by Lynne Graham
Oh, sure, Nat, a fate worse than death!
Just because you caught yourself wondering what undies you’d put on that morning when you saw a man didn’t mean you were contemplating him or anyone else seeing them. Rafe was the sort of man who would be pretty knowledgeable when it came to women’s underwear, she mused…or at least removing them. He was just the sort of man that made women conscious that they were…well…women! Possibly because he was so obviously and in-your-face male!
‘Granted, but your ability to do your job is compromised if you’re too tired and run-down to work and an ill-kempt appearance is hardly professional.’ Neither was it professional for him to want to unfasten the piece of velvet ribbon that held the hair she’d scraped back from her face in an unattractive pony-tail.
Natalie, teeth clenched and head bent over her desk, was unaware that her boss was finding the exposed nape of her neck strangely attractive. Calling her physically repulsive was one thing, but calling her unprofessional really hurt, especially when his accusation had some foundation. Uncomfortably she glanced down at her crumpled skirt and the run in her tights; he was right, she was a complete mess!
‘Linen is meant to look crumpled.’
‘If crumpled was the look you were after, congratulations, you’ve succeeded.’
Though she looked as though she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, her nut-brown hair looked smooth and glossy. Rafe felt confident that it would feel like silk if he let it fall through his fingers.
‘Are you wearing any make-up…?’ he rasped suddenly, exhibiting what seemed to her to be a peculiar preoccupation with her appearance.
‘I’m not sure,’ she responded without thinking. She found this conversation, like his critical scrutiny, was getting far too personal for her taste.
‘You’re not sure!’ he ejaculated, looking at her with the sort of expression she suspected he reserved for females without lipstick and Martians.
‘Did someone die and make you the style police? Or is it now office policy not to appear without lip gloss?’ she grunted with a belligerent frown.
He shook his head. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he snapped impatiently.
She wasn’t even beautiful, he thought, examining the too-sharp contours of her pale, pinched face. Actually, though her features lacked symmetry they did have a certain charm and her smooth skin, though as pale as milk, was amazingly blemishless. So she was attractive, he conceded, but beautiful—no, and either she had no fashion sense at all or for perverse reasons known to her alone she went out of her way to wear things that didn’t suit her. Take today’s offering, for instance…he looked and barely repressed a shudder.
Natalie hunched her shoulders and lifted her chin as she registered the pained expression on his dark, saturnine features. She could have explained that she’d had things other than colour coordinating her outfit on her mind that morning. Things such as hoping Rose wouldn’t end up being hospitalised again, but that explanation would no doubt elicit another accusation of her using her daughter to get special treatment—and no way was she going to give the smug ratbag the satisfaction.
Is it against your precious principles to say something that might make him not want to dispense with your services? Or is an apology too much like good sense? the exasperated voice in her head pondered.
‘I’m sorry you heard what I said. I was upset…’
‘Sorry I heard, or sorry you said it?’
Rafe, it seemed, was not in the mood to be placated.
She eyed him with escalating irritation. ‘Well, if you’re going to be pedantic…’ She closed her eyes as she heard the snippy words slip from her lips. God, I’m doing it again! She opened her eyes and pinned a bland smile on her face. ‘I wasn’t being serious, it’s just Luke had just told me something a bit upsetting.’
‘I’m so sorry that work interferes with your social life.’ Natalie’s bewildered eyes locked with his; the depth of smouldering anger in the deep, drowning blue only deepened her confusion. She couldn’t imagine what had put it there. ‘You weren’t happy Luke was going to New York…’ he reminded her in a terse, clipped voice. ‘Couldn’t you bear to be parted from him that long?’
‘You were standing there all that time!’ she gasped without thinking. ‘Well, I call that plain sneaky not letting on,’ she told him indignantly.
She was actually more indignant than she might have been because there was a grain of truth in what he’d said. Of course she was pleased for Luke’s good fortune, but she could still guiltily recall the wave of shameful envy that she’d felt for a split second when Luke had told her his news.
