Case for Seduction (Kimani Romance)

by Christopher, Ann

  Roger took his time grabbing his coat and crossing the room. When he finally started through the door, she heaved a tiny sigh of relief, but it turned out to be premature.

  “I want you back,” he murmured. “I don’t think we’re over. Not at all.”

  * * *

  “What’s going on?” Charlotte asked at the office one morning a couple weeks later.

  Standing with his back to the doors, Jake wheeled around in the conference room, his pulse lapsing into an enthusiastic tap dance at the sound of her voice. Ridiculous as it sounded, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, he’d missed her since they both went home from work last night. A lot. Maybe he’d turned into a sappy love song, but his mind was full of Charlotte, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Since Starbucks Day, as he’d started thinking of it, she’d filled him up with sleepless nights full of manic wonderings.

  Where was Charlotte now? At home? What’d Charlotte’s home look like? Was she home and in bed? Did she sleep in the nude? On her side? Her belly? What kind of sheets did she have? Where was Harry?

  Was Harry’s punk-ass father there with them?

  Since he didn’t want his head to explode, he gave that thought a wide berth.

  Some of his Charlotte wonderings were much more troublesome.

  Did she think about him, even a little bit? Was it easy for her to work with him? Did she have any idea how much he wanted to touch her? Was longing for him eating her up on the inside the way it was eating him up, or was she blithely unaware and unconcerned about his growing fascination with her?

  But the most troublesome Charlotte thought of all?

  How long could he do the right and honorable thing and leave his employee alone?

  Was he only fooling himself for thinking he could?

  “Hey,” he said.

  He’d hoped to manage another syllable or two, something like, How are you? or Come on in, but the words danced in the distance, just out of his clumsy reach.

  One corner of her mouth curled into a bemused smile, and the longing settled deep in his belly, forming a hard knot. Was she laughing at him? Did he look like an idiot? Why did this one woman regress him to a pimply sixth-grade nerd when he’d never been nervous around females, even when he was a sixth-grader?

  Okay, Hamilton, he told himself. You need to chill.

  But chilling was hard when she looked good enough to swallow in a single gulp. Today she wore a deep purple dress with ruffles. That, combined with some trick of the sunlight streaming in from the windows, made her more...vivid. Her gray eyes were bright, her cheeks rosy. Her hair gleamed, revealing streaks of red, gold and brown.

  She was stunning, his new paralegal, and she wound him up tight.

  He stepped aside, letting her through the French doors and all the way into the conference room. Grinning now, she brushed past, taking the breezy scent of her shampoo with her. Catching himself trying to identify the scent—it wasn’t floral, but it wasn’t quite fruity, either—he gave himself a swift mental slap upside the head.

  Really? Now he was noticing the woman’s shampoo? Come on, man.

  Putting her hands on her hips, Charlotte watched as the interior designer held up her paint cards to the wall and murmured with her assistant. Then her gaze swung around to the other side of the huge room, where the architect was taking measurements.

  “What’re you doing to the conference room?” Charlotte demanded.

  “Recommissioning it,” Jake told her. “No one ever uses this one anyway.”

  “Yeah?” Charlotte edged aside as a pair of workers started grabbing the tall chairs surrounding the table and moving them into the hall. “Recommissioning it into what?”

  “A day care for employees’ kids,” he told her.

  Those bright eyes of hers widened, and her mouth formed a round O of surprise. “A...day care?”

  “Well...yeah.”

  Ducking his head, he ran a hand over his scalp and questioned his own motives. The feeling was equally unfamiliar and uncomfortable. After his Charlotte-inspired epiphany the other week, right before they went inside Integrity for the photo shoot, he’d made a few quick plans and run them by his father and uncle. Not only had they wholeheartedly approved, they’d clapped him on the back and congratulated him on his sudden philanthropic impulses.

  Little did they know that a fierce desire to help Charlotte was behind the day-care idea. If it accidentally benefitted the other employees as well, so much the better.

  Which led him to shine a bright and unflattering light on his character.

  Was a good work still a good work if you did it with mixed motives?

  And now, with Charlotte looking at him as though he was responsible for the stars’ diamond glitter in the night skies, could he bring himself to care?

  “But—” she said faintly.

  She trailed off, looking too stunned to continue.

  Her overwhelmed silence made him blather.

  “You gave me the idea before the photo shoot, remember? And I got the go-ahead from the higher-ups. Made a few phone calls. Now we’re getting things started.”

  Eyeballing the bustle of activity, which, with the addition of a pair of electricians, was now beginning to look like ground zero at some high-rise construction site, she got right to the heart of this understatement.

  “A few phone calls?”

  He hurried on with his explanation. “We’ve got five parents here—including a couple dads—with a total of twelve kids under school age. Well, that’s the number I’ve counted so far. Then we’ve got four parents with a total of five teenage daughters who are at loose ends either before or after school. Why not put them together? We can hire a couple full-time day-care workers, and the teenagers can be volunteer assistants when they have the time. Some of them even need volunteer credits to graduate from high school, so I figure this’ll kill about ten birds with one stone. We’ll make the employees’ lives easier, because they won’t have the day-care hassles and the travel time issues with picking kids up and dropping them off, so we should get more productivity out of them. Oh, and it’ll be a free benefit of working here, of course. So the employees will save money that way. We have to get state licensing, too, but how hard could that be with all the lawyers we have around here? I’m thinking we can be up and running by—”

  Her hand on his arm put a stop to his diarrhea of the mouth, thank God.

