Her heart skipped. This man had sent her a fortune’s worth of exquisite, beautiful clothes and half of her heart wished he had sent them for romantic reasons. The other half was furious at his thick-headedness. She held on to the fury. It was her only choice.
‘Am I all right?’ Her voice was a high-pitched echo in the glass shower stall. ‘What do you think?’
‘Uh-oh. Whenever a woman asks that, I know I’m in trouble. Has Phillipa been giving you grief again?’
‘No,
you’ve
been giving me grief. What on earth did you think you were doing?’
‘When?’
‘When you decided to shower me with outfits, like I’m some model in a fashion show! How could you?’
It only fuelled her anger that Bryce looked utterly perplexed. ‘You didn’t like them?’
‘Of course I liked them! They’re beautiful!’ Meg raged, glaring up at him from her crouched position. ‘Much more beautiful than anything I could ever hope to buy myself, which I’m sure is what motivated you to send them. I told you already that I would get some more appropriate clothes when I had the money.’
‘And I offered you an advance, which you refused.’ Bryce sounded aggrieved at the very idea she would decline an offer of financial assistance from him. ‘I thought you would appreciate the gesture.’
‘The gesture was entirely inappropriate. Have you any idea what Mrs Dunkirk thinks of me now?’ Suddenly feeling the urge to negate the height advantage he had, Meg drew herself upright.
The aroma of bleach assaulted her, the chemical burning her nostrils and making bright spots flash before her eyes. Gripped by dizziness, she clutched at the shower door for support, but it swung backward, making her lose her balance.
She wasn’t surprised at all when Bryce was there to catch her. He was just that kind of guy. He unfurled himself from his relaxed position and stepped forward, his arms outstretched. Instinctively she reached for him, missing his hands altogether but managing to grab his suit jacket with one hand, then the waistband of his trousers with the other.
The full impact of her body crashing into his must have caught him by surprise, because Bryce teetered backward, losing his balance as well and landing with a muffled thud on the plush carpet of the hallway.
‘Oww!’ Meg exclaimed when the effect of having the wind thoroughly knocked out of her took hold.
‘Look who’s talking.’
Bryce’s voice was strained and the realisation came to Meg that she was sprawled on top of him, her chest flush up against his, her face buried in his neck. Her heart beat erratically against her breast, her pulse still rushing from the shock of the fall. Her position on top of Bryce did nothing to calm it down.
‘I’m s-sorry,’ she stammered, breathlessness making speech nearly impossible.
Her skin jumped as his hand moved to touch her shoulder, the barest movement of his palm spreading warmth over her flesh. ‘It’s all right. A man might be able to find an upside of being knocked to the ground by a pretty woman.’
Meg felt her pulse jump again at his off-hand compliment. Surely he was only being nice. He undoubtedly had women much more beautiful, and certainly less clumsy, clamouring to get horizontal with him. And they probably wouldn’t have to knock him down to do it.
‘Daisies.’ Bryce’s murmured word confused her. As did the slight turn of his head, his slow inhalation of breath. Was he…smelling her hair? ‘You smell like daisies.’
Meg couldn’t stop her nose from doing a little exploring of its own. He smelled like cologne, something very classy and light. And man. He smelled like good, warm, sturdy man. And bleach.
Bleach?
Realisation came rushing back.
Pretty woman, indeed.
He looked and felt and smelled great and she was wearing a pair of drawstring pants she saved for dirty jobs like cleaning showers, another ratty old T-shirt and a pair of ugly yellow rubber gloves. One of which was still hooked firmly around his belt where it had latched when she’d fallen.
Oh god. She had her hand down her boss’s pants.
Yelping, Meg scrambled to her knees in her haste to roll off her employer. Now there was something she hadn’t expected to do today. Disentangling her hand from his trousers, the rubber of her glove caught on the fabric of his shirt, pulling it from his waistband. The glimpse of his taut abdomen made her heart jump.
Snatching her gaze away, she rolled onto her back on the carpet, covering her hot face with her arm.
Eventually, it was Bryce who spoke. ‘Are you going to make a habit of this?’
‘Of what?’ Meg asked, her voice muffled in the crook of her elbow.
