Case for Seduction

When he looked at her, she felt hot.

When she looked at him, she felt breathless.

Not a good combination if she wanted to keep her head, was it?

When you looked like Jake Hamilton, she wondered, was it really your fault that women trailed you the way rats trailed the Pied Piper?

No, she decided.

But that didn’t mean she had to be a rat.

“What’s your name?” Jake demanded.

“Charlotte Evans.”

“What are you doing here?”

Thanks for the reminder, Jake.

He still had no clue that they’d been working in the same building for years. She still meant nothing to him. Never had, never would.

“I work here,” she said flatly.

Those brows lowered, creating a thundercloud effect that would have been pretty funny under any other circumstances. He cocked his ear, probably to make sure it wasn’t playing tricks on him.

“You—” he began, faltering.

“Work here, yes,” she finished for him. “For two years now. In the secretarial pool. Thanks for remembering.”

“Now that the introductions are finished,” interjected Roger, “I’d appreciate it if I could finish up my conversation with Charlotte, okay? Thanks.”

Jake stilled, except for the tightening of his jaw, and focused all his fierce energy on Roger.

Roger blinked, looking away first with a huff of impatience.

“And you are?” Jake asked in a tone appropriate for asking a dog why he was pooping on his freshly shampooed carpet.

“Roger Miller.”

They did not shake hands, which was probably for the best. There was so much negativity in the air at the moment that any physical contact between the two men would probably lead to an arm-wrestling contest followed by the snapping of someone’s arm as it broke in two.

“And why are you here, Roger?” Jake’s voice was silky smoothness over a layer of unyielding granite. “Interrupting my employee’s workday and upsetting her?”

Roger’s lips thinned. He opened his mouth to say something that would probably be pissy if not outright rude, but there was a new interruption.

Small footsteps raced up the hallway from the kitchen, and Harry, now holding a to-go coffee cup that thankfully had a lid on it, ran into view. Please, God, she prayed, do NOT let this child drop his drink on this expensive rug.

“Look, Mommy!” In his typical greeting, Harry launched himself at her legs, giving her a quick, one-handed hug before holding up his arms and demanding to be lifted. She obliged, settling him on her hip. “I have a chocolate milk-a-ccino. Taste it!”

He offered the cup, which was smeared with something that may once have been chocolate but was now disgusting.

She tried to look rueful as she declined this generous offer. “Maybe in a minute, Harry.”

Harry, luckily, rarely stayed on one subject long enough to get his feelings hurt. “Who’s that?” He pointed a fat and smudgy finger at Jake.

“That’s my boss, Mr. Hamilton,” she told Harry. “I work for him.”

Harry gave Jake an appraising look. “I’m Harry. I’m four.” He held up four fingers.

“Nice try.” Charlotte adjusted his fingers down to two. “You know how old you are. Stop trying to pretend you’re older.”

Harry scowled at her for calling him out, and then sipped his milk in what he apparently thought was a dignified manner.

The weight of Jake’s gaze felt as though someone had covered her face with a lead blanket. Deciding that she’d avoided the moment long enough, she hitched up her chin and looked at him over Harry’s head, feeling defiant.

His reaction to this news that she was a single mother—he’d figure out that she and Roger had never been married soon enough—didn’t matter to her. Of course it didn’t. If people judged her harshly, then that was their problem, not hers. She loved Harry, who was the pride of her life, and anyone who thought less of her personal situation was a moron. And her life was too full and busy to waste time with morons.

It was just that she’d had a few painful and best-forgotten experiences with men who had wanted to date her, found out she had a kid, then took the next train to I’m outta here, never to be seen again.

Jake’s expression was still. Dark. Utterly unreadable.

They stared at each other for one lengthy and terrible moment before Jake broke free of whatever had him in its grip. Something about him eased up, making him much less forbidding, and he studied Harry for a second or two.

Harry, all wide-eyed and fat-cheeked behind his cup, stared back.

“So you’re two, eh?” Jake’s lips curled into a half smile. “That makes you old enough to get a job, doesn’t it, little dude?”

Harry darted Charlotte an incredulous glance and squealed with laughter. “A job? No way!”

“Well, you’re welcome to hang out at the office for as long as you need to, anyway. Kids are always welcome here,” Jake informed him.

Charlotte’s jaw dropped.

“We’ll find something for you to do, okay?” Jake continued. “God knows some of the lawyers around here aren’t that much smarter than you. How does that sound?”

Harry grinned, revealing his tiny set of perfectly white teeth. “Great. Yay!”

With a definitive nod, Jake adjusted his cuffs and spared Roger a sidelong look that was none too warm. “I’ll let you two wrap things up.” He paused. “Quickly.”

“Thanks,” Charlotte said.

Jake leveled all of his attention on her, which gave her the uncomfortable sensation of being a butterfly pinned to someone’s board.

