To delay going home, she’d started staying later and later at the office, even when there wasn’t any pressing work to be done.

  Work at least made her feel productive. What else did she have left?

  “Rowan?”

  She waved Micah Grant in without looking up. It was easy to tell when it was him at her door since he managed to fill it in a way none of her other colleagues did.

  She finished typing the email she was working on before glancing up.

  “Tell me you have a decent candidate this time.”

  “Three,” he told her. “Each more decent than the next.”

  Rowan curved her lips in the shadow of a smile to acknowledge his attempt at humor. It wasn’t a habit for Micah, who usually took his job as seriously as she did hers, but perhaps the thrill of getting such a lucrative promotion was making him giddy. It was known to happen.

  Rowan scanned the three files he’d placed on her desk briefly before turning her attention back to Micah.

  “Are you excited about the new job?”

  “Getting there,” he acknowledged as he pulled a slight face. “I’m more impatient about it than anything else. There’s no better cure for the first day nerves than to get on to the second day.”

  “Is this the first time you’ll be managing people?” she asked, knowing the answer already.

  “Yeah.” He took up a familiar perch on the side of her desk, his hip half-leaning, half-sitting on the solid wood surface. “But I took the internal training course.”

  “I’m glad it’s mandatory now,” said Rowan, thinking back to her own first few weeks in her current position. It was a long time ago now, but she still remembered those nerve-wracking days. “My learning curve was more like a year than a day.”

  Micah raised his eyebrows. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Oh?” Rowan was intrigued. “Why is that?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. You’re so…confident.”

  “You met me after ten years doing this,” she pointed out, suddenly feeling very old. “You’ll get there.”

  “I don’t know if—” he stopped abruptly, his clear green eyes skittering away from her.

  “You don’t know if—?” Rowan prompted.

  The last few weeks had been like this between her and Micah. Easier. Less formal. More relaxed.

  Perhaps it was the knowledge that in a few short days she would no longer be his boss. Once he was out of the department, they would have little reason to interact with each other. It was almost as if he were leaving her life altogether.

  She’d been through it before many times, but this was the first time she sincerely regretted losing an assistant. Micah was like her. He was ambitious, and he took his work seriously, which was why she’d gone to bat for him when the promotional panel had first started reviewing his resume. However much she would miss his support in the department, he deserved to move up.

  Rowan scrutinized the man in front of her. When was the last time she’d really looked at him? Maybe around the time he’d started working for her.

  In a vague way, she’d known he was good-looking. Other women teased her about being distracted by Micah’s tall, leanly muscled figure and perfectly chiseled face. But she’d always preferred rugged looks over model types—though lately Stewart’s ruggedness had deteriorated into decidedly grizzled.

  “You don’t know if you want to be the kind of boss I am,” Rowan said. “That’s what you were about to say, wasn’t it?”

  He bent his head to avoid her gaze. He was very fair, though he obviously found time to lay under a tanning light on a regular basis. His hair was blond, almost platinum, and it waved away from his face in one of those artistically tousled hairstyles young men seemed to have mastered nowadays. Perfectly imperfect.

  He was good-looking. Better than good. He was actually pretty gorgeous.

  “You’re a tough boss,” Micah said, shaking his head as if to say he didn’t quite agree with the consensus.

  “A tough lady, you mean.” She’d encountered those words before. “If I were a man, I would be firm or no-nonsense. I’m a woman, so I’m tough or bitchy.”

  “Maybe…”

  She could hear the doubt in his voice. “Come on. Tell me that I should lighten up and overlook the minor stuff. Perhaps bake muffins and bring them in on Fridays or take people out to lunch on their birthdays.”

  There were a few managers who did those things—all female.

  Micah grinned. “I would hate it if you started taking people out on their birthdays right after I left. Mine’s next month, you know.”

  “I’ll put it in my calendar,” Rowan told him. “But seriously, if I started doing things like that, people would say I was trying to be everyone’s best friend—or, worse, their mother.”

  Micah’s expression sobered. “You’re right about that. But don’t you ever get lonely? Some of my best friends are from the office. It’s good to have someone you can talk to about what happens during your workday.”

  “Someone you can complain about your boss to?” Rowan smiled. “I have friends for that. They just don’t happen to work here.”

  And she used to have Stewart, although he only ever seemed to be paying her half attention when she spoke about her work to him. But he expected her to give his job her full focus when he had an event to attend. He wanted her to spring for new dresses and dazzle his colleagues.

  “You should try coming out with the rest of us,” Micah said. “Have a few drinks. Blow off some steam. You might even enjoy it.”

