by Eve Devon
And Adam had been told he was arrogant. “You want to call in a favor from an entire country?”
Edward smiled. “That’s what Max said when I ran the idea past him. But don’t think of it as a favor being called in, so much as aligning ourselves with our friends and standing tall beside them. Yes, I placed the initial call, but it was the royal family who extended the invitation.”
Adam supposed the idea didn’t totally suck. “While I agree that overreacting will only make the allegations appear true, I’m not certain what sending Max to Zarrenburg would do. There’s a danger it would look like he is burying his head in the sand over what’s happening back here with the company.”
“Agreed. That’s why we don’t send Max. We send you.”
Adam computed the math and took it to its next variable. “And Honeysuckle,” he added.
“And possibly Honeysuckle,” Edward concurred.
Thinking aloud, Adam said, “If it’s me who goes, then it’s to take responsibility for making sure the diamond is secure while on display. Everything looks business as usual from us—high profile, high-end client, high-end product. It’s what we do, and why would we do any different? Honeysuckle handles the PR side of things—why would we put her in the role if we thought her previous employment relevant, et cetera. Plus, schmoozing is not my strength, whereas when she puts her mind to it, she excels at it. She would only be semi out of the firing line, though.” You tended to get a slightly better class of press invited to cover a royal event, but that didn’t stop the paparazzi from trailing after you. He examined each angle methodically, while all the while a voice in his head expounded the fact that this would mean Honeysuckle would have to stay in her post.
He could stop missing her before she had even gone, and they could get back to how everything was before.
“Two weeks isn’t enough time,” he murmured, adding something else into the mix.
“Well, it’s all you’ve got.”
Adam mentally calculated whether he could get his prototype fully operational by then. The risk was huge. Normally, Adam didn’t do risks that big. But Zarrenburg would be the perfect testing ground.
The phone on his desk rang, and Edward glanced at his watch. “That’ll be Max wanting to talk you through the plan.”
Adam picked up his phone as he watched Edward get up to leave.
From the slight smile on Edward’s face, Adam realized Edward seemed to be in charge of orchestrating how to get them out of the frying pan.
He frowned as Edward exited his office. Why did he get the feeling he’d been played?
Chapter Three
Honeysuckle’s fingers paused on her keyboard midsentence as the door to Adam’s office clicked softly open, and she looked up to find her rocket-scientist boss filling the doorway.
She tried to read beyond the tiredness in his eyes, but he was too good at hiding deep emotion, and his glasses acted like a secondary shield.
A relatively new addition, but as soon as he’d walked onto the premises wearing them, his status amongst the female staff had changed from Heart of Steel to Man of Steel.
Oh, he still had a heart of steel. More than once she’d marveled that he could be so passionate and loyal about Steel Hawk and its staff and yet still not trust anyone. Not enough to let anyone in, at any rate.
Sometimes she was certain he wasn’t as oblivious to the staff impressions of him as he made out.
Brain too big.
Eyes too observant.
Demeanor too sure.
Sometimes that made her wonder how he could be so obtuse about her.
But then, any wondering where Adam was concerned only led to heartache, and so she’d tried every trick in the book not to. She thought with her latest plan—leaving—she’d found a winner.
“Mind stepping into my office for a moment, please?” Adam asked.
Oh my.
So formal.
She jerked her head in the semblance of a nod, butterflies morphing into stampeding buffalo looking for the exit.
The distance between her desk and where Adam stood felt more like a Swedish mile than the fifteen feet it actually was. Her stilettos beat out a staccato as she covered the polished hardwood floor. The sound faltered only when it became obvious there wasn’t room for both of them in the doorway.
As they brushed up against each other, Honeysuckle’s breath lodged unhelpfully in her throat, where it then stayed, as if waiting for release by his personal invitation.
For one crazy moment, she thought they might have leaned infinitesimally into each other, when, in fact, neither of them had moved at all.
Not one muscle.
Then suddenly Adam sprang backward, allowing her room to walk through. She tried out a tsk to cover the sound of her lungs reinflating and strode past him to wait at his desk.
“Take a seat,” Adam offered, appearing to wait for her to sit down until he sat down himself.
Honeysuckle lowered herself onto the chair opposite Adam’s desk as elegantly as her nerves would allow, smoothing her palms down the length of her skirt as she did so. He was acting a little weirded out. Because of her?
Nerves spiked, bringing her back to her feet, and Adam, who had been on the verge of sitting down, stood back up also.
“I should have brought something to take notes on,” she said.
“Actually, I think the less recorded about this conversation, the better. Please. Sit.”
Honeysuckle eyed him warily.
O-kay. Oh. Maybe this was about her resignation. Had Edward served up a lecture on appropriate staff management?
But that couldn’t be right. She hadn’t told anyone that Adam had refused to accept her resignation. Or that he had actually locked the letter in his safe and told her he wouldn’t even contemplate discussing the matter until she could get it out of his safe and bring it to him.
Bastard!
Sweet bastard, she amended.
