The Boss’s Unconventional Assistant Read online

  A picture of a close-knit family emerged. Two elder sisters, one with a stepdaughter, the other with a nine-month-old baby named Anastasia. The husbands of those sisters. An elderly grandfather they all seemed to have taken to their hearts.

  How would it feel to have a family like that? Grey couldn’t begin to imagine. He realised her chatter had died away and she had released his ankle.

  ‘Are you done already?’ The woman had talked to distract him while she’d put him through the requisite number of stretches. It had worked, and they’d been perfectly undisturbed the whole time. He even felt something close to relaxed—almost sleepy, actually.

  Doc Cooper would be pleased.

  Grey shuffled the sarcastic thought aside. He had goals to focus on. ‘It’s a wonder the phone hasn’t rung several times by now.’

  ‘It probably has. I put it on silent ring and sent it to the answering service before I left to make our lunch.’ She didn’t lift her head as she replaced and laced the exoform brace.

  His relaxed mood frayed. ‘I need to know of all incoming phone calls the moment they occur. I have a company to control.’ He leaned forward and gave her the benefit of his displeased expression. ‘There could have been something urgent.’ One project in particular had issues right now and could cost him upward of three million dollars if it crashed and burned.

  Her gaze locked with his, caught in the glare of his anger. ‘I’m sorry. I thought lunch time would be a break from all of that. I’ll check the messages now.’

  The woman sounded disappointed in herself and her mouth looked vulnerable, as it had when she’d watched and waited to see if he liked her bizarrely flavoured soup. It might have grown on him, he supposed, but how could he know for certain? His taste buds had imploded after the first two sips.

  Another urge overcame Grey now. For a scant moment in time, he thought of kissing her uncertainties away. Maybe he revealed something of that thought as he looked at her because her gaze flared from curiosity to interest.

  Of its own volition, Grey’s body leaned towards hers. She copied his action before she stopped abruptly.

  ‘I’ll turn the coffee on to brew before I check the messages. I prepared it earlier so it’s only a matter of flicking a switch.’ She removed herself from beside him, didn’t stop until she stood half a room away.

  With her hands clasped in front of her she cleared her throat. ‘I assume you’d like coffee?’

  ‘One cup.’ Damn the doctor’s orders. ‘Not too strong, plenty of milk.’ Grey forced aside other wants—unacceptable wants that had nothing to do with coffee. It must be the country air addling his brain. Not that he’d breathed any of it except for this morning when he’d waited those few minutes on the veranda for Sophia to arrive.

  Well, country air or simply the closeness of a woman—he had reacted on instinct, no thought involved. Now he had to engage his brain to override those instincts. Sophia Gable was not someone he should mess with.

  ‘You could take a nap instead of going straight back to work.’ She fidgeted from one foot to the other, burned into action, perhaps, by his glare.

  ‘I’m keeping off the foot as much as I can.’ Yes, he’d felt better, but, considering his injuries, that was to be expected. ‘And I’ll turn in at a decent hour tonight.’ Those were the only concessions he would give, and ‘decent hour’ was a relative term.

  She sighed. ‘Coffee it is, then.’

  Soph did indeed sigh, and repeated the sigh as she hesitated before she left the room. She didn’t want to irritate her employer, truly she didn’t. Rather, she wanted to help him, to be of assistance, to contribute appropriately to the working relationship. He didn’t make that easy. Nor did the way she reacted when in close proximity to him.

  ‘Are you resting well at night?’ She tried not to picture him in that big bed in the master suite and, yes, she had peeped into the room when she’d first arrived. So sue her.

  Grey shook his head, whether as a statement of his lack of rest or resistance to her questions, she couldn’t have said. ‘Perhaps we should concentrate on you, Sophia, and your tendency to make arbitrary decisions about my care without consulting me.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’m not accustomed to that kind of behaviour in my employees.’

  ‘I won’t do the phone thing again.’ Why did she get all shivery when he put on his growly voice? She pushed the question aside. Maybe it was simply chilly today or something.

