She opened her mouth, but the only thing that came out was air. Jill was saying something, but Amanda couldn't make any sense of it. She was too busy hyperventilating from embarrassment.
“Simon,” she choked out.
“Yes, Simon. You're obviously interested in the man.” Jill's impatient voice in her ear had a dreamlike quality to it.
Reality was six feet, two inches of masculine perfection and a sardonic gleam in gunmetal gray eyes.
“Jill.”
she said, breaking into her friend's familiar tirade on Amanda's lack of a love life.
“What?”
“Simon's here. I think he wants to talk to me.”
Jillian's gasp was audible. “Simon's there?”
“Yes.”
“How much did he hear?” Her friend's whisper was too little, way too late.
“Enough.”
Simon's black brow rose in question.
Jill said “Oh.”
“Exactly. Look, Jillian, I've got to go.”
“Sure. Call me later.”
“Maybe tomorrow.” If she hadn't died of mortification by then. Could one die from that sort of thing?
She snapped the cell phone shut. “I didn't hear you knock.”
“I think your concentration was elsewhere.”
It had been. Oh yes, it had been. “You're right.”
“You, however, are wrong.”
She was wrong about her concentration? Her usually efficient brain was not functioning at anything near normal capacity at the moment. “About what?”
“I do want to have sex with you.”
Her knees gave way. Luckily the bed was right behind her and she landed precariously on the edge. “W-what?”
“I think you heard me.”
She shook her head, but the buzzing his words produced did not abate. He hadn't moved a centimeter. His entire posture where he leaned in the doorway, filling it, was one of relaxation. He couldn't possibly be discussing sex with her and maintaining such insouciance. It wasn't possible.
“You did, but I'll say it again. I do want to have sex with you.”
She lost her hold on the bed. The carpet muffled the thump as she landed on her bottom on the floor with her back against the mattress and box spring. “You didn't just say that.”
He moved. Finally. It was to come across the room and offer his hand to her. She took it and he pulled her to her feet. Her bum was sore.
“I did, but that's not what I came in here to talk about.”
“It's not?” A modicum of sanity reasserted itself in her beleaguered brain. “Of course it's not.”
“I'm truly sorry, but I'm in the middle of an experiment I can't leave right now.”
“But you're here.” Okay, so her thinking processes weren't completely restored.
“For just a minute. I came down to tell you and Jacob I wouldn't be joining you for dinner. I don't know when I'll be able to break away from the experiment again tonight.”
Why was he telling her this?
“We'll have to put off the rest of your presentation until later.”
Two things struck her at once. The first was that Simon was capable of divorcing himself from whatever small desire he felt for her pretty darn easily. The second was that he was explaining himself in a way he hadn't so far in their brief acquaintance. She liked it.
“Thank you for telling me.”
He nodded. “You're welcome.”
His hands dropped from her shoulders. “I've got to go.”
“Right.”
“We'll talk later.”
“Later,” she parroted.
Then he left, taking his sinfully sexy body with him. She collapsed back on the bed and wondered if the Peace Corps had any use for a slightly damaged corporate negotiator in a country like Zimbabwe or something.
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Simon picked up the calibrator, made note of what it read and wrote a number down on the pad beside his right hand. It was just about what he had expected, but the slight discrepancy bothered him. He would have to find the reason for it before he could go forward with the fuel cell energy project. He started mentally ticking through the list of possible reasons, writing down ideas on isolating root cause as he went.
He stalled at the second likely test while his thoughts went winging back to his brief discussion with Amanda earlier. He could still see the look of shock on her face when she realized he had overheard her telling her friend, vehemently no less, that he did not want to have sex with her.
Was she blind?
Just because he wasn't acting on his desires didn't mean they had suddenly disappeared. She'd been there in the gym when he'd almost kissed her and she'd known what he'd been about to do. He might be clueless about women sometimes, but he knew when one was gearing up for a liplock with him.
He'd been so irritated with her feigned ignorance that he'd told her she was wrong. Not the brightest thing he'd done since first discovering sex. He shouldn't have admitted it out loud. It was a weapon she could use against him.
He wasn't about to give her the chance. He would listen to her proposal and then she could go back to her hotel in Port Mulqueen. With the temptation of her body gone, maybe he would get some actual work done.
He'd never experienced this kind of distraction before. His concentration was usually absolute, but since meeting Amanda he had found himself thinking about her when he should be analyzing a problem. Even the multiple projects he had going right now were not enough to keep his mind off the tantalizing woman. One of the reasons for his three-day work fest had been a test he was forced to restart when he'd messed it up daydreaming about Amanda instead of keeping track of the energy levels.
He could not afford to be distracted right now. Not if he wanted to be the first designer to get proof of concept on a fiber-optic computer processor. His fuel cell project was an interesting diversion, something to keep his mind from getting locked into a single mode of thinking. He'd learned long ago that working on more than one project at a time, projects that were vastly different, kept his thought processes fresh.
Amanda was interfering with that. No doubt about it. Images of her in his bed plagued him far too often. He'd never been so obsessed with the idea of having a woman, so consumed with the desire to know what she looked like out of her clothes, how she felt, how she tasted. Not even his precocious adolescence had elicited this kind of absorption in him.
