Max was sitting in her chair, eyes glued to her computer screen.

Ohhhhhhhh …

Not much of a thought, but all she could manage initially.

She reminded herself that she had turned everything off—the flash drive was in her drawer, the printed pages were shoved in her briefcase, and there was no way he could be looking at Passion Flower. He was probably looking for the Queensland report, to make some changes.

So breathe. Breathe and be normal.

‘Mr Rutherford? Is there something you wanted urgently? You should have called me,’ she said, forcing herself not to run to her desk but to take it slowly, calmly.

Max raised his head and looked at her—slack-jawed, marvelling, astounded.

And Catherine knew.

Max’s voice, when it finally came, was unbelievably husky. ‘You wrote this?’

Dear Reader,

I’m a Scorpio, so I’ve always loved the idea of the phoenix—rising from the ashes of an old life to claim a new one. And that’s the idea at the heart of TURNING THE GOOD GIRL BAD.

In this case we’re taking one prim and proper personal assistant—who is really a wild child in hiding—mixing her with one tough-talking boss with a secret Sir Galahad complex, and getting …

Well, Catherine North and Max Rutherford aren’t exactly sure.

All they know is that they have a brilliantly unconventional working relationship that shouldn’t be messed with. But when Max accidentally uncovers Catherine’s alter ego messy doesn’t begin to describe the situation.

Catherine suddenly decides it’s time to burst out of the cage she’s built for herself—but she can’t find the key. She thinks Max just might have one that fits, so all she has to do is tell him to open the door. Simple, right?

Wrong! Nobody tells Max Rutherford what to do. Oh, he’ll fit the key in the lock, all right—but he won’t turn it until he’s sure Catherine is ready.

And so starts a steamy high-stakes game of seduction, played by two sets of rules but with only one prize—if only they can agree on when and how to claim the spoils.

TURNING THE GOOD GIRL BAD is a story about coming to terms with who you are and what made you that way. It’s about rising from the ashes, showing off your coloured feathers and fighting for the life—and the love—you deserve.

I hope you enjoy watching Max and Catherine turn themselves inside out along the way.

Avril Tremayne

Turning the

Good Girl Bad

Avril Tremayne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

AVRIL TREMAYNE read Jane Eyre as a teenager and has been hooked on tales of passion and romance ever since. An opportunistic insomniac, she has been a lifelong crazy-mad reader, but she took the scenic route to becoming a writer—via gigs as diverse as shoe salesgirl, hot cross bun packer, teacher, and public relations executive. She has spent a good chunk of her life travelling, and has more favourite destinations than should be strictly allowable.

Avril is happily settled in her hometown of Sydney, Australia, where her husband and daughter try to keep her out of trouble—not always successfully. When she’s not writing or reading she can generally be found eating—although she does not cook!

Check out her website, www.avriltremayne.com, or follow her on Twitter, @AvrilTremayne, and Facebook, www.facebook.com/avril.tremayne

DEDICATION

This one is for Karen Sloane—quite possibly the funniest woman on the planet, and most certainly one of the kindest, most generous and loyal friends anyone could ask for!

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

DEDICATION

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

Extract

Copyright

ONE

...he tugged at the chignon at her nape. Hairpins scattering, the tight knot unwound. His fingers slid through the heavy chestnut silk—

‘Cathy!’

Catherine North jumped in her seat, scoring a bright red mark across the manuscript page she’d been poring over.

Max.

Her boss.

Back early from his overseas trip.

She cast one horrified glance at her computer screen, where the ardent love moves of her fictional hero, Alex Taylor, screamed Disaster! at her. A second glance went to the printer, which was delivering Passion Flower page by steamy page at precisely timed intervals.

‘Cathy? I’m back!’ came the bellow.

Catherine’s breath jammed like a fork in her throat. Heart leapt. Sweat popped.

She shoved at the edge of her desk and shot backwards across the floor on her wheeled chair to the printer. Grabbed the pages. Used her feet to leverage another whizzing roll back to her desk. Shuffled the fresh pages behind the others she’d be marking up. Stopped, panting like a woman in labour. What next?

A click from the printer galvanised her. Duh! She should have cancelled the print job first. She started jabbing, lightning-fast, at the keyboard. Find the printer. Jab. The print queue. Jab, jab. Dammit, where is it? Where is it? Where—

She heard a curse, looked up. Saw Max’s brown leather briefcase swinging into sight, rounding the corner. Froze as six feet and two inches of lean, elegantly suited frame descended on her with its usual churning impatience.

No time to stop the printer. No time to save her changes. No sudden frantic moves now if she didn’t want to look seven shades of guilty.

Catherine dragged in a breath around the fork in her throat as Max came to a stop in front of her desk. A waft of his expensively delicious cologne slid up her nostrils. She looked up at him, smiled serenely, and with an admirable imitation of calm, slid the damning pages under the thick report that was mercifully sitting in her in-tray.

‘Good morning, Mr Rutherford.’

‘Huh,’ he said. Or maybe asked.

Max had become pretty free lately with that slightly mystified ‘huh’, but Catherine hadn’t worked out what the ‘huh’ said about his state of mind and she was not going to start interpreting it today. She just wanted him to go into his office. Like, right that second.

But he didn’t. He just stood there.

Silence. Except for the sound of the printer, relentlessly spitting out pages. Max hadn’t looked in that direction yet, but he would.

Breathe. Think. Breathe.

She needed a distraction. Something dramatic, to keep his attention from straying over there. Something like...throwing up—if only she didn’t have a stomach like cast-iron. Or fainting—which she’d never come close to. Or maybe a heart attack. That was at least a possibility, because her heart was jumping around in her chest so vigorously she thought it might crack a rib.

And then it registered. He hadn’t noticed what was happening over at the printer. He hadn’t noticed her technically perfect in-tray slide. He hadn’t even noticed her ‘good morning’.

Because he was too busy noticing her hair.

Oh, my God.

Her hair. She raised a hand, touched the loose waves. Felt her eyeballs bug out behind her glasses.

Shock, horror, as it all came rushing back.

Last night. Being so carried away with her writing she hadn’t made it to bed until four. Causing her to sleep through her alarm. No time for breakfast. No coffee. Ergo, no wits. Therefore deciding there was no harm in coming to work au naturel today.

Just one day—no biggie, because Max was out of town so it didn’t matter.

And yet...here he was.

And here she was.

At least a disordered version of herself, with swathes of her luxuriant reddish-brown hair, usually ruthlessly disciplined, waving around her face. Wearing a figure-hugging black knit top instead of one of her usual white shirts. Minus the drab cardigan she normally wore—because why swelter in black knit and a cardigan in a Sydney summer, when Max was out of town and wouldn’t see her?

And then Max’s eyes dropped to her chest and Catherine lost it.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.

‘What happened to you?’ Max asked simultaneously.

‘What do you mean, what happened to me?’

‘What do you mean, doing here? I work here! I own here!’

Distract, distract, distract.

Catherine arched an eyebrow. ‘Oh, do you work here? I’d forgotten, it’s been so long.’

They stared at each other.

The click and whirr of the printer continued, depositing pages, layer upon layer.

At last Max flicked a glance at it. ‘What the devil are you printing, anyway?’

‘A document,’ Catherine said, and only just managed not to wince at the inadequacy of that.

‘Oh, a document. Enlightening.’

‘You want me to show you?’ Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. She was an idiot.

He tilted his head, curious. ‘Do you want to show me?’

Catherine opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

‘No? Hmm... Not moonlighting, are you?’ Max asked.

Moonlighting... Not exactly. But she’d be damned if she couldn’t build on that as a worthy diversion. She was desperate enough to try it, anyway, in the absence of something more dramatic—meteorite destroying planet Earth, maybe?

She straightened in her seat, nice and huffy. ‘You’re the moonlighter.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

She flared an outraged nostril. ‘You’re doing my job.’

‘Huh?’

‘Aren’t I supposed to make your travel arrangements?’

