“Until I’m dead.”
“According to Dr. Cavill, that could be any day now.”
Trainor gave a little snort of disgust and turned away from the paintings. “Let’s prove him wrong.”
For a moment Chloe thought he was heading toward the bed, and her heart gave a leap of anxiety and excitement. However, his path took him to the door, and she realized that Trainor’s way of warding off death was not to make love but to work.
Nathan pressed his palm against a touch pad, and a section of the wood paneling slid aside. The lights glowed to life automatically, illuminating sleek desks and banks of cutting-edge computer equipment. At the same time, the window wall went from shaded to translucent, offering a view of Manhattan’s towers. This room was all his; he’d designed it and equipped it, mostly with electronics of his own personal design.
“Holy Batcave!” Chloe said as she stepped into the room and turned slowly.
“Two superheroes in one morning,” Nathan said. “I’m flattered.” But he enjoyed watching the mixture of wide-eyed admiration and cynical amusement in her expression. She’d looked at his favorite paintings the same way, although there had been some extra element then, a cautiousness. She didn’t trust him.
And with good reason. He’d brought her to his office via the internal elevator that served only the three floors of his home. Being in that enclosed space with her had tested every ounce of his self-control. The faint floral hint of what must be her shampoo entered his lungs with every breath he drew in. He could see the rise and fall of her breasts under the white blouse she wore. He imagined pushing her against the wall of the elevator, shoving her skirt up to her waist, and burying himself in her while she wrapped her legs around his hips—those spike heels digging into him as she moaned the way she had last night.
Instead he’d put his hand at the small of her back as the elevator doors opened, a gesture that could be attributed to courtesy rather than an overwhelming desire to touch her somewhere. Anywhere.
It was a mistake. The warmth and movement of her body went straight from his palm to his groin.
He scanned the room along with her until his gaze settled on the back of a leather armchair while he pictured bending her over it and sliding his hands up her thighs before he . . .
She walked away from him to touch a swivel-mounted computer screen, making it pivot diagonally. “That’s cool, but I don’t see what the purpose is.”
“There’s a built-in projector so you can display the screen image on a wall or a ceiling or any other flat surface.” He came up behind her and reached around to flick on the device, throwing the twirling screen-saver image onto a corner of the room. As she tilted her head to look at it, the angle of her body shifted so that her behind brushed against the front of his trousers. He barely swallowed a groan.
She sidestepped away from him, and he couldn’t decide whether to be grateful or to seize her wrist and spin her in hard against him.
When she turned to look at him, he caught it: a quickening of her breathing, a tension in her posture, an awareness in her expression. She claimed she had come back only for the paycheck, but she was not offended by his behavior last night, as he’d feared. She might be wary but she was not indifferent to him.
He contemplated ignoring the mountain of reports on his computer and trying to seduce Chloe instead. Overcoming the barriers she put up would be a pleasurable challenge.
And she was a temp, so there would be no long-term issues as far as the office went. Once Janice was back, Chloe could go on to her next assignment at a different company.
The prospect gave him less relief than he expected. Chloe’s smart observations and snarky asides made the work seem less dreary.
The word brought him up short. When had he begun to consider his job in that light? And how had Chloe become so important to his mood?
“I’ll assume the giant chair behind the giant desk with the giant screens is your workstation.” Her voice derailed the unsettling direction of his thoughts.
“Yes, I use the size of my computer screens to indicate the size of . . . other things,” he said, matching his tone to hers.
That forced a little choke of laughter from her, and he felt a sense of satisfaction out of proportion to her response. It struck him that he could combine the work and the seduction into one package. The idea gave him such a jolt of energy that he wondered that electricity didn’t shoot out from the tips of his fingers.
He pulled a chair away from a workstation and wheeled it over beside his own chair, angling it to face one of the wings of the admittedly huge desk. “Sit here.”
She gave him a look that said she’d rather sit by a spider, and he smiled inwardly. This was going to be fun.