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Off in the distance, an alarm bell began to ring. Emily didn’t hear it. The beat of her heart, the sexy-sweet rasp of Jake’s whispers, drowned out everything else as he eased her blouse open.
“Beautiful.” His eyes, so hot and dark, locked onto hers as he ran the roughened tip of his index finger along the soft, warm curve of flesh that rose above the lace of her camisole. “Such a beautiful little sparrow.”
He bent his head, let the tip of his tongue follow the same path as his finger and she cried out, arched towards him...
Emily’s shoulder hit the Stop switch. The car lurched into motion. After a few seconds, so did her brain.
She was in an elevator in the Ascot Towers. It was heading up, towards a floor filled with people. And she was half-undressed, making love with her boss.
“Jake!” She shoved against his shoulders, tugged at his hair. “Jake! The elevator. The car’s going up!”
Right, Jake thought dazedly, and slipped his hand under her chemise. Everything was going up. And the ground was shifting under his feet.
“Stop it,” Emily hissed, into his ear. “Do you hear me? Stop!”
Stop? How was he supposed to...
“Jake!”
Emily pounded her fists against his back. He blinked, looked up, and realized that it wasn’t the ground shifting, it was the elevator. It was rising, and fast. Thirty, said the panel Indicator lights. Thirty-one. Thirty-two...
“Hell!”
Jake grabbed Emily’s jacket from the floor, draped it around her shoulders, draped her coat over that. He ran his hands through her hair, through his hair, tugged at his tie, his shirt...
The elevator stopped. The doors slid open and a small sea of faces peered at them.
“Hey, McBride,” a male voice said, “you guys okay?
This thing must have been stuck for twenty minutes.” Jake peeled his lips back from his teeth. “We’re fine.” “Fine,” Emily croaked.
Fine? Jake smothered a groan. She was as pale as a ghost; he could feel her trembling in the curve of his arm.
“Miss Taylor,” he said, “my, ah, my assistant. She, uh, she has a touch of claustrophobia...”
“Claustrophobia,” Emily said, and smiled brightly.
Jake tightened his hold, led her through the little crowd, down the hall and towards the party. Halfway there, she dug in her heels and balked.
“I can’t go in there looking like this,” she hissed.
He nodded. Of course she couldn’t. Neither could he. What they could do was turn around, get back into the elevator, stop at the reservation desk in the lobby and take a room for the night...
Oh, hell.
He cleared his throat, looked around, saw the discreet signs for the lounges, and pointed her towards the ladies’ room.
Emily disappeared through the door. Jake stumbled into the men’s room. It was empty, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He went into a stall, locked the door, took off his coat and hung it up. He straightened his shirt, his tie, his suit jacket, checked out his fly. Then he sagged against the wall and tried to figure out what had just happened.
Actually, what hadn’t happened, no thanks to him. If the elevator hadn’t started moving, he’d have made love to Emily right then and there. Made love to a sparrow, when there was a nest full of brightly plumed chicks just aching to be plucked only seconds away.
He groaned and rubbed his hands over his face.
Never mind that, he thought grimly, forget the bird analogy. The bottom line was that no man with even half a brain in his head got involved with his secretary. Okay, so Emily was his executive assistant, not his secretary. Whatever she was, he had to be out of his mind, even sniffing the air in her direction.
He hissed with frustration.
An intelligent man did not get involved with a woman who worked for him, even if she looked like a goddess, which Emily most certainly did not. Just imagining the repercussions of such a relationship were staggering. The sexual harassment charges. And even if there weren’t any, the emotional complications...
He was a civilized man. He ended relationships in ways that were bloodless. Jake thought of Brandi and winced. Okay. Relatively bloodless. And that would never be possible if he had an affair with Emily. It was bad enough to have a woman stalking him like the ghost of Hamlet’s father but if that woman worked for him, there’d be no avoiding her at all. She’d be there, all day, every day, sniveling into a hanky and giving him damp-eyed, woeful looks.
No way. No, no, no. A smart man didn’t ever mix business with pleasure, and Jake had always been smart, when it came to both.
He put his coat over his arm, unlocked the stall door, walked to the sink and turned on the cold water.