‘Yes, but I don’t see—’

‘Well, I didn’t make your travel bookings two weeks ago, and I didn’t change any of your bookings, and yet you were gone, and now you’re here, so...?’ She raised her hands, palms up, shrugged.

He looked suitably—if uncharacteristically—flustered. ‘I just— It just— Look, when I changed my plans there wasn’t time to bother you, so I did it myself. It’s called being considerate.’

‘Mr Rutherford, I like to be kept busy at work.’

‘Miss North, I will keep you busy.’ His eyes strayed towards her chest again, widened fractionally, and then jolted straight back to her face. ‘At work,’ he tacked on quickly.

Catherine gritted her teeth. ‘It’s Ms!’ she said, wishing she could cross her arms over her chest, but scared it would draw his attention back there.

‘No, actually, it’s Catherine and Max,’ he said testily. ‘I keep telling you it’s not the nineteen-sixties, so knock it off. Seriously, you make me feel a hundred and two instead of thirty-two.’

He didn’t wait for a response—luckily, because she didn’t have one. Just muttered something unintelligible and grabbed the hefty report from her in-tray.

‘I have some notes to give you on this Queensland business, among other things, so come in and we’ll see about ensuring you have something to do. If you have the time, that is, Ms Catherine.’

And at last he strode into his office.

Danger averted.

Catherine suddenly felt like laughing—partly because the sudden release of tension was such a relief, and partly from the sheer absurdity of that scene. Perhaps the most absurd so far in her four months at Rutherford Property—and there had been plenty.

She and Max had the most ridiculous boss-employee relationship. It felt like a theatre production, with each of them playing a role: her the prim, often outraged spinster—which she most definitely was not—and Max the irascible autocrat. And she was pretty sure that was one big, tough-guy act.

Max thrived on people speaking their minds—mainly because it allowed him to do the same. It made for some hair-raisingly direct and unceremonious exchanges of opinions. It also made work both unpredictable and fun. Catherine figured that was how Max had slipped past her defences; it was just too hard to keep your distance from a boss who actually wanted you to be insubordinate.

‘Cathy!’

‘Yes—coming.’ Ruthlessly morphing back into strait-laced assistant mode, Catherine grabbed her compact out of her bag to check her face. She wanted so badly to at least fix her hair. Well, she would just have to be extra buttoned-up tomorrow, so Max would think today’s unprofessional appearance was a figment of his imagination. And she would not make the mistake of coming into the office minus her camouflage gear ever again.

‘How long are you going to keep me waiting?’

Max’s bark brought her thoughts to an abrupt halt.

‘Just one minute,’ Catherine said soothingly as she turned off the printer as a shortcut to stopping the job—a feat she accomplished with such suddenness a page jammed.

She cleared the paper tray, swearing under her breath with a fluency that was very unlike Ms North Prudish Secretary—but she was stressed, dammit! She looked like this, Max was waiting, she was wasting precious moments unjamming the printer, and she had yet to save the changes she’d made to her manuscript and get it onto the flash drive and off the screen.

At last the sheet pulled free.

‘Catherine!’

‘Two seconds.’

She spun towards the computer, but before she could lower a finger towards the keyboard she heard the unmistakable sound of Max cursing as he pushed back his chair.

He was always so impatient!

Reacting on instinct, she simply hit the off switch, trusting the computer to do a back-up save. Then she pulled out the flash drive and thrust it to the back of her top drawer, snatched up her notepad, grabbed a pencil and hurried towards Max’s office—managing to run straight into him.

Catherine was too shocked at the sudden contact even to recoil as Max’s hands shot out to steady her.

It was the first time Max had touched her—and the fact that it was purely accidental did nothing to stop the heat that sizzled through her body in a fierce surge.

For one moment Max froze. Then his hands dropped. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I told you I was on my way in,’ she said, staring at his chest so he wouldn’t see how rattled she was. ‘You didn’t have to come barrelling out like a rodeo rider on a bull.’

‘You were taking too long.’

‘You’re too impatient,’ she said.

Pause. And then, ‘What’s so interesting about my shirt?’

Catherine sucked in a breath, thinking fast. ‘Actually, it’s your tie,’ she said.

‘Is there something wrong with my tie?’

She managed a sorry-but-you-did-ask look up. ‘Yes. It’s mauve. Isn’t mauve a bit poncy?’

He hooted out a laugh, and Catherine’s breath became all jammed up because she wanted to laugh, too, whenever he did.

‘Ouch! Weight-lifting tonight, then, to get my macho back.’

Another laugh. Delighted.

Catherine’s fingers went for the top button of her shirt—her first line of defence in reminding herself of exactly who she was in this office. But, encountering skin above fine wool instead, her fingers hovered there ineffectually.

‘No button today,’ Max observed. His eyes followed her hand as it fluttered up to her earlobe, searching for her second line of defence. ‘And no little gold hoops. What are you going to do now?’

Well, what she was not going to do was get into a discussion about the way she looked! ‘Work, I assume, Mr Rutherford,’ she said.

‘Max,’ he said.

Catherine blinked at him. ‘I know what your first name is.’

‘Then use it, dammit.’

Catherine’s resistance to calling her boss by his first name had become quite a bone of contention. It just felt too...too personal. And she didn’t like personal in the office. Personal could move into unsafe territory if you weren’t on your guard. And she was already teetering on the edge with Passion Flower.

But she decided not to antagonise him with another ‘Mr Rutherford’ for the rest of the day.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Max.’

He looked shocked for a moment—but then he nodded, satisfied. Too satisfied.

‘But please don’t swear at me,’ she added, very saintly, and almost gave herself away by giggling as his satisfaction gave way to bemusement.

‘But I didn’t sw—’ He broke off, and slowly his bone-melting lopsided smile appeared. ‘Oh, the “dammit”.’ He laughed. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re really as twinset-and-pearls as you’d have me believe, Cathy.’

‘Twinset and pearls?’

‘Prim and proper.’

A strangled sound escaped Catherine, and Max looked at her sharply.

She quickly schooled her features into an appropriately offended expression. ‘I do own a twinset and pearls, actually,’ she said, with the hint of a sniff. Of course nobody who’d seen her fire-engine-red cashmere twinset had ever described it as anything other than ‘hot’. And the pearls were exotic black pearls, interspersed with eye-popping turquoise.

They’d been given to her on her twenty-first birthday, five years before, by her hang-gliding, motorbike-riding brother, Luke, and had cost half the impressive advance he’d received for his second crime novel. To describe those pearls as anything other than dazzling would be ludicrous.

Max dipped his head in that way he had when he wanted to look her in the eye. And look he did—as though trying to dive into her brain through her pupils.

‘I wonder why that’s so amusing to you?’ he asked softly. ‘And what you’re not telling me?’

Any desire Catherine had to giggle was gone. Sucked out of her by the arrested tone of Max’s voice. His utter stillness. That look... So intense...

As though he knew...

No, he couldn’t know.

Not about her. And not about the book. She’d been so careful to look like, act like, be the quintessential strait-laced wallflower. She’d even changed her perfume from dark musk to lemon-scented, to reinforce the impression that she was tart and astringent and not to be touched. And the book was nowhere to be seen. Safely secret.

So if Max thought he was going to dig below her carefully constructed surface with a keen look and a so-soft question he had another think coming.

‘Shall we get started?’ she asked briskly.

But Max’s eyes had dropped, all the way to her feet, and Catherine almost groaned. She’d stuck her nail through her last pair of black tights putting them on in a rush this morning, and—of course—hadn’t wanted to take the time to stop and buy more on her way to work. So her legs were bare, and she’d gone all ‘what the hell?’ and was wearing open-toed shoes, with her red toenails on display.

‘Huh,’ he said, as if he was saying it to himself.

Catherine fought off a blush. ‘Well? Shall we? Get started?’

Max shoved a hand through his already dishevelled hair. His hair was regularly subjected to an unceremonious scrabbling of his hands through it. When he was thinking hard. Or coming up with a brilliant idea. Or exasperated. Or bored. Or... Well, anything.

‘Yes, if you can hurry the hell up,’ he said, and went striding back into his office.

