Out of Hours...Office Affairs: Can't Get Enough / Wild Nights with her Wicked Boss / Bound to the Greek

“Fine. Can I have my office back now?”

He sounded bored. Her back went up again like clockwork.

“Of course. Just say the word,” she said, aware her voice came out hard and tight.

“I thought I did,” he drawled.

She blinked at him, aware that his casualness had caught her on the raw. Just when she thought he was a decent human being, he had to go and be like this.

She heard a heavy sigh from him behind her as she headed for the door.

“Claire, hang on a minute. About last night—” he began to say, and she realized with horror that he was about to offer her some sop for not calling.

“It’s fine, Jack. Already forgotten,” she said briskly.

“I want to explain. I just think that you’re—” he tried again.

She spun around, desperate to stop him from saying something about how mistaken she was, how she’d misunderstood him. “Forget it. Okay? I wish the whole thing had never happened. Enough said.”

He held her gaze for a moment, and she hoped she looked suitably indifferent. If humiliation resembled indifference in any way, she figured she had a chance.

“Your call,” he said, and she shot him a look. Had he meant to choose those words, exactly?

Impossible to tell. She attempted to reassemble a little dignity and self-respect around herself.

“I’ve got a meeting scheduled with Hillcrest tomorrow at ten,” she said coolly, already turning toward the door.

“Fine. I’ll be there.”

She paused on the threshold of his office.

“And please wear a tie. Hillcrest is a traditional man.”

“Hillcrest will have to learn to loosen up a little. Do him good.” He had a dangerous, indolent air, along with a definite “give it your best shot” glint in his eye.

She took a deep breath and reached for some patience. “Jack. Please. Just once. Is it so painful to be conventional, even for just five minutes?”

He shrugged, oozing innocence from every pore. “Hey—I don’t even own a tie. So it’s irrelevant.”

She made an exasperated noise in the back of her throat. He was laughing at her again, leaning against his desk, his broad shoulders silhouetted against his stunning corner-office view.

“Fine. Come in your best holey T-shirt and grass-stained jeans, forget to shave, stink of beer and scratch your furry face through the whole meeting. See if I care.”

With that, she wheeled out of his office, slamming the door behind her. Or at least trying to. Except it had one of those nifty pneumatic door closers on it, and all she got was a bit of kickback when she tried to force the mechanism.

She could still hear his laughter when the elevator doors closed on her. She headed straight for the ladies’ room on her floor, and once she was in the safe confines of a private cubicle, she leaned against the wall and threw her head back, closing her eyes against the cocktail of emotions waiting to swamp her.

She felt so weak. Hadn’t last night taught her anything? Intellectually she knew that Jack was a disaster area, a no-go zone, even though she’d already been there. But her body could not resist him. Just thinking about how he’d smelled, and the heat of his body against hers when he hauled her close to staple her cleavage—it was enough to get her hot all over again. Claire glanced down and saw that her nipples were stiff and aroused, jutting out against the silk of her shirt proudly. Between her legs, a dull ache throbbed, and she pressed her hand against her mound through the fabric of her skirt.

I don’t want this, she ordered her body. I don’t want to feel this way about Jack Brook! Stop it immediately!

After five minutes of strong self-talk, she emerged from the cubicle. The hectic-cheeked woman who greeted her in the mirror was a stranger, and she shook her head at the gleam of desire that still shone in her eyes.

After a few minutes of wrangling, she managed to extract the staples, but her shirt was ruined. Toying with the idea of sending him the bill, she headed to the nearby shopping mall to find a replacement so she’d be presentable for her afternoon meetings. If only her pride could be salvaged so easily. She had only to remember the way Jack had calmly stapled her to decency to feel a rush of humiliation. She’d spent the bulk of a sleepless night inventing conversations where he explained why he hadn’t called, great excuses that meant she could still indulge the fantasy that she hadn’t behaved like a total wanton in the elevator. Boy, was she deluded. She’d built up this whole…thing between them, imagining a whole lot of stuff she had no business imagining. And all he’d been concerned about was extracting himself from Morgan Beck’s assignment.

They’d been stuck in an airless space for several hours. He’d been bored. They’d shared things they hadn’t told anyone else, and he’d taken what she’d so willingly offered.

Big deal. She was sure that’s what he was thinking. It must have been what he was thinking when he went to tell Beck he wouldn’t work with her. And when he decided not to call her last night, despite what had happened.