  “You did this?” she asked, disbelieving.

  Jokes came easily to him when he was flustered. “What? Spent the firm’s money?”

  “I’m serious. Do you know how many lives this will change? Including mine?”

  “I don’t know about all that. I just, you know—”

  Her eyes changed color on him, turning a flinty gray. “Are you telling me this won’t change my life?”

  “Well...no, but—”

  “This’ll save me about a thousand dollars a month. Do you know how much money that is to me?” She was gathering steam now, beaming at him with a megawatt smile that felt like more than reward enough for any little day-care idea he’d had. “It’ll save wear and tear on my car. And gas. And travel time, which means I’ll have way more time to study. And the money I save on day care, I can use on classes. With my promotion, I figure I’ll have my J.D. by, say, the end of the month, at the very latest.”

  He laughed.

  She sobered. “Thank you, Jake. I can’t even—” She shrugged, swallowing hard. And if he didn’t know better, he’d say he saw the sparkle of tears in her eyes before she blinked them back. “Thank you.”

  Oblivious to the commotion all around them, she stepped forward, hugging him.

  For one arrested moment, the unexpected contact froze him inside his own body, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out what h
e should do.

  But then instinct took over.

  His arms came up and tightened around her, hard, pulling her closer until their thighs were pressed together and he could feel the hot pressure points where her firm breasts met the wall of his chest. The rightness of it—the exquisite perfection—nearly choked him, as did the soft sigh of her breath.

  For one millisecond, he let his eyes roll closed—maybe one of the worker bees saw them, but screw it—and just experienced everything about her: the supple body under the silky dress, the sweet warmth of her skin, the satin brush of her hair against the backs of his fingers.

  And then he pulled back, setting her aside while he was still capable of letting her go.

  Too undone to look her in the eye, he put his hands on his hips and strode a few steps away, making a project of studying the room. In his peripheral vision, he saw her wrap her arms around herself and look in some other direction as well, as though she also thought eye contact wouldn’t be prudent at this sexually charged juncture.

  Unless he was the only one who thought it was sexually charged—a thought that made him want to throw back his head and howl like a young werewolf at his first full moon.

  “So, uh—” He paused, clearing his husky throat. “We’re going to need a fair amount of input from the parents on staff. What kind of equipment we’ll need, and a committee to help with the interview process so we make sure we get top-quality people.” He scrubbed a hand over his chin, wishing his body wasn’t quite so violently alive right now. It would sure be easier to think a thought or two. “Maybe we should just, uh, go ahead and form a permanent day-care committee to handle the whole project. What do you think?”

  Silence.

  “Charlotte?”

  The sound of her name seemed to register with her. Starting, she ran a hand through her hair, messing it up, blinked away the glazed look in her eyes and flashed a smile that was bright but looked a little forced.

  “Committee? That’s a, uh, great idea. So I’d like to, uh, be your first volunteer. If that’s okay, I mean. Because I don’t want to...you know, take too much time away from my regular duties.”

  “Good idea. Your boss can be a real SOB.”

  “My boss is a great guy.” The sudden fervency in her voice surprised him and seemed to embarrass her. A vivid flush gathered in her cheeks and quickly spread over her entire face, but she didn’t back away from what she’d said. “And a surprising guy,” she added softly.

  He stared at her, not knowing what to make of this assessment, or of the sudden wild hope thudding in his chest. “Charlotte,” he began.

  “Why did you do it?”

  For you. I did it all for you.

  The words were right there, waiting to come out, but it wasn’t right to say them when he’d promised his behavior would be strictly professional. So he swallowed them back, creating a knot of misery in his throat.

  “It was the right thing to do.”

  “For your employees?” she asked, and he had the eerie feeling that she was testing him, that she knew he was lying.

  He stared her straight in the face. “I’d do anything for...my employees.”

  Her breath hitched sharply, and she looked away from him.

  As though she understood exactly what he wasn’t saying.

  As though the heat of his desire had reached out and burned her.

  Chapter 7

  About an hour later, after they’d both had a chance to decompress a little, Jake poked his head in her office. He was afraid he’d crossed a line somehow—afraid they weren’t cool anymore—and had to make sure that he hadn’t rattled her too much.

  “Got a minute?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  Her welcoming smile was the same as always, which should have been a relief. It wasn’t. Was she always so cool and collected? Was he making any sort of a dent in her self-protective shell? Why did sticking to his gentlemanly behavior feel like it was eating up years of his life?

  “So did you get your reading done last night?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Barely. Your little friend Harry—”

  “Your son, Harry?”

  “Yeah. He was a real pain in the rear last night. He did not want to go to bed. That’s becoming a real habit with him lately. And then he wanted to call his father and say good-night. Again. He likes speaking on the phone.”

