Other
women, he immediately reminded himself, squeezing his eyes shut tight again to eliminate the vision that was Amanda in the morning. But when he opened them again, she was still there, still looking . . . Okay, okay. Gorgeous. Damn. She had turned back around, but the breeze was whipping up the hem of her robe enough that he caught the merest glimpse of shorts beneath. The kind of shorts women slept in, not went to the beach in. The kind made of wispy, flowery fabric and trimmed in lace. The kind that were so wispy, in fact, that the breeze could whip them up a little, too, enough that a man who had voyeuristic tendencies—And come on, what man didn’t?—could also catch a glimpse of that
very
nice,
very
soft,
very
erotic lower curve of the wearer’s ass.
Max squeezed his eyes shut
again
. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of Amanda Bingham’s ass as erotic. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of her ass at all. Or any of her other body parts. The only time he thought about Amanda was during those unfortunate times they turned up at the same parties. And on those occasions, the only thought he gave to Amanda was to wonder what the hell she was thinking, dressing the way she did and acting the way she did and being the way she was, when any other woman who had her, ah, assets—Okay, okay, maybe he’d checked out her ass a time or two, so sue him—could be making a fortune appearing monthly in the center of a magazine with strategically placed staples. And then appearing indefinitely inside the lockers of auto mechanics, steelworkers, and frat boys all across America.
Was this a great country or what?
What it was, Max decided as he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, was a weird country, where two people who had been having a perfectly good adversarial relationship as recently as a couple of weeks ago were suddenly sneaking peeks at parts of each other they’d never cared about seeing before. Or maybe it was just him being weird. Vacations had a way of making people do and feel things they wouldn’t in the normal world.
He heard the soft slide of the French door accompanied by Amanda’s voice, and rolled over to look at her again. She was still on the phone, looking even more apologetic than she had before. Worse, she was groveling to whoever was on the other end of the line, in a voice he’d never heard from her before. Whenever he talked to Amanda, she was assertive to the point of belligerence, antagonistic to the point of militancy. Truth be told, he’d always kind of liked that about her. That she was so passionate about her beliefs—however misguided they were—and that she challenged him in a way no one else ever bothered with. Max realized that most people considered him to be . . . well, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you knew what he meant. And he supposed he hadn’t exactly ever tried to dissuade anyone of the idea. Life was simpler when everyone had low expectations of you. Made it easier to avoid responsibility if you could plead stupid to whatever crisis arose. And it was easier to be an observer of life instead of a participant, which Max liked a lot. Oh, he participated in the things he enjoyed—sipping a cold beer on a hot afternoon, carving a sinuous design out of a satiny block of mahogany, slow-dancing with a warm woman to the music of Keb’ Mo’—but he liked to watch how life played out for other people too. He liked watching the people even more.
Which brought him back to Amanda. Who was still talking apologetically on the phone. Who had barely noticed him as she’d walked to the breakfast bar to open her laptop. Who cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder as she began to type, something that caused her robe to fall open enough to reveal a wispy, flowered top that matched the wispy, flowered shorts. A top that was so wispy, in fact, that it was drooping nearly as much as the robe, offering Max an equally erotic hint of the dusky valley between her breasts.
And waking up a certain, very masculine, part of him in a big, big way.
Great. An early-morning boner. He hadn’t been thinking about how frequently he woke up in that condition when he gave Amanda the bedroom and took the sofa for himself. With her being an early riser and all—not that she was the only one, mind you . . . ahem— he was going to have no privacy. He should have acted like the jerk she thought he was and claimed the bedroom as his right for being the first person to arrive. Who knew how long it was going to take for his, ah, condition to, ah, diminish—not that it would diminish very much, by God—especially with her running around all wispy and lacy and flowery and sexy.
No, not sexy!
he immediately corrected himself. This was Amanda, after all. That realization alone should have, ah, diminished him on the spot. Instead, when he looked at her again and saw her leaning over the laptop enough to allow him an even better view of her luscious—
no, not luscious!
—curves, he did just the opposite of diminish. Very much too.
Dammit!
“Certainly, Mr. Hoberman,” he heard her say ruefully. “No, I’m sorry I misunderstood the first time. Of course I should have realized you meant just the opposite of what you were saying. . . . What . . . ? No, sir, I didn’t mean to imply that you didn’t know what you were . . . No, sir . . . I understand, sir. . . . Yes, sir . . . I’ll get right on it and be in touch later this morning. Will that be all right, sir?”
Max shook his head in disgust. Man, it must suck to be a lackey.
“Hey, Amanda!” he called out as loudly as he could, hoping her boss on the other end of the line would hear him and take the hint. “Come on back to bed, sweetheart! You shouldn’t be working! You’re on vacation!”
Her head had snapped up the moment she heard his voice, and now she glared at him, her eyes wide behind her glasses, her teeth gritted.
“Here, babe! Have another bloody Mary!” he shouted even louder. “You earned it after all that exertion last night!”
Her cheeks went pink with irritation, but instead of yelling back at him to shut his trap, she muttered, “No, Mr. Hoberman, that’s the television. One of those awful daytime talk shows . . . What . . . ? No, I don’t know how it got turned on. I never watch those. I must have bumped the television when I went past. . . .”
Then she did some more groveling, and Max shook his head again. After witnessing a few more minutes of her toadying, by the time Amanda finally hung up the phone, Max’s condition had indeed diminished—though not very much, by God. Because this was the Amanda Bingham he knew—the corporate kiss-ass. It didn’t matter how hot she looked in sexy sleepwear. She wasn’t his type. At all.