It was an absorption he could not afford if he wanted to prevent his cousin from merging Brant Computers with Extant Corporation. Amanda's ideas were good, but she and Eric were considering too many of the wrong things in their enthusiasm for the merger. Simon refused to let them forget the company's beginnings, the commitment Brant Computers had always had toward its employees.
The temptation of Amanda's body could very well undermine his efforts in that direction. She had to go.
Out of his house and preferably back to California with a “No,” from Eric ringing in her ears.
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Warm, salty wind caressed Amanda's face as she sat on the bobbing dock, her feet dangling in the chilly water of the Puget Sound. There were a lot of things she didn't miss about home. She didn't miss the smog, or the stalled traffic on the freeway. She didn't pine for the fast pace or the crowded malls, but she did miss a warm ocean.
Her feet were going numb from the cold. Was that a bad thing? You couldn't get frostbite from water, could you? It probably wasn't worth the risk. Sighing, she pulled her feet from the water and drew her knees to her chest. She watched with much more attention than it deserved as a puddle of water formed around her feet on the sun washed gray wood.
Simon had said he wanted to have sex with her and her mind had gone as numb as her feet were now. Her thought process was still sluggish as she attempted to deal with the ramifications of his statement.
He wanted her
.
So, why had he pulled away from kissing her in the gym? Or had he? She still couldn't be entirely certain he had meant to kiss her at all. When it came to men's passion and their desire to act on it, she was a total novice despite having been married.
She'd been tempted to call Jillian back and tell her everything, but in the end, Amanda had decided against making the call. Because she already knew what her friend would say.
Jill would say, “Go for it.”
No hesitation. No other considerations. She would expect Amanda to ignore her own less than successful attempt at sexual intimacy in the past, to ignore the fact that Daniel wanted her to use sex as a weapon against Simon and to forget her sense of propriety when it came to business relationships.
The truly terrifying reality was that Amanda was considering doing just that. Without Jillian's cajoling.
Amanda wanted Simon.
More than she had ever wanted another man. More than she had believed possible. She had long ago come to the conclusion that all the hype about making love was just that, hype. Or at least an aspect of reality she was not destined to experience.
She'd read somewhere that there was no such thing as a frigid woman, just an inept lover. She didn't believe it. Or hadn't . . . until Simon.
Her desire for him put paid to her certainty that she was not a very sexual being. She certainly felt sexual around him. In fact, it was hard to focus on any other aspect of her humanity when he was around. She wanted to touch him. To be touched by him.
Just thinking about it had all sorts of interesting things happening to her body. Her nipples were tightening, puckering, getting hard. The rigid buds pressed against her legs that were drawn close to her chest. Her nipples had never before manifested any sort of sexual excitement until manipulated physically.
She could never remember feeling this throbbing ache between her thighs either, or the fluttery sensation in her stomach. Her breathing didn't usually go ragged and uneven, not even in the act of intercourse.
But all of those things were happening right now and they were all for Simon. And not even Simon in the flesh, but the simple thought of him.
Her body wanted his possession. Okay, it wasn't PC and she'd never say it out loud, but that was what she wanted. She wanted to feel him
inside her, surrounding her, owning her
for that brief time when their bodies meshed and sought the ultimate pleasure. An experience she'd never actually had.
She was too repressed to pursue it on her own. The mere thought of using mechanical devices made her blush. She'd definitely never known such a thing with Lance. She thought maybe she'd come close once or twice, but now she realized that what she'd mistaken for passion had been at best lukewarm physical pleasure.
“Some people have better things to do than to track down wayward guests and give them messages.”
Her head snapped up as a shadow fell over her and Jacob's irascible voice jarred her from her thoughts. “Hello, Jacob. Am I the wayward guest?”
“Don't see nobody else staying in Simon's house, missy.”
She was getting used to his bouts of surliness. “I don't either, so that must mean the message is for me,” she said with a sunny smile.
Was that approval she could see in his eyes? Maybe the old man was starting to like her.
“The boss said to tell you he would come down about nine o'clock.”
“Tomorrow morning?” She had to stifle her disappointment at having missed Simon when he'd surfaced from his lab.
“Tonight. Said to tell you he'd come to your room.” Jacob managed to lace the words with disapproval and a fair dose of innuendo all at once.
“At nine o'clock?” Her voice squeaked on the word nine. “In my room?”
“That's what he said. I retire before that unless the boss instructs me other wise.”
So, she and Simon would effectively be alone. In her room. She felt like sticking her head in the frigid water of the sound. Anything to clear the morass of thoughts chasing themselves through her mind.
Was he planning to pursue his desire to have sex with her? She couldn't believe he would have sent the message through Jacob, but then Simon didn't do things the normal way. And she hadn't been around when he'd come out of his lab, presumably to tell her himself.
“Simon wants to meet me at nine o'clock in my room?” she asked to verify the improbable message.
Jacob's snort of impatience barely impinged on her consciousness. “That's what I said. Do you need it in writing?”