Hold Me Close, Contemporary Romance (Last Frontier Lodge Novels Book 7)

by J. H. Croix

  Ivy hadn’t thought much about what to bring other than her papers and books. Joan had already made arrangements to have her few boxes carted into her room. With her thoughts buzzing with the anticipation of starting a new job, living in a new place and her entirely inappropriate attraction to Owen, she was uncertain just what to do. She’d been driven intellectually for so many years, it had never occurred to her there would be a pause. Her pause had only lasted a month, yet she felt completely lost. Academia had been her home, or so she’d hoped it would be. A wave of bitterness rose inside. She’d chosen to leave her last job and she didn’t doubt her decision for a minute, but it still bit at her that she’d felt forced to walk away from the research she loved.

  She shook her head sharply. She needed something to latch onto, not to dwell on the past. It’s just that she’d plastered all kinds of hopes and dreams onto that job and had to leave them behind along with everything else. With another spin to look around, she strode briskly to the boxes. A short while later, she’d added a few personal touches to her office and placed her books on the book shelf tucked into the corner behind her work table. She hadn’t brought her own laptop, although she belatedly realized she probably should’ve. It would give her something to focus on while she waited. She was anxious to dive into the actual work here.

  Restless, she paced slowly back and forth in front of the windows, almost jumping when there was a soft knock on the door. “Come in,” she called out, assuming it was Joan.

  The door opened on a whisper, and Owen stood there. Once again, she was reminded of the power of his physical presence. His tall, muscled frame filled the doorway. Those dark blue eyes of his landed on her. Her pulse bolted to a gallop, and her brain fuzzed. For a moment, he was quiet and simply looked at her. She hadn’t paid much attention to her appearance because she’d been so anxious about coming here today. She was suddenly self-conscious. She wore a pair of black silky pants that swung around her ankles and a cashmere sweater that fit loosely. Owen held her gaze, the distance between them sparking to life. He dipped his head in a subtle nod.

  “I hear Joan took you on a tour this morning. Do you have everything you need?” he asked as he stepped into her office.

  He wore a long-sleeved cotton t-shirt, which his muscled chest filled out nicely, and faded jeans with worn leather boots. Her skin prickled everywhere, and she could hardly catch her breath. She belatedly realized he’d asked her a question. “Joan was great. She took me all over and made sure I met anyone we saw. I’m not sure if I missed anyone, but I’m sure I’ll meet everyone eventually. I don’t think I need anything. I suppose I’m wondering when I can get to work.”

  She fiddled with her silver bracelets, a nervous habit she’d never been able to break. Owen took another few steps into the room until he reached her side. “I hope you enjoy the view,” he said with a nod toward the windows. As before, he felt remote and cool. He was polite enough, but with her body nearly on fire, his response to her only heightened how wildly out of control she felt.

  “Of course. Is it my imagination or does every room in this building have a view?”

  The slightest smile curved his lips, finally a chink in his armor. “Not your imagination. I figured we should make the best of the location. Even the bathrooms have a view.”

  Ivy felt herself start to smile and tried to stop it, but she couldn’t. “I noticed.”

  She stood there smiling back at him until she realized what she was doing. The slightest smile from him made her goofy. She tore her eyes free and stared out over the view. Snow capped the peaks of the mountains. It was late winter with spring somewhere ahead, or so her brother promised her. Having grown up in Utah, she was accustomed to mountains and snow, although Cam had prepared her to expect winter in Alaska to last a tad longer than in Utah. Restless, she looked back to Owen. “So when will I be able to start working?”

  He arched one of his dark brows. “Well, everyone who’s ever worked with you told me you’re an incredibly hard worker. I suppose I figured most people enjoyed a slow start to work. Joan wanted the morning to take care of HR stuff. She was supposed to be in charge of lunch, but the school called her to pick up her daughter. Something about a fever. I figured I’d take you to lunch instead. I can give you a rundown on our latest projects. Ready?”

