IN BED WITH THE BOSS

“I just wanted to make sure you got home safe,” Scott said.

It wasn’t much, but it was such a sweet gesture that Vivian couldn’t help a smile. She just couldn’t figure the man out. Sometimes, he behaved like an asshole that she wanted to scream at him, and other times, he was such a gentleman. A gentleman who knew exactly how and where to touch her to make her shiver.

“Yes I’m home” she replied simply.

“Don’t you care if I’m home?” he asked mockingly, “Damm woman, you know you can be mean sometimes.”

Vivian chuckled softly . Imagine him calling her mean! It was the joke of the century. “Fine, are you home now, Mr McCall?” she asked, smiling, and she was glad that he couldn’t see her.

“Yeah I’m home.” Scott replied, “And please call me Scott, damn it. We’re not back in the office now, are we?”

“It doesn’t change the fact that you’re still my boss,” Vivian said, but she was talking more to herself than him. Like reminding herself that she was going down a dangerous route. She’d just made out with her boss, and she knew that nothing good could come out of having such a relationship with her employer, but she’d liked it way too much for comfort.

“I’m going to be thinking about you all night.” Scott continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Such a shame that you refused to come home with me tonight. I wanted to pleasure you hard, Vivian. When was the last time you let a man touch you?”

Vivian gasped. It was such a raw and personal question, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to answer it. It wasn’t any of his business and as far as she was concerned, they had crossed the line they shouldn’t have that night. She couldn’t deny what had happened them, but what she could do was try to put an end to it before they were too far gone.

“I need to hang up now, Mr McCall. You should get some sleep.” she said, and without waiting for him to reply, she hung up.

But sleep didn’t come for over an hour, and when it finally did, she was tormented with dreams of Scott McCall.

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Two weeks later, Vivian stood a good four paces back from the desk and sizzled inside with grim defiant patience while she waited for Scott to acknowledge her presence.

She was wearing a simple-cut cream linen dress today, cinched in at her waist by a mustard-yellow leather belt, and on her feet she wore a pair of matching shoes. This particular outfit had been picked off the rail with only one purpose in mind-to challenge Scott McCall to find anything objectionable about it.

If she thought that he was annoying before, she’d not known just how much worse it could get… after that party she’d attended with him. He’d surprisingly not brought it up at all and she hadn’t either, but she found herself wondering if he did things like that all the time. Kiss a girl, make out with her, ask her to go to bed with him, and then not even try to talk about it the next day.

He’d not talked about it, but he’d become even more annoying and seemed to always find something wrong with almost everything she did, and just yesterday, the way she dressed took a hit too.

The man could frame a thousand criticisms with one sweeping glance from his cold dark eyes. And yesterday’s objection had been aimed at the short pearl-grey skirt she had worn with a delicious plum-coloured silk georgette blouse. His sweeping glance of disapproval had taken in the length of leg she had on show and glittered with ice at the see-through fabric of the blouse even though she wore a matching camisole underneath it.

She had been surprised, because he had never complained about her dressing once since she started working for him. She could have even sworn that she saw his eyes darken with desire at some point, but it had been replaced immediately with anger, so today she’d covered up in a dress with a hem that finished primly two inches below her knees. And she’d scraped back her hair into such a tight bun the skin framing her face felt tight, because yesterday he’d also snapped at her when she had to keep pushing the heavy weight of glossy black waves away from her face each time she’d looked down at her work.

And she was absolutely certain that he was deliberately making her wait like this to string out the tension by keeping his chair swung facing the window so all she could see of him was the top of his dark head.

It was all part of the war of attrition he was waging against her, because he was mad at her for turning him down. It almost made her laugh sometimes. He was throwing a damn tantrum like a big baby who didn’t get what he wanted. He was never going to forgive her for walking away from him, but she was determined to stick this thing out and ignore him totally if he didn’t try to talk about it like an adult… even if it killed her in the process.

Or she killed Scott McCall.

Scott sat behind his desk with his phone held to his ear, and wondered if Vivian had a single clue that he could read her thoughts through the back of his head. The trouble with Vivian Sanchez was that she had not learnt the art of masking her feelings, and she was too damn stubborn to want to do so if she could.

Murmuring a response to the man on the other end of the line, Scott kept his brooding dark gaze fixed on the plate of tinted glass set between him and the view of the city beyond, though he did not see the view. His attention was focused on the smoked glass itself, onto which Vivian’s image was stamped like a poorly exposed photograph, visible but misted by the daylight filtering in from outside. There but not there, he likened. He preferred her like that, out of focus and out of reach so he could pretend that whatever else kept on charging up between them wasn’t there either.

His call concluded, Scott dropped the phone, took in a deep mental breath, then swung his chair around. An instant surge of testosterone-charged heat took a leap down his front to gather like a flaming knife in his groin.

The provocative witch, he thought, letting his eyes shutter out the telling gleam he felt spark to life in them while, at the same time, taking in every smooth sleek inch. The dress was a classy work of formal modesty, the pulled-back hair an insult to its fabulous long and waving length. Everything, even the length of her skirt, was telling him she’d corrected each criticism he’d aimed at her-spoken or unspoken. His jawline flexed. She missed damn well nothing.

Vivian read the flexing tension as yet another display of criticism which threatened to crucify her self-confidence as much as it made her blood start to burn. She wished she could adopt the same physical indifference to him that he dealt out to her but she’d tried and she couldn’t. Even though she hated him at the moment and she could not stop herself from responding-inwardly, at least-to the pure male animal magnetism that poured out of him in such hot sinful waves. He made her feel breathless and snarled up by self-awareness she neither understood, nor could control.

“So, what have you got there for me?” he broke the silence, and even the rich deep tones of his voice made her insides quiver as she walked forward to place the file she was holding down on his desk.

“The files you wanted, Sir” she supplied.

Scott glanced down at the bulky file, then back to Vivian again, his lengthy black eyelashes flickering in surprise. “That was quick.” Reaching forward he slid the file towards him. “Did you stay up all night working on it?”

“You said you wanted it by this morning,” Vivian reminded him.

“So I did.” Lowering his gaze again, Scott experienced a pang of guilt as he scanned through documents. Maybe he’d worked her too hard and he was damn sorry, but he was frustrated with her. She was the only woman he’d met who seemed to have the annoying ability to mess with his head without even trying at all, and he wanted her so much… more than he’d ever wanted a woman in his life. And she’d walked away from him…

Even now she stood there, head held up high, as if she didn’t care about anything in the world. She didn’t care about him…

He studied the papers intently, his face in shadow as he read. Silence spread over the room, disturbed only by the crackle of savagely turned pages. Suddenly his head jerked up as he snapped the folder shut and tossed it aside. “Dammit woman, don’t you ever talk?” he snapped.