For a moment he looked taken aback by her indignant cry, then she saw his electric-blue eyes fill with laughter. His mobile lips twitched, and Natalie, who normally had no problem laughing at herself, especially when she said something spectacularly stupid—and that little gem definitely qualified—felt more inclined to lie on the floor and scream.
‘I wasn’t actually trying to hide and if you hadn’t been so absorbed by pulling my character to shreds you would have seen me…or at least seen the message Luke was desperately trying to signal.’
The mention of Luke reminded Natalie of his original accusation. ‘I was not upset because you gave Luke a great job!’ At least the notion that she had a social life at all was funny. ‘And I’m happy for him,’ she insisted sturdily.
Even as she spoke she saw herself, not Luke, striding confidently into the New York office. Even Rafael would have found no fault with this glossily groomed other her, she thought, releasing the image. A realist, she was impatient with herself for indulging in this romanticised daydream.
‘If you don’t mind a little bit of advice?’ Rafe suggested, watching the revealing expressions flit across her face with narrowed eyes.
‘Do I have any choice?’
She instantly regretted her childish retort as his perfect profile hardened with displeasure. Do you actually want to lose your job, Natalie? The problem with men like Rafe, she told herself, was they could dish it out, but, surrounded by people who constantly told them how marvellous they were, they bleated foul if anyone gave it back.
‘I think that it’s possible you might find that your relationship with Luke would stand a better chance in the long term if you actually support his efforts to promote his career rather than trying demotivate him.’ The condescension in his voice made her teeth ache and her fingers furl into combative fists. ‘Some people are not happy to drift along without any real challenge.’
No need for him to add that he considered her one of this breed he evidently despised when the scornful expression on his dark features said all too clearly he thought she was.
‘How dare you?’ His smug, sanctimonious attitude made her long to beat her hands against his broad chest, though he’d probably emerge from the attack without a hair out of place and she’d have bruised fists and no job!
Quivering, she rose to her feet; even then she barely reached Rafael’s broad shoulder. As their eyes locked a wave of dizziness hit her, making the room tilt and everything but his dark, devastating features shift out of focus… They seemed to sharpen until they filled her vision; similarly the subtle male scent of his body filled her nostrils…
‘Are you ill?’
Only in the head. Natalie closed her eyes and took a deep, fortifying breath. Actually this close it wasn’t possible to pretend even to herself that the damage was restricted to her mental capacity, not when her body started responding in some very embarrassing ways to the man.
She had no illusions, she could have dressed up the effect he had on her in all sorts of painless ways, but what would be the point? It wouldn’t change anything. He was an outrageously attractive, sexy guy—in a dark, predatory way that wasn’t to her taste, at least not on an intellectual level. Problem was it wasn’t her intellect that was in action here, it was her indiscriminate hormones that were responding to his raw animal magnetism.
She cou
ld be a victim of her hormones or she could rise above them.
Her knees were trembling—in fact her entire body was quivering as she tried to shake off the last remnants of the red blur before her eyes.
‘If I did have a relationship with Luke, which I don’t—I don’t!—’ she enunciated grimly from between gritted teeth in response to his blatantly sceptical smile ‘—the last person I’d take advice from would be someone with the emotional depth of a puddle! Luke is my friend.’
‘But he’d like to be more?’ He scanned her face as if he suspected to find a guilty secret written there.
CHAPTER THREE
NATALIE’S jaw tightened as she glared at Rafe belligerently. ‘Would that be so amazing?’ She was too angry to wonder at the personal comments coming from someone who was not exactly a touchy-feely boss. You did your job and didn’t bring your personal problems to work at Ransome. ‘Well, maybe he doesn’t have your high standards!’ she snarled waspishly.
The faces and figures of the women in Rafe’s life could have been neatly superimposed by a computer on top of one another with no overlapping edges. Long, leggy and decorative, even the ones who weren’t looked like models. Thinking about them made Natalie feel unaccountably angry.
