Man vs. Socialite

by Charlotte Phillips

  But he didn’t. He just stood there.

  Silence. Except for the sound of the printer, relentlessly spitting out pages. Max hadn’t looked in that direction yet, but he would.

  Breathe. Think. Breathe.

  She needed a distraction. Something dramatic, to keep his attention from straying over there. Something like...throwing up—if only she didn’t have a stomach like cast-iron. Or fainting—which she’d never come close to. Or maybe a heart attack. That was at least a possibility, because her heart was jumping around in her chest so vigorously she thought it might crack a rib.

  And then it registered. He hadn’t noticed what was happening over at the printer. He hadn’t noticed her technically perfect in-tray slide. He hadn’t even noticed her ‘good morning’.

  Because he was too busy noticing her hair.

  Oh, my God.

  Her hair. She raised a hand, touched the loose waves. Felt her eyeballs bug out behind her glasses.

  Shock, horror, as it all came rushing back.

  Last night. Being so carried away with her writing she hadn’t made it to bed until four. Causing her to sleep through her alarm. No time for breakfast. No coffee. Ergo, no wits. Therefore deciding there was no harm in coming to work au naturel today.

  Just one day—no biggie, because Max was out of town so it didn’t matter.

  And yet...here he was.

  And here she was.

  At least a disordered version of herself, with swathes of her luxuriant reddish-brown hair, usually ruthlessly disciplined, waving around her face. Wearing a figure-hugging black knit top instead of one of her usual white shirts. Minus the drab cardigan she normally wore—because why swelter in black knit and a cardigan in a Sydney summer, when Max was out of town and wouldn’t see her?

  And then Max’s eyes dropped to her chest and Catherine lost it.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Max asked simultaneously.

  ‘What do you mean, what happened to me?’

  ‘What do you mean, doing here? I work here! I own here!’

  Distract, distract, distract.

  Catherine arched an eyebrow. ‘Oh, do you work here? I’d forgotten, it’s been so long.’

  They stared at each other.

  The click and whirr of the printer continued, depositing pages, layer upon layer.

  At last Max flicked a glance at it. ‘What the devil are you printing, anyway?’

  ‘A document,’ Catherine said, and only just managed not to wince at the inadequacy of that.

  ‘Oh, a document. Enlightening.’

  ‘You want me to show you?’ Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. She was an idiot.

  He tilted his head, curious. ‘Do you want to show me?’

  Catherine opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  ‘No? Hmm... Not moonlighting, are you?’ Max asked.

  Moonlighting... Not exactly. But she’d be damned if she couldn’t build on that as a worthy diversion. She was desperate enough to try it, anyway, in the absence of something more dramatic—meteorite destroying planet Earth, maybe?

  She straightened in her seat, nice and huffy. ‘You’re the moonlighter.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  She flared an outraged nostril. ‘You’re doing my job.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Aren’t I supposed to make your travel arrangements?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t see—’

  ‘Well, I didn’t make your travel bookings two weeks ago, and I didn’t change any of your bookings, and yet you were gone, and now you’re here, so...?’ She raised her hands, palms up, shrugged.

  He looked suitably—if uncharacteristically—flustered. ‘I just— It just— Look, when I changed my plans there wasn’t time to bother you, so I did it myself. It’s called being considerate.’

  ‘Mr Rutherford, I like to be kept busy at work.’

  ‘Miss North, I will keep you busy.’ His eyes strayed towards her chest again, widened fractionally, and then jolted straight back to her face. ‘At work,’ he tacked on quickly.

  Catherine gritted her teeth. ‘It’s Ms!’ she said, wishing she could cross her arms over her chest, but scared it would draw his attention back there.

  ‘No, actually, it’s Catherine and Max,’ he said testily. ‘I keep telling you it’s not the nineteen-sixties, so knock it off. Seriously, you make me feel a hundred and two instead of thirty-two.’

  He didn’t wait for a response—luckily, because she didn’t have one. Just muttered something unintelligible and grabbed the hefty report from her in-tray.

  ‘I have some notes to give you on this Queensland business, among other things, so come in and we’ll see about ensuring you have something to do. If you have the time, that is, Ms Catherine.’

  And at last he strode into his office.

  Danger averted.

  Catherine suddenly felt like laughing—partly because the sudden release of tension was such a relief, and partly from the sheer absurdity of that scene. Perhaps the most absurd so far in her four months at Rutherford Property—and there had been plenty.

  She and Max had the most ridiculous boss-employee relationship. It felt like a theatre production, with each of them playing a role: her the prim, often outraged spinster—which she most definitely was not—and Max the irascible autocrat. And she was pretty sure that was one big, tough-guy act.

  Max thrived on people speaking their minds—mainly because it allowed him to do the same. It made for some hair-raisingly direct and unceremonious exchanges of opinions. It also made work both unpredictable and fun. Catherine figured that was how Max had slipped past her defences; it was just too hard to keep your distance from a boss who actually wanted you to be insubordinate.

  ‘Cathy!’

