His Christmas Acquisition (11 page)

Jamie found that she was holding her breath.

‘So you’re never going to get married? Have kids? Become a grandfather?’

‘If I do, it will be on my terms to someone who is willing to take second place to the fact that my primary concern is being one-hundred-and-ten-percent hands-on with my company. There’s nothing that goes on at RS Enterprises that I
don’t know about. That situation exists because I make sure that I never let my attention slip.’

‘Lucky lady, whoever snaps you up,’ Jamie murmured with sarcasm and Ryan released her and laughed softly and appreciatively.

‘I date women who understand where I’m coming from.’

‘Was Leanne the exception?’

‘Leanne knew the score the minute she became involved with me. I’m honest to a fault.’ He couldn’t read a thing in the cool, brown eyes assessing him. He continued, irritated by what he took to be silent criticism from Jamie. ‘I never make promises I can’t fulfil and I never encourage a woman to think that she’s got her feet in the door. I don’t ask them to share my space. I discourage items of clothing from being left overnight at my apartment. I warn them that I’m unpredictable with my time.’

Jamie marvelled that he could still think that just because he laid down ground rules hearts would never be broken.

‘Maybe you should tell your mother that.’ Jamie snapped out of her trance and broke eye contact with him. ‘Then perhaps she would stop cornering you with awkward questions.’

The shutters were back down. Ryan wondered whether he had imagined that response he had seen in her. Had he? Disconcerted, he frowned and half turned away.

‘Maybe I’ll do that.’ He smiled at her with equal politeness. ‘Honesty, after all, is always the best policy …’

C
LAIRE
and Hannah, their husbands and children left in a flurry of forgotten stuffed toys that needed to be fetched, a thousand things that had to be ticked off their check list and lots of hugs and kisses and promises to meet up just as soon as life returned to normal. And then they were gone and the house felt suddenly very quiet and very empty.

In two days’ time, Ryan would take one plane to Florida while she took another back to England and Vivian, his mother, would stay on for a further week, joined by several of her friends for their annual bridge holiday.

With Vivian excusing herself for an afternoon nap and Ryan announcing that he intended to work, waving her down when she immediately started to talk about what they would be doing, Jamie found herself at a loose end. For the first time, she realised that it was a relief to have been deprived of her mobile phone. Normally, she would have been following the crisis between Greg and her sister in a state of barely suppressed stress, but without the means of contacting them unless she used the landline, which she didn’t intend to, she felt guiltily liberated from the problem—at least temporarily.

For the first time since she had arrived, she decided to take advantage of the empty swimming pool, and was there
in her bikini with her towel, her sun block and a book within forty minutes.

It felt like a holiday. The pool offered spectacular views of the sea and was surrounded by palm trees and foliage, ripe with butterflies and the sound of birds. Jamie lay down on her sun lounger and let her mind wander, and every one of its meanderings returned to Ryan. His image seemed to have been stamped on her brain and she wasn’t sure whether that had always been the case or whether it was something that had occurred ever since some of the barriers between them had been eroded. Had she been sucked into his charming, witty, intelligent personality without even realising? Or had all that charm, wit and intelligence only begun working on her once he had uncovered some of those private details that she had striven so hard to keep from him?

She had been determined never to repeat the folly of getting personally involved with the boss. Falling for Greg had been a youthful indiscretion and she could now look back on that younger self with a certain amount of wry amusement, because her crush had been so
harmless
.

This situation with Ryan was altogether more dangerous because Ryan was just a more dangerous man. There were times when she physically reacted to him with something that was unconscious and almost primitive in its intensity, and when she thought about that she wanted to close her eyes and faint with the horror of it.

In comparison, her silly infatuation with Greg was exposed for what it had really been: something harmless that had occurred at just the time she had needed it. An innocent distraction from the stress and trauma of her home life. She had taken refuge in her pleasant daydreams, and her working life, which had involved spending hours in Greg’s company, had been a soothing panacea against the harsh reality
that had been waiting to greet her the second she had walked back through the front door at the end of the evening.

Greg had been kind, thoughtful and gentle and he had been a buffer between herself and the disappointment of having to give up on her dreams of going to university.

Ryan, however …

Yes, he was kind and thoughtful and gentle. She had seen it in a thousand ways in his interaction with his sisters, his mother, his nephews and nieces. But he was no Greg. There was a core of steel running through him that made her shiver with a kind of dangerous excitement that enthralled and scared her at the same time. When his dark eyes rested on her, she didn’t feel a pleasurable flutter, she felt a wild rush of adrenalin that left her breathless and exposed.