‘Or maybe he doesn’t know a lost cause when he sees one,’ Rafael suggested provocatively.
Natalie’s nostrils flared as she took a wrathful breath. ‘As for me being happy with a job that I could do in my sleep…you think I like that?’ she quavered incredulously.
His wide shoulders lifted as he leaned towards her and his compelling eyes collided with hers before dropping to her quivering lips. He swallowed, working the muscles in his brown throat. ‘Tell me what you would like,’ he instructed tersely.
Tell me what you would like?
In her mind Natalie heard those words spoken in a way that changed their meaning dramatically. Her soft lips parted as a sigh snagged in her dry throat. Mike had never asked her what she’d wanted, and even if he had—an unimaginable scenario!—she doubted she could have told him. There had always been a restricting self-consciousness in the physical side of their relationship.
Natalie had sometimes wondered a little wistfully if the mind-blowing sex of legend, the sort where you forgot where you ended and your lover began, actually existed. She had come to the conclusion that if it did she was not likely to experience it. Self-awareness was a good thing, but it was still dreadfully depressing to acknowledge that you were just too inhibited to ever experience the pleasures of head-banging, no-holds-barred sex.
Though he hadn’t come right out and said so, Mike had managed to reinforce this belief with the few things he’d casually let slip about his vastly improved love life with the sexually insatiable Gabby. It was impossible to avoid coming to the inevitable conclusion that the fault must lie with her.
I’m just not a sexy, throw-caution-to-the-wind woman, which is probably why I married the first man I slept with who was my childhood sweetheart to boot!
She sighed, a dreamy expression drifting into her eyes as they dwelt speculatively on the strong features of the man who had spoken…the sensual curve of his mouth did not suggest he was overly encumbered with inhibitions. Looking at it made her breathing quicken and her tummy muscles quiver in a painfully pleasurable way.
Would Rafael be the sort of lover who would…?
With a horrified gasp Natalie pulled a veil across that dangerous line of speculation. Her neatly trimmed nails pressed half-moons into the soft flesh of her palms when, despite her best efforts, tantalising little glimpses of what lay behind that veil kept intruding in a deeply distracting manner.
In an angry gesture she flicked her head, sending her pony-tail whooshing silkily backwards. ‘So that’s what this is about!’ she cried contemptuously.
Rafe watched, his blue eyes unwillingly held captive as her explosive action dislodged several more silky strands of hair from her pony-tail. If he had his way she’d never tie her hair back but wear it loose. In his mind he saw it lying straight and fine down her narrow, naked back almost reaching a waist he could span with his hands—though to know this for sure he’d have to put the theory to the test…
He cleared his throat and reached up to loosen the tie at his throat. ‘Define “this”.’
As if he didn’t know! Maybe it was time they got this out in the open even if it did mean she lost her job.
‘I turned down that stupid offer of fast-track promotion…’ she continued carelessly, brushing a stray section of hair off her face with the back of her hand. She could see a vee of brown skin where he’d undone the top button of his shirt. She ran her tongue over the dry outline of her lips as she watched his long brown fingers release the second button.
She released her baited breath in a gusty sigh as the fabric parted.
And I’m the one who always wondered what women get from watching men strip…hell, I’m getting hot and bothered over an innocent extra square centimetre of bare flesh! I’ve clearly lost it.
‘Stupid…?’ Rafael shrugged. ‘I suppose,’ he conceded wryly, ‘in retrospect it was stupid, but at the time I actually thought I was giving you an opportunity most people in your situation dream about.’
His scornful tone made her flush angrily. ‘Out of the goodness of your heart, no doubt,’ she sneered irrationally—since when had business been about kindness? ‘What was I meant to do with a young child when I got the word to hotfoot it to New York like Luke…shove her in my hand luggage?’
Rafe looked taken aback by her aggressive question. The line between his dark brows deepened as he shook his head. ‘If that was the only problem why didn’t you say so at the time?’
