Page 28 of Some Like It Deadly
“Yeah, that just tells me I owe you more.” He blew out a breath. “Honey, you can keep fighting me on this and I’ll stand here and argue with you, but I’m an attorney. I can argue all night.”
“Okay, one you can’t just walk into a hospital room, tell me I am staying with you for the weekend, follow me home and continue the argument. I’m your assistant, not your girlfriend.” A struggle played across her expression.
“I know, but you’re myfriendKate. I like myfriendand I want to take care of her. Can you let me do that?”
Their gazes clashed. He understood the difficulty—hell, he wrestled with his own issues. A part of him thought she would be better off far away from him—but the selfish part of himdidn’t want to send her away. Armand had him under watch, apparently whether he liked it or not, so the safer place was with him.
After all, isn’t that what I told Armand when he was so determined to push Anna away for her own good?
“You don’t fight fair.” She set the bottle down and rested back against the counter. Her statement of the obvious suggested she wavered, but she’d hardly given up.
“I fight to win.” A truth he had long since come to accept about himself. “I’m going to go pack a bag for you. What do you want?”
“I can’t sleep with you Richard.” Her quiet words stopped him. “We would be crossing a line we can’t take back.”
Leaning on the doorframe to her kitchen, he stared at her levelly. “I know. You work for me. Sleeping with me has not been, is not, and never will be a condition of that employment. But I know we’re a little bit more than employer and employee—and I know you feel it too.”
“It doesn’t matter what I feel or don’t.” She ran her tongue over her upper lip and shook her head. “It doesn’t change the facts.”
“It can,” he said softly, because what he said in the next few minutes could very well change the direction they went. He really wanted to control the steering of that particular course. Maybe they’d only had a few weeks to get to know each other, but what he knew of her he liked and dammit—he wanted more. “We make rules, we negotiate them, and we don’t break anything or change until we’re both ready.”
“Life is not a negotiation. Not always.” Not a rejection.
“It can be, if you want it bad enough.” His had been. He didn’t like the life he’d grown up in—one stained by his father’s dishonesty and double dealings—so he’d changed his life by changing the rules. “But this? Right now? This isn’t about takingyou home to my bed, stripping off your clothes and kissing you until we can’t see straight. See, I know that’s a potential outcome and it’s an attractive one. But that’s not what I’m asking you for or what I am trying to accomplish. Tonight.”
Blowing out a long breath, she gave him a skeptical look. “What are you asking?”
“You. Me. My house. The weekend. Tonight through Monday morning at eight a.m. We’re not an attorney and his assistant. It’s not about the office or the job—just you and me. Richard and Kate. Spending a weekend together, getting to know each other and letting me look after you so I don’t worry that you’re okay.” It sounded damn good to him. They could always renegotiate later.
“Can I get that in writing?” The smile curving her mouth teased him. “Specific terms and definitions.”
“Contracts favor the one who writes them.” He glanced around her kitchen and spotted a legal pad. He grabbed it and a pen, carried them over and set them next to her. A phone number was in the upper right hand corner of the pad. He recognized it instantly. Armand’s private number at the tower. He paused. Then, remembered Anna, how fondly the women spoke of each other. He wouldn’t be surprised if they too had formed a deeper employer/employee relationship. Though, he doubted contract terms were involved in their friendship.
Tearing off the top sheet and laying it aside, he held up the pen. “Dictate the terms.”
“You’re serious?” She studied him, disbelief and—dare he hope?—a hint of enchantment in her eyes.
“Deadly.” He nodded once and waited, pen poised over the paper. “Terms, woman. Name the terms.”
“Fine. The following contract and terms, to be hereinafter known as ‘The Contract’ will be between Kate Braddock and Richard Prentiss, hereinafter known as ‘The Parties’ with regardto the next—” she paused to look at the clock on her stove, “—sixty-eight hours. Expiring at zero-eight hundred, Pacific standard time, Monday.”
He grinned at the “hereinafters” and the definition of “the parties.” Adding Monday’s date to it, he glanced up. “Someone’s been paying attention.”
“After the seventy-four we’ve written, reviewed or amended in the last four weeks, I should hope so.”
“Seventy-four? Are you sure?”
“The consortium contracts—we had to write out individual ones for each negotiation and each company licensingSpherecastsoftware.” The amused impatience in her tone drew another grin from him.
“True. All right, point to you. Next, terms?” He tapped the legal pad.
“Impossible man,” she muttered.
He wrote downRichard must be impossible.
“That is not a term.” Her mouth formed an “o” and he had to bite his tongue to keep from kissing her.
“You said it, it goes in, and I don’t have a problem with that stipulation.” Hell, he rather enjoyed imagining how many ways he could be impossible.
