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She hadn’t wanted to run into Christo at all. She’d done her best to avoid him for the past three years because she still writhed in mortification every time she thought about that night in his apartment.
That night she’d waited for him in his bed.
Even now her cheeks burned at the memory.
That he’d been shocked to find her there when he got home from a business dinner that night went without saying. She’d expected that.
But she’d also expected he’d be pleased. Delighted, in fact. And happy to join her.
Wrong. A hundred thousand times wrong. And if the circumstances had been mortifying, it was how badly she’d misread the situation that she still had trouble facing. She wasn’t used to being a fool.
Well, he needn’t worry, she thought as she got up and began taking her clothes out of the suitcase, hanging them in the closet, trying not to hear every sound he made as he moved in the living room.
She certainly wouldn’t be jumping into his bed again.
But it would be a whole lot easier if her earlier humiliation and subsequent hard-won maturity were complemented now by total indifference to the man in the other room.
Sadly, they weren’t.
Something about Christo Savas still had the ability to make her heart quicken in her chest. His thick dark hair perhaps? His chiseled jaw and sculpted cheekbones? His sharp straight nose and fathomless green eyes? His rangy but muscular body that looked as appealing today in faded jeans and a gray T-shirt as it had in tropical-weight wool suits, starched long-sleeved shirts and ties?
All of the above?
Unfortunately, yes.
But it was even more than that. Always had been.
If Christo’s arresting good looks had first attracted Natalie’s attention the summer she’d been a clerk in the firm where her father was a partner, it had very quickly become more than his hard body and handsome face that held her interest.
His quiet intensity, determined hard work and steel-trap mind were equally appealing. So were his incisive arguments and his way with words. She’d been dazzled by the young litigator and it hadn’t taken long to become smitten.
She’d been raised on the story of her own parents’ courtship and marriage—He was a young lawyer and I was working in the office. It was love at first sight, Laura used to tell her children. So Natalie hadn’t found it hard to believe in a variation on the same theme for herself and Christo.
Bolstered by her own family history, and aware of a certain electricity in the air every time she and Christo Savas looked at one another, Natalie had seen their relationship as fate.
And she’d done her best to make history repeat itself.
It hadn’t been easy. Christo had been consumed with work, not with the summer clerk in the securities department. They had rarely been in the same room as each other, though she did help out with extensive legal research in a securities case he was trying.
She might never have fallen into the trap of her own illusion if she hadn’t found him in the law library late one afternoon flipping through books, and scowling as he made furious notes and muttered under his breath.
“Something wrong?” she’d ventured.
“Not something,” he’d said grimly. “Everything.”
He’d just been appointed guardian ad litem for a seven-year-old boy named Jonas in the middle of a nasty billion-dollar divorce and custody case. “I don’t know anything about family law! I don’t know anything about kids! I don’t even know where to start.”
That wasn’t true, of course. He knew plenty, and certainly enough to figure out where to start. He was just frustrated, overwhelmed. Momentarily vulnerable.
And Natalie, heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings, had offered, “I could do some research if you’d like. On my own time. It would be good practice,” she added, smiling hopefully at him. And then she’d felt it again, that current of electricity arcing between them, when he met her gaze and nodded slowly.
“Yeah,” he’d said. “If you wouldn’t mind. I’ll tell you what I need.”
For the next three weeks, she had worked her tail off for him. Lunch hours, evenings, weekends. She’d spent every waking moment that she wasn’t being a clerk with her nose in a book or scowling at a computer screen scribbling furiously, then reporting her findings to Christo who was almost always in his office just as late.
“You’re a star,” he’d told her when she found some particularly helpful cases. And he’d been almost as grateful for the pastrami sandwiches she brought in because he never took time to eat.
He’d been willing to stop and explain things to her when she dared to ask questions. And sometimes when she found something and let out a little yelp of joy, he’d come over and bend over her shoulder so close that she could feel his breath stir the tendrils of her hair.
“Great. I can use this.” And she’d looked up to see a grin on his face and a determined light in his eye. Once more their gazes had caught and held.
And Natalie had dared to believe.
But she wouldn’t have believed without the kiss.
