No problem there. He’d spoken to her line manager in the accounts department earlier just in case she did need firing. Fortunately, she didn’t. Her work was superb and she was a reliable, valued member of the team.
‘You’re excellent at your job,’ he said. ‘You’ll pass it. And we crossed the boss/employee line the minute you tried to access the Belle’s Angels site from a computer I own.’
‘Nevertheless, no.’
‘Okay, fine,’ he said, annoyed with himself for pushing it. He wasn’t that curious, dammit. If she didn’t want to tell him, so what? In fact, it was a good thing, because she ought to go. The battle he was having to keep his eyes off her legs and his mind off the rest of her was taking more effort than he’d anticipated. Their business was concluded and, frankly, the sooner he could get back to work, back to normal, the better. ‘You can see yourself out.’
* * *
Kate watched Theo nod in the direction of the door and then turn his attention to whatever was on his computer screen, and thought that if that wasn’t a cue to leave, she didn’t know what was. As dismissals went it was unambiguous. She’d refused to play ball and he’d lost interest. Which was fine. There was no way she was going to share the issues surrounding her non-existent sex-life with her boss, of all people. Imagine the humiliation. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Therefore his cue was one she was going to take. Right now. She was going to get up, waltz out and go home, where she could ponder at length this evening’s whole surreal conversation and, when it came to her money troubles, pinch herself hard.
So why wasn’t she moving? Why did her bottom appear to be glued to the chair? Why was her heart hammering at such a rate it might crack a rib and why was a cold sweat breaking out all over her skin? She couldn’t actually be thinking of telling him what he wanted to know, could she?
No. It was out of the question. Theo Knox was the very last man she ought to want to confide in, although her brother had obviously had time for the guy and he was prepared to come through for Milly so maybe he wasn’t all bad. But that was irrelevant. Spilling her innermost thoughts and fears to him would be insane. Complete and utter professional suicide. Not to mention epically mortifying. Besides, why would she even want to? She shouldn’t. She didn’t.
And yet, to her horror, it was growing increasingly tempting to think to hell with it and throw caution to the wind. She could feel the pressure to do exactly that building unbearably inside her, and the words were on the tip of her tongue, piling up one on top of the other, clamouring for release.
What was going on? she wondered in mounting panic, clamping her lips together as horror thundered through her. Had the stress of everything that had happened lately finally broken her down? Had Theo cunningly deployed some sort of reverse psychology that suddenly had her desperate to share every tiny detail? Or was it simply that now she’d experienced a smidgeon of his interest she wanted more?
Impossible, she told herself as she took a deep breath through her nose and willed the dizziness to subside. That would be utterly ridiculous. She wasn’t that pathetic. She certainly wasn’t so starved of attention that she’d forfeit her dignity and fall on any crumb dropped at her feet.
But when was the last time a man had expressed any interest in her? Ever? Okay, so Theo had made it perfectly clear at Mike’s funeral he wasn’t interested in her like that, and that was fine because it wasn’t as if she wanted him to do anything about her little problem, was it? Heaven forbid. When she did finally get around to losing her virginity she didn’t want him anywhere near her. He was rude, high-handed and unpleasant and made her bristle with loathing, although, come to think of it, it wasn’t loathing she’d been bristling with for the last quarter of an hour. She wasn’t entirely sure what it was, any more than she understood what that charged moment when he’d looked at her legs had been about. The blessed relief that her money worries were over, most probably.
It couldn’t be anything else. It certainly couldn’t be attraction. What a waste of time and energy that would be. Even if she had liked him, Theo Knox was so far out of her league he was on another planet. He was a staggeringly handsome, enormously successful billionaire. She was an inexperienced ordinary woman of significantly above average height, who managed to look passable on a good day in the right clothes, of which, truth be told, she had few since it was expensive to clothe well a body like hers. She was moderately good at her job and reasonably intelligent, but she wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t special. In fact, she was the very opposite of special.
But regardless of her non-specialness, something about what she’d done had caught his attention enough to summon her up here and grill her when he could have just had her fired. And that was more appealing than it ought to be.
And so it seemed that—oh, dear—she was that pitiful and she was that starved of attention, because whatever the cost to her pride she wanted Theo’s interest back. She wanted to matter to someone. It was undoubtedly stupid and she definitely didn’t want to think about what it said about her, but the longer she sat there, the more inevitable it became, the more powerful was the urge to share, and she suddenly didn’t have the strength to resist.
‘Well, if you really want to know,’ she said, vaguely wondering if she hadn’t completely lost the plot, ‘mainly it’s my height.’
‘What?’ Theo snapped as he whipped his head round, his deep scowl clearly indicating his displeasure at her continued presence.
‘It’s my height.’
‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?’
‘Everything.’
‘Why? Lying down—or in most other positions, for that matter—height makes absolutely no difference.’
What?
Okay...
‘Well, naturally I don’t know much about that,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t blushing quite as madly as she suspected and wishing she had stronger willpower. ‘But I hit six foot some time around my fifteenth birthday. I was lanky and clumsy and towered over the boys in my class at school. When it came to adolescent hook-ups they gave me a wide berth. There were plenty of other more normal girls to choose from.’
‘There is nothing abnormal about you,’ he said darkly, his gaze roaming all over her and setting her skin on fire.
‘Others might beg to differ,’ she said, determinedly ignoring it. ‘It was a difficult time anyway. My parents had just died and my twelve-year-old sister was in hospital, fighting for survival. Life as I knew it had shattered. Most people were kind and full of sympathy. Others, not so much. Some didn’t know how to handle it, well, me, really, and teenagers can be cruel, can’t they?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What did they do?’
‘It was more a case of what they said,’ she said, her throat tightening as she recalled the grief, pain and confusion that had dominated her emotions during that time. ‘There were a lot of stupid, nasty rumours going round. A few bitchy comments. On one particularly memorable occasion a boy came up to me and said that my parents must have deliberately crashed because death was preferable to the embarrassment of having such a freak for a daughter.’
There was a pause, during which Theo’s jaw clenched imperceptibly and his entire body seemed to tense. ‘I literally have no words,’ he said eventually.