Page 16 of Forbidden Hawaiian Nights
Her bra was the thinnest of cotton, just a sliver of stretchy fabric. She felt the push of her nipples as they swelled and tightened under his leisurely appraisal. She was hot all over, her skin tingling. She followed the trajectory of his gaze when she licked her upper lip as it rested for a crazily long time on the innocent gesture.
She’d thought that her divorce had put her into a deep freeze but, if that was the case, she was certainly thawing out now, big time, and had been since she had first clapped eyes on him.
She whipped her gaze away but her breathing was laboured and her fingers were linked so tightly together that when she stared down she could see the pale brown of the stretched skin of her knuckles.
‘I wouldn’t worry about whether you’re over-dressed or under-dressed when you’re with me,’ Max murmured lazily. ‘You could wear a bin bag at a Michelin-starred restaurant and no one would dare raise an eyebrow.’
He paused for so long that eventually she got up the courage to look at him, while her heart thumped like a runaway train inside her.
‘At any rate,’ he added, dropping his eyes and shifting his big body in the seat next to her, ‘you look pretty damn good whatever you decide to wear.’
CHAPTER FOUR
HAVING ONLY EVER worked for herself since she had left college, it was something of a shock to the system to discover that working for Max involved jumping at his command and keeping pace with the speed of his intellect as he went through every detail of the hotel, from the amount of nails ordered, to the teams on standby for when the bulk of the work was to begin.
Their scheduled trip to see the hotel had been put on hold but she knew that he had gone there briefly with Nat the day before. It was the first time in the four days since he had commandeered her life that she had busied herself on a couple of the other small projects she’d had in the mix which required face-to-face meetings and brief land surveys.
Not that she worked with him every minute of the day. He worked in the boardroom, which he seemed to have appropriated for his needs and his alone, and much of the time he was involved in all sorts of conference calls to who knew how many people scattered across the globe. But, when it came to the hotel, he expected her to be at hand, ready to answer any questions he had.
He’d had no problem in telling her that whatever other jobs she had would have to be put on ice, because time was money, and he didn’t have a lot of time to sort out the unfinished business his sister had left behind.
‘But,’ she had told him on day one, ‘my job at the hotel has to be taken a step at a time. I’ve done all the drawings and plans for what I would like to do with the surrounding land, but actual purchasing and planting will have to be done in stages, and can’t reasonably begin until work on certain parts of the hotel are underway.’
‘And?’ Max had quirked a questioning eyebrow. He had been sitting in front of his computer, a commanding presence at the long table in the boardroom, his body language telling her that he wasn’t expecting a long-winded conversation with her, because he had things to do, so could she make it brief.
Standing to one side, she was awkwardly conscious of her crisp, clean clothes that were somewhere between the prissy starched outfit she had worn that very first time she had gone to see him, and the outdoor gear she spent most of her days in. Neat shoes, a pair of grey cotton mid-calf trousers and a tee shirt tidily tucked into the waistband of the trousers.
‘And in my spare time I focus on a few other jobs. None of them are particularly big but I need all the work I can get.’
‘Why?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re generously paid by me.’
‘Yes, I know that, but in this line of work it’s not just about the money. This job will finish in under a year and I need to have other things in the pot that I can turn to. I give one hundred and ten percent when it comes to the hotel and that includes all the extra duties I’ve taken on over the past few months…’
‘Okay, spare me the highlights and lowlights. You’re not auditioning for a job. Fact is, I won’t be setting aside dedicated time for hotel business. I have a lot of other deals going on, deals that I should be handling back in London, but which I now have to handle here because Izzy’s done a runner.’
He had let that settle into the silence between them, a reminder that he was there because he had chosen to give his sister the benefit of the doubt and leave her be until she sorted herself out. A reminder that he had chosen to listen to what she, Mia, had advised rather than following his natural instinct to bypass her when he hadn’t got what he had come for and hire someone to locate his sister.
‘What are these other jobs?’ he had demanded.
‘I have some tenders I’m looking at…ideas I need to commit to paper. A couple of meetings lined up as well…’
‘In which case…’ he had gestured magnanimously at the boardroom table ‘…you can sit anywhere you like at this table and do whatever you have to do right here. That way, you’re at hand when I need to ask you a question. As for meetings? You have my word that after five your time is yours.’
He wasn’t about to give way on this because he was the sort of man who never gave way on anything.
Mia had thus discovered the joys of the very type of office job she had often teasingly reminded her sisters was the very depths of boring.
The puzzle for her was that she enjoyed it more than she had thought she would, more than she thought she should.
She perched opposite him. She’d brought all her work with her and she had to admit that the surroundings were pretty fabulous. Pastries and coffee were on tap. It was beautifully air-conditioned and, in fairness, he had a capacity to focus that was incredible. When he became involved in conference calls, when he sat frowning in front of his computer, scrolling and making notes, when he spoke to CEOs, voice clipped and every word succinct and to the point, she knew that she ceased to exist.
And when she was in that place where she ceased to exist…her eyes strayed. She couldn’t help it. She sneaked glances at him, committing to memory the way he sat with his chair swivelled at an angle…the way he stared off into the distance when he was concentrating…the way he absently tapped his pen on the table when he was working on his computer, a gesture that summed up the restless energy of his personality.
Today, they were going to be meeting with Nat at the hotel, but Mia was already running late.
