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“And as you say, Max is very attractive…for his age.” She giggled again, as if enjoying some private reflection.
“You’re more attracted to me than you are to Max.” He said the words flatly, yet there was a wealth of challenge in them, and he looked at her as if daring her to deny them.
She opened her mouth, then shut it again. She arched her eyebrows at him provocatively. “You think so?”
“You know you are,” he insisted. “There’s been a spark between us since day one.”
This time she opened her mouth and didn’t shut it, still trying to formulate the words. She gave a careless, dismissive shrug. “In your dreams, Savas.”
But Sebastian didn’t wait. “You want proof?” He closed the space between them so that she had to tip her head up to look at him. His mouth was bare inches away. She could see the whiskered roughness of his jaw, could feel the heat of his breath.
She swallowed. She blinked. She waited.
And the next thing she knew Sebastian’s lips came down on hers.
Neely had certainly been kissed before. She’d known her share of masculine mouths, their hard warmth, their persuasive touch. She’d opened to them, dared to taste them in turn. And she’d always been able to keep her wits about her, to think, hmm,kissing is interesting, but no big deal.
All of a sudden, right now, with Sebastian Savas’s mouth on hers, it became a very big deal indeed.
There was the hard warmth and the persuasion. But there was more—a hunger, a need, a seeking, a question looking for an answer.
And her mouth knew the answer even as it asked questions of its own.
It wasn’t just a spark, either. Though she would have had to admit, had she been capable of rational thought, that yes, she’d sensed it, too.
This was far more than a spark. It was a fire, burning hot and fast, fanned to full flame. And the deeper the kiss, the less the fire was quenched. It raged and consumed, hungry and desperate and edging toward out of control.
His arms came around her, slid up her back, drew her closer so that their bodies leaned, touched, pressed. She had never felt like this, had never wanted a kiss to go on and on. Had never kissed without caring where her next breath came from because she knew—she was sharing his.
She lifted her hands and touched his back, his shoulders, the nape of his neck. Her fingers threaded through short crisp hair, then fell to clutch his shoulders as her need spiraled, her hunger grew.
And then, abruptly, Sebastian pulled away to stare down into her eyes, his own lambent with arousal, his breathing harsh. “Does Max kiss you like that?”
Stunned, shaken and absolutely furious—as much at herself as at him, Neely could barely find the words. “No one kisses me like that!”
Sebastian smiled a satisfied feral smile. “So dear Max isn’t perfect after all? I’m not surprised. It’s what you get, trying to get it on with a man old enough to be your father.”
Neely’s heart was still slamming in her chest as she wrapped her arms across it and hoped she didn’t look as rattled as she felt. “I wasn’t trying to ‘get it on’ with Max. We were working.”
“All night?” Sebastian scoffed.
“No, but until two. And then I went to bed. Alone. In the guest room.”
“Yeah, sure. So, you’re saying you’re just friends, is that it?” Sebastian mocked her.
And Neely slowly, firmly shook her head no. “We’re not just friends.” She lifted her eyes and met Sebastian’s knowing look. “He’s my father.”
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_d9d505f9-f537-57ad-a957-3575b4a7e47b)
“YOUR father?” Seb stared at her, poleaxed. His heart hammered, his body clamored, and he didn’t believe a word of it. “He is not.”
“He is. Max is my dad.” Robson insisted, her chin jutting as if she was daring him to take a poke at it.
Seb was sorely tempted, especially after he dragged in a desperate breath and looked at that chin more closely, spying something familiar in the shape of it as he did so.
God Almighty, was she really Max’s daughter? Was that the female version of Max’s chin he was seeing? He stared at her, stunned, still disbelieving.
Robson glared right back, eyes flashing. And the longer and harder he stared the more Seb realized that the color of her eyes was the same stormy blue of the man he’d just accused her of sleeping with.
Oh, hell.
The boss’s daughter. And he had just kissed her senseless.
Worse, it wasn’t only Neely Robson who’d been senseless with desire. He’d been right there with her—wanting her.
And now…now he wanted to kill her.
Ordinarily Seb went to ice when his emotions were frayed. He was all steely coldness when he needed to be. But his emotions were beyond frayed at the moment. And he went beyond ice and straight into meltdown.
“What the hell were you playing at?” he demanded.
“Me?” She arched her eyebrows in a way that annoyed him. As if she had nothing to reproach herself with.
“Never mind.” He cut her off before she could speak. “I know damn well what you were doing! You were baiting me, trying to get me to make a complete ass of myself!”
“You did that all by yourself,” she informed him airily. “And I did not bait you.”
“The hell you didn’t! ‘Max is very attractive…for his age’!” He flung her words back at her in a mocking tone. “That’s not baiting?”
“I was agreeing with what you said. You’re the one who called him a ‘stud’ first. You’re the one who accused me of having an affair with him! You’ve been accusing me practically since the day you met me!”
“And you’ve been acting like he was your long-lost lover!”
“Or my long-lost father.”
She said the words quietly, but Seb was too incensed to care. “You didn’t have to lead me on. You could have said, ‘He’s my father,’ anytime at all.”
“I could have,” Neely agreed. “But why should I?”
“Because it’s the truth!” he shouted.
At the fury of his explosion, Harm put back his head and howled.