It came without warning the day he’d got Jonas’s formerly intractable parents to finally see the light and realize it was a child they were dealing with, not a silver service or an Oriental rug. She’d been in the parking garage, heading for her car late that afternoon when he’d got out of his, coming from a meeting about Jonas. She’d paused, waiting for him to get out, expecting yet more bad news. But the look of sheer joy on his face when he shut the door and came toward her was one she’d never forget.
Her heart kicked over. “Did they—?” she began.
The grin nearly split his face. “They did. At last.” And suddenly he was there in front of her, and what had begun as a grin and a high-five turned into a fierce exultant hug.
Instinctively she had lifted her face to smile into his—and they had kissed.
Natalie might have been only twenty-two and not the world’s most experienced woman, but she knew there were kisses and there were kisses.
This kiss might have started out as pure exultation, the shared joy of something going right. But in a second it was something very different indeed. Just as a single simple spark could become a conflagration, so it was the moment their lips touched.
She’d never felt it before.
The kiss didn’t last. Barely a second or two later he let her go and stepped back abruptly, looking around as if expecting to be shot. If anyone had seen them, she knew he could have been—not shot—but facing the wrath of the senior partners and the possible loss of his job.
“You’d better go on home,” he said hoarsely, and without a backward glance he strode off across the garage toward the elevator.
Natalie didn’t move. She’d simply stood there, her fingers pressed against her lips, holding on to the memory, the sensation, the dawning belief that there was substance to the dreams of the future she’d hoped for.
Of course, it had been only a matter of moments. But with one single kiss Christo Savas had nearly burned her to the ground. Even now, running her tongue over her lips, she could still taste—
“Er-mm.”
At the throat-clearing sound behind her, Natalie whipped around, face burning. Christo stood in the doorway to her mother’s bedroom watching her.
“What?” she snapped.
“I’m finished measuring. I’ll order the wood in the morning. Then I have to sand and stain it before I can put it in. I’ll give you plenty of warning.” He sounded very businesslike, very proper.
Exactly the way she wanted him. She gave a short curt nod. “Thank you.” Then, because she knew it was true, and she also knew that, despite her own feelings about Christo Savas, he had done her mother numerous good turns over the past three years, she added, “My mother will appreciate it.”
“I hope so. I like your mother.”
“Yes.” The feeling was mutual. Laura thought the sun rose and set on Christo Savas. She couldn’t understand why Natalie declined invitations that included him.
Still they stared at each other. And there it was again, that damned electricity, that unfortunate awareness. And still he didn’t leave.
Maybe they needed to clarify things further. “My mother said you’d water the plants in the garden.”
He nodded. “She thought it might be too much for Harry.”
“I’m sure she was right. But since Harry’s out of the picture, I can do them. I’m not currying favor—” she said awkwardly.
“Let’s leave it the way she arranged it.”
All lines neatly drawn. Everyone in their own place. “All right.”
At last he turned toward the living room, then glanced back at her over his shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Maybe.” Natalie didn’t move. Watched his back disappear, heard his footsteps recede, the door open and close, the sound of his feet on the steps outside. Only then did she breathe again, and say aloud what she was really thinking. “Not if I see you first.”
Natalie Ross.
As gorgeous and enticing as ever. Right on his bloody damn doorstep.
Christo tipped back in his desk chair, let out a sigh, rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes, then leaned forward and tried to focus again.
It didn’t work. He’d been trying to focus all evening. Ordinarily that wasn’t a problem. He regularly settled down and worked well after dinner when it was quiet and there were no clients in and out, no phone calls, no papers to sign or distractions lurking and he could concentrate.
Not tonight.
Tonight every time he tried to bend his mind around where Teresa Holton’s soon-to-be-ex-husband might have secreted assets everyone knew he had, his mind—no, worse, his hormones—had other ideas.
They wanted to focus on Natalie.
It was because he’d been too absorbed with work lately, he told himself. Except for an hour or so of surfing most evenings after work, he hadn’t taken any time off in weeks. His hormones were feeling deprived as well. It had been two months since Ella, the woman who, for the past year or so, had regularly been the object of their attention, decided she wanted more than a casual no-strings affair.