It was kind of nice to know he didn’t think he could function without her, despite the fact the notion was way off.
Adam could do anything he put his mind to. It was why he was the youngest head of department and why he had won awards for his work. She was in awe of his ability to focus his considerable brain into such incredible design.
She couldn’t do that consistently. She always succumbed instead to the seduction of the next wave of creative inspiration.
Her inability to pursue any one thing to its conclusion drove her family insane, especially her sister, Sophie, a private detective, who, when she had a puzzle to solve, was like Adam. Single-minded and scarily focused. To the exclusion of all else.
It was Sophie who had brought out the big-gun reverse psychology and bet Honeysuckle she wouldn’t last five minutes in this job. Coming right on the heels of leaving her last job, Honeysuckle had been inclined to take the bet. Before, she had always declined jobs at Steel Hawk, refusing to be associated with any nepotism.
Yeah, like that’s the real reason.
Honeysuckle rolled her eyes at the voice in her head, not wanting to concede to the real reason—that she secretly feared she couldn’t cut it, that she’d get bored and let her parents down, tainting the one thing they loved almost as much as their two daughters.
But after the debacle of her last employment, she’d sort of felt she owed it to her sister, to her family, to herself, to try it their way.
No one had been more surprised than she when she’d taken to it and kept taking to it.
As she lowered back down to her seat, she watched Adam mimic the movement before he began pushing a stack of papers on his desk into a neat, precise pile.
He’d adjust when she left in two weeks’ time.
He might not think he would, but he would.
Hopefully, in time, so would she.
Leaving
Steel Hawk was going to give her family yet one more perfect opportunity to despair of her, and that was going to hurt. Hurt bad, because this was the first place that she’d really thought she could stick.
But leaving was the best shot she had at falling out of love with Adam.
Because telling herself to put on her big-girl panties and stop thinking, stop fantasizing, stop hoping, wasn’t getting it done, and if she stayed, sooner or later, Adam was going to figure it out.
Dying from mortification didn’t sound like a very heroic way to go.
Adam stopped manhandling the papers on his desk into regimental piles and looked up. “So, I kind of need to know whether it’s at all possible, that as well as being my personal assistant during the day…if at night…you might also do something else?”
Honeysuckle blinked. “Excuse me?” How on earth could he have discovered her hobby? And now that he obviously had, what did that have to do with Edward and legal and Steel Hawk and trouble?
Adam rolled his shoulders and tipped his head from side to side.
“A book about Steel Hawk comes out on Monday,” he told her. “Mostly it’s about the Hawks. Edward says there’s a chapter devoted to you, so I need to ask you, that as well as working here during the day…might you also, and I want to be clear that I’m making absolutely no judgments here, be working as a dancer in a club called Rumors?”
“Oh my God.” Honeysuckle shot to her feet. “Oh. My. God,” she repeated with horror. Panic gathered, quashing her ability to think. She looked around wildly, not really registering anything. Deaf to everything but the distinct sound of humiliation whooshing in her ears. This wasn’t about her secret hobby at all. This was about her having danced burlesque. “Someone knows?” she asked. “Everyone is going to know?” she whispered, her tongue licking over dry lips at the look of confirmation on Adam’s face. Stupid pride had her reacting to his saying he wasn’t making any judgments, when she knew it was absolutely human nature to do so. “I don’t have anything to be embarrassed about,” she tried, wrapping her arms around her midriff and risking another look at the man who’d stolen her heart. “It’s a legitimate career.”
The fact that she couldn’t begin to fathom his expression made it so much worse. Pride folded in on itself so that she was left emotionally naked. “Yeah, you’re thinking, maybe not quite the career for a Hawk, huh?” Which was precisely why she hadn’t told anyone. Sometimes it was easier to rebel if no one you knew was actually aware that was what you were doing!
“So I guess this is the part where you tell me I’ve brought the company into disrepute,” she said, unable to remove the arms from around her midriff in case she actually threw up.
Adam stared at her for a few moments before saying, “Mostly this seems to be the part where I wonder what else I don’t know about you.”
Beneath his shuttered expression, a soupçon of suspicion leaked out, and, right then, she wished he were like every other guy she knew. Wished he could focus on the titillation of the news, smile a wicked smile, and bring out the banter. But Adam worked on one very simple premise. Work was work. A personal life was personal.
Now he’d had to ask her a question he obviously would rather not have, and it turned out the truth was more unpalatable than any lie, because he’d been under the mistaken impression she was only what she had purported to be—a sometimes slightly kooky, but nevertheless efficient, personal assistant.
He had never wanted to have to think about her as anything else, ever.
And even though she knew that, it still hurt.
“I really need to, um, go.” She whirled in the direction of the office door. Why did a sinkhole never appear when you needed one?
Adam moved lightning quick, making it to the office door a split second before her hand wrapped around the handle, so that when she went to yank it open, it met the resistance of his palm against wood.
Honeysuckle bowed her head against the cool wood and tried to pull herself together, but the sexy sandalwood scent of him surrounded her to combine with the heat of him against her back, stealing her sanity and holding her seductively prisoner.