“Now see what you’ve done!” Neely dropped to the floor and wrapped her arms around the dog, shushing him. He stopped howling and happily licked her chin.
“I didn’t do anything,” Seb said gruffly. “He was just yelling at you, too.”
“Was not.” Neely’s voice was muffled against the dog’s fur. She hugged him tightly.
Seb scowled down at her, still infuriated. “Stop hiding behind that dog.”
At the accusation her head jerked up, and she threw him a daggerlike glare. But when Seb just stood there staring at her implacably, she scrambled to her feet, threw her shoulders back. “I am not hiding behind anything—not my dog, nor my father. And I did tell you—just now.”
“Thanks a lot,” he said sarcastically. “Thoughtful of you. Got any more…revelations, Robson?” He arched a brow at her. “Is your mother the Queen of England maybe?”
“Who’s baiting whom now? And my mother is exactly who I said she was.”
“A hippie who just happened to have a fling with the most uptight workaholic in the western hemisphere?”
“She had a relationship with Max. They lived together.”
Seb’s eyes widened in surprise.
“They did,” Neely insisted. “They were young,” she said. “And in love.”
“Sure they were.”
“See?” Robson pretended to pout. Aiming those moist, luscious lips at him. “There you go again, making judgments, jumping to conclusions! That’s exactly why I didn’t say I was Max’s daughter in the first place. If I had, you would automatically have assumed that he’d given me the job because he’s my father.”
“And he didn’t?” Seb asked sceptically.
“No, he didn’t. He didn’t give me my job at all. He’s not even the one who hired me. Gloria Westerman in personnel hired me.”
“You never met with Max?”
She folded her arms across her chest now and leaned back against the bar between the kitchen area and the living room. “I never met with Max.”
“But you knew he was your father.” It wasn’t a question.
Robson nodded. “Yes, I knew. But he didn’t know who I was at all. I hadn’t seen him in years. We moved to California when I was four.”
“And you never saw him again?”
“Not until November when I came to work. And then I didn’t want him to know who I was. I use my stepfather’s last name. Max didn’t know it. I wanted to make it on my own before I told him.”
Seb rubbed a hand against the taut cords at the back of his neck. He was still ticked by her having gulled him with her pretense, but he could appreciate the reason she had given for not telling Max or anyone else who she was. If he was honest, he knew that in her shoes, he’d have been tempted to do the same.
“You’re not telling me he still doesn’t know, are you?” Because there was no way on earth he’d believe that.
“No, of course not. After I won the Balthus Grant and he invited me to work on the Wortman project with him, I knew I had to. If we were going to be working together, I wanted him to know. Besides by then I’d won the grant, so I knew and he knew—and so did everyone else—that I could do the job. See?”
Seb grunted. He rocked back on his heels, muttering under his breath. Yeah, he saw. It made sense, what she’d said. But it still annoyed him.
“You could have told me.”
“Like you told me you were buying the houseboat!”
“That’s not the same thing at all!”
“No? Well, it sure felt like it. One minute I thought I knew what was going on—I was buying a houseboat from Frank—and the next minute you walked in and it was yours! My home belonged to you!” “
Her face flushed again, the heightened color making her more beautiful than ever, and Seb felt an overwhelming urge to stop arguing and kiss her again.
He took one step toward her and she said abruptly, “Stay away!”
He stopped, brows drawing down. “Stay away?”
“Yes.” She wrapped her arms even more tightly across her breasts as if she were cloaking herself in body armor.
He gave her a sardonic look. “You’re going to go all cool and detached and claim that I forced myself on you? Another prevarication, Robson?”
Her lips pressed in a tight line. “I’m not lying, Savas. And I’m not claiming any such thing. But—” and here she shook her head fiercely “—you’re not doing it again.”
“Why not? You liked it. You kissed me back.”
Let her deny that if she dared.
For a moment he thought she might, but then she shrugged. “Yes, I did.”
“So…why stop? Don’t you like kissing? It felt as if you liked kissing,” he told her with a knowing grin.
“Kissing’s fine.” Her voice rose, as if she were going to say more, but in the end, she didn’t. She simply shook her head.
“But…?” Seb coaxed her.
Her eyes flashed. “But there’s no point!”
He could definitely think of a point to a passion as hot as the one that had raged between them. “Seems like we could have come up with one.” He grinned again.
Robson didn’t. “Well, one point,” she allowed. “I suppose we could tear each other’s clothes off and make—have mad passionate sex. But we’re not going to.”
“You don’t like sex?” He’d noticed how she cut herself off, changed what she’d been going to say. Make love.
“It’s fine,” she muttered.
“Ah, kissing’s fine. Sex is fine, but…” he goaded her now. “But what, Robson? You’re frigid? Can’t convince me of that.” His body was still humming from the heat generated by their passion.
“I’m not trying to convince you,” she fired back. “I’m just saying it isn’t happening again. Not with you.”
Their gazes met, locked, battled. Dear God, he wanted to stop fighting with her and take her to bed!
“You wanted me,” he argued.
“I already admitted to that. I’ll say it if you want—my body wants yours.” She flung the words at him. “But I don’t do ‘sex for sex’s sake,’ Savas. I don’t do ‘one-night stands.’”
“No one said anything about one night.”
“I don’t do ‘affairs,’ damn it.”