For the next hour Max talked. About the company’s diamond-themed African development, new hotel and shopping complex in Canada and eco-resort in Brazil. Catherine knew how Max worked—his rhythms, his style, his expectations—and could second-guess him as she made notes about actions he wanted put in place, meetings to be arranged, documents to chase up. She took a little old-fashioned dictation for some correspondence, but Max always expected her to finesse his letters using her own words, so she didn’t get too strict with the transcribing, even though she was pretending to get every single syllable verbatim—because that way she could keep her eyes very deliberately on her notepad, and off her boss.

Which was not easy. Because Max was drop-dead gorgeous.

Just under the too-tall threshold, with the promise of athlete-grade strength under his immaculate suits; black hair on the long side, and always, always bed-head tousled; vivid blue eyes fringed with thick, black lashes; that lopsided grin that would turn a female ice sculpture into a puddle.

The whole package—the looks, the sense of humour, the ace brain, and that elusive factor X that made him seem unattainable without any apparent aloofness—was droolworthy.

There was a good side and a bad side to having a hot-as-Hades boss.

The good side? Max had women throwing themselves at him with a frequency and ardour that was embarrassing. He didn’t have to grope or flash or proposition an unwilling employee to get his sexual thrills. And what a blissful realisation that had been after the hell of her last boss—the despicable RJ Harrow.

But the bad side—and it was very, very bad!—was that a month into the job Catherine had started wondering what Max would do if she groped or flashed or propositioned him! And she just could not get her head around how she could think like that. The last thing Catherine needed was another boss-related fracas, ending in her ignominious departure from a job she was good at.

Not that Max would ever give her the chance to grope or flash or proposition him. Because he might be the flirt of the century—as the whole office knew!—but Catherine North wasn’t his type. Tall, leggy, blonde—dared she say horsey?—that was his type.

She swallowed a giggle as she pictured the shock on Max’s face if starchy-knickered Ms North were to roll a prurient eye in his direction. They’d need a defibrillator! Or maybe she could give him mouth-to-mouth...

‘Something funny, Cathy? Because you’re allowed to laugh here, you know.’

She looked up. ‘Nothing’s funny.’

He did that through-the-pupils stare, then leaned back in his chair and loosened his tie with three sharp tugs. ‘Onto the problem child—Kurrangii, our luxury resort in Queensland.’

He nudged the report he’d taken from her in-tray earlier and smiled at her—and Catherine’s heart started knocking into her ribs again as she hastily dropped her eyes and started taking notes.

‘Our’ luxury resort. And it did feel as if it was theirs—his and hers—because they’d worked so closely on it together.

That night two weeks ago, when they’d stayed late to finish preparing the main report, Max had loosened his tie with those exact three tugs. Her memory of that night was so clear. Just the two of them, bouncing ideas back and forth, writing and rewriting. They’d ordered in Thai food and worked while they ate. It had struck midnight, but they’d worked on. Neither of them had been happy with the end result, so they’d decided to call it a night and do it all over again the next day—into the night if required.

But Max hadn’t turned up the next day. Or the next, or the next, or... Well, he hadn’t shown up until today. And in the interim the only contact they’d had was via email or through his deputy, Damian.

It had driven Catherine a little bit crazy.

She’d figured she had two options for dealing with the situation: she could gnash her teeth at her own stupidity for mooning over her boss, of all people—and, moreover, one who liked tall, skinny, amenable blondes, not short, curvy, argumentative brunettes—or she could take affirmative action to get her out-of-control hormones back in their cage before he returned.

In the end she’d gone hybrid and started writing Passion Flower. A teeth-gnashing way of exploring her secret fascination with Max and hopefully getting it out of her system before she did something really insane—like throwing herself at him and begging him to take her on his desk.

Ooohh, a desk scene! Could she write that...?

Catherine realised Max had finished dictating and was sitting there, watching her, and closed her notepad with a snap.

‘So, Cathy...’ he said.

His voice sounded raw, and Catherine’s mind switched instantly to the job. ‘You need water,’ she said, standing. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘Huh?’

‘Water.’

‘Huh?’ he said again, and then gave his head a tiny shake.

‘Your voice sounds hoarse.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ he said irritably. ‘And I can get my own damned water—you’re not a servant.’ He cleared his throat. ‘So, anyway... The Queensland resort. I want to know what you think of all that.’

‘All that?’ Catherine repeated, sitting again.

‘Yes, all that. I wasn’t talking to myself, was I? Or maybe I was—because you don’t normally sit there like a spewed-up piece of basalt rock.’

‘Spewed-up basalt?’ she spluttered, caught between laughter and outrage.

‘Yeah—like out of a volcano. But where’s the molten stuff? Aren’t you going to rip into me about the...the...’ He stopped, searching for words, shrugged. ‘I don’t know—the native animals or something?’

‘I don’t rip into you!’ she said. ‘About anything.’

He laughed. ‘Now, that’s a lie.’

Catherine eyed him cautiously as he stood and walked around the desk, each step redolent with the prowling energy that distinguished all his movements. He stopped just to the side of her chair, then perched his gorgeous butt on the edge of his desk.

‘Well? Native animals?’ He plucked the notepad out of her hand, flicked through it.

Catherine shifted her chair backwards fractionally, clamping down on a spurt of temper. She’d had plenty to say on that subject already, as Max very well knew, because he forgot nothing, so what was this? Torture Your Personal Assistant Day?

She looked at one of Max’s slashing black eyebrows, which seemed safer than an actual eyeball. ‘Sorry—am I supposed to be allowing for your jet lag? Because you know what I think about that. You thought the same—and you’ve already addressed the issue.’

‘Oh, yeah, we talked about it at length didn’t we?’ Pause. ‘That night before I left for Canada. Right?’

That night. Catherine repeated those words in her head. That night—when she’d half wondered, half feared, that short, curvy, argumentative brunettes might actually get a look-in after all—and had ended up sexually frustrated, writing Passion Flower.

‘Okay, then,’ he went on, when Catherine remained silent. ‘What’s your opinion of the way I’ve addressed it? Will the changes I’ve recommended damage your perception of the resort? Does it seem less upmarket if the cabins are repositioned the way I just described and the layout and style are modified? Would you still go there?’

‘Yes, I’d still go. If I could afford to, I mean—which I can’t. So, no, I won’t go there, but I would.’

Catherine mentally slapped herself. Could that be the stupidest thing she’d ever said in her life?

‘Because...? You would still go because...?’ he prompted. ‘I’m not asking you for the answer to global warming, Cathy—just a simple opinion about the modifications.’

Her eyes flashed. ‘I would still go because, judging by the diagrams Carl was kind enough to show me while you were away, the redesign will actually be more in tune with the surroundings. More special. More...secret... That’s the way I’d describe it. Which feels more exclusive.’

Max held her notepad out to her. ‘Perfect. Put something like that in that last letter, will you? One more meeting on the environmental impact study—just a formality—and we should be ready to get things underway.’

She reached for the notepad and her knee accidentally brushed against the side of Max’s leg. Somehow that made her start to tremble. Sexual frustration alive and kicking!

Next thing Max was tossing her notepad behind him onto the desk and catching her hand in his. Four whole months without physical contact, and in one morning three separate hits?

Today just sucked.

‘You’re shaking,’ he said, his face full of concern. ‘And you’ve hardly said a word for the past hour. Something’s wrong. Are you ill?’

‘No, I’m not ill,’ she snapped. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

Max looked disbelieving.

‘I’m fine,’ she insisted, but he clearly wasn’t convinced.

Catherine tried to pull her hand free. ‘A bit tired, that’s all,’ she offered.

‘Tired? Why?’

Oh, for God’s sake.

‘Just a...a late night.’

She wondered what Max would say if she gave him the bald truth: A late night transferring a few sexual fantasies about you from my head to the page. Yeah—maybe not.

He let go of her hand—whew!—and folded his arms so his hands were jammed under his armpits.

‘Oh. A late night. I thought maybe—’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Must be lunchtime, right? I assume you have...’ Another clearing of the throat. ‘Do you have plans?’