No fair.
“You lied on your résumé,” he stated flatly.
Honeysuckle winced. “What did you expect me to do, put the dancing as my last employment and give the club owner as a reference?”
“Why not?”
“And you wouldn’t have made a judgment when you read that?”
Silence and then, “The fact is, it isn’t on your résumé at all. In fact, I seem to remember you said you worked as a PA at a small engineering company before this.”
Honeysuckle swallowed.
“More lies?”
Yes. Sophie had let her use the name of one of her clients as a reference.
“Had you ever worked as a PA prior to here?”
“Well, it’s not like I don’t have admin skills, but, no, not so much,” she whispered.
“Damn it, Honeysuckle, is it any wonder I’m—” He broke off as if to distance himself from admitting to an emotional response. “I don’t like liars.”
“Who does?” she defended. “But, you know, you lied to me, so why don’t we call it even and move on.”
She felt the anger at being called a liar rumble through him. “Explain,” he demanded quietly.
“All that ‘I want to make it clear I’m not making any judgment’. From the minute you found out, tell me you haven’t imagined what burlesque dancing entails and then made a judgment, either positive or negative?” Embarrassment burned a red streak up her neck and across her cheekbones.
She actually felt him press closer, so close he was nearly touching her and his voice was deeper than she could ever recall when he finally said, “Well, luckily for me, this isn’t about me—it’s about you.”
“And Steel Hawk,” she added, gathering her strength and turning slowly to face him.
“Yeah,” he agreed, not giving her an inch of space, but instead raking his gaze over her so that tiny goose bumps danced over her skin. “And Steel Hawk.”
She tried to pretend his intense blue eyes weren’t cataloguing her every thought. She never had been much good at separating out emotion from her thinking. Whims and feelings had always led her. Until this job, with all it’s doing seven different things at once, and the pressure of doing them all to a high standard, held her interest for longer than five minutes and kept her from being seduced by the next thing. But come Monday, the world was going to find out she had been a burlesque dancer, and suddenly all the work she’d put into changing, into growing, into not lurching from one thing to the next, was going to be taken away from her.
Honeysuckle shuddered. She didn’t care so much about the world—well, she did, but the world was relative compared with her parents knowing.
Compared with Adam knowing.
As the repercussions of her previous life choices came home to roost, she clenched her fists and concentrated on the feel of her nails leaving little crescent shapes in her palms.
“Maybe now would be a good time to get my resignation letter out of the safe for me.”
Blue eyes bored into her. “You want it, you know where it is. All you have to do is open the safe.”
“Adam—”
“How about instead of talking about resignations we talk about how Steel Hawk can help you?”
God, as angry as he must be at her for lying to him, he still adhered to the loyalty thing?
“Surely the advice you received was to distance me from the company. I can’t stay at Steel Hawk, Adam. Can you imagine what all the staff will think? The department doesn’t need this kind of negative focus at the moment. You don’t deserve that, nor does the team. I was going anyway. This is just a little earlier than planned.”
Adam shook his head. “The lies about your work experience aside, if you
walk out of here, you make it a thousand times worse. You think Steel Hawk wants to look like it gets rid of its staff at the first whiff of scandal?” He searched her face for a few seconds before adding, “Besides, I’m pretty sure you can kiss good-bye to the job you were leaving here for, so I wouldn’t be quite so quick to say you understand and you’re happy to walk away.”
Honeysuckle couldn’t look at him. Perhaps now wasn’t the best time to tell him she hadn’t exactly firmed up a new job.
“If you’re still dancing, someone should probably give the club a heads-up.”
“If I’m still…? Do you even know what time I leave here most nights?”
There was a slight pause as Adam digested the news and then, “Right. Okay. So this was a previous-gig-type thing?”
Honeysuckle groaned. “I really can’t talk to you about this.”
“You want to talk to PR and legal instead?” When she couldn’t form words, he said, “Didn’t think so. So the job you were planning to go to from here wasn’t back to a burlesque club?”
“Yes, Adam,” she flung back sarcastically, “because being your personal assistant was only ever going to be a stopgap until the world of burlesque realized they needed Raven Delight back.”
“That was your name?” His voice was strained, and she swore the hand that was a couple of inches above her head, holding the door closed, moved to stroke lightly over the top of her hair, making a different kind of heat touch her face.
What, now, in front of her, he was going to imagine her dancing? She closed her eyes, unsure whether it was to savor the thought or deny the thought, and suddenly his previous words slammed into her. “Wait a minute, did you say notify the club?”
His gaze flicked from her hair back to her face. “Yes.”
No.
No, that would definitely not be a good idea.
If Lou, the owner of Rumors, discovered that the Raven Delight who had run out on her job was actually Honeysuckle Hawk, he might come after her. God, what was she thinking? As soon as that book came out, of course he was going to find out and come after her. What should she do? “I— Can you please give me some air?” She couldn’t think straight with him so close.