“I’ll need to see you in my office,” he said as he strode off. “Five minutes.”

Chapter 3

Jake planted his palms on his desk and leaned into it, struggling to master his thoughts. His thoughts did not want to be mastered. They were, in fact, spinning out of control, as though his head had become a child’s top, ricocheting off walls and furniture legs with no sign of stopping.

After a weekend of high agitation, no sleep and stalking the Starbucks for any sign of her, he’d found his mystery woman.

Well, found wasn’t exactly the right word, was it?

He’d stumbled on to his mystery woman.

He’d discovered that his mystery woman was no real mystery, after all.

She’d been working right here, in this very building, under his very nose, for the past couple years, and he was willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that he’d never seen her before in his life, because how could he have ever laid eyes on a woman like that and forgotten her?

He must have, though.

Which made him a dumbass.

A blind dumbass, to be precise, and that was not a good feeling.

Shit.

Sudden exhaustion made him slump into his leather chair.

Renewed agitation made him get back up again and pace.

Charlotte Evans. A firm employee. And since he was a partner in the firm, that made her his employee.

A man couldn’t go around lusting after his employees, not unless he wanted to get sued for sexual harassment. And if he did enter into a discreet, consensual relationship with Charlotte—a big if, considering he didn’t know the status of her relationship with Dr. Punko out there—word would get out. Word always got out. And what would happen then? Office morale would plummet, for one. And his family would hand him his head on a platter for introducing his personal drama into the workplace, for another.

Double shit.

So where did that leave him?

Screwed, that’s where.

Because he thought about Charlotte Evans, firm employee. He saw her eyes when he didn’t want to. Heard her laugh when he wanted silence. Had been haunted by her all weekend.

Wanted her.

After about the tenth lap of his office, he wore himself out and rested a hip on the edge of his desk. And what about—

There was a soft knock on his ajar door, and Charlotte poked her head inside. “Hi.”

Snapping to attention with an abrupt spike in his pulse rate, he stood. “Come in.”

“Come on, little man.” Tugging Harry’s hand, she ushered him inside the office and tried to steer him toward the tufted leather sofa against the far wall. “I want you to sit right here and be very—”

But Harry had seen the large jar of M&M’s on Jake’s desk.

“Candy, Mommy!”

“Not a chance,” she told him.

No worries. Harry wheeled around, spotted the giant aquarium of tropical fish and plants and veered in that direction with a shout of surprised delight that made Jake grin. “Look, Mommy! Fish!” Harry raced over and pointed at the orange one with black and white stripes. “And look! There’s Nemo! Hi, Nemo!”

Charlotte shot Jake an apologetic look. “Harry ends every sentence with an exclamation point, in case you hadn’t noticed. Don’t tap on the glass, Harry. It disturbs the fish, okay?” It didn’t seem to matter, though, because Harry now had both palms and his nose pressed up against the aquarium and was in toddler rapture, murmuring to the fish. “Sorry about the fingerprints,” she told Jake, lowering her voice. “And I told Roger that I couldn’t have Harry here, but—”

Jake raised a hand, stopping her. “It’s okay. Kids are welcome here.”

“That’s very nice of you, but it’s a law firm, and Harry has no idea what an inside voice is. Oh, and he left a half pound of M&M’s in the potted plant in the reception area, and his typing sucks.”

Jake laughed.

“So I need to get him out of here. And I will. I just need to—”

“I didn’t know you had a child.”

Jake resisted the urge to clap his hand over his big mouth. Whoa. Where had that come from? And why had he said it, even if he was thinking it? He did, thankfully, restrain the follow-up question on the tip of his tongue, which had to do with Harry’s father—who was clearly a punk ass if ever he’d seen one—and whether he and Charlotte had an ongoing romantic relationship.

None of his business, he knew, even if the curiosity was gnawing on his guts with sharp little teeth.

Those striking eyes of hers turned flinty. “Among other things you didn’t know about me, yes.” She seemed to regret her words immediately, because she fidgeted on her feet, checked her watch and then shot a quick glance at Harry to make sure he was staying out of trouble. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I have a brief to finish typing and it’s got to be filed by noon, so I really need to—”

“Yeah. About that.” Jake waved a hand at her employment file, which he’d grabbed from their HR person and flipped through in the past few minutes. “I didn’t know you graduated from Penn with a degree in international relations. Which makes you uniquely overqualified for the typing pool here at the office.”

A subtle flair of panic crossed over her features but, to her credit, she quickly mastered it. “Yes, but I need the full-time work and the benefits are good. I have a mouth to feed. I need a job. I need this job.”

Admiration tugged at his mouth, making him want to smile, but he stifled it because he didn’t think she’d appreciate it. “You don’t get it. Keeping you in the typing pool isn’t making the best use of your talents, which is foolish. And I may be blind, but I’m not foolish.”

She gave him a narrow-eyed stare of suspicion. “You’ll have to help me out here. What does that mean?”