  And he was annoyed with her. She should think about that. ‘You see, I thought you wanted me to take care of all those things, but that you didn’t want either of us to acknowledge my efforts openly.’

  When he didn’t appear to understand, she went on. ‘I thought your pride was stung and, although that would actually be silly, I would still be willing to work with it but you would have to reciprocate. I must be able to take proper care of you.’

  Her voice tightened at the end of that statement, because it mattered, blast him. She wanted to succeed at the job. And yes, fine, maybe she also needed to feel useful and know she was giving back, not just receiving. It was called a community consciousness, and lots of people had it.

  Certainly it was nothing to do with him personally, or with the fact that he attracted her just a little.

  She turned her focus back to what mattered, and cut him a glare to make it clear she meant business right now. ‘The alternative is that I do nothing at all for you. That’s not acceptable to me.’

  ‘I’m not embarrassed by my injuries.’ Even as he said it, a faint tinge of colour came into his cheeks.

  Soph raised her gaze farther and got caught in deep-green eyes that seemed to hold surprise, a hint of unease, and something else.

  ‘I’ll play back the phone messages while you make the coffee. If anything’s gone amok, I’ll just have to fix it.’ Most of his anger was gone now.

  She was glad that he was prepared to let the matter go.

  The deep mellow tone of his voice raised goose flesh on her skin despite the distance between them, despite her lofty resolutions. That wasn’t so great.

  As though he, too, felt it, he shook his head. ‘Take a few minutes to pre-plan what we’ll eat for dinner tonight.’ Oh, prosaic words, but his gaze held a different story. ‘Perhaps a casserole, so it can cook while we work.’ He made his suggestion without meeting her gaze. ‘There’s a pre-set function on the oven.’

  Broad shoulders and slender hips receded from her view while Soph stood there, silent. She told herself to wake up, stop watching, to resist the lure of an interest that couldn’t be allowed to grow.

  Already she liked him, was intrigued by him, felt more towards him than she should. That had to stop.

  Grey buried himself in work for the rest of the afternoon. He seemed intent on maintaining distance. Those two things were good, Soph decided as she clacked away on the computer keyboard and assured herself that that earlier aberration of feeling was now firmly in the past.

  While Grey scattered his emails about the universe, Soph worked her tail off on his tapes.

  ‘I need to check on the casserole now.’ She took a deep breath and suggested he sit on the veranda in the sunshine. ‘It won’t last much longer, and Vitamin D is good for you. Or is it Vitamin E? Whichever is right, just give it ten minutes. That’s all I’ll need, and I’ll bet it makes you feel good.’

  He muttered under his breath as he hobbled out there, taking his dictation recorder with him, but he went. Soph managed the food issues in seven minutes and spent the other three with a lonely and disgruntled Alfie.

  ‘Taking a “smoko” break?’ Grey asked from the kitchen when she rushed back inside. She almost jumped out of her skin.

  ‘I’m certainly not. I don’t do that. That is, my sisters would have flayed me if I’d ever decided to try it, and once I grew up I didn’t want to anyway.’ She snapped her jaws shut before any more babble could escape.

  ‘I just took a breath of fresh air.’ Soph sidled inside. He couldn’t have
seen Alfie’s cage, even if he had looked all the way through and out the laundry room door. She moved to step past him and return to the office. ‘You don’t smell cigarette smoke on me, do you?’

  What a dumb question. Did she want him to grab her and sniff her hair, her clothing? Not to mention that would be far too close for comfort—witness the problems she’d had after lunch when she’d helped him do ankle stretches.

  ‘You smell like flowers,’ he pronounced and turned his back and started towards the office once more. ‘I don’t need to get close again to know that.’

  Well, certainly not, and no doubt he didn’t want to get close, either. She was simply the hired help, and short-term help at that.

  So not in his league, Sophia.

  He wasn’t in hers, either.

  Nope. Grey Barlow was not ordinary, not a safe bet.

