The Morning After the Night Before

‘So, go for a different job within the firm.’

She suddenly became aware that her fingers still pressed into his pectoral region and she tugged them gently free and curled them at her side. ‘What is it to you? Why do you even care?’

‘Because you were a good employee,’ he murmured down at her, all smoky intensity. ‘My best.’

Pfff. ‘We fought every day.’

He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and the move effectively pushed him out from the wall and a smidge closer to her. She didn’t step back. On principle. This was her domain, tiny as it might be. The scented heat pumping off him pleasantly consumed her.

‘You challenged me every day,’ he corrected.

It felt odd testing him now, standing this close and peering up at him. Hardly a position of power. Yet she felt as if the cards were all hers. ‘You made some bad decisions.’

It was only when his lips twisted so fully that she remembered what a nice mouth he had. When it wasn’t issuing ridiculous demands.

‘Clearly you thought so. But they were my decisions to make.’

‘If you just want a bunch of yes-men in your department then why are you here, trying to get me back?’

‘Because diversity is apparently healthy in a workforce—’

‘Not if it’s only token.’

‘—and because, surprising as it might seem, I appreciate spirit in women.’

‘Like horses?’ She snorted.

He wisely ignored that. ‘Spirit and brains.’

‘Uh-huh. So all those times you and I ended up locking horns, that was … appreciation making you flush red?’

He did it again now and it added a dangerous kind of gleam to his eyes.

‘You tell me.’

She crossed her arms angrily and it only served to plump her minor cleavage up a tad in the aperture of her blouse when viewed from virtually above. Which, naturally, he took full advantage of. Izzy dropped her hands by her side, instead, to take away his toy. It left his eyes nowhere to go but back to hers, all simmering and smart and way, way too close.

‘Come on, Dean,’ he purred, ‘you can’t say our … discussions didn’t give the daily grind a productive boost.’

There were times she’d have liked to have boosted Harry Mitchell right out of his twelfth-floor window. ‘Strange as it may seem to you, my productivity goes up when I’m respected professionally.’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘You think I don’t respect you?’

‘You don’t respect my opinion. Anyone’s really.’

‘Disagreeing with it and not respecting it aren’t the same thing. Anyway, occasionally I did agree with you.’

She knew. And weren’t those days the most confusing of all? Because he did so unconditionally. And wholeheartedly. She bit her lip and his gaze went straight to the childhood gesture.

‘You know what I’m starting to think?’ he murmured, still checking out the nibble of her teeth on her lips.

‘Enlighten me.’

‘Maybe all our fighting was just sexual tension in disguise.’

The room was way too small for her bark of a laugh. It fairly ricocheted off the walls. ‘You must be joking.’

‘Not at all.’ He grinned and it was the most predatory she’d ever seen from him. And smug.

‘Because you’re so irresistible?’

‘Because we have chemistry. I thought it was just me but Wednesday put a big question mark over that.’

No, they didn’t. Not chemistry and not Harry Mitchell. Hot or not. ‘Maybe you’re just projecting your own hormones.’

‘You don’t feel it?’

Challenge, not question. As if he already knew the answer. As if she did, too. But they bred them tough in Manchester. She tossed her short hair back. ‘Not particularly.’

Liar, liar …

‘February twenty-first this year,’ he challenged. ‘We shared the same lift and the end-of-day rush pushed us together at the back. We didn’t speak a word to each other and the only uncovered parts of us touching were our ungloved hands.’ He stepped a tiny bit closer. ‘But we both walked out of the building rubbing the tingles away.’

‘No, we—’

‘April third.’ He lifted his chin. ‘I knocked back one of your ideas and you spent a good portion of the day glaring at me through the walls—all flushed and infuriated and eyes spitting—and I spent a good portion of the day with half a hard-on, as a result.’

No way her gasp should have caught quite that tightly in her chest. She should have been outraged, not breathless.

Not excited.

Her glares across her crowded open-plan office to his lofty glassed-in one had simmered, and not always with anger. She’d felt it but had no idea he’d been able to see it.

God …

‘You’re making these up.’

‘Check your diary,’ he dismissed, plunging his hands even deeper in his pockets. ‘June eleventh, just before lunch. You stood in my office giving me hell about the new ratios and I just let you run because I was curious.’

She swallowed back a lump of dread. She remembered June eleventh. The room had been practically soaked with awareness and she’d come away fairly throbbing from the argument. And then she’d beaten herself up all day about the inappropriateness of it all. He was her boss. He was the bad guy.

Words formed themselves despite her best intentions.

‘Curious about what?’ she croaked.

His lips twisted. ‘Have you never heard the saying that a person fights like they f—?’

‘Stop!’ Air sucked hard into her lungs and then froze there, trapped, making it harder to squeeze out, ‘I thought that was dancing.’