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Was it only six hours ago she’d loved her job? Right now she’d happily flip flapjacks at the local diner. At least those people would appreciate her efforts.
She blew a strand of hair off of her forehead, just as there was a knock on her door. “It’s open,” she said, with not much conviction.
Tina walked in. Just who she wanted to see. The voice of doom and gloom.
“We have a problem.”
“This is news? What now?”
“Lionel De Wynter’s personal assistant has just run off with the pool boy.”
“They’re supposed to run off together. It’s in the script. Maybe they’re rehearsing?”
“If they are, they’re really into their roles. They just called from Las Vegas.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Let’s do the same thing. Blow this pop stand and head to Vegas.”
Meg tsked. “You have no imagination. We can get through this.”
“Tell me how.”
Meg looked at Tina speculatively. “Feel like playing the part of a personal assistant?”
Tina’s hands raised defensively, and she began backing up slowly toward the door. “Not a chance, boss. I’m the behind-the-scenes person, remember?”
Sighing, Meg closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. There had to be a solution. One just wasn’t popping into her head at this very moment.
Tina squeaked, and Meg glanced up sharply. Apparently an obstacle at the threshold to the office had blocked Tina’s escape.
That obstacle had gorgeous brown eyes and dark hair and a mouth that screamed “kiss me.” Especially when he had that lazy smile tugging at his lips.
“Excuse me,” Tina managed, then ducked under Mr. Rossi’s arm and skedaddled. That was kind of a strange, skittish reaction from fairly bold and stoic Tina. And it kind of irritated Meg that this man could intimidate her assistant like no one—not even Meg—could.
Rossi glanced to his left, watching Tina make good her escape, then turned back to Meg. With a barely concealed smirk, he strolled toward the desk. Raising his eyebrows at all of the pages littering the desktop, he drawled, “Problems?”
“Nothing we can’t handle,” she said, trying to keep a defensive, hysterical tone from her voice.
“I hear my personal assistant jumped ship.”
“Are you always into eavesdropping, Mr. Rossi?”
“Only when I happen to be standing at an open door, trying to get your attention.”
Meg sighed. “Yes, we lost a couple more to the whims of passion.” She snorted. “Never have seen the merit in that, but what can you do?”
“I know what you can do.”
Meg’s heart tripped a little, because the instantaneous list of things she’d like to do were a little scandalous. And shocking to even herself.
She swallowed and tried for bland. “Really? What would that be?” She picked up her water glass and sipped.
“Why don’t you play my personal assistant?”
Water splooshed all over her desk, and she choked.
The man moved quickly around the desk and began thumping her back. “You all right?”
Meg grabbed tissues from a box and wiped her watering eyes, then mouth, then the surface of the desk. “Sure. Fine. Really.”
He stopped thumping her, but began stroking her back in what should have been a soothing manner, but was failing miserably at soothing her.
His huge hands were warm and gentle and whispered seduction, even in such an innocent act.
Meg didn’t even like this guy. Even though he’d agreed to step in and help out when he didn’t even want them here, he was just an additional monkey wrench in what was turning out to be a disastrous venture. He wasn’t the enemy—Meg didn’t believe in having enemies—but he wasn’t a friend, either.
So why was his touch so electrifying?
Meg wasn’t into being electrocuted, either.
Finally she stood to get away from the current. “You’re joking, right?”
“Why not? You have to be around all the time to oversee things anyway. If you’re not part of the action, you’re merely a distraction. Do it.”
“Mr. Rossi—”
“My name is Matt. Call me Mr. Rossi one more time, and I’m tossing all of your butts out of here.”
She’d be mad, but she couldn’t quite get there when he was smiling. “Fine. Call me Ms. Renshaw one more time and I’ll personally rewrite this so that it’s your personal secretary who gets to kill you off.”
“Does that mean you’ll do it…Meg?”
She chewed on her lower lip. “Fine. Actually, it does make some sort of sense.”
His smile grew wider, and his eyes sparkled. “Great. This should be fun.”
Meg clamped her jaw shut to keep it from dropping. He actually sounded like he meant it. “I sure hope so,” she finally managed.
He leaned toward her, and she had to drop her head back. That’s when she noticed just how tall he really was. She was not a short woman.
“So tell me, Meg, am I sleeping with my personal assistant?”
4
“SINCE WHEN is the personal assistant sleeping with De Wynter?” Tina asked Meg, reading through the player profiles.
Meg never blushed. She prided herself on that. So she was certain the heat in her cheeks was simply from the heat in the room.
“You’re blushing, Meg.”
“I, umm, just thought I’d add a twist to the, umm, dynamics.”
“Right.”