She got to her feet with alacrity. ‘Yes, I do.’

He watched her for a long moment. X-ray eyes.

Catherine’s hand reached for the button that wasn’t there, and at last Max waved her towards the door. ‘Can you be back by one-thirty?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Catherine said, and dodged around him to grab her notepad.

She hurried from the office as Max reefed the report he’d taken from her in-tray off the desk, as though it would bite him if he didn’t subdue it.

Typical Max! He never just picked something up—he had to throttle it.

Back at her desk, Catherine neatened her work area mechanically. Simmering at the back of her mind was the worrying certainty that her working relationship with Max had gone off the rails this morning. That she’d been caught out.

Something’s wrong. Are you ill?

Yes, I’m sick with lust! What are you going to do about it?

He’d bypass the thermometer and go straight for the psychiatrist if he knew the truth.

She heard a curse float out from his office. He always cursed and tore his hands through his hair when something outside his control slowed him down, so he must have seen something wrong in the report.

She caught herself smiling, and pinched her lips to stop it. What the hell was there to smile at? If there was something wrong in the report Max had only himself to blame, because he’d choofed off to Canada instead of sticking around to beat it into shape.

And him choofing off to Canada was none of her business. She wished he’d go back to Canada. She wished he’d relocate to Canada and email his work in. Because it was not ‘our’ resort. It was his resort. And she would do well to remember that. Sharp, clear distinction between work and personal. Because work wasn’t personal. Work was work.

And, now she thought of it, she was going to change that scene in Passion Flower. That scene with Alex and Jennifer working in the office over a Thai meal—which she would make a...a...a Chinese meal. In fact she would delete the whole scene. Because in reality that interlude had ended with a brusque ‘Thank you for your help’ and a drive away—and what was so romantic about that? What did she think she was doing, turning that into a ‘Jenny, do you know how long I’ve wanted you?’ moment, complete with a slow reel in and a soft kiss?

She was a freaking idiot!

And her damned book sucked.

‘Sucked’: word of the day.

Her eyes moved to her in-tray, where her dark secret was buried.

Uh-oh. Where her dark secret was not buried.

Because the manuscript was sitting brazenly on top.

A whoosh of panic had her reaching for the back of her chair to steady herself. Until she remembered that the report had been covering it and Max had taken the report. That was the only reason the book was sitting there exposed.

Nothing to panic over.

Until she reached out to grab the pages so she could stick them in her briefcase...and saw the page on top.

She distinctly remembered scoring a red mark on the page when Max had called her name.

But there was no red mark on the page.

Catherine’s heart stopped, then started pounding. She slid into her chair, boneless. Flicked through her in-tray again. Sat stock-still for one appalled moment.

No red mark anywhere.

So...if the report had been on top of the manuscript, that meant...

No—God, no. Max Rutherford had picked up a few pages of her book along with his report!

And Max had started reading that report as she was leaving the office.

Hot, then cold, then hot. Hyperventilation. Paper bag...she needed a paper bag. Brain not working. Brain dead.

Then adrenaline tore through her veins and her synapses fired—electrified by pure fear—and she latched on to two essential facts: one, if Max had read even one sentence of those pages he would have come screeching out already and, two, she had to get those pages back.

Get them back immediately. But without running into his office, waving her arms and looking like an insane asylum escapee.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Nope—there was nothing for it. It was physically impossible for her to walk calmly into Max’s office.

She was going in like an insane person.

TWO

Max sighed, unwilling to give up until he’d read every page of the report—even if he had yet to take in a single word.

His mind wasn’t on it. His mind wasn’t in the office at all. His mind was at lunch.

But he wasn’t going to acknowledge whose lunch his mind was at, or why it was there. Because he was a moron, and had done nothing right for two weeks, and nothing had felt right the whole time he’d been away, and enough was enough, and it was time to put his mind back where it should be.

So he just sat at his desk, flipping, skimming, flipping, skimming. Counting down pages until he found a word he could take in: ‘Conclusion’.

One rush of air later he found himself holding nothing.

The report had been whisked out of his hands so fast it took a few seconds for him to feel the sting of the paper cut that had just been inflicted in the web between his thumb and his index finger.

‘Ouch!’

He looked up.

Catherine. Looking horrified.

That was...weird.

Catherine North never looked anything but completely composed. At least she hadn’t until today.

But, then again, Catherine North had never worn figure-hugging black that emphasised every mind-numbingly delicious curve until today. And Catherine North had never let a glossy, finger-luring curl stray out of place until today. And Catherine North had never had the skin of her legs visible until today. And Catherine North—

Was definitely looking horrified.

‘Lunch date stand you up?’ he couldn’t resist asking, wondering if there was a more direct way he could ask her who she was having lunch with without making himself look more of a moron than he already was.

Eyes huge behind the lenses of her tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, Catherine shook her head.

She didn’t seem inclined to add anything, so Max asked, ‘Did you want that report for a particular reason?’

He watched, fascinated, as the tip of her tongue came out to scoot quickly across her bottom lip.

She had the sexiest bottom lip he’d ever seen.

‘No,’ she said, and the bottom lip pinched itself in, in its usual repressed fashion.

Still looked sexy, though.

Max sucked a drop of blood from his wound, waiting to hear what Catherine would add. But it seemed no more information was forthcoming. ‘Then do you think I could have it back?’ he asked politely.

‘It?’

‘The report.’

‘Of course,’ she said, looking down as she hived off some pages from the back and held the rest out to him. She turned quickly on her heel.

Before she could take a step, Max asked, ‘Don’t I get to look at those pages, too?’

She stopped. Her shoulders tightened. And then she shrugged and said over her shoulder, ‘Just some shredding you picked up by mistake with the report. I wanted to take care of it before I left for lunch.’

And then she was running out.

And Catherine North had never run anywhere in this office. Until today.

So... What was so special about today?

Max’s mouth turned down. In short—nothing.

His return to the office had been monumentally disappointing. Not that he’d had any business expecting anything to be different just because he’d been away for two weeks and they’d left things a little...

Ugh. A little nothing! That was how they’d left things.

They’d worked hard that night, and she’d been so gob-smackingly smart, and warm, and energised, and it had been great. Like a revelation. No, not a revelation—a confirmation...of something he’d always suspected. That Catherine was...special.

And then they’d taken the elevator down to the car park and he’d said, ‘Thank you for your help,’ and she’d said, ‘No problem,’ and they’d looked at each other... One, two, three, four beats.

And then they’d gone to their cars and driven off.

And he’d flown to Canada as fast as he’d been able to book and go.

Yep, he really was a moron.

‘Moron’: word of the day. And it was all his.

He went back to page one of the report.

Two minutes later he was cursing and slamming it down again. He was getting nowhere. And all because Catherine was...different. As if something had changed.

Running away to Canada without telling her had obviously been a mistake. But he’d just been...cautious. No, he was never cautious. More like reluctant. Reluctant to mess around with their excellent working relationship by giving in to his curiosity about her. Curiosity about what it would be like to—

No! He shot to his feet. He would not go there, even in his head.

He started pacing around the office, letting out some excess energy.

Not going there. Because it was one thing flirting in the office when you both knew the score, but quite another to hit on a strait-laced virgin who was not interested. Even his father, serial secretary-dater and all-round loser, didn’t go there.

And Ms North was not remotely interested. Ms North did not know the meaning of the word ‘flirt’. Ms North would skewer him with a letter-opener if he laid a lukewarm look on her, let alone a questing finger. Look at the way she’d freaked when he’d held her fingers for a couple of seconds—as if he was an eagle and she was a tiny bird struggling to get free of his talons. And the reception he’d got on arrival today, which had given new meaning to the word ‘unwelcome’. She’d even had it in for his new tie.

He looked down at his tie, decided she was right, and tugged it off. Laughed again as he went back to his desk and sat down.

And then he wondered if he was going mad, laughing about his tie in the middle of this mess. His hands went diving into his hair. It— No, she! She was so...so frustrating.

