She’d grown to like the anxious and giddy feelings that rolled through her when she was with him, but having him so close—close enough to feel the corded muscles of his shoulder and chest under his jacket—made her feel light-headed and tremulous, like a blue jay that had mistakenly flown into a feline festival.
The toe of her shoe caught on the sole of his, and if his arms hadn’t been wrapped around her, if he hadn’t had the foresight to tighten his hold on her, she just might have stumbled to her knees.
“Sorry,” she murmured, feeling terribly embarrassed.
“No need to be,” he said against her ear, his voice only loud enough for her to hear.
“But I told you I couldn’t be accused of being clumsy, and then I go and step right on your foot.”
“Relax,” he said. “You’re supposed to be having a good time.”
She wanted to enjoy the moment. She wanted to get lost in the feel of Kyle, in the scent of him. But she couldn’t. Could it be all the lies she’d told, all the lies she’d allowed Kyle to believe, that were keeping her from having a good time? she wondered.
Her uncontrollable anxiety caused a soft, nervous chuckle to erupt from her throat, and at the same time the toe of her shoe bumped against the sole of his again.
“I’m afraid this isn’t going to work,” she said, humiliated to the core. “Let’s go sit down.”
“You just need a little practice,” he told her.
Then out of the blue, he led her off the dance floor. “Come on. Let’s go.”And before Cindy knew it, he’d paid the bill and they were heading for the door.
“Where’re we going?” she asked as soon as she was settled into the front passenger seat of his light green sports car.
“Back to your place. If that’s okay with you.”
Her eyes widened in the darkness. Back to her place? Where they would be all alone? Just the two of them?
“If you’d rather not,” he continued, “we could go—”
“No, no,” she rushed to say. “My apartment is fine. I don’t mind at all.”
Mind? Why would she mind when her paradise was getting better by the moment?
He’d taken her away from the crowded restaurant and he was driving her to her apartment where they would be isolated. Alone. What should she read into this turn of events? she wondered.
The giddy feeling sprouted to life in the pit of her stomach. Were his feelings for her changing? Could their relationship really be metamorphosing into something beyond the work alliance they shared at Barrington?
“You seemed so nervous back there,” he said softly.
He was speaking of the restaurant and their moments on the dance floor.
“I thought it would be better if we practiced dancing someplace more...secluded. Where strangers aren’t watching.”
She felt rather than saw him smile.
“That way you won’t be embarrassed if you trip over your feet.” There was suppressed laughter in his voice as he added, “Or mine.”
The excitement inside her wilted like week-old lettuce. He didn’t want to be alone with her. He was only trying to make her more comfortable on this pretend date they were having. The word pretend was more prominent in her mind now than it had been all evening. Kyle didn’t want her feeling humiliated because she couldn’t get the dance steps quite right.
Darn it, how had she let herself think, even for an instant, that Kyle might want to be alone with her? Disappointment rolled over her like a dark cloud. She pressed her lips together and stared out the window at the city. She felt angry with herself. It was her own fault, though. Allowing her hopes to get the better of her had been a mistake. She’d guard herself against experiencing this kind of letdown again.
“I was born and raised in Phoenix,” Kyle said in the darkness of the car’s interior. “My great-grandfather came to Arizona in the early 1900s looking for a job. He was one of the hundreds of men who built the Theodore Roosevelt Dam. He and his bride settled in Phoenix. So did my grandparents and my parents.”
Envy tweaked at Cindy. She thought it was wonderful that Kyle’s knowledge of his family tree went back four generations. Heck, she didn’t even know her own father. And she’d never met her grandparents, let alone her great-grandparents. The only family she had was her mother, and she hadn’t spoken to her in nearly a year.
Kyle went on. “My parents had that sixties, New Age mentality.”
The love he felt for his mother and father was extremely evident in the warmth of his tone.
“They wanted me to grow up feeling free to be me. They didn’t put any kind of pressure on me at all.” He glanced at her, a wide grin on his mouth. “At the ripe old age of thirty-four, I can now say that that style of parenting does have its drawbacks.”
Disappointment was forgotten as she became lost in Kyle’s life story. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged, leveling his gaze back onto the road ahead. “What they called freedom I now see as a lack of much-needed guidance. Kids need to talk about their options. They need some input on what to do, what to study, what to shoot for in life. As it turned out, I floundered around in college for several semesters. Having no idea what my major should be. No focus. No...goals. Oh, Mom and Dad loved me. And supported whatever decision I wanted to make. Of that I was certain. But their hands-off parenting technique was a definite obstacle for me.”
Loving and supporting parents would have been a gift from heaven, Cindy thought, remembering the way her own mother had pretty much ignored her as a child. It seemed that Kyle didn’t realize how very lucky he was.
“I went into business with a friend right out of college,” he said. “We had quite a bit of success in Atlanta for a couple of years. Then...”
His hesitation was small, but Cindy noticed it nonetheless.
“...something happened that broke up our partnership.”
He sighed, and she studied him in the darkness. She wondered what heavy burdens he was bearing, but didn’t feel this was the time to ask.
