Emily sat up a little straighter. “And if your guess is wrong?”
He shrugged. She thought of a big cat out on the veld, acknowledging the remote possibility that it might have misjudged the fleetness of a gazelle.
“If I am, then we end our relationship at the six-month mark.”
“Six months to prove myself,” she said softly.
“Six months to prove we were made to be together,” he said, even more softly.
She wanted to look away from him. She couldn’t. She did the next best thing and took the conversation in a direction that would clarify what they were talking about.
“Did your other assistants all live up to the standards you set?”
“One, years ago.”
“Oh.”
His lips curved in amusement.
“Her name was Beatrice. She was sixty-five, a grandmother who decided her granddaughter needed her more than I did.”
“Oh,” she said again, and felt her pulse blip.
“I’ve had assistants with management degrees, advanced degrees, complex office experience, everything that looks good on a résumé.”
“And?”
“And, they didn’t work out.” He hesitated. For the first time since she’d met him, he looked… uncomfortable. “Some of them seemed to imply that I am…difficult.”
“No.”
“Yes. It has been suggested to me that…” His eyes narrowed. “Are you laughing at me?”
“Would I do that to my boss?”
His gaze moved over her face. She was definitely laughing at him. When was the last time someone had done that? People did not laugh at him. For the most part, they didn’t even laugh with him unless they were very, very sure it was what he wanted them to do.
She was an enigma, this new assistant.
Beautiful. Bright. Tough. Tender.
And kissable. Eminently kissable, which was certainly not anything that would look good on a résumé, he thought, his eyes narrowing even more until they were all but hidden under the sweep of his dark lashes.
“I don’t know exactly what you would do to your boss,” he said in a low voice. “Perhaps you would care to enlighten me.”
“Don’t,” she whispered.
He reached out. Ran his thumb over her mouth. She felt her lips part.
“Don’t what?” he said, just as softly.
“Don’t flirt with me. This is business. You said—”
“Sometimes,” he said, curving his hand around the nape of her neck, “sometimes I say the damned stupidest things.”
“Marco—”
“Emily,” he said, and then his mouth was on hers.
The kiss was long and deep. She heard herself make a little sound, felt his hands close on her shoulders. He drew her to him; her breasts pressed against the hard wall of his chest. He said something in Italian; one of his hands threaded into her hair. The other rose and cupped her breast.
Her nipples budded; he groaned as the one he was caressing stabbed into his palm.
A little burst of static filled the cabin.
“We’re next for takeoff,” the captain announced over the loudspeaker. “Seat belts, please.”
Marco raised his head. Emily raised her lashes, opened her eyes, saw that his were wide and black with passion.
“Seatbelt,” he said gruffly.
He rose and walked away.
Three hours later, the flight attendant served lunch.
“Just coffee, thank you,” Emily said, and heard Marco, several seats behind her, say the same thing.
Except for passing him on her way to the bathroom, she didn’t see him again until the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport almost six hours later.
They went through Customs together, all of it very businesslike.
“My assistant,” Marco said briskly, when the customs officer looked at Emily and then at her passport.
Try to remember that, she almost told her new boss, but she smiled politely as the officer returned the passport to her.
Charles met them at the curb, seated behind the wheel of a shiny black Bentley.
Bentleys. Mercedeses. Her brothers used cars like these, too. Why did it bother her that Marco did?
She knew the reason.
He was Sir Arrogant. All those hours of the flight, thinking about how he’d kissed her, as if it were his right to change the rules because he was the person who’d established them—
“A limo for every city?” she said, her tone sweet to the point of nausea.
Marco settled into the leather seat beside her, picked up a slim leather case and opened it.
“No,” he said, “only when I don’t drive myself.”
She looked at him. “Very amusing.”
“Since it obviously bothers you—”
“Why would it bother me?”
“Since it does, and since you’ll be the one dealing with the expenses for the automobiles I own and rent, I will explain.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation. You’re the boss.”
Marco looked at her. “Yes. I am,” he said pleasantly. “And, as such, I see a need for larger cars on occasion. Tonight, for instance.”
“What about tonight?”
“We are having dinner with a CEO and his wife. I doubt the four of us would fit comfortably in a Porsche or a Lamborghini, which are normally my vehicles of choice. And just to put you at ease about the Mercedes, I drive a Ferrari when I’m home.”
“Home.”
“Yes. When I am in New York. Satisfied?”
“No.”
“Dio!
What now?”
“You said ‘we.’ When you talked about tonight. What does that mean?”
“How easily you forget, Ms. Madison. You are my assistant. Of course, I said ‘we.’”
Emily’s thoughts flew to the clothes in the suitcase Charles had loaded into the Bentley. She went through them all. Went through them again.
Somehow, she doubted that her best black suit, fraying a little at the cuffs, would do for a Bentley, a Frenchman and his French wife.
