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

“Oh.” She paused. “Um, good.” Pause. “I guess.”

He looked at her, apoplectic. “You guess?”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking you were. I mean, you didn’t know, did you? When you…kissed me?”

“No, I didn’t know! Then. But now I do and—” his tone was measured, but his gaze was not. It was simmering and intense “—I just want it to be clear.”

She nodded. “It’s clear. But really, it doesn’t matter.”

He blinked, then looked quizzical.

“Because it isn’t happening again. No kissing,” she repeated.

“Why?”

Now it was her turn to be apoplectic. “I told you why! Because kissing has to lead to something!”

“It does.”

“To love? To marriage?”

“To bed,” he said. “What’s wrong with that? Or do you never kiss without wanting a proposal first?”

“What I don’t do is kiss without any kind of possibility of commitment!”

“Ever?” He sounded stunned.

“Well, I just did, obviously.” And the truth was, she wasn’t that stingy with her kisses when they didn’t matter. It was when they did—when they threatened to make her lose all sense of propriety, when they could have her tumbling straight into bed without a thought for tomorrow or next month or next year—yes, then she was very stingy indeed. “No kisses,” she said again and met his disbelieving gaze with unblinking ferocity.

“You are a dinosaur,” he told her.

“I am a dinosaur,” she agreed. Better he think that than think she was a complete pushover.

He stared at her, then shook his head. “You just expect us to live together completely platonically when we could burn the boat to the ground with a kiss?”

“Yes.”

He barked a laugh, but it wasn’t a joyful sound. “Sure you don’t want to move out, Robson?”

“I’m sure,” she lied. She thought perhaps she ought to be running away as fast as she could. “We are, after all, adults,” she reminded him.

“I’d say that’s the problem, not the solution.”

“We have self-control,” she went on relentlessly. “Or I do,” she added. “Don’t you?”

His teeth came together. “I have self-control, Robson,” he said flatly, just as she had hoped he would.

“So it won’t be a problem, then. It will just be hands off,” she said brightly.

For a long moment Sebastian didn’t say anything. Then he agreed gruffly. “Hands off.”

“And…mouths off?”

“What are you, a lawyer?”

“Just covering…all eventualities. So, no kissing?”

A muscle ticked in his temple. “I already said that.”

“Just making sure.” But at the same time she was extracting the promise, she was staring at him sprawled there in that chair. He was still wearing a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt that treated her to far too much visual stimulation. Sebastian Savas with his long bare legs splayed and his muscular arms flexing as he cracked his knuckles did disastrous and very unfair things to her libido.

It wasn’t fair that such an unsuitable man should be able to make her heart kick over and her pulse quicken and other intimate parts of her body tingle with the mere awareness of him.

Their gazes met. And held. And held some more.

Sebastian swallowed. And even the sight of his Adam’s apple moving in his throat was an enticement.

The discovery made Neely gulp. She moistened her lips with her tongue.

Sebastian shut his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, just get the hell out of here.”

There.

It was simple.

Mind over matter. Or libido. Or something.

It wasn’t as if she wanted to want Sebastian Savas, after all. He was the last man she should be interested in.

She wasn’t interested in him.

Much.

It would have been easy—or at least easier—if he’d had to go back to Reno. But he didn’t. He was there—on the houseboat whenever she got up in the morning, coming out of his bedroom just as she was getting out of the bathroom. Coming abruptly face to breastbone with his bare chest was not conducive to pure innocent thoughts.

And then he would come downstairs looking all polished and professional—long-sleeved pale-blue starched dress shirts and dark trousers that should have looked like body armor but on Sebastian looked sexy as hell because she had no trouble imagining the hard-muscled man beneath them.

He was there at work, too. Not often. They didn’t work together. She was working with Max on Blake-Carmody, and Sebastian was doing whatever it was Sebastian was doing—but every now and then she caught a glimpse of him, caught him looking at her.

And abruptly they would both look away.

And no matter what she was doing or saying or supposed to be doing or saying, in fact she was thinking instead about what it had been like to kiss him.

It wasn’t just one day or two. It was the whole week. Day in, day out.

“What’s the matter with you?” Max asked. “You don’t have your eye on the ball.”

No, she didn’t.