‘Going all woozy on me and collapsing. You’re not pregnant are you?’
She tore her arm away from her face and frowned at him. ‘Not unless it was an immaculate conception.’ Meg blushed when his brow quirked, making her realise what she’d revealed. ‘It was the bleach,’ she hurried on. ‘And that first day I shouldn’t have had any alcohol on an empty stomach. I didn’t eat much today either, come to think of it.’
Bryce’s expression was troubled. ‘You shouldn’t do that to yourself. You need to eat.’
Was he saying she was too skinny? Did he think her less a woman than a scrawny kid? ‘I know. I’ll be sure and eat more regularly. You don’t want anything like this happening again.’
‘You don’t know as much as you think you do, Meg.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Nothing.’ With swift fluidity he rose to a sitting position and turned to look down into her face. ‘I’d much rather finish the discussion we were having before we ended up down here on the floor. What does my buying clothes you said yourself you needed have to do with Mrs Dunkirk?’
Remembering her irritation, Meg rose until she was sitting. ‘She thinks it was entirely inappropriate of you. So do I.’
‘I meant nothing inappropriate by it.’
‘That’s obvious,’ Meg agreed, wishing she didn’t sound quite so peeved about his complete lack of interest in acting inappropriate with her. ‘To
me.
However the old — I mean Mrs Dunkirk — isn’t so certain of your platonic intentions. Or mine for that matter.’
‘My intentions, platonic or otherwise, toward you or…any woman are none of my housekeeper’s business!’
He was getting irate now, Meg could tell by the way his cheeks flushed with colour, and the way he raked his hand roughly through his hair. She wished he wouldn’t do that. It caused the strands to stand on end in a wildly endearing way and made her think of mussing it up herself, like she might if he were kissing her or…
Oh bother.
It seemed
she
was the only one having inappropriate thoughts around here. ‘That may be so,’ Meg said, sweeping aside her adoring thoughts in irritation. ‘But it is Phillipa’s business. And if she thinks for a moment that I’m trying to insinuate myself more intimately into your lives, she’s bound to resist my attempts to build a relationship with her even more than she has already.’ Meg decided not to tell Bryce what his housekeeper had revealed about Phillipa’s role in the disappearance of her prior nannies. It wouldn’t help her cause if she got Phillipa into trouble. ‘And I have to work with Mrs Dunkirk. I need them both to respect me.’
He held her gaze sidelong for a long time, his elbow resting on one upraised knee. She couldn’t read his expression, but when he finally spoke regret was conspicuous in his roughly spoken words. ‘I’m sorry Meg. I didn’t think about how it would look. I was just trying to —’
‘Be nice. I know.’ He was being nice, and generous, and thoughtful, and she had yelled at him.
He pushed out a weighty sigh. ‘I’ll send the clothes back. And I’ll talk to Mrs Dunkirk. I’ll make sure she knows there isn’t the slightest possibility of anything romantic happening between us.’
Meg had to stifle the compulsion to flinch.
It’s the truth Meg. Get used to it.
‘Of course,’ she said, hoping her voice sounded normal to him, and not as falsely cheerful as it did to her ears. ‘Not the slightest possibility.’
‘It would help if you didn’t wear things like that, though.’
The accusing glare he gave her outfit made Meg glance down at herself in confusion. ‘Running shorts and a T-shirt?’
He made a gruff sound of assent. ‘Whether you like it or not, I’m going to advance you some money to buy some more appropriate clothes. Something…loose. Something beige.’
‘Like a potato sack?’
‘Something of that ilk, yes.’
Meg stared at him as her brain finally caught up with his meaning. ‘Oh I get it. You weren’t being nice when you bought me those clothes. You were being a control freak.’
‘I am
not
a control freak.’
‘You don’t think dictating to me what I wear is a little high-handed?’
‘Not when I’m signing your paycheques, no. Consider it a uniform.’
Meg scrambled to a standing position, annoyance fuelling her actions. She snapped off the rubber gloves and narrowed her eyes at Bryce. ‘Have it your way. But I warn you, I do
not
wear beige. I’ll consent to black, even grey. But not beige. It would completely wash me out.’
‘Fine,’ he relented through gritted teeth as he stood as well. ‘As long as it’s…’ he made a motion with his hand.
