Oh, hell.
Normally, Max would have preferred a woman who left nothing to the imagination over a woman who made him work for it. But he’d actually kind of liked imagining that part of Amanda, even if it had been for only a few seconds. Now that he was faced with the flesh-and-blood-and-more-flesh object of what would have made a righteous fantasy, he discovered he’d rather close his eyes and think about the sunlight filtering through Amanda’s dress again.
The woman smiled at him in a way that he probably would have found sexy had he not just had breakfast with a woman he suddenly found, well, sexy. “I was hoping you’d invite me to breakfast,” she said.
Max gazed down at the remnants of the meal he’d just consumed, thinking it should be pretty obvious to even the most casual observer that he’d already had his breakfast. “Um, thanks?” he said again. He gestured toward the empty plate. “But I’ve already had breakfast.”
She smiled again, and he decided that her expression actually wasn’t all that sexy, regardless of whom he’d just shared a meal with. In fact, it was kind of vapid. “I haven’t,” she said. And then, for some reason, she bumped her hip against his shoulder. Again.
Obviously, she was a woman for whom the hip-shoulder thing and the vapid-sexy smile thing usually got results.
Then again, Max was a man who, until recently, wouldn’t have needed even that much to convince himself that what he needed more than anything in the world was a second breakfast. And then a day of whatever this woman was offering, followed by a night of whatever she was offering, hopefully with a friend of hers.
Then again, that sort of thing had never happened to Max. Not the friend thing. He’d had more than his fair share of meaningless couplings with women, including women he’d just met. There was no reason why he should turn this one down. Even if she wasn’t offering him more than chatty conversation over a mimosa and fruit cup, it was a damned sight better than what Miss Amanda Bingham was offering him, which was nothing but a day full of antagonism and dirty looks.
So why did he want to gracefully decline Blondie’s hospitality and head back to the condo for an afternoon of Amanda’s hostility? Why did he want to turn his back on this woman’s ample . . . ah, charms . . . in favor of Amanda’s, ah . . . less ample . . . charms? Why was he even thinking Amanda had charms in the first place?
The answer to that last question, at least, came right away, though not without a little amazement. Because Amanda
did
have charms, he realized. Not only did she look surprisingly good in wispy, flowered pajamas—even wearing glasses . . . especially wearing glasses—but she’d made him think and talk and laugh—a lot—during breakfast. For the first time Max could remember, he’d actually enjoyed doing something with a woman that didn’t involve sex, and he’d enjoyed doing it for a lot longer than sex lasted.
Naturally, that made him wonder if the sex with Amanda would last longer—and be better—than sex with other women. Not that she was going to let him anywhere near her after having parted the way they had. Not unless he did something really drastic. Like . . . gak . . . apologize. Or, even more radical, be nice to her. For more than just a morning.
Hmmm . . .
That throat-clearing sound muscled its way through his musing again, and he looked up to find the blonde still gazing expectantly at him. Obviously, she wasn’t going to go away until he bought her breakfast. So he gestured toward the chair Amanda had just vacated, signaled for their server, and, as the waiter cleared away the remnants of Amanda’s breakfast, instructed the woman to order whatever she wanted from the menu.
What she wanted turned out to be not much of a breakfast at all—a fruit cup, dry toast, and water—making Max wonder why she bothered. Another thing about Amanda: she ate like a man. Eggs, bacon, hash browns . . . the whole nine yards.
After she completed her order—such as it was—Max tossed a handful of bills onto the table to cover three breakfasts and a hefty tip, then told the woman, “
Bon appétit.
I’m sorry I can’t join you, but I have a full day ahead of me.”
And with that, Max pulled an Amanda and made his way toward the interior of the restaurant, never once turning to look back.
Six
“Do you realize you’ve been on vacation for three days, and I have yet to see you vacate?”
Amanda started at the sound of Max’s voice, her hands convulsing on the keyboard of her laptop, making her accidentally send an e-mail she hadn’t finished writing—or proofing—yet. Fortunately, it was to Mr. Hoberman’s secretary, Elise, not to Mr. Hoberman, so damage control shouldn’t be too difficult to manage. Except that Elise was a punctuation Nazi who would send the e-mail back to Amanda with her corrections and tell her to resend once she’d made them, and she always insisted on using commas where they absolutely did not belong and omitting them from the places where they were utterly essential. So, okay, okay, maybe Elise wasn’t the only punctuation Nazi working for Hoberman Securities.
“Of course,” Max added, “part of that could be the fact that I haven’t seen you for most of the past two days at all.”
Had Amanda had her way, he wouldn’t be seeing her right now either. Not just because she was wearing her flowery vacation jam mies again, but because she’d gone out of her way to avoid him since yesterday’s breakfast and had made it ’til almost tonight’s bedtime. Well, her bedtime, anyway. Probably, Max stayed up past ten. Fortunately, avoiding him hadn’t been difficult, because she’d simply holed up in the bedroom with her laptop and . . .
She bit back a sigh. And worked. Dammit. To her credit, she’d at least rearranged the furniture so that the desk was under the window, and she’d been able to look out at the ocean while she was working. That had sort of been like a vacation, since at work, all she had to look at was the enormous eighteen-month dry-erase calendar hanging over the desk in her cubicle outside Mr. Hoberman’s office.
And she’d slipped out of the bedroom a few times when she knew Max wasn’t around, after hearing the front door close and the sound of his V-8 roaring off into the distance, or hearing the door to the deck
whoosh
open and closed and seeing him through the window as he sauntered down the beach. With a beach towel tucked under his arm and his surf jams riding low on his hips beneath acres and acres of bronzed, muscled back. She’d had to venture out of the room if she wanted to eat, after all. Or answer the call of nature.
