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Not to see the man who had been crouched by the fireplace and was now straightening, drawing himself up to his full six feet two inches and staring at her with narrowed suspicious eyes.
Her mouth felt as if someone had suddenly dumped a pail full of sand in it. “Christo?” She barely choked his name out. Then she frowned, too.
Their gazes met, locked. And then, in unison, “What the hell are you doing here?” they said.
“I live here. There,” he corrected, jerking his head toward the house beyond the garden. His gaze went to the suitcase by her feet. “What’s that for?”
The suspicion in his voice rankled. Natalie stood straighter. “I’m moving in,” she said, pleased at how firm her voice sounded. “Temporarily.”
Christo’s brows drew down. “What for?”
“I’m taking care of Herbie. And the plants.”
“Your mother said Harry—”
“Harry broke his leg.”
Now the brows went up. “First I’ve heard about it.” There was clear disbelief in his voice. He rested an arm against the mantel of the fireplace and regarded her doubtfully.
Natalie drew herself together. “Feel free to go over to Harry’s and ask. You might be right. Maybe this is all some great plot of my mother’s to throw me and you together.”
Christo grunted at the scorn in her tone. “She wouldn’t do that.”
“No, she wouldn’t.” Laura might well be thinking that it was a good idea for her twenty-five-year-old daughter to start looking around for a husband, but she wouldn’t meddle. Natalie was sure of that.
“I can feed the cat and water the plants.” Christo’s tone made it sound not like a suggestion. It sounded like an order.
Natalie bristled. She’d already survived the part she wanted to avoid. “I’m sure you can,” she said starchily. “But my mother didn’t ask you. She asked me. And I’m doing it.”
His teeth came together. She imagined she could hear them grinding. Well, so be it.
“So we know what I’m doing here,” she said pointedly. “What about you? You don’t just habitually wander into my mother’s apartment, I hope.”
The teeth did grind, then. “No, I don’t habitually wander into her apartment. I was measuring for bookshelves.” He held out his hand. There was a measuring tape in it.
“Bookshelves?” Natalie echoed doubtfully.
“She’s always saying to me how much she loves this room, but that it would be perfect if it had bookcases on either side of the fireplace.” He shrugged, but also jerked his head toward the space behind him and, studying the space, Natalie could see her mother’s point. His mouth twisted. “A belated birthday surprise.”
Natalie was surprised he knew her mother’s birthday had been last week. “And you were going to have them put in while she was gone?”
“No. I was going to put them in myself while she was gone.”
They stared at each other. An awareness Natalie didn’t want to acknowledge arced between them. It had been there ever since she’d heard his voice and opened her eyes to see him standing there. It was a feeling she’d felt with no one else—ever. Once she’d thought she understood it. Had cultivated it. Relished it.
Now she wanted nothing whatever to do with it at all.
“Well, you can’t,” she said and folded her arms across her chest.
His jaw worked, but he didn’t say anything. Their gazes were still locked and Natalie refused to be the one to look away first. Not this time. She was in the right this time.
“Fine,” he said shortly. “I’ll finish measuring now. I’ll order the wood. I’ll put them up when she gets back, mess up the living room while she’s here.” He turned and knelt back down, ignoring her. In effect, dismissing her.
Natalie glared at his back. Why had she ever thought she wanted to spend the rest of her life with this man? Why had she ever been in love with him?
She hadn’t, she told herself sharply. She’d been infatuated, the victim of a law-school clerk’s foolish crush on a brilliant up-and-coming litigator. She’d been dazzled by his brilliance, his extraordinary good looks, and whatever perverse sexual chemistry had always seemed to hum between them whenever he was in the room.
And the kiss, her mental memory box reminded her. Don’t forget the kiss!
No, God help her, she couldn’t forget the kiss. Try as she would she’d never been able to forget entirely the moment she and Christo Savas had locked lips. It had been the most blazingly hot kiss of her then twenty-two years. The most blazingly hot anything of her entire life—even up to this very moment.
It had been the impulse that had spurred on her unutterably foolish action that night three years ago.
Action she was not about to repeat no matter what Christo Savas thought. And it was no secret, Natalie knew, staring at him now, what he thought.
“All right,” she said abruptly. “Go ahead and put in the bookshelves.”
He was kneeling on the floor, about to measure. But he slanted her a quick glance, and in it she saw the instant wariness she expected.
She gave him a saccharine smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay completely out of your way. Won’t bother you at all. Won’t invite you to my bed and won’t turn up in yours. You’re perfectly safe.” She made her tone sound mocking.
But they both knew she wasn’t mocking him. She was mocking herself, the hopelessly naive girl who had taken a summer’s working relationship, a sense of kindredness that was, in retrospect, obviously one-sided, and a single spontaneous kiss to celebrate a triumph in the courtroom as an indication of something far deeper. A girl who had thought he must love her the way she imagined she loved him—and who had actually gone to his bed to prove it.
She made herself smile and hold his unblinking jade-green gaze, willing him to believe it because, God knew, it was the truth. There was no way on earth she would ever make a fool of herself like that again!
“If you’re sure…” Christo began.
“Of course I’m sure.” She gathered her laptop case and the suitcase up into her arms, fleetingly aware that she was probably using them as armor, even as she carried them into the room. “I was just…surprised to see you. In here,” she qualified because she didn’t want him thinking she’d been intending to avoid him—even if she had been.
She set the laptop case on her mother’s dining-room table. “I’ll just put this away.” She nodded down at the suitcase, then turned toward the bedroom. “And I’ll come back and help you measure.”
“I don’t need any help,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Which meant that, even though she’d pretty much spelled it out, he still didn’t entirely trust her not to fling herself at him even now.
“Fine. Suit yourself.” Natalie shrugged and carried the suitcase into the bedroom, only sagging down onto the bed and letting out a shuddering breath once she got there.
She could, of course, just leave the suitcase on the bed and deal with the contents later. But rushing back into a room where she clearly wasn’t wanted—and didn’t want to be—was not the best idea.
And there was a whole lot to recommend staying right where she was. She could use the time to put her clothes away—and regain her equilibrium in the process.
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.”