As if wanting to drive that fact home, after hanging up the phone, she clutched the neckline of her robe and pulled it closed to her neck, then grabbed the hem and tugged it down as far as she could. She straightened her glasses and tucked her hair primly behind her ears, then stammered, “I . . . I thought you were asleep.”
He pushed himself up on his elbows, mindless of the sheet that fell to his waist. Hell, it wasn’t like he was naked. In light of Amanda’s presence in the house, he had pulled on a pair of boxers before going to bed last night. Not that she cared. Not that he cared that she didn’t care. Because he didn’t. Care. At all. About Amanda. Or her opinion.
“Yeah, well, who can sleep with all that slurping going on?”
Her irritation turned to confusion. “Slurping? I wasn’t slurping. I haven’t even eaten breakfast yet.”
“Maybe not. But you’re the loudest suck-up I’ve ever heard.”
Now her irritation returned. “I wasn’t sucking up. I was doing my job.”
“News flash, Amanda. You’re on vacation. You’re supposed to be taking a break from sucking up.”
“I wasn’t sucking up,” she repeated more adamantly. “Mr. Hoberman is a very powerful man. You have to talk to him a certain way, otherwise he thinks . . .”
But Max had stopped listening. He lifted one hand and levered his thumb and fingers in the internationally recognized sign language for “blah blah blah,” and used the other to whip back the sheet. That, if nothing else, finally made Amanda shut up. Probably because his boxer shorts were spattered with dozens of garish colors, images of slot machines mingling with the word JACK-POT! in big red letters.
Well, he never said his underwear was tasteful. Besides, it had been a gift from a showgirl to commemorate an especially memorable night. Too bad he could barely remember it. Still, he did like the boxers.
He was about to make some flip comment—along the lines of
You should
be
so lucky
—but there was something in her face that stopped him. Amanda Bingham was—
“Holy crap, you’re blushing,” he said before he could stop himself.
That, of course, only made her blush even more. But she said nothing, only widened her eyes in panic and glanced away.
“You’re not going to tell me you’ve never seen a man in his underwear before.”
“Of course I’ve seen a man in his underwear,” she said, the words coming out hushed and patchy. “I’ve seen
lots
of men in their underwear.”
But she still wasn’t looking at him. Meaning the vast majority of the men she’d seen in their skivvies had probably been in the long johns section of the L.L.Bean catalog.
Then again, this was Amanda, he reminded himself. Again. Why did he have to keep doing that? Why did he keep forgetting who—and what—she was? She probably turned out the lights when she had sex. If she even
had
sex.
Which, if she didn’t, he thought, would explain
a lot
.
Biting back a frustrated sound, he reached for the khaki shorts he’d tossed on a nearby chair the night before and, with Amanda still gazing at the other side of the room—and still blushing furiously—he put them on, deliberately pulling up the zipper slowly to see if the soft, raspy sound would make her blush harder still.
Yep. It did.
Unbelievable. There was still a woman in the world who could be shy about something like a guy in his underwear. Amanda Bingham was an even bigger prude than he’d thought. And that was saying something.
So why did a warm, gooey ripple shudder through his stomach at the realization? Why did he find it kind of . . . erotic . . . that she was so unworldly?
Man, he really did need a vacation if he was reacting this way to Amanda Bingham.
“You can turn around now,” he said as he finished buttoning his fly. “I’m decent.”
She turned around, but she still didn’t look at him. “Hah,” she muttered. “That’s not a word I think anyone would use to describe you.”
He grinned at that. “Ah, come on, Amanda. Lighten up. You’re on vacation.” Before he realized what he was doing, he added, “Let me take you to breakfast. I saw a place up the road when I was driving in. Right on the beach. Bloody Marys on me.”
Her irritation disappeared at that, to be replaced by . . . something. Something Max was hard-pressed to identify. Mostly because her gaze ricocheted from his and zinged to every other object in the room. “I, uh . . . Thanks, but, um . . . I can’t.”
He was amazed at the depth of his disappointment. What was up with that? “Why not?”
“I, ah . . .” She looked at him again, only to have her gaze once again go flying off in another direction. Very softly, so softly he almost didn’t hear her, she said, “I have to work.”
“Work?”
he echoed incredulously. “But you’re on vacation.”
“I know, but Mr. Hoberman—”
“You’re on vacation,” he repeated. “You can’t work when you’re on vacation. That violates the most basic law of nature. If you work while you’re on vacation, you throw the entire universe out of whack and we all get sucked into a black hole.”
“I really don’t think that’s going to hap—”
“C’mon,” he cajoled. “You have to eat. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, ya know.” Then he tossed her a crumb he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist. Unfortunately. “You won’t be able to do your job effectively if you don’t eat breakfast.”
And why was he so adamant that she eat breakfast? With him, no less? What did he care if Amanda wanted to spend her vacation working? Hell, it would keep her out of his hair, something that would allow
him to
enjoy
his
vacation. Hey, just last night he’d told her how easy it would be for the two of them to avoid each other, hadn’t he? So why was he actively not just crossing their paths, but twining them together?
Before he could answer any of those questions—not that he had a clue how to answer them—she sighed heavily, took off her glasses to rub her eyes, and tossed them onto the countertop. Her glasses, not her eyes. That would have been really gross.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said wearily, sounding like someone who really needed a vacation. “But you don’t have to treat. I’ll pay my share.”
He started to tell her to forget it, that he’d been the one to invite her out, so he was going to treat, then stopped himself. Not just because Amanda seemed to think it was important to pay her own way, but because if he—or she, for that matter—paid for both of them, then the excursion would feel more like . . . you know . . . a . . . a
date
than breakfast—which it absolutely wouldn’t be, in any way, shape, or form. And that was all it was. Breakfast. People had to eat, for God’s sake.