At first it had been a novelty, having an assistant who wasn’t remotely interested in his body.

But it had moved past that, to another novelty: being seriously attracted to someone who looked as if she’d faint if she heard the word ‘sex’.

Even without today’s hair and top and toenails—even when she was buttoned to the hilt in ill-fitting shirts covered with drab cardigans in shades of porridge and grey and dinge-green—he’d started feeling a little tortured—but in a weirdly good way—being near her.

That lemony fresh perfume she wore combined with her natural scent beneath it—lovely. The way her luminous hazel eyes shone behind her lenses when she was arguing her case—adorable. The habit she had of touching the button at her collar as though reassuring herself it was done up—intriguing. And when her fingers sneaked up to her perfectly shaped ear to touch the discreet gold hoop—demure...and yet somehow not demure.

He cursed under his breath, reached for the report again and saw another tiny bead of blood from the paper cut. He grabbed a tissue from the box on his desk and blotted it. Frowned at his hand as he remembered the look on Catherine’s face. There had been something at the bottom of the report Catherine hadn’t wanted him to see.

Max thought back again to his arrival that morning. He’d been so shocked at how she looked he’d been blinded to anything else at first. But if he dug past that there had been...dismay. No, more than dismay. She hadn’t wanted him anywhere near her. Because of...

The printing!

She’d been on edge because—and the truth was slapping him in the face now—he’d disturbed her printing something she shouldn’t have been printing. She hadn’t wanted to tell him what the document was—not that he’d really cared; he’d only asked because she’d looked so guilty. He’d wanted to goad her a little, get one of those mind-your-own-business glares out of her that just cracked him up. But now...?

What would a personal assistant be printing that her boss shouldn’t see? What would have her running in and snatching it out of his hands? Hmm...

Oh. Oh! Well, of course. A job application!

But she’d been printing reams. Too long for a letter and CV.

So not just one job. More than one. Which meant she wasn’t attracted to a special job she’d just happened upon but wanting to leave this job and going all-out scattergun to do it. God knew how many emails she’d sent to complement so many snail-mail CVs.

It was like an arrow between the eyes, and for a full minute he couldn’t think straight.

And then he could think. But his poor benumbed brain seemed willing to accommodate only one thought: Catherine wasn’t allowed to leave.

He forced himself to put that ironclad fact to one side. Because if his bogged brain didn’t start working how was he going to figure out a way to make her stay?

Just ask her to!

Okay, that seemed logical—although how he could do it out of the blue, when she hadn’t actually indicated she was unhappy with her job, was not immediately obvious.

Except... Damn. She’d said today she couldn’t afford to go to Kurrangii. Had to be a message in that. He wasn’t paying her enough.

Well, he could give her a pay rise. It was his company—he could pay her whatever he wanted. Whatever she wanted!

Good. Perfect solution.

Without further ado he was out of his chair and heading for the door. ‘Catherine!’ he bellowed, before he reached it.

Silence.

He bolted through the doorway, searching.

Empty.

Max leaned against the doorjamb, running both hands into his hair. Why hadn’t he asked her where she was going for lunch? Hello? Earth to Max? Irrelevant! As if he could invade her date to offer her a pay rise! He’d look completely deranged.

Dammit. He was going to have to wait until she got back. He hated waiting.

He checked his watch. Forty minutes.

Feeling he should be doing something, he circled her desk. Looking at its almost stately tidiness made him smile. It was strangely comforting to see the evidence of her fastidious little habits.

His brain went stubborn on him for the second time: Catherine wasn’t allowed to leave.

Of course if he had a copy of what she’d been printing he’d be in a better position to know what he was up against. What counter-offer would work.

But there was no paper on the desk. No paper anywhere. Reflexively, his gaze moved to the printer. Clean. Silent. Turned off. The computer, too. Strange.

He sat in her chair. Looked at the computer screen. Turned on the computer and signed in to the system.

A sudden mental picture of how he looked—at Catherine’s desk, in her chair, hunched in front of her computer—made him roll his eyes. Thank God their suite of offices was completely private, so nobody would wander past and see him in this shameful Machiavellian guise. But, even so, this was crazy! What had he come to? He should just wait for her to come back and ask her what was going on! The way a sane person would.

He reached to flick the computer off.

And saw it.

A document. Recovered—the way it happened when you turned off the computer suddenly. Just there on the screen, without him searching or opening anything. A document called... What the hell...?

‘Passion Flower’.

Passion Flower?

Max looked around, feeling a tad uncomfortable now the moment of truth had arrived and it turned out not to be a job application—because nobody called a job application Passion Flower.

Could he really do this?

It took him perhaps two seconds to decide that, yes, he could. He had a right to read any document he wanted—this was his business, these were his premises, it was his equipment. Really, he was honour-bound to look.

Three seconds after that he started reading. But he wasn’t prepared for the reality.

Underneath the title Passion Flower was a line in smaller type. It read: A novel of love, lust and loneliness.

And Max’s jaw dropped.

Jennifer Andrews had been dreaming of her boss for months. Wild, erotic dreams.

Definitely not a job application, Max thought, shell-shocked. No way was he going to stop, though.

He read, scrolled, read, scrolled.

He’d figured out the truth as soon as he’d clapped eyes on that strapline, but somehow it wasn’t until he arrived at page three that the knowledge crystallised into recognisable syllables.

Cathy was writing a novel.

A romance novel.

A sexy romance novel.

He scrolled again, avidly searching, the sentences and phrases beckoning to him like a siren’s call, wrapping around his senses.

She knew Alex would be back soon, but Jennifer was too impatient to sit calmly in the navy leather chair she always occupied.

Navy leather chair! Like the chairs in his office, where Cathy sat.

She was drawn to Alex’s office window. Ten floors down, Jennifer could see the Botanic Gardens. It felt like a scene trapped in time...the immaculate green of the trees...Sydney Harbour shining in the distance, a diamond-sprinkled sheet of blue silk...the sun radiating a heady, hazy aphrodisiac...

Tenth floor. Office window overlooking the Botanic Gardens. Sydney Harbour. Check, check, check.

Alex walked into the office, brown briefcase in hand, and fixed her with his blue-eyed stare.

‘Notepad, Jenny,’ he barked at her.

Max was incapable of stopping his fingers from hitting the down arrow as his eyes stayed glued to the monitor to see what would happen next.

Alex towered over her, six feet two inches from the top of his tousled black hair to his Italian leather shoes. She clutched the red silk of her peignoir against her chest...

Max’s finger kept punching the down arrow, almost obsessively.

A red silk peignoir...

What would Cathy look like in that?

Max breathed out and sat back in Catherine’s chair to recover the breath that had somehow become linked to an almost savage tightening in his groin.

He checked his watch, assessing how much time he had. A twinge of conscience hit him. He should not be reading this. He should stop. This was bad.

But he returned his finger, now a little shaky, to the keyboard.

* * *

Catherine was determined to be back at precisely one-thirty, as ordered, so she hurried her friend and colleague Nell through lunch fast enough to cause dyspepsia.

‘What’s the rush?’ Nell protested as Catherine all but grabbed a passing waiter by the apron to demand the bill before they’d finished their coffee. ‘Max isn’t going to mind if you’re late.’

‘I’ll mind. And would you stop staring at me? I’ve had enough of that from Max!’

‘Well, it’s such a change.’ Nell gulped a mouthful of coffee. ‘What did he say? Max? About the new you?’

‘Nothing of consequence.’

Which was the truth. Not that it was really the ‘new’ her; it was the old her—not that anybody at Rutherford Property could possibly know that.

‘And, anyway, remember the girlfriends? Susie, Maria, Leah? All tall, all blonde, all dressed in tight, short dresses? And that was just in my first month. And the parade of starry-eyed PAs before me? All tall, blonde, blah-blah-blah?’

‘Haven’t seen any of his famous blondes for a while.’

‘Oh, he’ll have one stashed somewhere. And, regardless, he wouldn’t notice me—not in the way you mean—if I burst into his office doing the Dance of the Seven Veils.’

