Himself, he could do it in either.
Her cheeks flushed prettily and he knew she was headed for one of them, and right now he didn’t care if he’d never mixed business with pleasure before...he wanted to strip her naked and join her.
‘I...’ She cleared her throat. ‘Bed, actually.’
Well, hell, he could be conventional as well. He smiled. ‘Want me to turn down the sheets?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Her haughtiness just inflamed him more. She was so proper. So different from him. ‘I said...’
‘I heard you. And I think you should leave.’
He came toward her and saw her pulse flicker rapidly in the base of her neck. ‘Let’s not pretend, Eleanore. I know you feel the chemistry between us as keenly as I do.’ She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and he wondered if she was turned on already. ‘You want this.’
She let out a startled laugh. ‘Well, no one could ever accuse you of having an unhealthy ego.’
Now that he’d said the words out loud, now that he’d acknowledged that there was something between them, all Lukas could think about was touching her. Tasting her. Taking her.
The fact that she wasn’t his type and that he’d never come on to an employee before no longer seemed relevant. She wasn’t a permanent employee anyway.
‘But you’re wrong.’ She stared at him defiantly. ‘I don’t want you.’
He hadn’t even realised he’d moved closer to her until her clipped words penetrated the lust-filled fog in his brain. He stopped barely a metre in front of her. He wondered what she would do if he took two more steps and backed her against the wall, pressed himself against her and let her feel what state she had put him in all day. ‘Coward,’ he baited softly.
Her eyes narrowed and she moved to put some distance between them. ‘I’m not a coward. And I won’t deny that I find you physically attractive—on some level—but I intend to see a shrink about that as soon as I get back to New York.’
Lukas laughed and wondered if it wasn’t her sassy wit that attracted him as much as her mouth and her legs. Her pert breasts and her smoking eyes. ‘Why not do something about it here?’ he suggested.
‘The language barrier,’ she deadpanned. ‘Your shrinks probably only speak Russian.’
‘I have a better idea than a shrink.’
‘I do too. It’s called you leaving.’
Lukas knew he was stalking her as he stepped closer and forced her back against the wall but all he felt was a primal satisfaction that he affected her as much as she affected him.
A coil of her hair had come loose from her messy hairdo and he tucked it behind the small shell of her ear. He loved the feel of a woman’s skin there. It was a good indication of how smooth the skin between her inner thighs would feel and Eleanore’s skin was like the petal of a new rose in bloom. She trembled and he noticed that the green and amber flecks in her eyes seemed to glow with longing. The same hungry longing that was eating him up inside.
She watched him, her small pink tongue darting out to moisten her lips as if in anticipation of his kiss.
He nearly chuckled when he saw it. For all her determination to deny how much she wanted him he was almost disappointed at how easy this was going to be in the end.
Sensing his hesitation her long lashes swept up and her gorgeous eyes connected with his. Something passed between them, something that made Lukas’s breathing suddenly shallow, made his heart bump erratically inside his chest. ‘No, I don’t think I will kiss you,’ he murmured, fighting to understand why his instincts insisted that she was a danger to him. She was just a woman. ‘I think I’ll wait for you to kiss me.’
She blinked her eyes rapidly as if she’d been under a spell, narrowing them into murderous slits as she processed his arrogance. She pushed away from him. ‘Why don’t you hold your breath while you do that?’
This time he did chuckle. He couldn’t help himself. He’d laughed more in the past twenty-four hours than he had in years. Maybe ever. And had it really only been that long? He felt like he’d known her for ever. ‘It’s going to be interesting,’ he mused as he breathed in the lingering scent of her apple blossom shampoo. ‘Seeing how long you can hold out.’
She crossed the room with measured strides as if she wasn’t furious with him. ‘You really do have tickets on yourself, Mr Kuznetskov,’ she said over her shoulder.