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He’d failed Marcus, but he couldn’t fail Tilda. She was his wife. Not in all the ways that counted, but that didn’t seem to matter to his bleeding heart, which was still somewhere on the ground.
Tilda was his do-over.
* * *
Warren had shut up about her sexy underwear, thank God, but the overwhelming vibe of awareness in the room never faded. By lunchtime, Tilda was a wreck.
This was so far from the professional veneer she’d worked hard to maintain. What had possessed her to spill all her secrets to Warren? She could have left it alone, appeared before him last night in the solarium with some made-up explanation about her lingerie set and gone on. But no. She’d had to blab about Bryan and give Warren enough ammunition to figure out that her ex had stripped away her confidence when it came to her interactions with men.
Easier to not engage. Which she’d tried to do by avoiding him, only for him to yank her back into his presence with a flick of his wrist. She should hate how dictatorial he was about everything, but of course, she didn’t. Apparently all he had to do to fix that was hug her in what should have been an awkward show of comfort and support.
Not awkward. A total turn-on. Warren was an authoritative man with a kind streak who was keeping her away from Melbourne. Her little crush on him had exploded into something she had no idea what to do with.
Warren, on the other hand, had plenty of ideas.
“Let’s go to lunch,” he announced at ten till noon.
“We’re in the middle of crunching these numbers from Wheatner and Ross’s revised proposal,” she reminded him—unnecessarily, since they’d been doing it for hours. But hey—at least her voice hadn’t squeaked.
The very last thing she wanted to do was go somewhere with Warren. The less he clued in that she was a quivering mass of nerves and emotion, and had been ever since he’d touched her, the better.
“They’re crunched. We both knew the revisions were on target the moment we looked at them. Now we’ve both appeased our obsessive tendency to overanalyze and we can move on. The only thing that makes me hungrier than overanalyzing is being obsessive. Indulge me.”
Against her will, she had to smile at his perfect assessment of why they’d spent an entire morning buried in a proposal she’d known by nine o’clock that they’d accept. “Fine. You pick.”
Dumb, ridiculous idea. She should be spending her lunch hour getting herself under control, not having lunch with her boss in the middle of downtown Raleigh where everyone would see them.
Clearly she needed to redefine her parameters, because the moment they left the building, Warren ceased to be her boss. He held doors for her, helped her into the limo and settled into the creamy leather so close to her that it would have been awkward if he didn’t sling his arm around her, so, of course, that was exactly what he did.
She braced for more discussion about stuff she’d rather not talk about, but it never came. Warren sat in the car with her as if they always cruised around town in a pseudo embrace as he pointed out various landmarks like her own personal tour guide. In all the weeks she’d been in Raleigh, she’d never once done any sightseeing. There’d never been time—one of the symptoms of being a workaholic.
When she actually relaxed, she noticed that Warren’s body was warm and she didn’t hate the little hum in her core that seemed her constant companion lately. How could she help it? He seemed to know by some kind of osmosis exactly what she needed and when she needed it most. It was unsettling. And wonderful.
When the car rolled to a stop—at home—she glanced at him. “I thought we were having lunch.”
“We are.” He pulled her from the car by the hand, but instead of guiding her inside, he took the stone walkway leading around through a wrought-iron gate and they emerged in the circular garden she’d seen from the terrace Saturday night.
Her breath caught.
Warren had obviously called ahead. A lavish picnic had been painstakingly spread out in the center of the blooms in the grassy section of the garden. “What is all this?”
“A circus,” he shot back wryly. “What does it look like?”
It looked like the perfect place for Warren to pick up where he’d left off this morning, poking into things that he shouldn’t while hiding her away from prying eyes. It was far more brilliant and devious than taking her to a restaurant, where they couldn’t have any sort of frank conversation. Instead, he’d gone for romance. Seduction.
“It looks like a man who’s playing dirty.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Then my work here is done. Come. Have a glass of champagne.”
