Page 14 of Forbidden Hawaiian Nights
He’d never seen anyone look so uncomfortable in his life before. She didn’t want to be there, and she’d weirdly decided to wear a strange, starchy suit—which, her expression had managed to convey, was all his fault.
Yet even in the discomforting get-up, and even with her disgruntled, struggling-to-be-polite expression, she was still so stunningly pretty.
Then she’d sat down, he had breathed in the light scent of whatever flowery perfume she was wearing and he’d had to back away from proximity to her. Two hours breathing her in and seeing the tantalising flash of leg so close to his might stretch his powers of concentration a little too much.
At any rate, it made sense to go to the hotel with her so that she could talk him through the finer points. Yet here, in the confines of the car, there was a sizzling awareness of her that he couldn’t seem to damp down.
‘Rustic mosaic tiles,’ he said flatly, angling his big body so that his back was against the car door and he could face her, legs sprawled apart. ‘An absurd amount of wooden planks… Four-poster beds…’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m giving you a taster of some of the unexpected items I came across, and I’ve only just begun my search. Since you seem to know quite a bit about the hotel, care to tell me if any of these items make sense to you?’
His eyes drifted to her full lips. It irritated and bewildered him that he couldn’t seem to focus when he was in her presence. Max knew that women behaved in a certain way when they were around him. Even the women he met on a business level. He was very much aware of the fact that they tailored their responses, aimed to please, strove to gain his attention.
He was used to that and he liked it. Life was pressured enough on the work front so, when it came to women, he liked things to be laid back and unchallenging.
Certainly, demanding women were a turn-off, so it was downright puzzling that he found himself so inexplicably drawn to the woman sitting next to him who had done nothing but bicker, argue and overreact from the very second he had announced who he was. Even before that, when he thought about it.
Hadn’t her opening words to him been, ‘Forget it’?
She was looking at him narrowly, striving to remember that she was his employee, whilst no doubt wanting to launch into another diatribe.
She’d tied her hair back and he wanted to tell her that, however hard she’d tried to look businesslike, she had failed miserably because she was still as sexy as Hell.
He wondered what she would say, how she would react.
He wondered…what it would feel like to unbutton the prissy blouse she had chosen to wear and slip his hand underneath the bra, which he imagined would be a no-nonsense white affair. What would she look like half-naked? She had small breasts and he had a graphic image of his hand covering one of them, playing with her, watching her scowling, defensive face soften with passion.
A dark flush stained his sharp cheekbones. His imagination was running away and he would have to rein it in. Not simply because he didn’t do loss of self-control but also because he didn’t do mixing business with pleasure. Delectable she might be, but she worked for him, and as his employee she stood on the opposite side of a very well-defined divide.
Mia met his eyes steadily. He was scowling, his face dark, already prepared to jump the gun and lay into her because he had given Izzy orders—no doubt camouflaged as suggestions—and she had chosen to bypass them. His default position was attack mode, and she would have to be careful to remember that and not be lulled into any false sense of security if he happened to lay on his natural charm now and again.
She inhaled deeply, counted to ten and then said calmly, ‘I do know some of the things Izzy had in mind for the hotel, as it happens, and I’m pretty sure you’ll get on board once I run through them with you.’
Mia was not at all sure of any such thing. He was so…rigid—so very different from his sister. She had never met anyone as tightly controlled as him and she wondered if some of her fascination stemmed from that.
‘This isn’t my first venture into the hotel business,’ Max informed her. He studied her from under the screen of sooty black lashes. ‘I know what works.’
‘What?’ Mia asked a little breathlessly.
‘Luxury. Unabashed luxury. People who pay big money want a certain level of indulgence.’
‘This is Hawaii…there’s more scope to be casual here.’
‘No matter if it’s Timbuctoo,’ Max said smoothly. ‘You’d be surprised how much the wealthy tend to follow a certain pattern of behaviour.’
‘You could be wrong.’
‘When it comes to making money, I’m never wrong,’ he said with a level of smooth self-assurance that was frankly mesmerising. ‘When our parents died, I was catapulted fresh from university into the family business. I went from dissertations on mergers and productivity in commercial markets to having to work out how to put that into practice. I took the family business from where it was, comfortable but stagnating in the bottom percentile, and hauled it into the millennium. I learned, every step of the way, where to look for opportunities and how to make the most of them. I also learnt fast that it’s not enough to have ideas or to put them into practice. It’s even more important to know the beast you’re dealing with.
‘When it comes to hotels, people want to feel that they’re being pampered, even if the pampering might be camouflaged. They don’t want to pay a fortune, Mia, and find themselves swimming in a real lake, with very real algae and mud at the bottom. What they want is a sanitised pool pretending to be a lake so that they can feel as though they’re in the middle of nature but without the tiresome, gritty lack of comfort.’
‘That’s so cynical.’ Mia looked at his tough, handsome face and then found that she couldn’t manage to tear her eyes away.
‘If you want to get on in life—’ Max shrugged ‘—you have to be cynical.’
Ten minutes later, Mia realised that they were pulling up outside her house.