“It means that I’m making you my new paralegal, effective immediately. Thereby sparing myself the time and trouble of interviewing more people. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the candidates I’ve seen so far, and it’s been a month since my old paralegal relocated to Boston.”

Charlotte blinked at him, working hard to get her jaw up off the floor. “But—”

“Which means that you get the office next to mine, which has a TV in it for viewing video depositions, but you can use it to let Harry watch kid shows while he’s here.”

Charlotte rubbed her temple and took a moment to get her thoughts together.

“But—” she repeated weakly.

“Mommy!” Harry jumped up and down, pointing into the tank. “It’s a starfish! A STARFISH, Mommy!”

“Wow. I see it,” she answered before turning back to Jake. “What’s going on? I don’t understand this at all.”

Yeah. There was a lot of that going around, apparently, because Jake didn’t understand his attraction to this woman at all, or his strange compulsion to help her out where he could and make her complicated life a little bit easier. Oh, and he also didn’t understand how he thought he’d work closely with her without falling deeper into lust, but he figured he’d tackle that hurdle one day at a time.

“All you need to understand is that I’m giving you a promotion to a job that’s much more educational for a law student. Which comes with a fifty percent raise, by the way. But if you think you’ll miss the tedium of typing for eight or nine hours every day, then feel free to refuse, and I’ll continue my search for a good paralegal. It’s entirely up to you.”

She hesitated.

“Mommy? Mommy! Can we get a fish tank for my bedroom?”

Charlotte rolled her eyes, but Jake wanted to share a high five with the little guy for helping him make his case. Kids were expensive, weren’t they? They needed and wanted things, like food, shoes and fish. A paralegal could afford many more kid things than a secretary could, and Charlotte was more than smart enough to know it.

And if dangling this tempting offer in front of a mother’s nose made Jake a bit of a devil, well, that was a charge he could live with. To get to know her better he could live with it, no problem.

And the fact that he was lusting after a woman who was a mother? Also no problem, he discovered to his own surprise.

However, the fact that he was simultaneously thinking about how he could get closer to Charlotte while issuing himself stern warnings about staying the hell away from her...well, that was a problem.

A big freaking problem.

An even bigger problem was that, the longer he stared at her, the less he cared about problems, big or otherwise.

She was severe today, with her glorious hair scraped back into a bun at the nape of her neck that should be forever consigned to grannies and librarians. Plus, she was buttoned down into a navy blue suit that was so drab it made Jake want to find the designer and bludgeon him.

Even so, there was no hiding the curve of her hips or the hint of cleavage up top. Her long and sexy legs ended in a pair of pointy nude heels, the kind that were a gift to men everywhere, and her ass, in that straight skirt, was nothing short of spectacular.

Her face was tight, her lips thin and her eyes stormy as she struggled with her dilemma. And right there, served up on a silver platter for him, was the answer to one of the questions that had plagued him all weekend.

The prickling electricity he’d felt between them? She felt it, too, and she knew it could very well lead to something complicated...but interesting.

Why else would she hesitate to accept such a great promotion?

Maybe the gentlemanly thing to do would be to give her the promotion as some other attorney’s paralegal. He could snap his fingers, and it would be done.

Too bad he wasn’t feeling gentlemanly.

He was feeling hot and bothered, and he suspected he’d feel that way for a while. Why? Because the only cure he could imagine was unbuttoning all that armor she wore and getting inside her. And, much as he wanted to do just that, he was still rational enough to know it was a bad idea.

But he was feeling pretty irrational, too. “Ticktock,” he murmured, tapping his watch.

The storm behind her eyes had turned to a glare, and her chest was heaving up and down, which was quite the sight to see, even if her ugly jacket blocked the view. She stepped closer, ready to go toe-to-toe with him, even if he was her boss.

He liked that.

“And what’s in it for you?” she demanded, low.

He shrugged. “A good paralegal, I hope,” he said, keeping his tone silky. “What else?”

“You hit on me the other day. Back when you had no idea who I was. I know it doesn’t mean anything, because you probably hit on every woman who stands still long enough for you to ask her what her sign is—”

He scowled. For one, this assessment of his, uh, exuberant dating life cut a little too close to the bone, frankly, and, for another, his fascination with her bore no resemblance to the passing lust he felt for pretty women in general, which disturbed him.

“—but I’m not trying to be the victim of any sexual harassment. So, like I said Saturday, I don’t think our spending time together is a good idea.”

“I’m a professional, Charlotte. Have I done or said anything inappropriate this morning?”

“No, but—”

“You think I want to ruin my career with sexual harassment allegations?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Or maybe you think I’m so taken with you that I can’t think straight or tell right from wrong.”

Her defiant gaze wavered and fell. “Of course not.”

Ironic, eh? His thinking didn’t feel straight at all right now. Good thing she had no idea how his hands twitched for the feel of her.

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