‘Loose. I get it.’ Meg filled in, her voice seething as tautly as his. So he hated her clothes. He hated her opinions about his daughter. Hated that she didn’t fall into his plans as smoothly as a tooth into a cog. Once again she felt he was probably regretting hiring her. But Bryce Carlton
didn’t take things back,
as he’d once told her. So he was stuck with her.
And she was stuck with his annoying tendency to try and control everything around him, as though people could be forced into a mould as easily as numbers could be added on a spreadsheet.
***
Bryce couldn’t sleep.
He had always been a sound sleeper, at least as a child and for most of his adult life. When he was twenty-four and his parents were both killed, he had suffered from sleeplessness for nearly a year. An understandable affliction, under the circumstances. It had been left to him to take the reins of the company his father had built from the ground up. While he had been well trained in the business and had always known he would take it over one day, fear that he might not be up to the task alone, without his father’s wise mentorship — fear that he would fail, that he wouldn’t live up to his father’s expectations — had kept him awake many a night.
After several months of restlessness he came to his senses and concluded that an exhausted CEO was a very bad CEO, and that fear itself posed the greatest threat to his success. He had forced himself to sleep, and had gotten into a good routine that hadn’t been broken again. Not even during the merger, or his divorce.
Well, not much during his divorce. He’d taken on a greater workload and it had proven an effective distraction from wallowing in the failure of his marriage.
Yet now he lay staring wide-eyed at the ceiling at one in the morning, his pillow feeling hot and ineffectual beneath his head. He had already tried tracing trend graphs in his mind, calculating stock values over time, a technique that even he — a man who had more than a passing interest in such things—usually found dull enough to induce slumber. But for the life of him, he couldn’t get the picture of slim, willowy Meg Lacy out of his mind. And it was keeping him very much awake in ways he didn’t want to admit to.
He couldn’t quash the memory of how her body had felt sprawled across his, her weight no heavier than a summer blanket draped across him, but every inch of her leaving an indelible impression on every inch of him. On several specific inches of him, to be precise. When she had fallen on him that afternoon he had been deathly afraid to move should Meg detect the sudden and intensely aroused state he had found himself in.
His swift and shocking reaction had to be the inevitable consequence of the state of celibacy he’d remained in since the end of his marriage. It had nothing to do with the fact that he found her refreshingly ingenuous. Or that her lips were the exact pink of the iceberg roses his gardener took such great care with, and that he could vividly imagine those lips pressing against his throat as they had inadvertently today, but with a much more seductive intent. He had been nearly overtaken by the urge to roll Meg onto her back and press her into the plush carpet with his weight while he kissed the breath from her and then some.
With a grunt of frustration, Bryce swung his legs to the floor and collected his black silk robe, shrugging into it as he slipped quietly down the hall. He stopped at the door next to his and peeked in at his daughter’s sleeping form. As hardy and impertinent as she appeared during the day, Phillipa occasionally suffered from nightmares and was a little afraid of the dark, though she would never admit it. He watched her sleeping peacefully in the dim glow provided by the half-moon for a few moments before turning and making his way downstairs.
He’d begun piano lessons when he was six years old, and had continued the ritual into his teens out of an appreciation of the discipline the instrument required rather than any singular passion for it. He rarely took the time to play anymore, but felt himself drawn to the Steinway at the far end of the living room as though it held the solution to his Meg-related vexation. Sitting on the velvet-upholstered stool, he let his fingers drift softly over the ivory keys, careful to keep the volume of his playing low. After a while he closed his eyes and lost himself in the melody.
He was tinkering with his third piece and thinking his boyhood piano teacher would be gasping in horror if she could hear him when a noise from behind caught his attention. His hands stilled over the keys. It had sounded like a sneeze.
He turned to see Meg sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs that lead down to her living quarters. Bryce had a vivid recollection of seeing her there that first morning, sprawled on the floor in his pyjama shirt and looking fetchingly befuddled. Her halo of blonde hair looked as untamed around her oval face as it had then, her eyes as wide and bright blue. She was wearing a pink terry robe cinched at the waist that looked as if it was keeping her lithe body warm and cosy.