlaced clothing on the job, so seeing her in that sleeveless tank and loose, silky sleep pants was a jolt to his system. Not to mention the fact that her upper arms were sleekly muscled and tanned. Where did she get that tan?

“Do I really strike you as the kind of woman who would enjoy lounging on a beach for two weeks?”

“Yesterday,” he told her, “I would have said no way. But today—” he paused and let his gaze sweep up and down the length of her in an appreciative glance “—maybe.”

She seemed to realize what she was wearing and he thought he actually caught a flush of color fill her cheeks briefly. Andi blushing? How many more surprises could a man take?

“You should go,” she said simply.

Yeah, he probably should. But not yet. He could see that she was nesting or some damn thing here and until she’d gotten it out of her system, nothing would budge her out of this tiny, unfinished house. So the quickest way to get things back to normal would be for him to help her. Besides, if he really had kept her so busy she couldn’t even unpack over the past year, maybe he owed it to her.

Whether Andi knew it or not, she was going to be bored senseless with nothing more to do than paint and mow the yard and whatever the hell else needed doing around here. Her mind was too sharp, her organizational skills too well honed for her to be happy puttering around the house. The sooner she realized that, the better for all of them.

“Tell you what,” he announced. “I’ll take the next two weeks off, too.”

“What? Why? What?” She shook her head as if she hadn’t heard him clearly, and who could blame her?

Mac couldn’t remember when he’d last taken time off. He’d always been reluctant to leave the business in anyone’s hands but his own. Not even his vice president’s, and there weren’t many people Mac trusted more than Tim Flanagan.

Now, with both Mac and Andi out of the office, and Tim off investigating another possible business move, there’d be no one there but Laura and a couple of interns. But it wasn’t as though he was leaving the country, he told himself. He was right here in Royal, so if Laura ran into problems, he was completely reachable. Besides, two weeks would be over in a blink and everything would get back to normal.

“You quit your job so you’d have time to do stuff like this, right?”

Andi’s lips pursed for a second before she nodded. “In a nutshell, yes.”

“Fine. Then I’ll be here for the next two weeks, helping you slap this place into shape.” He curled his fingers over the brim of his hat. “Once we’re done, if you still want to quit, fine.”

“I will,” she told him. “In fact, I already have quit.”

He shrugged. “You can always change your mind.”

“Not going to happen.”

“We’ll just think of these next two weeks as a sort of trial period,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “You can see what it’s like to be out of the office and still have a chance to call off your resignation.”

“Mac, you’re making this harder than it has to be.”