It would be a relief to return to England. She hoped that Greg and Jessica would have sorted out their differences by then, but even if they hadn’t she would still be returning to the protection of the office, her colleagues and the self-imposed distance between boss and secretary. Out here, a million miles away from her home territory, it was too easy for the lines between them to be eroded.

She flipped over onto her stomach, but even after half an hour, and with her sun protection liberally applied, Jamie was beginning to feel burnt. The sun out here was like nothing she had felt before. It was fierce and unrelenting, especially at this hour of the day. When she tried to read her book, her eyes felt tired from the white glare and after a while she dragged the wooden lounger under the partial shade afforded by an overhanging tree.

Then, when she began feeling uncomfortable even in the shade, she dived into the pool. Pure bliss: the water was like cool silk around her. She began swimming, revisiting a pleasurable activity which she had indulged only occasionally
in London, because her working hours were long and she just never seemed to find the time.

Like a fish, she ducked below the surface of the water, mentally challenging herself to swim the length of the pool without surfacing for air.

Uncomfortable thoughts began to gel in her head as she swam, reaching one end, gulping in air and then setting off again.

She had given up going to the swimming baths because of her work. She had given up going to the gym three times a week because of her work. She made arrangements to see friends in the evening but had often cancelled at a moment’s notice because Ryan had needed her to do overtime. She had thought nothing of it.

She had assumed herself to be a goal-focused person. She had patted herself on the back for being someone who was prepared to go the distance because she was ambitious and worth every penny of the three pay rises she had been given in the space of eighteen months. She had never thought that maybe she had gone that extra mile because she had enjoyed the opportunity of being with Ryan. Had she been the ever-obliging secretary because, without even realising it, she had wanted to feed a secret craving? Had she been smugly pleased with herself for having learnt a lesson from her experience with Greg, only to be ambushed by repeating her mistake without even realising it?

That thought was so disturbing that she was unaware of the wall of the pool rushing towards her as she skimmed underneath the water. She bumped her head and was instantly shocked into spluttering up to the surface.

When she opened her eyes, blinking the water out of them, it was to find Ryan leaning over the side of the pool like a vision conjured up from her feverish imagination, larger than life.

He was in his swimming trunks, some loose khaki-coloured shorts with a drawstring, and his short-sleeved shirt was unbuttoned.

Jamie was confronted with a view of his muscled, bronzed torso, which was even more disconcerting than the bump on her forehead.

‘What are
you
doing here?’ she gasped, in the flimsy hope that her fuddled brain was playing tricks on her.

‘Rescuing you again. I had no idea that you were so accident prone.’ He reached out his hands to help her out. Jamie ignored him, choosing to swim to the steps in the shallow end and sit there, half immersed in the water.

‘What were you thinking, swimming like greased lightning and not bothering to judge how far away the wall was?’ Ryan shrugged off his shirt and settled into the water next to her. ‘Here, let me have a look at that bump.’

‘Let’s not do this again,’ Jamie snapped, touching the tender spot on her head and wincing. ‘My head is fine, just as my feet were fine when I fell yesterday.’

‘Bumps to the head can be far more serious. Tell me how many fingers I’m holding up.’

‘I thought you were working,’ she responded in an accusing voice, watching out of the corner of her eye as Ryan lounged back against the step behind him, resting on his elbows. His eyes were closed, his face tilted up to the sun and, like an addict, Jamie found herself watching him, taking in his powerful, masculine beauty. When he opened his eyes suddenly and glanced at her, she flushed and looked away.

‘I
was
working, but I couldn’t resist the thought of coming out here and having a dip. I didn’t realise that you were such a strong swimmer.’

‘Were you
watching
me?’

‘Guilty as charged.’ But he wouldn’t let on for just how long. Nor would he let on that he had felt compelled to follow
her out to the pool. For once in his life, he hadn’t been able to concentrate on work. Watching her from above as she had whipped like a fish through the water had mesmerised him. Her bikini was a modest affair in black, the least obviously sexy swimsuit he had ever seen on a woman, and yet on her it was an erotic work of art. Sliding his eyes across, he took in the generous cleavage and the full swell of her ripe breasts—more than a generous,
very generous
, handful.