As Christo didn’t—a fact that he had made crystal-clear from the beginning—he had let her go without a qualm. But he’d had neither the time nor the inclination to look for anyone else since.
He didn’t have the time now.
As for inclination, if his hormones were inclined toward Natalie Ross, too damn bad. There was no woman on earth less likely to want a no-strings affair than Natalie. She was her mother’s daughter through and through.
Though Laura and Clayton Ross were now divorced, it had never been Laura’s idea. It was Clayton who’d run off with the paralegal, leaving Laura, after twenty-five years of marriage, to fend for herself. She had, but she still believed in marriage and babies and forever. So did Natalie. Christo knew it instinctively.
He wanted nothing of the sort.
Resolutely he picked up his pencil again and beat a tattoo on the desktop, trying to stimulate brain cells. But his brain cells didn’t need stimulation. They had plenty, thank you very much. It just wasn’t focused on the Holton case. They had something—someone—else in mind.
As did another part of his anatomy.
Irritated, Christo shoved away from the desk and stood up, flexing his shoulders and pacing around the room.
His office was at the back of the house with a wide window facing Laura’s garden. It was dark now. He couldn’t see the flowers. But if he looked up, he could see the light on in Laura’s apartment. The drapes were pulled, but Natalie could, if she were so inclined, look between them directly down into his office. She could watch him pace.
Christo walked across the room and flipped the blinds shut. He wished he could as easily shut out thoughts of her.
He knew, of course, that Laura hadn’t been trying to complicate his life by asking her daughter to come and take care of the cat and the plants. Laura was as protective of his time as he was himself. More so, in this case, because if she hadn’t been she’d have asked him to take care of the cat and the plants when Harry broke his leg.
Instead she’d asked her daughter.
Of course, she had no idea about his history with Natalie.
Not that there was a history. There had very determinedly—on his part—not been any history at all.
Except for that one disastrous totally spontaneous kiss.
He scrubbed his hands over his face now, remembering it.
He had never done anything so stupid before or since. He’d always been absolutely impeccable in his workplace behavior. And if the parking garage had not been precisely part of the workplace, that was pretty much legal hairsplitting and Christo knew it. Natalie had been working at the firm, and if he wasn’t her boss he was certainly senior on the totem pole—and he damned well should have known better.
He had known better.
It had simply been a combination of joy and relief. And desire.
Time to call a spade a spade. But doing so didn’t make the desire go away. Old memories welled up. He squashed them. Memories of scant hours ago took their place. He resisted them, too.
He prowled some more. He cracked his knuckles, then pressed his palms down against the desktop, hunching his shoulders and staring blankly down at the paper he’d given up trying to make notes on. He couldn’t even see what he’d written so far. Visions of Natalie teased at the corners of his mind.
“Stop it,” he told himself sharply.
It was perverse, this desire he felt for Natalie Ross’s slender yet curvy body—as perverse now as it had been the first time.
Christo didn’t do rampant desire. He liked women—in their place. Which was not in his mind or in a relationship. Only in his bed.
He hadn’t lusted madly after any female since his teens. Now, at the age of thirty-two, he should be well over that sort of thing. He was well over it!
He’d walked away from Natalie Ross once, for God’s sake. He’d done the right thing. The sensible thing. The only thing.
Now he gave up trying to work. He went out the front door and crossed The Strand, dropping down onto the path along the beach and beginning to run.
So, fine. The words pounded in his head as he picked up the pace. He’d resisted Natalie Ross before. He’d simply do it again.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR three days Natalie didn’t see Christo at all.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. She caught a glimpse or two of him in the morning as he headed off to work while she was taking her time, deliberately not venturing out of the apartment, staying in to feed the cat and do some scheduling work on her laptop for the rent-a-wife business she ran with her cousin, while she incidentally kept one eye on the window so she could see when he had left.
In the evening of the second day she saw him down on the patio of the garden sanding the boards that had been delivered for her mother’s bookcases.
That had been more than a glimpse. In fact, she’d stood there, unable to tear her eyes away from the sight of a shirtless Christo Savas bending over a board, a sheen of sweat glinting across his bare muscular back as he sanded the wood vigorously, then straightened and smoothed his hand along the grain.