  ‘Yes—coming.’ Ruthlessly morphing back into strait-laced assistant mode, Catherine grabbed her compact out of her bag to check her face. She wanted so badly to at least fix her hair. Well, she would just have to be extra buttoned-up tomorrow, so Max would think today’s unprofessional appearance was a figment of his imagination. And she would not make the mistake of coming into the office minus her camouflage gear ever again.

  ‘How long are you going to keep me waiting?’

  Max’s bark brought her thoughts to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Just one minute,’ Catherine said soothingly as she turned off the printer as a shortcut to stopping the job—a feat she accomplished with such suddenness a page jammed.

  She cleared the paper tray, swearing under her breath with a fluency that was very unlike Ms North Prudish Secretary—but she was stressed, dammit! She looked like this, Max was waiting, she was wasting precious moments unjamming the printer, and she had yet to save the changes she’d made to her manuscript and get it onto the flash drive and off the screen.

  At last the sheet pulled free.

  ‘Catherine!’

  ‘Two seconds.’

  She spun towards the computer, but before she could lower a finger towards the keyboard she heard the unmistakable sound of Max cursing as he pushed back his chair.

  He was always so impatient!

  Reacting on instinct, she simply hit the off switch, trusting the computer to do a back-up save. Then she pulled out the flash drive and thrust it to the back of her top drawer, snatched up her notepad, grabbed a pencil and hurried towards Max’s office—managing to run straight into him.

  Catherine was too shocked at the sudden contact even to recoil as Max’s hands shot out to steady her.

  It was the first time Max had touched her—and the fact that it was purely accidental did nothing to stop the heat that sizzled through her body in a fierce surge.

  For one moment Max
froze. Then his hands dropped. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I told you I was on my way in,’ she said, staring at his chest so he wouldn’t see how rattled she was. ‘You didn’t have to come barrelling out like a rodeo rider on a bull.’

  ‘You were taking too long.’

  ‘You’re too impatient,’ she said.

  Pause. And then, ‘What’s so interesting about my shirt?’

  Catherine sucked in a breath, thinking fast. ‘Actually, it’s your tie,’ she said.

  ‘Is there something wrong with my tie?’

  She managed a sorry-but-you-did-ask look up. ‘Yes. It’s mauve. Isn’t mauve a bit poncy?’

  He hooted out a laugh, and Catherine’s breath became all jammed up because she wanted to laugh, too, whenever he did.

  ‘Ouch! Weight-lifting tonight, then, to get my macho back.’

  Another laugh. Delighted.

  Catherine’s fingers went for the top button of her shirt—her first line of defence in reminding herself of exactly who she was in this office. But, encountering skin above fine wool instead, her fingers hovered there ineffectually.

  ‘No button today,’ Max observed. His eyes followed her hand as it fluttered up to her earlobe, searching for her second line of defence. ‘And no little gold hoops. What are you going to do now?’

  Well, what she was not going to do was get into a discussion about the way she looked! ‘Work, I assume, Mr Rutherford,’ she said.

  ‘Max,’ he said.

  Catherine blinked at him. ‘I know what your first name is.’

  ‘Then use it, dammit.’

  Catherine’s resistance to calling her boss by his first name had become quite a bone of contention. It just felt too...too personal. And she didn’t like personal in the office. Personal could move into unsafe territory if you weren’t on your guard. And she was already teetering on the edge with Passion Flower.

  But she decided not to antagonise him with another ‘Mr Rutherford’ for the rest of the day.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Max.’

  He looked shocked for a moment—but then he nodded, satisfied. Too satisfied.

  ‘But please don’t swear at me,’ she added, very saintly, and almost gave herself away by giggling as his satisfaction gave way to bemusement.

  ‘But I didn’t sw—’ He broke off, and slowly his bone-melting lopsided smile appeared. ‘Oh, the “dammit”.’ He laughed. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re really as twinset-and-pearls as you’d have me believe, Cathy.’

  ‘Twinset and pearls?’

  ‘Prim and proper.’

  A strangled sound escaped Catherine, and Max looked at her sharply.

  She quickly schooled her features into an appropriately offended expression. ‘I do own a twinset and pearls, actually,’ she said, with the hint of a sniff. Of course nobody who’d seen her fire-engine-red cashmere twinset had ever described it as anything other than ‘hot’. And the pearls were exotic black pearls, interspersed with eye-popping turquoise.

  They’d been given to her on her twenty-first birthday, five years before, by her hang-gliding, motorbike-riding brother, Luke, and had cost half the impressive advance he’d received for his second crime novel. To describe those pearls as anything other than dazzling would be ludicrous.

  Max dipped his head in that way he had when he wanted to look her in the eye. And look he did—as though trying to dive into her brain through her pupils.

  ‘I wonder why that’s so amusing to you?’ he asked softly. ‘And what you’re not telling me?’

  Any desire Catherine had to giggle was gone. Sucked out of her by the arrested tone of Max’s voice. His utter stillness. That look... So intense...

  As though he knew...

  No, he couldn’t know.

  Not about her. And not about the book. She’d been so careful to look like, act like, be the quintessential strait-laced wallflower. She’d even changed her perfume from dark musk to lemon-scented, to reinforce the impression that she was tart and astringent and not to be touched. And the book was nowhere to be seen. Safely secret.