  Yet he had noticed the subtle scent she wore. Soph had only dabbed the tiniest bit behind each ear and on her wrists before she’d left home this morning.

  So what? She had simply leaned too close to him on the sofa. He couldn’t help but smell her perfume, and probably didn’t even like it.

  ‘The casserole is doing nicely.’ She needed to get back to matters at hand. ‘It’s a curry, since you enjoy spicy food. I’ll serve rice pilaf with it.’ As though he would even care, but the silence yawned and Soph talked on. ‘You…you smell quite nice, yourself.’

  That stopped her, even if it was a little late. With a sharp breath she bustled past him and subsided into her office chair. From then on she focused her attention on her work!

  She did, however, draw the line at six o’clock. With a determined air she shut down her computer and tidied the remaining work on her desk. Then she faced her employer and waited until he gave up on whatever he was typing one-handed and lifted his head reluctantly to look at her.

  ‘It’s after six o’clock. You must have worked since at least seven this morning to churn out so many tapes before I got here. That’s an eleven hour day and far more than you should take on.

  ‘Would you like your bath before or after dinner, and would you like me to shut down your computer for you while you make your way to the living room and start your next set of physio exercises?’ She asked it all in one stream of words and then waited, arms crossed in front of her.

  ‘There’s still work for me to do before I finish for the day.’ He gestured towards the computer screen.

  ‘I think your company can probably survive without your input until tomorrow morning.’ Most of the employees would have gone home by now, wouldn’t they? ‘Unless you work your people in around-the-clock shifts, none of this is going anywhere at this hour, anyway.’

  ‘Be that as it may…’ he started.

  ‘I’ll just help you with this.’ Soph leaned across, saved his email into his drafts folder, clicked out of the program and shut his computer off.

  He made a half startled, half disbelieving sound and pushed his chair back. It had the unfortunate result that his shoulder brushed against the inside of her outstretched arm and across her breast.

  Soph froze. He froze. And then they both hurriedly shifted away from each other.

  He got to his feet, swung to face her, wincing as he did so, and the movement put pressure on his ankle. He cradled his arm against his body.

  Irritated green sparks shot at her from his eyes.

  ‘Don’t bother to say anything.’ She held up her hand. ‘You left me no other choice.’

  Had the man heard of backing off a little, rather than needing to be right in the thick of everything that happened in his working world? Yes, he appeared to have a project in trouble, but what about all the reports that things were going perfectly well in other departments? Did he really need to be so hands-on and go into such detail with all of that?

  Soph poked a finger into the air in front of him. ‘Your ankle is causing you pain. For the last two hours you’ve favoured your arm. I suspect it should be in a sling, but would you answer me when I asked about either of those things earlier? No. I got the death glare while you continued to speak into Bear Growling.’

  ‘Bear Growling?’ He stepped closer until they were almost nose to nose.

  The intensity in his gaze made her catch her breath. ‘I…uh…it’s how I think of your voice program.’

  Because he had a gorgeous growly voice that she would like to listen to, snuggled at his side…

  No. She wanted no such thing.

  Irritation crept through his tone even now. ‘It’s not my fault the voice program doesn’t work properly. I trained it at the start, exactly as instructed.’

  ‘Yes, but did you snarl at the time, because if you didn’t, it wouldn’t recognise snarl-speak now, would it?’ Soph said absently, still caught in the thought of having him growl just for her. When she realised what she had said and glanced at his face, she almost laughed at the look of surprise there.

  ‘You—’ he took her upper arm into his free hand as he stared with aggravation and something else that wasn’t aggravation at all, right into her eyes ‘—are a very odd kind of personal assistant.’

  She could have taken offence but she didn’t. Maybe because his fingers held her arm in a gentle clasp and stroked lightly. The bear might not want to admit it, but Soph thought he found her at least a little intriguing.

  His eyes widened and he stepped abruptly away from her. Soph backed towards the door. She had to put distance between them before the Gremlin of Temptation struck and she said something terribly inappropriate. Like, Grey, I really notice you as a man even though I’ve decided it’s not a good idea to do so, and it’s clear you’re appalled that you’ve noticed me.