  Ivy was flustered beyond flustered and all Owen was doing was standing beside her. Lunch, right. He wanted to take her to lunch. She supposed her new boss taking her to lunch was perfectly normal, but her body was tingling and she’d have to find a way to breathe more effectively around him if she ever expected to get anything done. On the heels of a shallow breath, she nodded. “Sure.”

  She looked around for her purse and coat and followed him down the long hallway, carefully keeping her eyes on the spectacular view rather than him.

  Owen looked across the table at Ivy. She was looking out the window, her eyes following the flight of an eagle that had just lifted off from the rocky beach and flew low across the water. Joan had insisted he take Ivy somewhere for lunch when she had to leave to pick up her daughter and further ordered him to be nice. “She’s nervous. I can tell, so don’t do your whole distant thing,” Joan had said.

  “Distant thing?” he’d asked in return.

  “The thing where you’re so focused on work, you barely bother to look at anyone. You’ve a heart of gold, but hardly anyone knows it. I like Ivy, and I don’t want you to scare her off,” Joan had said sternly before racing out the door to pick her feverish daughter up from school.

  Joan had been with Off the Grid since the beginning, back when it was nothing more than a one-room office in the third story of an old building in Boston. Joan had been the first person Owen hired when he realized he needed help handling the logistics of the business. She was loyal, an incredibly hard worker and one of the best people he knew. She was also one of the few people in his life now who’d known him before his parents died. Sixteen years ago, he’d been in his freshman year of college when he’d received a call early one morning. His parents had died of carbon monoxide poisoning during the night—an all too common occurrence, and one that ripped the foundation out from under his life. Joan was a family friend and had been his mother’s receptionist in her accounting business.

  While his mother had been a mentor to Joan, Joan in turn became one to him. She and her husband had insisted he stay with them during holidays after that, becoming the family he’d lost in many ways. Joan knew quite well that Owen could be distant. He’d come from a warm, loving family. As such, if there was one thing he didn’t ever want to experience again, it was the pain of a loss like that. So, he was distant. It worked for him. Throwing himself into academics had saved his sanity after the painful loss of his parents. Their death also became the impetus that drove his engineering work. He was determined to provide cost-effective alternatives to energy that didn’t hold the potential for death.

  He gave himself a mental shake. He knew why Joan was being bossy with him about Ivy. She’d liked Ivy the first time she met her last week and was bound and determined to make sure he kept good employees. Engineers were hard to come by, particularly ones who specialized in the field of alternative energy and who were actually pleasant to work around. Ivy was unusual in that respect, or so her references indicated.

  With Ivy absorbed in the view, he took a moment to look at her. Her amber hair was spun into a knot atop her head today with tendrils escaping and framing her face, one curl twining around a temple on her glasses. He’d convinced himself in the week since he’d seen her that his physical reaction to her had been a fluke. It wasn’t. He’d opened the door to her office and raw longing had jolted him. She wore soft, flowing pants and a royal blue cashmere sweater, neither of which emphasized her curves, yet he knew they were there. The neck to her sweater dipped down in a vee, revealing a hint of the shadowed valley between her breasts where his eyes kept wandering. Her skin had a warm glow—she was amber all over from her hair to her eyes
to her skin. It made him want to taste her so badly, he ached. She turned away from the window, her eyes catching his.

  “I’ve visited a few times since Cam moved here, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to seeing eagles almost every day,” she said.

  He had to force his mind to focus and not stare at her delectable mouth—lush and pink and so damn tempting with her dimple making occasional appearances. “I haven’t,” he finally replied. He was relieved when their waiter came to the table to take their order.