  So if Max thought he was going to dig below her carefully constructed surface with a keen look and a so-soft question he had another think coming.

  ‘Shall we get started?’ she asked briskly.

  But Max’s eyes had dropped, all the way to her feet, and Catherine almost groaned. She’d stuck her nail through her last pair of black tights putting them on in a rush this morning, and—of course—hadn’t wanted to take the time to stop and buy more on her way to work. So her legs were bare, and she’d gone all ‘what the hell?’ and was wearing open-toed shoes, with her red toenails on display.

  ‘Huh,’ he said, as if he was saying it to himself.

  Catherine fought off a blush. ‘Well? Shall we? Get started?’

  Max shoved a hand through his already dishevelled hair. His hair was regularly subjected to an unceremonious scrabbling of his hands through it. When he was thinking hard. Or coming up with a brilliant idea. Or exasperated. Or bored. Or... Well, anything.

  ‘Yes, if you can hurry the hell up,’ he said, and went striding back into his office.

  For the next hour Max talked. About the company’s diamond-themed African development, new hotel and shopping complex in Canada and eco-resort in Brazil. Catherine knew how Max worked—his rhythms, his style, his expectations—and could second-guess him as she made notes about actions he wanted put in place, meetings to be arranged, documents to chase up. She took a little old-fashioned dictation for some correspondence, but Max always expected her to finesse his letters using her own words, so she didn’t get too strict with the transcribing, even though she was pretending to get every single syllable verbatim—because that way she could keep her eyes very deliberately on her notepad, and off her boss.

  Which was not easy. Because Max was drop-dead gorgeous.

  Just under the too-tall threshold, with the promise of athlete-grade strength under his immaculate suits; black hair on the long side, and always, always bed-head tousled; vivid blue eyes fringed with thick, black lashes; that lopsided grin that would turn a female ice sculpture into a puddle.

  The whole package—the looks, the sense of humour, the ace brain, and that elusive factor X that made him seem unattainable without any apparent aloofness—was droolworthy.

  There was a good side and a bad side to having a hot-as-Hades boss.

  The good side? Max had women throwing themselves at him with a frequency and ardour that was embarrassing. He didn’t have to grope or flash or proposition an unwilling employee to get his sexual thrills. And what a blissful realisation that had been after the hell of her last boss—the despicable RJ Harrow.

  But the bad side—and it was very, very bad!—was that a month into the job Catherine had started wondering what Max would do if she groped or flashed or propositioned him! And she just could not get her head around how she could think like that. The last thing Catherine needed was another boss-related fracas, ending in her ignominious departure from a job she was good at.

  Not that Max would ever give her the chance to grope or flash or proposition him. Because he might be the flirt of the century—as the whole office knew!—but Catherine North wasn’t his type. Tall, leggy, blonde—dared she say horsey?—that was his type.

  She swallowed a giggle as she pictured the shock on Max’s face if starchy-knickered Ms North were to roll a prurient eye in his direction. They’d need a defibrillator! Or maybe she could give him mouth-to-mouth...

  ‘Something funny, Cathy? Because you’re allowed to laugh here, you know.’

  She looked up. ‘Nothing’s funny.’

  He did that through-the-pupils stare, then leaned back in his chair and loosened his tie with three sharp tugs. ‘Onto the problem child—Kurrangii, our luxu
ry resort in Queensland.’

  He nudged the report he’d taken from her in-tray earlier and smiled at her—and Catherine’s heart started knocking into her ribs again as she hastily dropped her eyes and started taking notes.

  ‘Our’ luxury resort. And it did feel as if it was theirs—his and hers—because they’d worked so closely on it together.

  That night two weeks ago, when they’d stayed late to finish preparing the main report, Max had loosened his tie with those exact three tugs. Her memory of that night was so clear. Just the two of them, bouncing ideas back and forth, writing and rewriting. They’d ordered in Thai food and worked while they ate. It had struck midnight, but they’d worked on. Neither of them had been happy with the end result, so they’d decided to call it a night and do it all over again the next day—into the night if required.

  But Max hadn’t turned up the next day. Or the next, or the next, or... Well, he hadn’t shown up until today. And in the interim the only contact they’d had was via email or through his deputy, Damian.

  It had driven Catherine a little bit crazy.

  She’d figured she had two options for dealing with the situation: she could gnash her teeth at her own stupidity for mooning over her boss, of all people—and, moreover, one who liked tall, skinny, amenable blondes, not short, curvy, argumentative brunettes—or she could take affirmative action to get her out-of-control hormones back in their cage before he returned.

  In the end she’d gone hybrid and started writing Passion Flower. A teeth-gnashing way of exploring her secret fascination with Max and hopefully getting it out of her system before she did something really insane—like throwing herself at him and begging him to take her on his desk.

  Ooohh, a desk scene! Could she write that...?

  Catherine realised Max had finished dictating and was sitting there, watching her, and closed her notepad with a snap.

  ‘So, Cathy...’ he said.

  His voice sounded raw, and Catherine’s mind switched instantly to the job. ‘You need water,’ she said, standing. ‘I’ll get it.’