“Anyway,” he said, “I took a job with Barrington Corp. At the Atlanta hotel. I spent a couple of years there when a job opening in Phoenix was offered to me. Until then, I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed my home. I accepted the job, worked my way up to V.P. of New Products and I’ve been happy as a clam ever since.”
He chuckled. The bleakness he’d expressed just a moment ago when he’d mentioned the breakup of his partnership seemed to dissolve, like a fog that had been burned off by the blazing Sonoran sun.
“Phoenix is home for me,” he told her. “I’m happier here than anywhere I’ve been. I don’t know why I wasted all that time searching for success and fulfillment anyplace else.”
Kyle pulled his car into the parking lot of her apartment complex, eased into a slot and cut the engine.
His words were ringing through her mind. Phoenix is home for me. Phoenix is home for me.
A home. That’s what Cindy was looking for more than anything else. And she was trying to make Phoenix the permanent home she was searching for. She’d lived all over the world. Felt as though she’d left tiny pieces of herself in each and every place she’d lived. Now here she was trying desperately to fill up all the empty space she felt inside her. With her beloved apartment. With her cherished friends from Barrington. With her job. Even with her wild dreams of somehow making Kyle fall in love with her.
The barren void inside her was oppressing.
Yes, she wished she’d had the kind of loving parents Kyle had grown up with. And she craved the sense of home, the sense of belonging he obviously felt for this beautiful desert city.
Cindy would never have the loving support of her mother. She knew that. But maybe, someday, she just might find a real, honest-to-goodness home here in Phoenix. Maybe. Someday.
Chapter Six
What the hell had he been thinking? Kyle wondered. To suggest that he and Cindy return to her place to practice dancing—to practice slow dancing—ha
d been an idiotic idea.
He wasn’t normally into self-torture. Holding her in his arms, smelling the light, flowery fragrance of her hair, her skin, was most definitely torture. To the highest degree. And the erotic music playing on the stereo was only making matters worse. Kyle knew he needed to focus his thoughts on something, anything else but the feel and delicate scent of Cindy’s skin, the silky texture of her hair—
Think of something else! he commanded himself. However, he couldn’t come up with a single, safe thought to latch on to.
His behavior over the past couple of weeks continued to baffle and confuse him. First, he’d kissed Cindy. His personal assistant. His employee. What on earth had possessed him? As he waltzed Cindy around her living room, where they’d pushed back the furniture to create a makeshift dance floor, he pondered the answer to that question.
The only answer he could come up with was that it wasn’t all his fault. She’d completely overwhelmed him by the physical change in her appearance.
Oh, come on. A silent voice sneered at him. What kind of excuse is that? What kind of man can’t control his raging hormones?
Okay, okay, he silently responded. So it wasn’t the greatest of excuses. But she’d flirted with him in the conference room. She’d been the one who had fluttered those long lashes at him. Batted those gorgeous green eyes his way. So again he felt that the kissing incident hadn’t been entirely his fault.
What kind of person blames his behavior on someone else?
Kyle felt he was going to go nuts if he didn’t stop the questions. He also felt he was going to go nuts if he had to endure being this close to Cindy for much longer without acting on his terrific urge to kiss her. Again.
Oh, no you don’t, the stern voice said. There will be none of that. Not with Cindy. Not with any woman. Not after the hell you went through with Monica.
Cindy had explained her flirtatious behavior in the conference room. And he had no reason not to believe her when she’d told him she hadn’t intended to tease him, it hadn’t been her aim to play with his emotions in order to get promoted to personal assistant to Mr. Barrington’s son when the man finally came to take over the company. With that thought in mind, Kyle wondered why he’d continued to be so unsettled by Cindy. Before the big presentation, before her makeover and the kiss they had shared, their working relationship had been damned near perfect.
So why in the hell had he agreed to take her out for dinner and dancing? That was the worst move he could have made when his hormones were in such an uproar over the woman. And in an uproar his hormones had been. And continued to be. There was no denying it.
But something in him just snapped when Molly and Rachel and Cindy’s other friends had talked about her dating some stranger. The idea had been very disconcerting for him. And before he’d realized it, he’d found himself offering to take Cindy out on the town.
Buff up her dating skills, indeed. Kyle guessed his real motive in offering to take her out was to make her realize that she should get to know a person before she trusted him enough to date him.
The mere idea of Cindy going out with this Mike from the mail room made his whole body tense with displeasure. In that moment of total preoccupation, his ears became completely deaf to the beat of the music playing on the stereo and he planted his foot, solidly and firmly, on top of Cindy’s. It was her painful grimace and the stiffening of her spine that brought him back to the present.
“Sorry,” he murmured. They stepped apart. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“It’s okay.” She chuckled, lifting her knee and reaching down to rub at her small toe. “I guess we just weren’t made to dance together.”
“Nonsense,” he told her. “We can do this.”
Kyle didn’t like to fail. At anything.
“We’re just finding out,” he continued, “that I need just as much practice as you.”
“Maybe so,” she said, although a heavy doubt was in her tone. “But let’s give our poor feet a break. I’ll go make us some coffee.”