Catherine delved into her purse and laid some notes on the table without waiting for the bill. ‘I’m paying—the least I can do after rushing you into a bout of indigestion. But can we go? Like...now? Right now?’

‘All right,’ Nell said, ‘but I still don’t get why we have to hurry. We’re not late.’

Catherine didn’t plan on enlightening her—because she couldn’t explain, even to herself, the unformed sense of panic that had been racing through her veins ever since she’d left the office. Telling herself that everything was fine and she was merely suffering from a guilty conscience and an over-active imagination didn’t seem to be working. And the panic just kept growing.

Catherine bade Nell a preoccupied farewell at level eight and, the moment she was alone in the elevator, jabbed irritably at the button for level ten. Although she knew the elevator wouldn’t ascend any faster just because she hit the button a thousand times.

She breathed a sigh of relief when the doors opened at her floor—only to choke on it as she rounded the corner from the lift lobby.

Max was sitting in her chair, eyes glued to her computer screen.

Ohhhhhhhh.

Not much of a thought, but all she could manage initially.

She reminded herself that she’d turned everything off, that the flash drive was in her drawer, the printed pages shoved in her briefcase, and there was no way he could be looking at Passion Flower. He was probably looking for the Queensland report to make some changes.

So breathe. Breathe and be normal.

‘Is there something you wanted urgently?’ she asked, forcing herself not to run to her desk but to walk slowly, calmly.

Max raised his head and looked at her—slack-jawed, marvelling, astounded.

And Catherine knew.

Max’s voice, when it finally came, was unbelievably husky. ‘You wrote this?’

THREE

Catherine’s brain was limping around the edges of semi-formed words, refusing to fasten on to any of them long enough for her to string a response together.

Max shook his head, as if he’d sustained a blow and was reeling. ‘You wrote this.’ This time it wasn’t a question.

Automatically Catherine’s hand moved to where her top button should have been primly done up.

Max’s stunned eyes followed her hand—could he see her pulse throbbing there?—moved lower, lower. Until every inch of her had been examined.

Catherine was lost—no button, no earrings. Coping the next best way, she whipped off her glasses and started polishing them ineffectually.

Thinking. Thinking. Thinking.

‘“His fingers slid through the heavy chestnut silk as he looked down at her, his vivid blue gaze on Jennifer’s hazel eyes through the round tortoiseshell rims of her spectacles...”’ Max recited, watching her as though spellbound.

He knew it by heart! Catherine put her glasses back on and took the only route open to her: she threw herself on her sword with an unvarnished ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry?’

‘For bringing it here—doing it at work. I’ve just...just had a lot of time on my hands lately, while you’ve been travelling.’ Catherine braced herself for the inevitable: she was going to get the sack. She deserved it. She stiffened her spine and said again, ‘I’m sorry.’

But apparently Max was too stunned to respond. All he could do was stare.

And it was unbearable. Yes, she was three hundred per cent in the wrong—crush on her boss—groan—turning him into Alex—ugh—bringing the book to work and using Max’s equipment, supplies and the time he was paying for—cringe. But come on! Do the humane thing and drop the axe, get it over with—sack her, tell her to—

‘Why?’ Max asked suddenly.

Oh. A word at last. But not what she was expecting.

‘Because,’ Catherine said.

Clearly she wasn’t going to win any prizes for writing snappy dialogue with a comeback like that—but what the hell was that? Why? Why what? Why was she sorry? Why was she writing it? Why was it in the office?

She had a vision of that meteorite she’d wished for earlier, plummeting towards the earth, targeting the Sydney Central Business District.

Max stood slowly, like a man in a dream. His eyes did another slow rove along her body before he walked around her desk and stopped beside her.

‘And you...’ he breathed, still visibly stunned. ‘She’s you. Jennifer Andrews is you. The chestnut hair, the glasses, the hazel eyes—you’re Jennifer.’

Catherine wasn’t going to bother denying it. But she wasn’t going to confirm it either. And, in any case, she was too busy trying to form a reply to what she just knew his next question—the important question—would be.

‘So who’s the tall, black-haired, blue-eyed man? Who’s Alex?’

Yep. Next question—right on cue. Because Max wasn’t an idiot.

‘I made him up,’ Catherine said, too quickly, backing away a step.

‘You didn’t draw on a flesh-and-blood model?’

Catherine fingered one naked earlobe. ‘N-not too...too heavily. Not really.’

‘You seem a little flustered, Cathy,’ Max said, softly, closing the distance again.

Catherine wondered if the air between them, impregnated with his scent, had some mysterious connection to her insides. Because she sure felt strange, breathing it in.

‘I just don’t want you to think I’m—’

Catherine heard the pathetic squeak that had replaced her voice and stopped herself. Enough. Catherine North did not do pathetic squeaks—not old Catherine, not new Catherine, not any Catherine.

She took a deep breath, settled herself. ‘I know I shouldn’t be working on personal matters in the office,’ she said, and was pleased with that businesslike steering of the conversation into more appropriate waters. Because, really, it was her less than professional behaviour that should be the topic under discussion here—not the colour of her eyes or the model for her hero! ‘So I’m sorry.’

For the third time, and now can you just sack me?

‘You described the gardens perfectly,’ Max said, uncooperatively. ‘I’ve often wondered what you look at when you gaze out of my office window. You do it a lot, you know.’

‘I do? Ah... Well, I...I do draw on real life for descriptions of...of places. Now, could we—’

‘And my leather chairs?’

‘The setting is...is incidental. It has no bearing on anything. I just...just like those chairs. And they seemed...’ Catherine’s words dried up as Max continued to look at her with that slightly dazed and wholly speculative expression.

‘So. Black hair, blue eyes, six-two.’ He repeated the description slowly. ‘What does he do for a living, I wonder? Engineer, by any chance?’

The flare of horror in Catherine’s eyes must have confirmed that nicely for him, because he grinned.

‘Lots of men are engineers,’ she said.

Uh-oh, little squeak there.

‘Shall we start eliminating the ones with brown or green eyes? The fair-haired engineers? The short ones? And the engineers who—?’

‘Look, Alex Taylor is a figment of my imagination,’ Catherine said shortly, and walked stiffly past Max to put her bag in the cupboard. She sat in her chair, whipped her hair back, coiled it into as tight a knot as she could and stuck a pencil through it to hold it. Better. ‘Now, are you going to sack me or not?’

‘Huh?’ He stared at her. ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course I’m not going to sack you.’

She closed her eyes, just briefly, to savour the relief of that. ‘Then shall we get back to work? You did say I was going to be busy.’

Max leaned over her desk, arms straight, hands flat on the wood either side of hers, where they were clutching the nearest thing she could find—which happened to be a stapler.

‘He’s me, isn’t he?’ Max asked.

Catherine laughed, as though that were too silly to consider.

But Max apparently wasn’t going to be sidetracked, and she didn’t blame him after that unconvincing titter.

‘Well?’ he prompted.

‘The book is fiction,’ she said. Well, that was actually the truth! ‘The characters are made up.’ Okay—that part was a lie. ‘Now, can we get back to reality?’ And that was the important thing.

Max leaned closer. Catherine could smell his spicy cologne. Vanilla, a touch of sandalwood, a hint of amber. Heaven.

‘Sure we can,’ he said. ‘Fiction is fun, Catherine, but the real world is where it’s at.’

Catherine accidentally stapled her thumb, but didn’t feel it.

The real world... The world RJ Harrow had opened her eyes to. Where bosses tried to get their assistants into bed and if the assistant said no her life became a living hell. Where she got waylaid in corridors and shoved against walls and mauled in hotel rooms and there was nothing she could do about it because apparently it was her own fault for looking the way she did.

The real world sucked—hello, word of the day! That was the whole point of Passion Flower. So there was no confusing reality with fantasy. Because in Passion Flower the assistant could say whatever she damned well wanted: yes, no, maybe, drop dead.

But of course in Passion Flower, bespectacled, hazel-eyed personal assistant Jennifer said a passionate yes to tall, black-haired, blue-eyed Alex the engineer.