  Instead, Soph went for the most prosaic words she could come up with. ‘Will you come into the kitchen? I’ll tape a bag over your cast so it doesn’t get damaged if you accidentally splash it while you’re bathing.’ She blocked her mind to all thoughts of her employer in the bathtub!

  ‘I’ll cope without a bag on the arm.’ He just said so instantly, unequivocally, and turned away.

  Soph didn’t feel the least disappointed in this further example of his resistance to her care. The attraction side of it was irrelevant, of course. Hmph. But what could she do if he wouldn’t accept her help?

  ‘I’ll get on with dinner, then. I still have a side dish to prepare to go with the curry.’ She turned her back, busied herself in the kitchen and didn’t look around again until she heard water running upstairs. At least she had the healthy food aspect well in hand.

  Soph donned protective mitts and drew the casserole out of the oven, removed the lid, then discarded the mitts and gave the contents of the dish a vigorous stir.

  She and her employer just had some random chemical reaction going on between them. No doubt it would go away through lack of a receptive audience. On either side!

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘OH, GOOD, you’re ready for me. It seems I’ve timed it exactly right.’ Soph pushed the door to her employer’s bedroom wider and stepped through the aperture. They’d eaten their dinner. Afterwards Soph had suggested they watch some television together and had received a blank look followed by a resistant one before Grey had said he had business phone calls to make, excused himself and disappeared into the office.

  At least he’d seemed to somewhat enjoy chatting with her over the meal. Not that Soph had needed him to enjoy her company. Nor had she been overly conscious of her boss in the short time they’d spent together. She had worked on her silly, earlier inappropriate awareness of Grey and had that all under control now.

  ‘Let me put this tray down and I’ll help you get settled in the bed.’

  The tray held a ceramic incense burner complete with stand, candle holder and tiny teapot on top, matches and a drinking mug full of steaming liquid. In a trice she placed the tray on to the dresser and turned to face her boss.

  Nurse Sophia to the rescue.

  Her employer hovered, features frozen, near his bed. He wor
e green silk pyjama trousers and, well, nothing else actually, which meant Soph had a rather amazing view of his broad shoulders, his chest, the smattering of hair that tapered towards his navel…

  ‘Ah, it’s warm in here, isn’t it?’ Soph snapped her gaze upward, away from silk, away from his chest, though meeting his gaze wasn’t particularly better. Did he have to look so sensual to go along with his air of fierce affront?

  ‘I can’t say I’d noticed any particular warmth,’ he snarled, but he also examined her from her hair—piled in a loose, messy knot on top of her head—to her face, her mouth and finally over her body and back up again. His muscles tensed.

  Soph wanted to touch him.

  No. Soph did not want to touch him.

  ‘Um, well, you probably put out a lot of body heat.’ She waved vaguely towards him. ‘Hence no need for a shirt to wear to bed.’

  A shirt she truly had expected to see on him when she barged in to settle him down for the night. Nurse Sophia, indeed. If she got much hotter from looking at him, she would become a medical emergency.

  Temperature far too hot, Doctor. What should we do?

  ‘Why are you here?’ Grey’s eyes flared for just a moment before he snapped his gaze away from her. When he turned back, the irritation had returned in full force. His eyebrows drew down and a muscle twitched at the base of his jaw. ‘I told you when I stepped out of the office that I planned to retire for the night.’

  ‘Yes, so I came to help.’ She’d been finished with the telly anyway. Soph tried not to look back at his chest, but it was so…there. And he had looked at her with interest before he’d locked the reaction down.

  In the same way Soph needed to reject it. That was the thing. She couldn’t afford to desire her boss, and he clearly didn’t want to desire her.

  ‘I’m here to work,’ she blurted. ‘I mean, I’m here to work in your room, to put you to bed. I took a shower, gave you time to do whatever it is you might have needed to do, and then came to help you get settled. That’s why I’m in my nightwear. It seemed silly to dress again.’