“I have nothing to wear,” she said, and winced at how clichéd that sounded. “What I mean is—”
“I know what you mean. That clothing allowance.”
“Yes. And obviously, I haven’t had time to—”
“To shop.” Marco opened the leather case. “That’s all taken care of.”
“Taken care of how?” Emily leaned over. “Is that an iPad?”
“It is your iPad. I’m just making sure that everything you need has been loaded onto it… Good. Excellent. There are notes about Monsieur Rogan and his wife here, in this file. Be sure and look at it after you dress.”
He closed the iPad case and handed it to her. She put it in her lap.
“After I dress in what? I just told you, I haven’t shopped.”
“And I told you that is taken care of.”
“How?”
“You’ll find a couple of suitable outfits in our suite.”
“What? You shopped for me?”
He raised one dark eyebrow. “Not me. I phoned the concierge. She picked up some things.”
“You did this without consulting me?”
“What was there to consult about?”
Emily stared at him. He sounded genuinely baffled.
“How about checking to see if that was OK, for starters?”
“You just said you have nothing suitable to wear.”
“Well, yes. But—”
“I repeat, what was there to consult about?”
“Well…well, color. Size. Style.”
“Sapphire blue. Or a somewhat paler shade.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” Emily said coldly, “that I might not like blue?”
He shrugged. “It is a good color for you.”
“Your opinion, but I—”
“Your eyes are blue. Sometimes they are dark, like an angry sea. Sometimes they are light, like a mountain sky early on a summer morning.”
His voice had gone low and husky. Her gaze flew to his. Something hot and electric flashed between them.
She felt a flutter low in her belly.
“That’s not…” She swallowed. “That’s not a good reason for—for—”
“It is an excellent reason.”
Arrogant. He was so damned arrogant!
“As for the size…” His tone was casual again, the voice of the master dealing with a servant. “I described you. The concierge thought a size six.”
“I’m an eight,” Emily said. “See? You’re not always… What do you mean, you described me?”
Another shrug. “Height. Shape. I described you and she said six and I said that sounded right.”
“Was Jessalyn a six?” Emily said, and could have bitten off her tongue.
His smile was slow and sexy.
“Jealous,
cara
?”
“Certainly not. I just wondered how you could make that determination so easily.”
“I have not lived my life in a monastery.”
No. She was sure he hadn’t. Who knew how many Jessalyns had been in his life, how many would continue being in it now that he was free?
“So, there will be a dress. A gown, actually. Shoes. The necessary accessories.”
“I’ll probably pop out of the dress and have to scrunch my toes to get into the shoes,” Emily said, and he, horrible and arrogant man that he was, laughed.
They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then she opened the iPad, found the notes he’d left for her and began to read through them.
“There’s a lot here,” she said. “Didn’t you think of filling me in while we were in the air?”
He glanced at her. That telltale muscle in his jaw knotted as he turned away, stared straight ahead and folded his arms over his chest.
“I should have done so but my thoughts… took a detour.”
There were endless answers to that but she wasn’t foolish enough to try and lay the blame for what had happened on him. He’d kissed her, yes, but she’d been more than a willing accomplice.
Even the thought sent heat shimmering through her blood.
She was in deep trouble.
“
Cara.
” The sweet endearment sounded exactly like a caress. “Your face is an open book.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Still,” he said softly, “it is true. I can read what you are thinking.”
“Has anyone ever told you that life isn’t all about you and what you can and can’t do?”
Those amazing eyes of his darkened.
“Has anyone ever told you that you are a puzzle a man would find challenging to solve?”
She wanted to tell him he was being ridiculous, that a woman would never be moved by a line as corny as that.
But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t because what she really wanted to do was ask him if he meant it, if she could be a challenge for a man like him
“Emily,” he said, and the only thing that saved her from making a fool of herself was a tangled knot of typical Parisian traffic, a blast of French car horns, and thank heaven for that sudden dose of reality.
******
The City of Light was as beautiful as she’d remembered.
She’d been a teenage kid the last time she’d visited Paris. She, Jaimie and Lissa had spent a couple of weeks of summer vacation with the general on one of his European command tours.
They’d stayed in his assigned housing, an impressive apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, and he’d seen to it that their days were filled with carefully escorted tours. Still, they’d found the occasional chance to sneak away and wander along the Seine or pop into the McD’s on the Champs-Elysées, where Lissa, the eldest at fifteen, would try to look old enough to order beers with their Big Macs and
frites.
She never pulled it off but it was the trying that counted.
They’d also attended a couple of formal functions including a dinner the general had hosted at the George V, one of Paris’s most elegant hotels. Well, not the dinner. The cocktail party before it. They’d worn velvet dresses: Emily’s had been the color of rich summer grass.
