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“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 (#u13d10844-1cb2-5208-84ec-41c7ee6a77a2)
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.
She’d lingered in the window until his cell phone rang and in answering it, he turned and his gaze lifted to meet hers.
Instantly, Natalie stepped back, face burning at being caught out ogling him. She nearly tripped over Herbie in her haste to retreat to the kitchen where she poured herself a tall glass of ice water which she drank right down.
She stayed well away from the window after that, not venturing near until the sun had set and the world was completely dark.
The next day she didn’t see him at all. She got back to the apartment shortly before suppertime, expecting that she might run into him in the patio and steeling herself for the encounter. But he was nowhere to be seen, and the boards were stacked in the garage, still awaiting stain.
The next evening she didn’t see him, either.
Her mother rang that night. “I would have called sooner,” she said, “but I didn’t want you to think I was hovering.”
Natalie smiled. “Thank you for the vote of confidence.”
“So how are things going? Does Herbie miss me?”
“Of course. But things are fine. Herbie is thriving. The plants are surviving.”
“Of course they are,” her mother said with quiet satisfaction. “I knew I could count on you. How’s Christo?”
“What?” The unexpectedness of the question made Natalie’s voice crack.
“I wondered how Christo was coping,” Laura said. “I know you aren’t feeding him dinner, but I thought you might have talked to him, found out how things are going.”
“He doesn’t appear to be starving,” Natalie said drily. “So I assume he’s getting nourishment.” But then, because she knew her mother would wonder at her edgy tone, she said, “I really haven’t seen him to talk to, Mom. Only once, the day I got here.”
“Well, I hope things are going all right at work,” her mother said. “The temp who usually helps out is working elsewhere. So I had to train another woman before I left. It should be fine,” she said, but her voice trailed off and she sounded a little worried.
Natalie steeled herself against it. “You’ll have to ask Christo about that,” she said briskly.
“I have,” Laura said. “I called him tonight. He said everything was under control.”
“Then you should believe him.”
“I know. I do.” A pause. “But he sounded—I don’t know—stressed. I hope he’d let me know if it wasn’t all right,” Laura added pensively. “Oh, drat. There’s the bell again.”
“Bell?”
Her mother let out a weary sigh. “Your grandmother has a bell. She rings it when she wants something.”
“Let me guess. She wants things often.” Natalie smiled at the thought of her imperious grandmother ringing a bell to make her mother jump. It would delight the old lady no end.
“Every other minute,” Laura concurred. “Coming, Mother. I’ll give you a call in a few days,” she said to Natalie. “Wish me luck.”
Natalie hung up and was silently wishing her mother luck when there was a knock on her front door.
She opened it to find Christo standing there, still in the dark trousers and long-sleeved dress shirt he would have worn to work. The top button was undone, his tie was askew, and he had his suit coat slung over his shoulder.
“Your mother says you run a rent-a-wife agency,” he said without preamble.
Natalie blinked in surprise. But she stopped herself before she wetted dry lips. “That’s right,” she said.
“Do you rent office personnel, too?”
“Office…”
“I need someone to take your mother’s place.” His jaw worked.
“I thought everything was under control?”
When he narrowed his gaze at her, Natalie shrugged. “I just got off the phone with my mother. She said she’d talked to you and that you said everything was fine.”
“I lied.” He dropped his jacket over the porch railing and raked fingers through already mussed hair. “They didn’t work out.”
“They?”
“The first one was bossy to the kids. Acted like she was some damn mother superior.”
Kids? It took Natalie a moment to realize what he was talking about. When she thought about Christo she generally still thought of him at her father’s firm, but of course he wasn’t there. He’d left not long after she had at the end of that summer to go off on his own—to start his own practice in which he focused on family law. Because of Jonas? She’d often wondered. But of course she’d never found that out.
Now he said, “I sent her back, and they sent me another one. One your mother hadn’t trained,” he added grimly. “And she cried.”
“She cried?” Natalie echoed.
“A lot. Every time she couldn’t find something.” He ground his teeth.
“Every time you yelled at her?” Natalie guessed.
“I didn’t yell. I was very polite.”
She bet he was. Icy politeness from Christo Savas would be far worse than being yelled at. “And she left?” Natalie guessed.
He shook his head. “I sacked her, too. And today they sent two others, but they’re hopeless. I sent them back. And the agency doesn’t have anyone else. Not until next week. Lisa can come on Thursday. She knows the office. She’s worked with your mother. She’s worked with me. But I can’t put the office on hold until Thursday. And—” he paused and rolled taut shoulders as if doing so would loosen the tension in them “—I can’t tell your mother. She’d come back.”
She would, too. Natalie knew it. “She might be glad to,” she ventured with a slight smile.
Christo’s brows raised. “She would?”
“Yes.” Natalie sighed. “But she can’t. She needs to be there. To get Grandma through this and capable of being on her own again.”
He grimaced. “That’s what I thought, why I lied. Why I don’t want to call her back. So…do you have someone? Just through Wednesday.”
“I’ll check,” Natalie said.
And there it was again, lighting his face—the heart-stopping grin that had seduced her once before—the drop-dead-gorgeous, Christo-Savas-thinks-you’re-wonderful smile.
“Terrific,” he said. “Just send her to my office tomorrow morning by eight-thirty. I’ll get her up to speed. Thanks.”
He knew it was a long shot, asking Natalie to supply a secretary. He didn’t want to ask her for anything. He’d been vaguely distracted ever since she’d taken up residence at Laura’s place.
Not that he’d seen her—except for when he’d caught a glimpse of her in the window of the apartment when he’d been sanding the bookshelves. But she’d disappeared instantly, as if she had no more desire to see him than he did to see her.
Good, he’d thought. But that had been before he’d run out of office help.
He couldn’t believe the agency didn’t have anyone else. More likely they just didn’t have anyone he wouldn’t make cry.
Laura never cried. Laura was as tough—and compassionate—as they came. There was nothing she couldn’t handle—not his most difficult clients, not cantankerous judges or demanding opposing counsels, not irate parents or Christo himself when his own mother or father breezed in to complicate his life.