He pressed his lips together, quelling the tremendous urge to conquer the task at hand. But rather than argue with her, he acquiesced with a small sigh. “Okay. Coffee sounds great.”
His gaze automatically lowered to her slightly sashaying fanny as she left the room. Closing his eyes, he turned away, admitting that he could use a short reprieve from the battle he was waging with his overwhelming urges.
Alone in Cindy’s living room, he scanned his surroundings. She had nice taste in furniture. The couch and matching chairs had big, comfortable pillows. The wide picture window was framed in a light and airy fabric that gave the room a friendly, informal feel. Just right for entertaining. Very lived-in. Homey. He liked it.
As he listened to her movements in the kitchen, he considered sitting, but then he noticed all the photos in the room. Frames of all types hung on the walls and were displayed on the tabletops. With his hands clasped behind his back, he studied the pictures that sat on the low table beneath the picture window.
He smiled at the images of Cindy as a child. She’d been cute with her ponytails and wide green eyes. In nearly every photo, the little girl Cindy was always with a beautiful woman. Her mother, he surmised. Now Kyle knew from whom Cindy had inherited her gorgeous gem-colored eyes.
The woman with Cindy was more than attractive, actually. Her bone structure was model perfect. And in every photo she was dressed to the nines, her hair coifed just so, her nails lacquered with rich color. Yes, Kyle mused, Cindy’s mother was one exquisite woman.
Frowning, he noticed something odd about the pictures. There were very few in which Cindy had been captured smiling. Usually kids loved to clown around for the camera, grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat for the photographer. But most all of these photos portrayed a solemn, withdrawn little girl. Because the Cindy he knew was not one to be sullen about much of anything, he was left wondering what had happened during her childhood that might have made her unhappy.
Then another peculiarity struck Kyle. Most of the photographs had been cropped, a third person clipped from the image. Kyle could tell because there was usually an errant hand draped around the shoulder of Cindy’s mother. A masculine hand.
Rubbing his jaw in contemplation, Kyle wondered if maybe Cindy had had some kind of disagreement with her father. Some falling-out that had impelled her to chop the man right out of her life, right out of her childhood photographs. The thought made him curious about Cindy. It also made him realize just how little he knew about the woman who worked as his personal assistant.
“I know you said you didn’t feel like dessert—”
He turned at the sound of Cindy’s voice.
“—but I scrounged up a few cookies. They’re store-bought. I hope you don’t mind. But I just don’t have time to bake.” She set the plate on the coffee table in front of the couch. “Coffee’s perking. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
He nodded. “I was looking at your pictures. You weren’t kidding when you said you’ve lived all over the world.”
A tiny sigh escaped her. “I wasn’t kidding.”
He squelched his desire to ask her about her somber expression in the photos, and he also remained silent about the extra male hand—so obvious to him now—in most of them.
Instead he said, “Your mother’s a very beautiful woman.”
He seemed to sense a slight chill in the air.
“Yes,” Cindy said, “she is.”
Did he detect a stiffness in her tone? The obscure change in her confused him, and he wondered if he’d tread on unsettled ground. But if she had a problem with her mother, why were there so many pictures of the woman sitting around the room? Kyle decided he must be mistaken. He tried again.
“I can see now,” he commented, “where you get your beautiful green eyes. Yours are the image of your mother’s.”
Cindy abruptly sat down on the sofa, a tiny, dubious frown planted in her brow. “You really think so?”
> The vulnerability he heard in her tone had him homing in on Cindy’s blatantly self-conscious expression. A realization hit him like a stone right between the eyes.
She really is unaware of just how beautiful she is, he mused.
Kyle smiled, deciding that the trait was attractive indeed. Very attractive.
“I really think so,” he assured her. “I really do.”
Her mouth cocked up at one corner—a tiny movement that he found utterly sexy—and she murmured a soft thank-you. However, it was clear from the tone of her voice, the lowering of her eyelids, the very set of her body, that she didn’t believe a word he’d said. He wanted to reiterate, to make her understand that he was telling her the truth. She was a beautiful woman in her own right. She was attractive. Desirable. But to press the point would only make them both feel awkward.
Glancing over at the photos he’d been looking at, she said, “I just wish my mother could have been a little more interested in being a parent and a little less concerned with attracting all her friends.”
The bitterness coating her tone as she emphasized the final word made Kyle frown.
“We could have survived just fine without them,” she continued. Then her voice unwittingly lowered to a whisper. “All I ever wanted was someone to love me. To support me.”
The disclosure took Kyle aback. Her statements were complex, and extremely revealing. So complex and revealing, in fact, that Kyle was sure he’d never grasp all of the complicated implications at which she was hinting.
Like a powerful magnet, the empty spot on the couch next to her pulled at him. He crossed the room and sat down; then he took one of her hands in his.
Knowing it was unnecessary for him to ask her to elaborate, he simply waited. She didn’t disappoint him.
“I guess you could call my mother a...socialite.”
He felt a small shudder course through her and he got the distinct impression that Cindy was embarrassed by the admission.
“All through my childhood, her only concern was what she looked like,” Cindy said. “And who she was with.”
The Boss and the Beauty Page 8