And now Max had read all about that passionate yes. Max knew she was Jennifer. Knew he was Alex. Did that mean...? Did Max think Catherine was asking for it? Because of what happened in the book? Because of the way she looked today? Because of that night, two weeks ago, when she’d let her guard down?

Max was doing that through-the-pupils-into-the-brain stare while he waited for her to say something, but she was incapable of speech.

And then he leaned a smidgeon closer. ‘Cathy, there’s one thing. About Alex. He’s not quite—’

‘You’ve completely misunderstood,’ she said, cutting him off.

She calmly removed the staple from her thumb, as though she regularly stapled a body part, and repositioned the stapler back on the desk.

‘Alex Taylor is a...a composite. The black hair comes from a man whose name is Luke. And then there’s my neighbour, Rick, who has the most amazing amber eyes—because, you see, I am in the process of changing Alex’s eyes from blue to amber; it’s a much more unusual colour, you know. And the engineer part is from all the Rutherford Property guys—you, of course, and Damian, and Carl.’

‘Carl?’

‘Yes, Carl—who is brilliant if only you’d look past his shyness. Really brilliant—and kind, and creative. Did you know he paints?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Max snapped. And—thank God—he removed his hands from her desk and straightened. He plucked a ruler off her desk and started flexing it.

There was silence as Max stared at her, flexing the ruler. Flexing, flexing. And then it snapped, and he looked at it as though he had no idea how it had ended up in his hands.

Her with the stapler, him with the ruler. God help the paperclips, the way they were going!

‘Right—composite—got it,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to have to play the boss card, Catherine, and tell you to direct your attention to something worthwhile while I’m in Queensland for the next week. Like the...the filing. I’d like the old files sorted and archived.’

Catherine’s eyes shot to his. She wanted to protest that he’d only just got back after too long away, but she swallowed the words. It wasn’t her job to question the boss about his comings and goings—just to book them. And then do the filing while she imagined him with a horse-faced blonde bimbo in his hotel room.

Long, silent growl.

‘When would you like your flight booked?’ she asked tightly.

‘Tomorrow. First flight to Cairns.’

Catherine sat looking at him, wanting to call back the whole disastrous day.

Max’s gaze tangled with hers for endless moments.

Suddenly he seemed to come to a conclusion. Forking one hand through his hair, he turned on his heel, broken ruler clenched in one fist, went into his office, and quietly closed the door.

* * *

Max had said he’d be gone a week. But he was now two days overdue. And it was driving Catherine nuts.

Once Max had left for Queensland he’d reverted to passing on his instructions via Damian, responding to her phone messages via text or email and not once actually speaking to her.

Catherine tossed another pile of old files onto her desk for sorting. She hated filing! She hated everything. Her head was aching because she’d been pinning her hair too tightly for a week and two days. She was wearing thicker tights and they were making her itch. She’d bought new shirts that buttoned so high they were choking her. All to counteract the Passion Flower effect.

The least Max could do was show up and appreciate her new take on ultra-conservatism, and get it through his thick head that she knew the difference between fantasy and reality.

Catherine threw herself into the fray and it wasn’t long before she was tackling the ‘home run’—the top drawers of Max’s ten ancient filing cabinets. The oldest, mustiest files. And they were hard to reach for someone who was only five feet four.

She was standing on an upturned wastepaper basket when the accident happened.

She’d tugged one of the drawers open, hands buried blindly in it to extract the first few files, when the wastepaper basket slid out from under her. She fell backwards, pulling one file with her and scattering papers in an airbound muddle. The filing drawer, tugged along by the force of Catherine’s other flailing hand, slid fully out, disengaged from the cabinet and started a heavy descent to the floor.

‘Cathy?’

She heard Max’s herald from the lift lobby as she hit the floor almost simultaneously with the drawer, which landed next to her as she let out a mangled ouhmph sound.

Winded. Great! How was she supposed to look ultra-conservative lying on a carpet of loose pages, gasping for breath, next to a filing drawer?

Well, the filing alcove was tucked away. Hopefully Max would think she’d left the office on some errand and go into his own office. She could wait out the diaphragm spasms in peace, then get up, straighten her clothes, and walk back to her desk as though nothing had happened.

‘Cathy?’ he called again, obviously having reached her desk and found her missing.

Catherine closed her eyes. Two minutes was all she needed. Go into your office, she begged silently. Two minutes, that’s all. Two—

‘Cathy?’

By this time Max was sounding puzzled, irritated, and a little alarmed.

Oooohhh, this was not going to work.

‘Catherine North! Where the hell are you?’

Followed by a string of graphic curses.

She willed her diaphragm into submission and managed to draw an uncomplicated breath. One more. A third.

Right. Time to get up—so she could at least be found on her feet.

But she’d only managed to raise herself on one elbow when Max hurtled past the open door of the filing alcove. Stopped. Turned. Charged back, another string of curses accompanying him.

Catherine raised herself on her other elbow. ‘No wonder you wanted the files cleared out,’ she said, with only a faint wheeze. ‘They’re a health hazard.’

‘I’ll tell you what you can do with the files,’ Max ground out. Kicking loose pages out of his way, he shoved the errant drawer aside with such ferocity that Catherine hoped he’d refrain from filling her in on the intricacies of that particular suggestion.

In seconds he was kneeling beside her. ‘What happened? Should I call an ambulance? I’ll call an ambulance.’

‘You will not call an ambulance,’ Catherine said. ‘Because I’m fine.’

‘You’re not,’ Max contradicted flatly. ‘You didn’t answer when I called. Did you hit your head?’

‘Yes, but—’

Without waiting for the rest, Max delved one of his hands into her hair and Catherine groaned. There went her tight chignon; she could feel waves of hair springing out all over the place.

All it took was the groan for him to dig deeper. ‘There? Does it hurt there?’

‘No, it doesn’t hurt there,’ Catherine said waspishly. She reached a hand up to her head. ‘Oh, what are you doing to my hair? Do you know how long that takes to pin?’

‘So don’t pin it,’ Max said. He got to his feet, effortlessly drawing Catherine up beside him, then put his arm around her. ‘My office,’ he said, and started shepherding her along.

Catherine groaned again. This was too awful. Not only the embarrassment of being discovered in such an undignified position, but the fact that Max had his arm around her, so she was breathing in that erotic scent of his—that mixture of special cologne, ultra-clean clothes, and Max’s own personal essence. At close range it was too wonderful to be borne.

‘I’m fine, I promise you,’ she said feebly.

‘Nearly there,’ Max soothed, shouldering open his office door, settling her on the leather couch against the wall, crouching beside her. ‘All right, now just lie there.’

Catherine would have preferred one of the matching chairs where she normally sat. A couch was so...intimate. It reminded her of an Alex-Jennifer scene—Jennifer reclining on a chaise-longue, hair tumbling over her shoulders; Alex staring down at her with burning eyes...

Max smoothed a hand across the top of her head and Catherine groaned again.

‘See?’ Max said accusingly. ‘You are hurt!’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Catherine grumbled and, using her hands for leverage, tried to sit up.

‘Look,’ Max demanded, grasping the hands pushing against the leather of the couch and lowering her again. ‘You’re shaking like a leaf.’

It was true. And Catherine was very glad to have the fall as an excuse—because her body’s trembling reaction had nothing to do with that fall and everything to do with Max’s proximity to her.

‘All right, a headache and a teensy bit of shock,’ she lied. ‘Now, can I get up?’

Max squashed himself onto the edge of the couch beside her and put his hand to her forehead—feeling her temperature, of all things. Well, he was an engineer, not a doctor.

‘I guess that’s a no,’ Catherine said dryly. ‘Although I think you should consider doing a first-aid course.’

‘I thought I was managing pretty well.’

‘Hmph. It’s a good thing I didn’t injure my back, the way you dragged me off the floor.’

‘What—was I supposed to leave you there?’

‘And I don’t have a fever, so you can move your hand.’ Next thing he’d be asking her to stick out her tongue—and there was no saying what she’d do with it once it was out of her mouth!