  He’d obediently taken her to where Joan had made reservations at the Boathouse Café. The Boathouse was a local favorite. Once upon a time, it had been a standard diner, but the new owners had updated the classic diner look with polished mahogany tables, a bar with an extensive wine collection displayed on mahogany shelving with mirrors behind and copper cookware hanging above the open kitchen grill. The restaurant sat on a bluff overlooking Kachemak Bay, offering a close-up view of the glorious bay and mountains on the far side. He quickly ordered the halibut tacos and waited while Ivy asked a few questions of the waiter and eventually ordered the same dish.

  After the waiter left with their menus, she looked over at him. “I’ve never had halibut tacos, so I had to try them.”

  “They’re not quite like the usual tacos, but they’re delicious. It’s a good choice.”

  She took a sip of coffee and nodded. When he realized she seemed to be waiting for him to speak next, he latched onto the only topic he could think of, seeing as he didn’t seem too capable of casual conversation with Ivy. He was burning up with questions about her, so he talked about work instead. “I suppose we could talk about some of our projects.”

  She nodded, her amber eyes lighting up. “I’d love that. Between leaving the university and moving here, I haven’t been able to dig into any research for over a month. I’d love to hear what you’re doing and what I might be working on.”

  “Perfect. As you know, our main focus is developing clean, sustainable and affordable energy. There’s plenty of wind and solar out there, along with the whole fuel cell idea. My concern has been much of what we have on the market now isn’t cost-effective for the average homeowner, or business, looking to move in that direction, not to mention that roofs covered in panels and giant wind turbines aren’t the most attractive. Off the Grid has three main projects we’re focused on now. One is optimizing the capacity of solar panels to capture solar energy more efficiently, so panels can be smaller. Another is focusing on the wind issue. Wind turbines are fantastic, but they’re huge. We’re trying to create much smaller ones, so small they might look decorative in someone’s yard. The other project is my baby—it’s creating batteries that discharge and recycle all the energy they use in a form that’s instantly reusable. The idea is to have no waste, whether it be through gas, heat, or other. My hope is these batteries will be used for anything from cars to appliances. I have some other ideas on my radar, but we try not to get stretched too thin. I was hoping to put you in the lead on the recycled energy project. I read your work on extending battery life for rockets and noticed you made some strides in getting the battery output to cycle back into the batteries themselves. Your ideas were solid, but you didn’t get to keep going because—shocker—they chopped the funding. That’s an overview, but tell me what you think.”

  She stared back at him, her eyes wide and alive. A smile slowly spread across her face, bringing out her tempting dimple. He literally had to tell his body to calm down when he felt himself hardening just at the look on her face. She isn’t excited about anything to do with sex, man. This is all intellectual. Keep it that way. Problem was, intellectual passion was the only passion he allowed himself. Adding her shared intellectual excitement to the equation of his attraction to her only made it multiply again and again.

  “Oh this is awesome! Really? I can’t believe this! The battery project was one of my favorites, and I was so bummed when they cut the funds for it.”

  “Unfortunately, funding for research is often the first to go. That’s one of the reasons I decided to found Off the Grid. It’s easier to raise money and reinvest the profits than it is to jump through the hoops for university funding. We have some grants, both government and university, that supplement, but we can survive without them.”

  Conversation carried on with Ivy peppering him with questions about the project—every question clearly demonstrating her thorough grounding in the topic. She didn’t pause until their food arrived. By the time they left, he was buzzing, inside and out. The problem he’d convinced himself was nothing more than a passing issue—the electric physical attraction he felt toward Ivy—was turning out to be far more formidable than he’d anticipated. He walked beside her out to his SUV—matte black and decked out with every top-end detail available—and found his hand resting on the curve of her low back. He hadn’t even realized he was touching her, it simply happened. He tried to tell himself he had to take his hand away, but he couldn’t seem to do it. That small point of connection reverberated through his body, and he ached for more.

  When they reached his SUV, he made sure she was situated in the passenger seat and turned away swiftly. He needed to get a handle on the lust searing through his body and fast. He managed small talk on the way back to the office by asking her about her move and how she was settling in. He noticed a subtle tension whenever he asked about her work at her last position. Her answers were clear, but he sensed a wariness and couldn’t help but wonder what lay behind it.

