Oh, sure, Nat, a fate worse than death!
Just because you caught yourself wondering what undies you’d put on that morning when you saw a man didn’t mean you were contemplating him or anyone else seeing them. Rafe was the sort of man who would be pretty knowledgeable when it came to women’s underwear, she mused…or at least removing them. He was just the sort of man that made women conscious that they were…well…women! Possibly because he was so obviously and in-your-face male!
‘Granted, but your ability to do your job is compromised if you’re too tired and run-down to work and an ill-kempt appearance is hardly professional.’ Neither was it professional for him to want to unfasten the piece of velvet ribbon that held the hair she’d scraped back from her face in an unattractive pony-tail.
Natalie, teeth clenched and head bent over her desk, was unaware that her boss was finding the exposed nape of her neck strangely attractive. Calling her physically repulsive was one thing, but calling her unprofessional really hurt, especially when his accusation had some foundation. Uncomfortably she glanced down at her crumpled skirt and the run in her tights; he was right, she was a complete mess!
‘Linen is meant to look crumpled.’
‘If crumpled was the look you were after, congratulations, you’ve succeeded.’
Though she looked as though she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, her nut-brown hair looked smooth and glossy. Rafe felt confident that it would feel like silk if he let it fall through his fingers.
‘Are you wearing any make-up…?’ he rasped suddenly, exhibiting what seemed to her to be a peculiar preoccupation with her appearance.
‘I’m not sure,’ she responded without thinking. She found this conversation, like his critical scrutiny, was getting far too personal for her taste.
‘You’re not sure!’ he ejaculated, looking at her with the sort of expression she suspected he reserved for females without lipstick and Martians.
‘Did someone die and make you the style police? Or is it now office policy not to appear without lip gloss?’ she grunted with a belligerent frown.
He shook his head. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he snapped impatiently.
She wasn’t even beautiful, he thought, examining the too-sharp contours of her pale, pinched face. Actually, though her features lacked symmetry they did have a certain charm and her smooth skin, though as pale as milk, was amazingly blemishless. So she was attractive, he conceded, but beautiful—no, and either she had no fashion sense at all or for perverse reasons known to her alone she went out of her way to wear things that didn’t suit her. Take today’s offering, for instance…he looked and barely repressed a shudder.
Natalie hunched her shoulders and lifted her chin as she registered the pained expression on his dark, saturnine features. She could have explained that she’d had things other than colour coordinating her outfit on her mind that morning. Things such as hoping Rose wouldn’t end up being hospitalised again, but that explanation would no doubt elicit another accusation of her using her daughter to get special treatment—and no way was she going to give the smug ratbag the satisfaction.
Is it against your precious principles to say something that might make him not want to dispense with your services? Or is an apology too much like good sense? the exasperated voice in her head pondered.
‘I’m sorry you heard what I said. I was upset…’
‘Sorry I heard, or sorry you said it?’
Rafe, it seemed, was not in the mood to be placated.
She eyed him with escalating irritation. ‘Well, if you’re going to be pedantic…’ She closed her eyes as she heard the snippy words slip from her lips. God, I’m doing it again! She opened her eyes and pinned a bland smile on her face. ‘I wasn’t being serious, it’s just Luke had just told me something a bit upsetting.’
‘I’m so sorry that work interferes with your social life.’ Natalie’s bewildered eyes locked with his; the depth of smouldering anger in the deep, drowning blue only deepened her confusion. She couldn’t imagine what had put it there. ‘You weren’t happy Luke was going to New York…’ he reminded her in a terse, clipped voice. ‘Couldn’t you bear to be parted from him that long?’
‘You were standing there all that time!’ she gasped without thinking. ‘Well, I call that plain sneaky not letting on,’ she told him indignantly.
She was actually more indignant than she might have been because there was a grain of truth in what he’d said. Of course she was pleased for Luke’s good fortune, but she could still guiltily recall the wave of shameful envy that she’d felt for a split second when Luke had told her his news.
For a moment he looked taken aback by her indignant cry, then she saw his electric-blue eyes fill with laughter. His mobile lips twitched, and Natalie, who normally had no problem laughing at herself, especially when she said something spectacularly stupid—and that little gem definitely qualified—felt more inclined to lie on the floor and scream.