There had also been a couple of times when she’d ventured out of the room while Max was sleeping. And if she’d taken her time creeping past the couch to watch him, it was only because she hadn’t wanted to risk waking him. It hadn’t had anything to do with marveling at the sheer poetry of his sculpted, naked torso or having to fight the temptation to reach out and run her fingertips over the wisps of dark hair sprinkling his broad, naked chest.
It hadn’t. Really.
Really
.
Anyway, she would have thought he’d at least have the decency to knock before bothering her, but there he stood in the doorway in another one of his obnoxious Hawaiian shirts and his standard khaki shorts, his feet bare, his hands tucked behind his back, the very picture of innocence.
“Are you telling me you want me out of here?” she asked. “Why? Did you invite that hot little blonde from the restaurant yesterday up to see your etchings?”
He narrowed his eyes in confusion. “Why would I ask her to see my etchings? I don’t have any etchings.”
Amanda sighed with frustration. “It’s an old-fashioned term for . . . Never mind,” she immediately stopped herself. Not just because she suddenly realized Max would have no knowledge of anything that had happened more than fifteen minutes ago, but because the last thing she wanted to bring up after yesterday was a euphemism, however archaic, for sex.
He was still looking puzzled when he asked, “And why would I want you to leave?”
“You told me to vacate,” she reminded him.
“No, I didn’t. I said I hadn’t seen you vacating on your vacation. It was just an observation.”
She was about to interrupt him again and point out that vacating and vacation didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. But before she had a chance, he pulled his hands from behind his back, and she saw that he was holding two
very
luscious-looking beverages that she was going to go out on a limb and guess contained something alcoholic.
“You need a break,” he said with much conviction.
Not that she disagreed with him, but something about having Max point that out instead of realizing it herself rankled. So she lied, “I don’t have that much more to do.”
He took a few deliberate steps forward and set one of the frothy drinks—had he actually mixed up something that was pink?—on the desk, well within her reach. “The point is that you have
any
thing to do,” he told her. “You’re on vacation. You’re supposed to be doing nothing.”
“You’ve obviously been doing enough for both of us,” she said crisply. “You made enough drinks to keep you busy for the rest of the evening.”
He smiled indulgently. “I made one of them for you. And making drinks, especially those that require the use of a blender, is an activity that has the full approval of the EPA.”
She arrowed her brows downward. “The Environmental Protection Agency?”
He grinned more broadly. “The Escapism Profligacy Agency.”
She bit back a smile and tried to look haughty instead. “Yeah, you need more escapism and profligacy in your life.”
“No, thanks,” he said. “I have plenty. It’s you who needs this.” He dipped his head toward the drink. “I just didn’t want you to have to drink alone. That’s so . . . tragic.”
“Mm,” she said noncommittally.
He pointed to his watch. “It’s always five o’clock somewhere.”
She pointed at
her
watch. “It’s way
past
five here.”
He reached across the table, flattened his hand against the back of her laptop screen, and began to ease it down. “All the more reason. You have a lot of catching up to do. Just pretend happy hour is just beginning here.”
Oh, no, she thought. No way was she going to start pretending things. That way lay madness. She curled her fingers over the top of the computer screen and pushed it back open. “First, I have to fix a mistake you made me make.”
And how could something like that come out sounding almost portentous? she wondered. She just wasn’t getting enough rest this week, that was all. This week when she was on vacation. When she was supposed to be getting some rest.
Pushing the thought away, she reopened the unfinished e-mail and finished—and proofread—it, apologizing to Elise for sending an incomplete one the first time and changing the subject head to include a “Read Me First” admonition. Then she jammed her finger against the Send key—telling herself it was
not
with more force than was necessary—and started to open the next e-mail in the queue.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Max said, moving a lot closer than she was comfortable with having him. He started to reach for the laptop to close it again. “You’re done for the day.”
But she’d already opened the e-mail, one from a new hire at Hoberman Securities that was designated highest priority. Thank goodness she did, too, because it was indeed
very
important, a notice about possible SEC violations at one of their rival brokerage firms. It concluded with a link to an Associated Press story about the investigation, which Amanda naturally clicked on, even as Max told her to c’mon, take a break for God’s sake, and she countered that it would take only a minute.
But they both shut up when a new screen appeared on the computer depicting not an Associated Press story, but a YouTube video of a clean-cut young man in a black outfit with overcoat dancing and singing something about how he was never gonna give her up and never gonna let her down or run around or desert her. That was when Max started laughing. Hard.
“Oh, man,” he said when he found his breath. “You got Rickrolled.”
Still confused, Amanda turned to look at him. “I got what-rolled?”
“Rickrolled,” he repeated, still chuckling. He must have picked up on the confusion she was feeling, because he asked, “Don’t you know what Rickrolling is?”
She shook her head.
He smiled again. “Why am I not surprised?”
“I don’t know. Why
are
you not surprised?”
He ignored the question and instead explained. “It’s an Internet phenomenon whereby a prankster tells you they’re sending you to some legitimate site, then they send you to a Rick Astley video instead, thereby Rickrolling you. It’s been going on for a couple years now.”
He was still smiling broadly, but Amanda couldn’t figure out why. “Who’s Rick Astley?”
“The guy in the video. A one-hit wonder from the eighties.”
She thought about that for a minute, then said, “I don’t get it.”
He chuckled again. “I’m not surprised.”
“No, really,” she insisted. “Why is it supposed to be funny?”