  Rowan widened her eyes at him. “You want me to have a drink with you?”

  His green stare was unswerving. “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

  Why not indeed?

  Rowan told herself that she was crazy to even consider going out for a fun evening with her co-workers, much less with the younger men who Micah hung around with on his breaks—that Jay person who always stared holes through her clothing and foul-mouthed Ethan.

  “Okay,” Rowan said, throwing caution to the wind. It would be one less night she was stuck at home alone, waiting for the sound of Stewart’s key in the lock. “Why not?”

  “Great.” Micah flashed straight white teeth in an alarmingly sexy smile. “I’ll let the rest of the gang know.”

  * * * *

  Not cool, man. Count me out.

  That was Jay’s text message response to the idea of having his boss accompany them that night to the local bar.

  Ethan’s text was even more pointed.

  Are you fucking crazy?

  And he’d thought maybe Jay might actually be excited at the prospect of meeting Rowan Lacy outside their office building.

  “Ready?” Micah stuck his head through Rowan’s doorway. It was almost seven, and the rest of their colleagues were gone for the day, leaving closed doors and darkened cubicles along the hallways.

  Rowan had shed her suit jacket, leaving her arms bare in a sleeveless blouse. Her dark gray skirt went past her knee and fit her tightly from hip to calf, showing off her sultry curves. He had no idea how she walked in it, much less in those shiny black heels.

  His own jacket was slung over his arm. He’d taken off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt at the collar and cuffs, rolling up the latter to mid-forearm.

  “Looks like it’s just the two of us tonight,” he said as they walked down the silent hallway, striving to sound casual.

  Rowan immediately stopped walking. “What’s the matter? Did I scare away your friends? I suspected that might happen. You know, I can just skip the bar. It’s not as if—”

  “No.” Micah felt guilty and uncomfortable. He’d promised her a night out with colleagues, and he’d ended up saddling her with a date. “They were just busy with other things. The two of us will drink enough to make up for them.”

  After a visible hesitation, she started walking again. “That’s not a bad idea. I need a drink…a big one.”

  She was true to her word at the crowded bar he took her to, shouldering his way into a quiet corner and more or less evicting a lingering pair of construction workers who’d long since finished their beers. The corner booth was cozy and just far enough away from the bar itself to allow for a conversation.

  At first Rowan drank and Micah talked. He hardly even knew what he spoke about. He started telling her about his career plans, and somehow that segued into talking about college, then his childhood and his family. He finally wound down after about an hour, embarrassed to find that he’d gone on that long in what amounted to a monologue.

  Rowan looked a little bleary but in no way bored. She’d smiled at his stories, sometimes laughing out loud at the more comic episodes of his childhood.

  “Two brothers and one sister,” she repeated at one point. “That sounds lovely. I was an only child. I guess I still am.”

  She looked so sad as she said those words, her big brown eyes growing luminous. Hadn’t someone recently said that brown eyes were boring? Micah had to disagree with whoever that was, because Rowan’s eyes were beautiful, wide and fringed with black lashes that made little fans against her cheeks every time she looked down.

  With her hair floating around her shoulders instead of pulled back in a chignon or ponytail, she seemed softer, more approachable—and very sexy.

  Micah made an effort to swallow the last of his beer. His throat was suddenly constricted.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” he said to cover his strange awkwardness.

  She did. She spoke about growing up in a middle-class household with a divorced mom and a dad she saw on the weekends. She talked about high school and college, about internships and climbing the ladder at their company.

  Almost pointedly, she ignored talking about her relationships, past or present. It seemed deliberate to Micah, who wondered what she was hiding. But it was his turn to listen—and drink—so he kept his questions brief and unprobing. He wanted to learn everything about this woman he’d worked with for the past two years yet never seemed to have gotten to know. Now that he was leaving, their conversation had a certain urgency to it, as if this might be their last chance to listen to these stories and ask the right questions.

  After his fifth beer, though, Micah was no longer sure which were the right questions and which were the wrong ones. All he seemed to be noticing as he listened to her was the way her lips moved when she spoke, how they parted when she laughed—usually at jokes she made at her own expense—and the flicker of her tongue as she sipped from her wineglass.

  Damn, she was hot!

  He’d known all along that she was beautiful, smart and sexy but he’d never known that she had a sense of humor, that she used it to poke fun at herself or that she could look so oddly vulnerable whenever she spoke about her past.

  “Another one?” he asked when she put down her glass and saw only a tinge of red in the bottom.

  She smiled as she shook her head, making the dark strands of her hair nestle more closely against her neck. They looked ticklish, and he wanted to brush them away, but instead folded his fingers more tightly around his nearly empty mug.