“Circulate among my guests and make me proud of you,” had been their father’s command, which had meant show them that you can make useless conversation in French as well as in English.
Lissa had slipped off and somehow charmed her way into the kitchen to watch the sous chefs at work. Jaimie had wiled away the time doing complex math problems that involved the number of guests and the number of canapés—something like that, anyway.
Emily had dutifully chatted with half a dozen people and then she’d wandered into an adjoining salon, discovered a beautiful piano and spent the next few minutes happily playing Chopin until the general found her.
“So it’s
you
making all this noise,” he’d said sharply. “It’s carrying through to the next room. You are not a pianist, Emily. Remember that.”
Such a foolish thing to think of on her first day in Paris in more than a decade. Things had changed. She was an adult now, here as assistant to a man who had chosen her for that position because he believed her capable of handling it.
Yes,
a voice inside her whispered,
but are you, really? You’ve failed at so many other things…
“Emily?”
Marco spoke softly but the sound of his voice still made her jump. He frowned and put his hand over hers.
“What is it,
cara
?”
“Nothing. Really. I was just—I was just thinking of the last time I saw Paris.”
He smiled; his hand lifted to her face and cupped her cheek.
“Isn’t that a line from an old song?”
She wanted to turn her face and kiss his hand. It felt so right against her skin. Warm. Comforting. And wasn’t it crazy that his touch could be comforting when only hours ago it had been exciting?
Wasn’t it more than crazy that a man she hardly knew should have the power to affect her this way?
“Emily. Tell me what you are thinking.”
His voice was low. Thick. She looked at him and felt it again, that rush of electric excitement.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, because suddenly lying was impossible. “That’s the problem, Marco. I don’t know what I’m thinking.”
He made a sound halfway between a groan and a growl. Slowly, he lowered his head to hers and kissed her.
It was a soft, brief kiss, the simple whisper of his mouth against hers. She could have turned away.
But she didn’t.
She let the kiss go on and on.
In the end, it was Marco who took his lips from hers.
His eyes were the color of the night.
And she thought,
oh God, I could fall into those deep, dark pools and drown.
******
They made the rest of the drive into the city in silence.
Say something, Marco told himself.
An excellent idea—but what should he say? Should he apologize for kissing her? No. How could he do that when, dammit, he didn’t regret that kiss, didn’t regret any of the kisses they’d shared?
That last kiss, especially. The sweetness of it. The tenderness.
No apologies—even though kissing her was a mistake.
He’d meant what he’d told her in his office. He did not mix pleasure with business. Not ever. A business dinner, no matter how elegant, was all about business. A game of tennis or golf played with a rival was business. Every decision of his adult life had been made with business in mind, even before he’d had his own business to run.
It was how he had gotten to where he was today.
Emotion was emotion. Logic was logic. A man who mixed the two was a man asking for trouble.
Another lesson learned from his brief marriage.
Marco shifted his weight as the Bentley entered the city.
Sex. Desire. Those were provable things. They were measurable. They had their place, and it was not the office.
Back to square one.
He had made a mistake, hiring a woman he found desirable.
It was too late to do anything about it now. He needed Emily’s services on this trip, but as soon as they got back to New York…
“We’re here, sir.”
The Bentley had pulled into the semicircular drive of the hotel. His hotel. La Boîte à Bijoux.
He smiled.
If there was anything it was safe to be emotional about, it was a building like this.
******
Emily had spent the trip from the airport telling herself that she should quit her job before it all blew up in her face.
She’d worried about being in over her head as far as the responsibilities of it were concerned. What she hadn’t considered was that she was in over her head in terms of—what could she call it except her libido?
She wanted a job, not an affair. She was bad enough at keeping jobs; she could never keep a man. Not that she’d ever tried, but a man like this…? She wasn’t cut out for one night stands or one-week stands or however long the Marco Santinis of this world could be expected to find a woman… what had called her? An interesting puzzle.
If he only knew.
There really wasn’t anything puzzling about this. Pared down to basics? She wanted to sleep with the boss.
In other words, it was time to go home.
Only one problem.
She’d agreed to work for him for six months. Was that an oral contract? Even if it was, she could break it… and that led to the second problem.
Where was she going to get the money to fly home?
Dammit, this was the borrow-to-pay-the-rent thing all over again. She couldn’t turn to her brothers, couldn’t go to her sisters...
“Emily.”
Could she stick it out for just a couple of days? They wouldn’t be here very long…
“Emily.”
She blinked. The car had stopped. The door was open. Marco was standing outside, holding out his hand.
“We’ve arrived,” he said.
She nodded. Pushed her hair back from her face. Took his hand because it was the polite thing to do and…
And, where were they?
She hadn’t really thought about it but if she had, she’d have figured they’d be staying at the George V or the Plaza Athénée. Where else would a man like Marco Santini stay than in one of the city’s famous hotels?