Reckless (Benson Security 1)

“Julia?” His lazy baritone with its curling American vowels made her mouth go dry.

She saw his feet appear as he strode through the doorway. He stopped on the other side of her U-shaped desk, which she’d positioned unconventionally. Instead of fitting the U part into the corner, she’d put her chair there and fit the desk around her, making a kind of desk fort.

“Julia.” There was clear confusion in his voice. “Are you under the desk?”

Honestly, if her face burned any brighter her whole head would combust. She cleared her throat, but her voice still came out as the timid squeak she hated. “Yes. I’m…fixing cables.” Lame! “What can I do for you Joe?” Unreasonably terrified that Joe would crouch down to check her excuse, or worse, offer to help her, Julia started randomly unplugging everything in front of her. She heard her computer beep then die. Great. She really hoped she hadn’t just lost the work she’d been doing.

“Can you come out for a minute? I’ve got some hard copy files on Abramovich that I need to go over with you.” Joe sounded amused. Julia wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that right now. It’s essential that I get this wiring sorted. Just put everything on the desk and I?

??ll send you an email about it later.” She held her breath, waiting for his response.

The man moved. The desk creaked and from the angle of his shoes, she thought he might be perched on the edge of her desk.

“I can wait until you’re done.”

Julia didn’t use swear words, but she thought this might be a good time to start.

“I realise your time is valuable.” She aimed for a bland, professional tone that in no way made the man realise that her heart stuttered any time he was in the room. “I may be down here some time. There’s no need to wait. Please, leave the files.”

The desk creaked some more. Julia tried hard to use her non-existent x-ray vision to see what he was doing. It didn’t work.

“I have to say, Miss Julia, you look mighty fine in that skirt.” It was a teasing drawl that took a second to register.

Then it did. Julia’s head twisted to look behind her. Sure enough her backside was sticking out from under the desk.

“Joe!” She scrambled to get her whole body under the damn thing. With a desk this size it should have been easy, but it wasn’t. As soon as she got out from under it, she was calling the Granger boys back in and demanding they remove the side drawers. That way, if this ever happened again, she’d fit under the desk on the first try.

She resisted the urge to thump some sense into herself by banging her head on the floor. She’d actually caught herself planning to hide under her desk in the future.

“Julia, baby, we talked about this.”

Joe’s voice was soft, compassionate even. It made her bite her bottom lip to stop from sobbing. Stupid, stupid behaviour. She knew it and she still couldn’t seem to stop it. Dealing with two eccentric old men was one thing—dealing with Joe Barone was something else entirely. Something she wasn’t ready to do. Something she might never be ready to do.

“You can’t keep hiding from the people you work with,” Joe said gently.

Julia wanted to protest that she didn’t hide from all of them. Just the really scary ones. The ones that were too demanding, or too loud, or too masculine. Okay, that was pretty much everyone who worked for Benson Security. She wondered again if she should just quit this job while she was still partly sane and go to work for a nursing home. Or better yet a petting zoo. She could deal with animals. Animals didn’t intimidate her to the point of making her hide.

Joe let out a heavy sigh. The desk creaked again as he stood. “Okay, we’ll let it go this time, but there’s gonna come a day, Jules, where I’m not going to let you run and hide. You hear me?”

“I’m neither running, nor hiding. I’m fixing cables.” She told herself it wasn’t really a lie because now she really did have to fix cables.

“I’m leaving the files on your desk.” He walked to the door. “And Julia, I think I’m a little bit in love with the skirt you have on.”

With that the man sauntered away. Julia sat on the carpet with a thud. She placed her hands to her burning cheeks and closed her eyes. Normal. All she wanted to be was normal. Because a normal girl wouldn’t have hidden from a man like Joe Barone. No, a normal girl would have smiled and flirted. A normal girl would have known how to tease a kiss from a man with lips like heaven.

Unfortunately, Julia would never be a normal girl.

Chapter Five

They were meeting Johnny Rotten in a dark alley. Of course they were meeting a guy called Johnny Rotten in a dark alley. Megan rolled her eyes. Obviously Johnny went to the TV movie school of how to be a bad guy.

“You stay here.” Dimitri pointed at a dumpster. Yeah. A dumpster. She half expected some guy with a camera to shout cut and make them start again.

“You don’t mean in the dumpster, right?” Because—eew!

“No. Beside it. In the dark.” He didn’t even try to disguise that he was losing patience. “Don’t move, don’t make a sound, don’t interrupt.”