Just looking at her like this, with sexual hunger, was playing with fire. Ryan was getting dangerously close to the point of no longer caring whether she was his perfect secretary or not or whether going to bed with her would be crazy or not.

‘Have you been in touch with your sister?’

‘Have you forgotten that you broke my phone?’

‘You’ll be amply compensated for that the very second I get back to England. In fact, you’re authorised to use company funds to get yourself the best mobile phone on the market as soon as
you
get back to England. No stinting!’

‘That’s very generous of you.’

‘Well, it was my fault that you dropped your phone and broke it, although strictly speaking you should have listened to me in the first place and used the landline.’

‘Funny the way you cause me to drop my phone and break it and yet it’s still my fault.’

Ryan gave a rich chuckle. ‘My mother says that you’re the only woman she’s ever met who can keep me in line. I think it was the way you accused me of cheating at Scrabble last night and insisted I remove my word and take a hefty penalty. And, hearing that acerbic tone of voice now, I’m inclined to agree.’

‘And
I’m
sure that all those other women you dated would be inclined to disagree!’

‘Have I ruffled your feathers? It was meant as a compliment. And just for the record, all those other women I dated were perfectly happy to let me take the lead. I can’t think of any of them keeping me in line.’

‘You haven’t
ruffled my feathers
! And if any of them had worked for you …’

‘Worked
with
me. We’re a team, Jamie.’

‘Well, whatever. If any of them had worked
with
you, then they’d find out soon enough that the only way to survive would be to try and …’

‘Take control? I never thought that I would enjoy a woman who took control, bearing in mind my own disposition, but spending time with you here is certainly—’

‘Useful!’ Jamie interrupted hurriedly. ‘I really hope that you’re managing to accomplish all the work you set out to do.’

‘It gets on my nerves when you do that.’

‘When I do what?’

‘And don’t try that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-mouth routine. You know exactly what I’m talking about. The second the conversation veers off work, you frantically start trying to change the subject.’

‘That’s not true! I’ve chatted about all sorts of things with your family.’

‘But not with me.’

‘I’m not paid to chat about all sorts of things with you.’ Jamie desperately tried to shove the genie back into the bottle.

‘Are you scared of me? Is that it? Do I make you nervous?’

Jamie suddenly bristled. ‘No, you don’t make me nervous. But I know what’s going on here—you’re not accustomed to lazing around for days on end. I haven’t known you take more than a weekend off work in all the time I’ve known you.’

‘You’ve actually noticed?’

‘Stop grinning! You’re out here and maybe a little bored, so you’re indulging yourself by … by confusing me.’

‘Am I? I thought I was trying to get to know you.’

‘You
already
know me.’

‘Yes. I do, don’t I?’ Ryan murmured softly for, thinking about it, he did. Not the details; he had only just discovered that she had a sister. But he knew
her
in a weird sort of way. Working so closely with her, he had somehow tuned in to her personality. He knew how she responded to certain things, her mannerisms, her thoughts on a whole range of subjects from remarks she had made and which he had clearly absorbed over time. All this had built a picture lacking only in the detail. Like an itch he couldn’t scratch, the thought of the vet being the privileged recipient of those details niggled at the back of his mind like a nasty irritant.

‘As much as you must know me, my conscientious little secretary, which means that you must know that I don’t want you holding off on contacting your sister because you feel awkward using the telephone here. Unless, of course, you don’t want your conversations with the vet overheard by anyone. Or maybe you’re embarrassed to be caught playing long-distance counsellor with a married man.’

‘That’s totally uncalled for!’

‘Every time I mention the guy, you look guilty and embarrassed. Why is that?’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I have eyes in my head. I’m telling you what I see.’

‘You have absolutely no right to make suggestions like that!’

‘I take it that’s the guilt talking, because you sure as hell aren’t answering my question. Was there something between the two of you?
Is
there still something between the two of you?’

‘That’s an insult!’ Jamie pushed off from the step and began swimming furiously towards the other end of the pool, her one instinct just to get away from him.

She knew that he was right behind her when she reached the other end and heard the sound of him slicing through the water, but she refused to look around.

‘Greg is married to my sister!’ She fixed angry eyes on him as soon as he was next to her. ‘There is
nothing
going on between us.’

‘But he wasn’t always married to your sister, was he? In fact,
you
knew him before your sister did. I saw the way you looked at him when he came through your front door on Christmas day …’