Behind The Boardroom Door: Savas' Defiant Mistress / Much More Than a Mistress / Innocent 'til Proven Otherwise

As if he cared. He didn’t like her much, either.

And it would be a damn good thing when she and her menagerie were out from underfoot.

With luck, by the time he got back from grocery shopping, she’d already be packing.

Neely had never been a Boy Scout.

She did, however, believe in the motto: Be Prepared.

So she was prepared, when she let herself in the front door that afternoon, to lay a proposal on the line to Sebastian Savas.

She’d thought it all out after she’d left Frank’s. Maybe he was right. Maybe by now Sebastian had buyer’s remorse. Maybe he woke up this morning seasick. Well, probably not. But she could hope.

In any event, she spent three hours at the public library—because she wasn’t going home—reworking her finances, then calling her mother in Wisconsin to say that things would be a little tight for a few months. Lara wouldn’t care. She never thought of money anyway.

And then Neely came back to the houseboat, prepared to make Mr. Cold-Blooded Businessman an offer he wouldn’t refuse.

She wasn’t prepared to walk into the living room and find herself staring out through the plate glass window at a very different man entirely.

In the seven months she’d worked for Grosvenor Design she had never seen Sebastian in anything other than a suit. Sometimes he took his coat off and she saw his long-sleeved dress shirts. And once, on a job site, she’d seen his collar unbuttoned and his tie askew. Last night, of course, she’d seen him in a suit—dripping wet.

Even after Harm had knocked him in the water and he’d showered, Sebastian had come back downstairs wearing another dress shirt and a pair of pressed dark trousers. Okay, he hadn’t worn a tie. But big deal.

She’d told Max once that she thought Sebastian had been born wearing cuff links.

It didn’t seem far-fetched. He wore his cool, calm demeanor like a suit of well-fitting armor. And his well-pressed, totally-together look promised the icy aloofness and consummate unapproachability which was, with Sebastian Savas, exactly what you got.

So who was the guy with the bare tanned feet and faded blue-jean-clad muscular legs braced against the upper rungs of her ladder?

Neely stopped in her tracks. But even as her body stopped dead, her gaze kept right on moving up—until it was well and truly caught by the sight of several inches of hard flat masculine abs peeking out from beneath a sun-bleached red T-shirt.

There was even an arrow of dark hair visible until it disappeared into the waistband of the jeans as the man wearing them reached up and slapped paint on the wall above the window.

Neely wet her lips. She swallowed. Hard. And swallowed again.

Her heart seemed suddenly to be doing the Mexican Hat Dance in her chest. She forced herself to take a breath—and then another—as she tried to regain her equilibrium.

It was what came of being an architect, she told herself, still combating light-headedness. They just had extraordinarily well-developed senses of appreciation for physical beauty, for strength and economy and power all wrapped up in one neat, um, package.

Perhaps not best choice of words.

On the other hand, quite possibly the most accurate, she thought as her gaze fastened on the bulge beneath the soft denim right below his waistband and framed between the rungs of the ladder.

Her face flamed and, deliberately, Neely squeezed her eyes shut tight.

She didn’t see the kittens tussling right in front of her. And of course, she stepped on them.

“Mrrrrooowwwww!”

“Oh, help!” Neely stumbled, shrieked, caught herself against the back of the sofa and jerked open her eyes just in time to hear the paintbrush clatter to the deck and see Sebastian—who else?—skim down the ladder like a fireman on his way to a four-alarm blaze.

His gaze locked on her even as he reached down to scoop the brush up off the deck and toss it in the paint tray.

“What the hell—?”

“It’s n-nothing. N-nothing,” Neely said hastily.

“If it was nothing, why’d you shriek? What happened?”

“Nothing happened!” Face still burning, Neely crouched down and snagged up the kittens, clutching them to her chest and gently kneading their small squirming bodies to make sure they weren’t hurt.

Sebastian jerked open the door and glowered accusingly. “Don’t tell me you were shocked to see me. I live here.”

That wasn’t what had shocked her. She cuddled the kittens closer. “I stumbled,” she said. “I landed on the kittens.”

He looked skeptical, but finally he shrugged. Why did his shoulders look even broader in a T-shirt than in a dress shirt? Unfair.

“You should watch where you’re going,” he told her.

“Obviously.” And she wasn’t about to tell him why she hadn’t been. Instead she buried her face in their fur and took a few more deep breaths until finally she lifted her gaze again and said, “You don’t have to paint.”

He rolled his shoulders. “It’s my boat. Or were you going to say it’s your paint?”

Neely pressed her lips together. “It is, actually. But that’s not the point. The point is—” she took a breath, then plunged on “—I want to buy the boat. Still. From you.”

He opened his mouth, but she cut him off. “You can’t really want it. You didn’t have any idea it even existed twenty-four hours ago. It’s some spur-of-the-moment mad purchase for you. Maybe you think you want it now, but you won’t.”

He started to say something again, but Neely knew she had to get it all out now without interruption, had to make it clear how very badly she wanted the houseboat. Maybe it was foolish. Maybe it would make him even less likely to sell to her.

But yesterday, when Harm knocked him in the water and he didn’t take it out on her, when he actually sounded just slightly bemused. “More harm than good,” he’d said. And it was so unexpected that she couldn’t believe he was totally unfeeling.

“Hear me out,” she insisted. “I know you think you want it now. But you’ll get sick of it. You’ll hate the way the dampness makes your computer keys stick. You’ll get tired of the fog. You won’t want birds pooping on the deck. You’ll crave your penthouse again. I’m sure you will! So, I just want you to know that, when it happens—and it will happen—I’ll take it off your hands for what I agreed to pay Frank—or even ten thousand more,” she added recklessly. “And I will get financing.”

She’d let Max help if she had to.

She stopped and looked at Sebastian, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t say a word. Half a minute ticked by. Then he said, “Are you finished now?”

“Yes.” Tick, tick.

“So tell me why. Why do you want it?”

She wished he hadn’t asked that. Neely loved people and made friends easily. She’d had to, given how often she was in a new place. But she usually took her time exposing the personal side of her life. And she really didn’t want to do so to a man who formed judgments faster than the speed of light.

But he hadn’t said no. And he stood there now, waiting expectantly, those green eyes assessing her from beneath hooded lids.

Right. So be it. “It felt like home the first time I walked in the door,” she told him. “I don’t know why.” And she’d given it a lot of thought, too. “We lived all over the place. Here. In California. Montana. Minnesota. Wisconsin. To say we moved around is putting it mildly. We were always somewhere different and nothing was ever permanent…not until I was twelve, anyway.”

“What happened when you were twelve?”