Max removed his hand. ‘How am I supposed to know if I don’t check?’

‘Because you don’t get a fever from—’ Catherine broke off in exasperation. ‘Oh, never mind! Just tell me when you’re free for that first-aid course.’

‘Why didn’t you answer when I called?’

‘I was flat-out at the time.’

The bone-melting smile. ‘A double entendre—so your brain’s working at least. Are you sure you didn’t break anything? Perhaps I’d better check—’

‘If you do, I’ll walk out of this office and never come back.’ Just to think of those hands wandering over her bones was enough to heat her blood to boiling point.

‘All right, all right.’ Short laugh. ‘God, you’re such a firebrand, Cathy. I love it.’

Firebrand. Catherine’s breath jammed. Jennifer was the firebrand. Catherine wrote her that way because she couldn’t be like that herself any more, not since RJ... Uh-oh. Not a good idea to be thinking about RJ. Or Passion Flower. Or tongues. Or fires in the blood.

‘Stay there,’ Max commanded, standing in one smooth, decisive movement. ‘Five minutes.’

But it was less than three minutes later when Max returned, a glass of water in one hand and two tablets in the other.

‘For your headache,’ he explained, and watched as Catherine downed them. ‘Now,’ he said when she’d finished her last swallow of water. ‘Explain.’

Catherine looked at him blankly. ‘Explain what?’

‘What the hell you were doing.’ He passed a hand that was none too steady over his eyes.

Whaaaat?

‘I was doing the filing. As requested by my boss.’

‘I didn’t mean for you to kill yourself!’

‘And I didn’t.’

‘Couldn’t you get someone else to get the files for you if they were too high?’ He started pacing in front of her. ‘In fact, why are they so high?’

‘I have no idea. I guess your last assistant was taller.’

‘Elise,’ Max said, matter-of-fact. ‘Yes, I guess she was.’ He looked at Catherine’s feet, her hideous flat shoes. ‘She wore high heels, too.’

‘Well, it seems your various Elises—’ oozed Catherine, dripping poisoned honey ‘—never threw out a piece of paper in their lives! I’ve found files so old they should be given a gold watch!’

‘Do you need help going through them?’ Max asked, ignoring her sarcasm to cut straight to the point.

Instantly Catherine’s back was up. No way was she going to get landed with a leggy blonde ‘Elise’ to help her. ‘I’m nearly finished. I can handle it.’

Max looked at her sceptically.

‘I can,’ she insisted.

Max was silent, studying her for a long moment. Then he got to his feet and walked over to look out of the window. ‘So...how’s the book going?’

Catherine pokered up. ‘If you think that’s the reason I haven’t finished—’

‘That’s not what I—’ Max broke off, spinning around. ‘I just...had an idea. You know...for a scene. I thought of it while I was in Queensland.’

Catherine opened her mouth to tell him to mind his own damned business—but for some reason out came, ‘A scene?’ instead. Because—arrggghhh!—she was interested. Intrigued, even. And clearly insane.

In. Sane.

‘Yeah. A cocktail function where Alex is trying to woo investors,’ he said. ‘Jennifer has planned the event. And something goes wrong. She...she twists her ankle or...or hits her head, maybe...? And Alex has to rescue her, and he calls the doctor and...and stuff.’

‘What kind of party? I mean, black tie?’ Catherine frowned, thoughtful. ‘Because Jennifer doesn’t dress up.’

He hurried over to her, sat on the edge of the couch again. ‘This could be the first time she does though, couldn’t it? And he’s thinking, Wow, who knew?’

She stared at him, her brain ticking over. ‘Hmm... Maybe I could try that.’

His eyes were so warm, so serious. For a heart-stopping moment Catherine thought he was going to touch her. She flinched backwards and Max jumped to his feet.

‘I just wondered, that’s all,’ he said, and paced to the other side of the room, jamming his hands under his armpits. ‘That’s how he’d treat her, right? Alex? How he’d be with Jennifer if she needed help?’

Okay, maybe she had a concussion and Max had some bizarre kind of interstate-travel version of jet lag. Because there was no rational explanation for this conversation.

‘I think I should get back to work.’

Max unjammed his hands, shoving them into his hair instead. ‘Not until the doctor has a look at you,’ he said, and all but ripped the phone off his desk. ‘I’ll call him, then go and bring Damian up to speed. Give you some privacy while the doc’s here.’

Alex...calling the doctor. Max...calling the doctor. This was weird. Too weird.

Catherine was so fidgety she could barely respond to the doctor’s questions. And when she was pronounced fit and well and was back at her desk with the filing she couldn’t concentrate. Because whenever she saw Max’s bold handwriting on a document she’d remember how it had felt to have his arm around her, his hands in her hair, that look of worry creasing his forehead and darkening his eyes, him talking to her about Passion Flower.

That’s how he’d treat her, right? Alex. How he’d be with Jennifer if she needed help?

Yes, that was exactly how he’d be.

And it had triggered other Passion Flower scenes, which now started rolling in her head. Sex in the filing alcove. Sex on the couch in his office. Sex on her desk—after Alex had wiped the top clear of all distractions...vicious staplers, hapless rulers, all flying off.

When she found herself mixing up the ‘keep’ and ‘archive’ files for the fourth time she started digging her own hands into her hair, even though it was back in its nice tight chignon.

And that was when she started really worrying—that she could write romance novels until the cows came home and still not get her feelings under control.

This was not going to turn out well.

* * *

When Max started reading from the top of page one for the fourth time he finally gave up.

He shouldn’t have touched Catherine. At all. Let alone going the full Neanderthal, dragging her off the floor and digging his hands into her hair. But now he had touched her he wanted to touch her again. Really, really wanted to. Like drag-her-close, breathe-her-in, put-his-tongue-somewhere touch her.

He shoved his hands into his hair and tugged. The truth was he’d wanted to touch her forever. Even when he hadn’t understood why.

And then, that night when they’d worked late, it had started to make sense: his brain had been seeing under her skin, where his eyes didn’t reach, and everything under there had been slowly but surely reeling him in. The sharp-as-a-tack brain. How she giggled to herself when she thought he wasn’t looking, making him wonder what was funny and why it was secret. Her stalwart defence of misfits like Carl—who’d better not have been sniffing around in his absence! The volcanic eruption when they disagreed on something, followed almost immediately with the grab for her top button or her earlobe—even though she had to know she didn’t have to be nervous around him; she could say anything to him.

In Canada, he’d convinced himself that their partnership was not to be screwed with because she was the best assistant he’d ever had. Which meant hands-off. But then he’d come home and she’d been sitting there in that tight top with her hair loose—and he’d known his hormones had been in on the act with his brain all along, seeing what his eyes hadn’t. The total, outrageous hotness of her.

Well, a fat lot of good his hormones had done him! Because she’d dressed like that for that day’s anonymous lunch companion—not for him! She only ever treated him to starchy buttoned-up shirts and shapeless drab skirts. No wayward curls for Max’s viewing. No sexy black tops. No alluring red silk peignoirs.

Peignoir... Max groaned and gripped his head, two-handed.

That book!

The second tactical error he’d made today. Why had he asked her about Alex and Jennifer? What sort of coward’s way was that of finding out how Catherine wanted to be treated by a man? And what difference would it make if he did know how Catherine wanted to be treated when she didn’t want him to be that man?

Damn Alex Taylor, anyway.

Alex. Black hair. Six feet two. Italian leather shoes. Navy leather couches. A view of the Botanic Gardens.

Arrggghh! Everything fitted—whether the eyes were blue or amber or pink!

Why couldn’t Alex be him?

He opened the report again and did his best to read past the first paragraph. But it was no use. Within thirty seconds the report was languishing, unloved, on the desk.

She’d ruined him—that was what she’d done!

She had him ignoring the steady stream of leggy blondes all clamouring for his attention. Had him running away from his own office to get his raging passions under control. Had him becoming his own personal assistant because he was too scared to take her on perfectly legitimate business trips.

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