  “His father, eh?” Jake couldn’t stop his scowl, nor could he keep the sour note out of his voice.

  “Umm.” She ducked her head, refusing to elaborate while he slumped into one of her visitor’s chairs. “What about you? Did you have a good night?”

  He frowned, thinking of the pizza he’d ordered—his third in the last ten days or so—the mindless channel-surfing he’d done and the solitary sleeping he’d had in his big bed.

  “The usual,” he said, trying to make the usual sound as though it was remotely interesting. “Oh, and I’ve been meaning to mention the barbecue at my house on Saturday. It’s a thing I have every year for the staff I work most closely with and their families.”

  “Did you say barbecue? As in ribs?”

  “Smoked ribs,” he added to sweeten the deal. “You haven’t lived until you’ve had my smoked ribs.”

  “Strong words.”

  “You’ll see. It’s a great time. Bring Harry and your mother. Like I said, it’s for families. Oh, and I have a pool, if anyone wants to swim.”

  His mind flashed ahead a couple steps, to Charlotte in the kind of black string bikini that she probably didn’t even own, and he had to back away from the image before it scorched his eyebrows.

  “We’ll be there.” She smiled like she was looking forward to it. “Thanks.”

  She’d be there. An unreasonable wave of pleasure swelled inside him, suffusing the world with brighter colors, more sunshine and, for all he knew, rainbows and unicorns.

  He was truly becoming an idiot where this woman was concerned.

  Sad.

  “Maybe we should talk about the day care,” Jake commented.

  “Right.” She grabbed a legal pad and started jotting things on it. “So I think the most important issue with the day care will be the licensing. Which lawyer did you say is— Whoa, what’s all this?”

  Something past his shoulder had caught her attention. Jake slung his arm over the back of the chair and twisted at the waist in time to see the receptionist stride in with a wide smile and a giant gold box of Godiva chocolates with a big red ribbon tied around it.

  “Surprise, Charlotte!” the receptionist sang. “These are for you!”

  “Oh, no,” Charlotte cried, holding her palms up in a stop-where-you-are gesture. “Don’t you bring that in here. That’s got to be ten pounds of truffles, and I’ll eat all of them before lunch. Do not put them on my desk.”

  Laughing, the receptionist deposited the box right in front of Charlotte, who gave it a baleful glare.

  “Really?” Charlotte asked sourly. “Where did this come from, anyway?”

  “A very handsome doctor just delivered them for you. And there’s a card,” she called, sweeping back out of the room.

  A very handsome doctor.

  Jealousy hit Jake like a brass-knuckled punch, knocking away the sweet thrill of being with Charlotte and leaving only a nasty taste in his mouth. So there was, at the very least, some unresolved business between Charlotte and Dr. Punk, and here was the proof. Maybe it was only that baby daddy still wanted her, and who could blame him for that?

  A worse possibility was that they were still together, still working on constructing the perfect little family for Harry who, of course, deserved nothing less.

  And the most sickening part of all? Dr. Jackass was a competitor for Charlotte’s affections, and there wasn’t a
damn thing Jake could do about it. Jake couldn’t even enter the freaking playing field, because he was her boss and, in addition to not wanting sexual harassment complaints lodged against him, he wanted to do the right thing by Charlotte. She needed this job and the opportunities he could give her and he was determined not to make her complicated life any messier.

  And where the hell had that noble impulse come from?

  Were more noble impulses lurking in the background, waiting to sneak up on him?

  He stared at the top of Charlotte’s downturned head, trying to decide what to do.

  This was a tricky moment, and he knew it. Bosses had no business asking about the personal lives of their employees, so he needed to sit tight and keep his big mouth shut.

  “Nice gift,” he said tartly.

  “Yep,” Charlotte agreed. She had a white envelope between her thumb and forefinger, and she didn’t look too anxious to open it and see whatever gooey love message was inside. “I love chocolates.” Blinking, she seemed to emerge from her thoughts. “You love sweets, too.” She slid the box across the desk to him. “Help yourself. I can’t eat all this alone.”

  “Nope.” He’d sooner eat a bacon, lettuce and turd sandwich than enjoy one of those tainted chocolates from Dr. Whatsisname. But he didn’t need to be rude about it, did he? “Thanks.”

  Nodding, she pushed the candy and card to a far corner and picked up her pen again. “Okay. We should probably get back to work.”

  Back to work. Yeah. Good idea. Work was a safe topic. He opened his mouth to agree with her.

  “You don’t look too happy with your truffles,” he noted instead.

  She shrugged and waved a hand. “It’s nothing.”

  “What’s the issue?”

  “You don’t really want to hear about my little problems, do you?”

  Hell, yeah.

  “I’m a good listener,” Jake said.

  This was not, strictly speaking, the absolute truth. It wasn’t even mostly true, come to think of it. He had a short attention span for other people’s problems, especially when they lapsed into whining. Probably because he was good at slicing through layers of bullshit and getting to the heart of issues. When people didn’t want to engage in reasoned analysis and then make sound decisions, he quickly tuned out. He didn’t have time for wishy-washy waffling.