Until this moment, Meg had been happily deluding herself into believing that she’d added that element just to throw off Mr. Matthew Rossi. He’d been irritating her all last evening with lists, acting like he was organizing this event instead of she.
But if she were to be brutally honest, a niggling of a fantasy had crept in to her obviously—yet heretofore unrealized—warped mind. The thought of having an affair with the man was…
Ridiculous. This wasn’t like her at all. One time she’d read a study that most men sized up women within seconds of meeting them and classified them as “yes” or “no” in the sexual sense. She’d snorted at the time. Men. It figured. She knew it had taken one look at Christie to make Mike decide a walk down the aisle with Meg wasn’t in the plan. Well, no matter. Good riddance to Mike.
She couldn’t exactly feel that way about Christie, though, considering Christie was Meg’s sister. And Meg was long used to Christie stealing Meg’s boyfriends. It just would have helped if Christie hadn’t decided to do the stealing a day before Meg’s wedding.
Then again, after the wedding would have been worse. So Mike and Christie had done her a favor. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.
Men were basically dogs, but women sometimes helped by wagging their tails just right.
Yet, here she found herself doing almost exactly that. Not that her sizing up Matt Rossi sexually happened in the first couple of seconds. Well, maybe. But she shouldn’t be thinking of him in that way at all. There was nothing redeeming about him save his looks—that short, dark, mussed hair with those intense brown eyes—and she hated that this alone was enough to make her think lascivious thoughts.
Meg went for the mind. She didn’t think about men that way until she found their brains sexy. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.
Until Rossi.
This was an aberration, she decided. One she could just brush aside. He might be intelligent, but in a really annoying way. His brain was not sexy. So being hot for that gorgeous body was a rare, stray, hormone-charged anomaly. That was her story and she was sticking to it.
“When you drop down from the clouds, let me know,” she vaguely heard.
Meg shook her head and looked up. Tina was grinning. That was ominous. Tina never grinned unless she’d just kicked a guy between his rocks and his hard place.
“I was just thinking about a new plot twist,” Meg said.
“Like doing it with the murder victim?”
“Tina—”
“Just an observation,” Tina said, examining her nails.
“Well, observe something else.”
“Like how gorgeous Mr. Murder is?”
“Is he? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Oh, good. Then you won’t mind if I flirt with him a little.”
“Do it and die, babe.”
“Ha! I knew it!”
Meg was mortified at her knee-jerk reaction. “I’m just saying don’t mess with the guests.”
“Right.”
“Do you want to mess with me right now? And I might mention I’m PMSing.”
“I’m out of here.”
“Good decision.”
The problem was, Meg wasn’t PMSing. Unless PMS stood for “Please, Matt, Sex.” Which was dumb as dumb could be. Sure, he was good-looking. But he was also infuriating. The man had walked in and honestly believed he could take over. Just because he owned the place, he thought he could just waltz in and take control.
Control. That was the word. He was into control. Which made him so unappealing in the sexiest kind of way. Her father had been a control freak, too. Until her mother had died when Meg was ten, Jeanie Renshaw had been a buffer between father and children. But once she was gone the household had become a boot camp. And Meg had been the designated sergeant, being the eldest.
Learning to improvise had been so necessary. Checklists and protocols had become evil before she’d even turned into a teenager.
A rap on her office door brought her head up and her brain down from the clouds of memories. She looked at Mr. Checklist himself, standing in the doorway, busy scribbling notes on a legal pad. Great. More lists.
Meg took a moment to realize she didn’t appear all that professional in jeans and a Black Death European tour T-shirt. But they were under the gun and she had to be prepared to do anything from paperwork to housework.
She sighed. “Don’t come in, Mr. Rossi.”
“Too late,” he said, strolling through the door.
She didn’t think she could stuff that legal pad down his throat, but she’d love to give it a shot. “Look, you’re the dead guy. You’ve got one major speech and then you’re gone until you return as the ghost. From then on, you wing it. We’ve been through this.”
“I think we should be caught making love before the murder.”
Meg was never speechless. Right now her vocal chords had gone south. “Huh?” was about as much noise as she could conjure.
He looked at her with something very akin to pity. “You. Me. In bed.”
She needed to swallow. In fact, breathing might be a good idea, too. Fantasizing was out of the question, even if her brain was malfunctioning and doing it anyway.
“I’m—” she kind of squeaked, then cleared her throat “—not sure why that’s necessary.”
“Because we’re having an affair,” he said, tapping his notes. “We need to be caught.”
“I’m not certain that’s necessary,” she repeated. Although it sounded fun in theory.
He sighed and dropped his pad on the desk. “Do you want this weekend to be successful?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then it needs to have a little ‘oomph.’”
She swallowed. Hard. “Oomphing” sounded a little naughty. And nice.
“And you have to kill me.”