‘I wasn’t actually trying to hide and if you hadn’t been so absorbed by pulling my character to shreds you would have seen me…or at least seen the message Luke was desperately trying to signal.’
The mention of Luke reminded Natalie of his original accusation. ‘I was not upset because you gave Luke a great job!’ At least the notion that she had a social life at all was funny. ‘And I’m happy for him,’ she insisted sturdily.
Even as she spoke she saw herself, not Luke, striding confidently into the New York office. Even Rafael would have found no fault with this glossily groomed other her, she thought, releasing the image. A realist, she was impatient with herself for indulging in this romanticised daydream.
‘If you don’t mind a little bit of advice?’ Rafe suggested, watching the revealing expressions flit across her face with narrowed eyes.
‘Do I have any choice?’
She instantly regretted her childish retort as his perfect profile hardened with displeasure. Do you actually want to lose your job, Natalie? The problem with men like Rafe, she told herself, was they could dish it out, but, surrounded by people who constantly told them how marvellous they were, they bleated foul if anyone gave it back.
‘I think that it’s possible you might find that your relationship with Luke would stand a better chance in the long term if you actually support his efforts to promote his career rather than trying demotivate him.’ The condescension in his voice made her teeth ache and her fingers furl into combative fists. ‘Some people are not happy to drift along without any real challenge.’
No need for him to add that he considered her one of this breed he evidently despised when the scornful expression on his dark features said all too clearly he thought she was.
‘How dare you?’ His smug, sanctimonious attitude made her long to beat her hands against his broad chest, though he’d probably emerge from the attack without a hair out of place and she’d have bruised fists and no job!
Quivering, she rose to her feet; even then she barely reached Rafael’s broad shoulder. As their eyes locked a wave of dizziness hit her, making the room tilt and everything but his dark, devastating features shift out of focus… They seemed to sharpen until they filled her vision; similarly the subtle male scent of his body filled her nostrils…
‘Are you ill?’
Only in the head. Natalie closed her eyes and took a deep, fortifying breath. Actually this close it wasn’t possible to pretend even to herself that the damage was restricted to her mental capacity, not when her body started responding in some very embarrassing ways to the man.
She had no illusions, she could have dressed up the effect he had on her in all sorts of painless ways, but what would be the point? It wouldn’t change anything. He was an outrageously attractive, sexy guy—in a dark, predatory way that wasn’t to her taste, at least not on an intellectual level. Problem was it wasn’t her intellect that was in action here, it was her indiscriminate hormones that were responding to his raw animal magnetism.
She cou
ld be a victim of her hormones or she could rise above them.
Her knees were trembling—in fact her entire body was quivering as she tried to shake off the last remnants of the red blur before her eyes.
‘If I did have a relationship with Luke, which I don’t—I don’t!—’ she enunciated grimly from between gritted teeth in response to his blatantly sceptical smile ‘—the last person I’d take advice from would be someone with the emotional depth of a puddle! Luke is my friend.’
‘But he’d like to be more?’ He scanned her face as if he suspected to find a guilty secret written there.
CHAPTER THREE
NATALIE’S jaw tightened as she glared at Rafe belligerently. ‘Would that be so amazing?’ She was too angry to wonder at the personal comments coming from someone who was not exactly a touchy-feely boss. You did your job and didn’t bring your personal problems to work at Ransome. ‘Well, maybe he doesn’t have your high standards!’ she snarled waspishly.
The faces and figures of the women in Rafe’s life could have been neatly superimposed by a computer on top of one another with no overlapping edges. Long, leggy and decorative, even the ones who weren’t looked like models. Thinking about them made Natalie feel unaccountably angry.
‘Or maybe he doesn’t know a lost cause when he sees one,’ Rafael suggested provocatively.
Natalie’s nostrils flared as she took a wrathful breath. ‘As for me being happy with a job that I could do in my sleep…you think I like that?’ she quavered incredulously.
His wide shoulders lifted as he leaned towards her and his compelling eyes collided with hers before dropping to her quivering lips. He swallowed, working the muscles in his brown throat. ‘Tell me what you would like,’ he instructed tersely.