Bottom line: in the real world, out of claustrophobic elevators where people were forced to strip down to their underwear, men like Jack Brook did not look twice at women like her.

If only she’d known that before she’d let him slide her bra off and slide himself into her, before she’d had the best damn sex of her life.

Why had she given him the opportunity to reject her?

She had a sudden flash of Jack sitting on high—Zeus on his mountain—laughing at her as she scampered around at his feet like all the other women in his life.

She was walking past a display in the men’s section of a department store, and she almost ran into the young salesman setting it up. She stared down at the colorful array of ties the guy was finessing, and she remembered Jack’s refusal to wear a tie to her meeting with Hillcrest.

Suddenly she saw red. It was her meeting, and her client, and her magazine. And he was working with her. The least he could do was respect her reading of her client’s sensibilities.

Determined now, she turned to the salesman.

“Excuse me. Which would you say is the most conservative tie you stock? The sort of tie a retired banker might wear, for example?” she asked silkily.

“Definitely something with stripes. Or a royal insignia. That always seems to go over well with our older customers.” The salesman helpfully displayed two or three ties for her.

“I’ll take that one,” she said, pointing to the tie that combined stripes with a royal insignia.

And Jack Brook would wear it if it killed her.

8 (#ulink_7676712c-2b51-50d5-80c9-7157dcf85597)

JACK WALKED BACK into his office after his last meeting of the day and groaned at the pile of paperwork Linda had left on his desk: afternoon mail, letters to sign, blah, blah, blah. He sighed heavily and dropped into his chair, swinging his feet up onto his desk as he reached for the pile of mail. His feet knocked something to the floor, and he leaned sideways in his chair to peer around the edge and make sure he hadn’t broken anything.

His stapler lay on its side on the plush carpet, and he stared at it a moment. Unbidden, unwanted, unwise, a Technicolor image of Claire Marsden’s lacy bra popped into his mind. Complete with a memory of how she’d smelled and how she’d felt when he’d pulled her close to remedy the temptation. Because—really—how was a man supposed to have a good, solid argument with a woman when all he could think about was burying his face in her cleavage? And, after that, burying other parts of his body in her, also. He’d been so close to giving in to the need to touch her. If he closed his eyes for more than a heartbeat, images of their time in the elevator flashed back at him. It was the only thing he seemed able to think about. That, and all the other things he wanted to do to her. Once was not enough, he was fast discovering, where Claire Marsden was concerned. At least, that was what his body believed. Intellectually—well, that was a whole other ball game.

Because it was impossible to remember Claire’s spectacular body without remembering her spectacular temper. The spark of remembered lust faded as he recalled her insulting insinuation—that he’d told Beck she wanted him off the magazine. Man, he’d busted his ass being diplomatic with Beck that morning, explaining how he was loathe to work on something he wasn’t truly contributing to, pointing out his work schedule was already very hectic, stressing that Claire was very good and very likely to be able to soothe savage-beast-Hillcrest all on her own.

And she reads that as him setting her up! Which was the problem with her, when he got right down to it. She was always ready and willing to read an ulterior motive into everything he did. More trouble than she was worth.

Insidious and undeniable, the memory of her simple but sincere sympathy for him snuck into his mind. She’d said exactly the right thing, and she’d even anted up with a confession of her own so he wouldn’t feel like a complete dick when the doors opened. So she wasn’t an absolute lost cause….

And then there was the sex. He kept coming back to that. Had he ever been that hot for a woman? Surely in his teens he’d had encounters that were that hot…but he couldn’t quite remember with whom or when. In fact, all past encounters paled into insignificance beside what had happened yesterday. It was even beginning to worry him a little, the way his mind would automatically drift to those few precious memories of the smell of her skin, and the sound of her excited breath in his ear, whenever he let his guard down. He’d nearly embarrassed himself several times in meetings today. One moment he was discussing deadlines and feature stores, and the next he was fighting off sense memories of tanned skin and the wet, voluptuous slide of his body in hers. And as for how his body had reacted when her shirt had popped open…It had been a close-run thing, and he’d been forced to seek refuge behind his desk to hide his desire. The last thing he needed was for little Miss Uptight to know the potential hold she had over him….

He started as Linda stuck her head into his office doorway.

“I’m going now. See you tomorrow,” she said.