  They walked into the office with him breathing a sigh of relief that he’d gotten through lunch and kept his body under control. Again, his hands itched to touch her, but he managed not to, making it all the way to her office without slipping up. He stepped inside the door to her office. She was asking him something about reviewing the work on the project they’d discussed, but he barely heard her. She stopped just in front of him and shrugged her coat off. When she looked up, her cognac gaze locked with his, and he lost his mind. Without a thought passing through his brain, he took a step and lifted his hand, tracing it along the edge of her hair, which felt like silk as it slid through his fingers. The knot atop her head unraveled, her hair tumbling loose around her shoulders. Before he knew it, he’d dipped his head because he simply had to have a taste of her luscious lips. Her breath drew in sharply, the sound filtering into his awareness. He froze, suddenly aware he was about to cross a boundary he needed to keep in place. He couldn’t quite bring himself to move though. They stood there, the soft sound of their breath rising and falling. Desire shimmered around them, the air alive with its weight.

  He told himself he shouldn’t, but his body was winning the battle and was listening only to the desire vibrating in an electric arc between them. He closed the whisper of space between their lips, bringing his to hers. Her mouth was pure heaven, her lips soft and full. A shock scored through him, the simple point of connection so loaded, he reeled internally. She tensed for a second and then sighed. He was lost. He stepped closer and angled his head to the side, diving into the temptation of her mouth. He tangled his hand in her hair and swept his tongue into her mouth, his body reveling in her instant response. Distantly, he heard footsteps coming down the hallway, a soft echo on the tiled floor. It took another second for awareness to nudge his body out of its raw drive. He tore his lips free.

  Ivy’s amber eyes stared back at him, wide and hazy with desire. He was rock hard with need and had to scramble for purchase in his mind to force himself to take a step back. The footsteps stopped before they reached Ivy’s office. The sound of a door opening and closing came next. Owen couldn’t look away from Ivy. He was rocked to his core. He didn’t lose control. Ever. Until now.

  Chapter 3

  Ivy stood there, staring into Owen’s eyes and frantically tried to collect herself. She was flushed inside and out, and her lips tingled from where his had been. Owen’s eyes shuttered and he took a step back.

  “Sorry about that. Not so sure what I was thi
nking.” His words were clipped and icy.

  The man who’d offered only glimpses of a warm side went cold and distant. Fortunately or unfortunately—Ivy wasn’t sure which—Joan walked briskly into her office right then.

  Her gaze landed on Owen. “Did you forget you scheduled a planning meeting for the battery project? Derek and Jana asked me where you were.”

  Owen gave his head a little shake. “Right. Headed that way in a few.” He glanced to Ivy, his expression cold and distant and his eyes shuttered. “Joan will walk you to the conference room. I’ll be there shortly.” He spun on his heel and quickly departed her office, the door to his office closing with force.

  Joan’s warm brown eyes swung to Ivy. “Don’t mind Owen. He can be distant sometimes. No matter how many times I tell him it would help if he lightened up, he still hasn’t figured it out. Trust me, I’ve known him for years. He’s nicer than he seems at first.”

  Ivy nodded, still trying to slow her pulse and get a handle on her body’s deep reaction to Owen’s kiss. She tried to think of something to say, something to focus on other than Owen. “Is your daughter okay? Owen said she had a fever.”

  Joan nodded. “Katie’s got a fever all right, but it’s not too bad. We started her in swimming lessons this year, and she keeps getting ear infections. Along with those come fevers sometimes. She’s napping in my office for the afternoon. Come on, I’ll walk you to the conference room. This project will be yours if you can get Owen to let go a little.” While Ivy wondered what that might mean, Joan winked and hooked her hand through Ivy’s elbow, guiding her into the hallway.