Only problem? That he could imply she was making a fuss about nothing added insult to injury.
‘Why? So you could tell me you’re not a social worker.’ That had been Maggie’s response when she had attempted to explain her dilemma to the other woman. She had gone on to warn Natalie that Mr Ransome would not be interested in her lame excuses either.
You girls these days expect it all ways. Natalie had been deeply humiliated by the contemptuous criticism; she had vowed never to give anyone the opportunity to level that accusation at her again.
His dark brows knitted. ‘Social worker?’ he repeated, looking genuinely perplexed. ‘Being a single parent is hardly so unusual these days, is it? In fact,’ he added drily, ‘it’s almost the norm. Half the people I know are on their second or third marriage.’
But not him. Rafe seemed one of those men who were allergic to marriage. ‘More fool them.’
‘You sound bitter,’ he observed.
‘I’m not bitter, just cautious,’ she countered.
‘Cautious about what?’ he persisted. ‘Men or marriage?’
‘One is a nice idea, the other…well, just look at yourself.’ The righteously indignant expression faded from her face as she followed her own advice. She stifled an appreciative sigh; he really was the most stunningly perfect male imaginable.
‘Me…?’
‘Well everyone knows you have the staying power of a two-year-old when it comes to women. Yet I suppose one day you’ll meet the right woman and get married,’ she predicted sourly. ‘It’s just not logical to suppose that your personality will change overnight…’ Her voice faded as she encountered the blankly astonished expression on his face. It occurred to her that her evangelical enthusiasm for the subject had made her go too far. ‘Well, it seems that way to me anyhow…’ she added with a touch of husky defiance.
Rafe inhaled deeply and rocked back on his heels. ‘So it seems to you I am a shallow womaniser, who will sleep with the maid of honour at my own wedding.’ Cold ice scanned her dismayed face. ‘Have I got that right…?’ he enquired in a cuttingly satirical drawl.
‘Oh, dear, I’ve upset you.’ An understatement, she thought, regarding his taut expression with growing dismay. Well, at least there was no need to watch what she said any more—she had obviously t
alked herself out of a job.
Rafe brought his teeth together in a wolf-like smile. ‘How long did you say you were married for?’
‘I didn’t, but it was two years.’
‘That long?’ he drawled insultingly.
‘There’s no need to be personal.’ He released an incredulous laugh and she blushed. ‘I’m just trying to say that a lot of men are…’
‘Congenitally incapable of fidelity,’ he finished smoothly. ‘Whereas women never stray.’
‘Of course they do.’
‘Did you?’
‘Chance would be a fine thing!’ she snorted. ‘When Mike walked out Rose was three months old.’ As far as straying went, any idiot could figure out that this ruled out the twelve months prior to their separation. And afterwards, well… ‘Would you want an affair with a woman who had a baby or young child?’ she added cynically.
‘Some people seem to be able to combine being a mother and lover…’
The fact he had avoided the question was not lost on Natalie. ‘Whereas I can’t even combine it with a career.’
Rafe released an exasperated sigh from between his clenched teeth. ‘Self-pity doesn’t suit you,’ he observed drily. His brow creased. ‘Wouldn’t a nanny solve your problem? Or an au pair?’
Natalie gave an incredulous snort of laughter; nobody was that naïve, surely! She searched his face—he was serious! What world did this guy live in? Not one where you juggled half a dozen tasks simultaneously and did your supermarket shopping with a fretful child dragging along at your side.
No, Rafe lived in the glamorous world of the élite, flash cars, and flashier women, film premières and weekend skiing trips. It was hardly surprising that it was his world that sold newspapers and magazines to people whose own lives, like her own, were humdrum by comparison.
‘Oh!’ she cried, lifting a hand to her brow. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe,’ she added crisply, ‘because I couldn’t afford to pay for a full-time live-in nanny or even half a full-time nanny,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘The fact is you have it in for me,’ she spelt out before he had a chance to respond, ‘because I had the temerity to turn down that job offer!’