  “I think I’ve reached my limit at three glasses. Or was it four?” She giggled. “Bad sign when I can’t remember.”

  Micah smiled back. “Relax. It’s not like you’re the head of Accounts or anything. Oh, wait…”

  He was disproportionately pleased when she threw her head back and laughed loud enough for heads all around the pub to turn in their direction.

  “You’re funny,” she declared. Then, after a moment of owlish staring, her tone changed. “Why didn’t I notice that before?”

  The stare made his dick twitch, and he shifted in his seat.

  “How funny I am?” His voice was luckily pretty normal. “I guess there aren’t too many laughs in our department.”

  “Because of me,” Rowan said, switching her stare to the tabletop where she started to trace a pattern on the battered wood. “I’m too serious. I’ve sucked all the life out of the people around me.”

  Why did he get the sense that it was a quote?

  “You haven’t,” Micah protested, realizing, belatedly, that it was the truth.

  La Lacy—the nickname was suddenly distasteful—was exquisitely professional, but that in itself was a welcome atmosphere for a young person just starting out in their career. It was infinitely more difficult to navigate a workplace that expected an additional social component or demanded that you adhere to a manager’s eccentric idea of friendliness.

  “You made it easy,” he said, picking his words slowly as he recognized the reality behind the last two years. “I always knew what to expect with you. Good work—okay, probably perfect work—on time and in the proper format. You never changed the rules or bent them for anyone, but you also got me extensions when I needed them, if I had a valid excuse and wasn’t just slacking off.”

  She smiled. “You never slacked off. Well, hardly ever.”

  Micah was getting warmed up to his topic. “You drive us hard, but you also drive yourself hard, which is pretty awesome to see in a person at your level.”

  He’d said something wrong, because her smile contracted then disappeared altogether.

  “What? What is it?” Unconsciously, he reached for her hand. It was disturbingly soft and feminine in his grasp.

  Rowan shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

  But Micah held her gaze, silently insisting. He wanted to know what he’d said to hurt her.

  Rowan dropped her gaze, letting him see only the lush dark fan of her eyelashes. Damn, even her eyelashes are sexy.

  “Tell me.”

  She lifted her eyes again. “You don’t think I’m too obsessed with my career, do you?”

  He instantly sensed that those were someone else’s words. Did she have a boyfriend? He pictured some older guy with silver hair and tons of cash, the kind of man who was rude to waiters and drooled over young women when Rowan wasn’t looking.

  Shit, why did I think that? He didn’t want to think of the man she might go to bed with, who she wrapped those sleek long legs around and rode all night.

  His dick wasn’t twitching anymore. It was getting hard.

  “What’s too obsessed?” Micah asked, still choosing his words carefully. “We all care about our work. It’s how we feed and clothe ourselves, but it’s also where we get a lot of satisfaction. Everyone wants to move ahead.”

  He was rewarded with a wide smile.

  “Exactly!” she said. “That’s how I see it, too. I guess I’m not the type to go white water rafting or travel the world with a backpack, but I get my excitement from numbers and accounting and—”

  She broke off when she saw his lips quiver.

  “It’s not funny!”

  But a moment later, she was laughing, too.

  They laughed until they had tears in their eyes and had to clutch each other to keep from falling over. After that, every time they calmed down a little, he repeated the phrase ‘I get my excitement from accounting’ and they were off again.

  They laughed all the way back to her apartment.

  * * * *

  Rowan offered a nightcap…not that they needed it, not that they even wanted it. But they both knew that a nightcap meant sex.

  It was awkward at first, standing in the lobby of her building beneath the doorman’s benign but knowing eyes. They didn’t even talk. Then as soon as they stepped into the elevator and she turned around, he was there. Suddenly too tall. Standing too close. Looking too fucking sexy.

  He bent his head and kissed her. His mouth was warm and expert.

  Rowan clutched onto his shoulders for balance, and they both tottered toward the elevator wall. At the last moment, Micah put out his hand to prevent a collision and his chest pressed against her, all heat and hard muscle. All the while, his lips never left hers.

  So fucking sexy.

  He took advantage of the averted accident to deepen the kiss. He pushed his tongue into her mouth, making his need explicit.

  Rowan moaned, tilting her head back to take all of him, stroking his tongue with her own before sucking it deep inside her mouth.

  Neither one of them noticed that the elevator doors remained open until the doorman walked over, leaned in and hit the button for Rowan’s floor, likely grinning the whole time.

  They made it to her door, stumbling against each other in an urgent need to stay connected. Their lips stayed fused while Rowan fumbled the keys from her purse, relying strictly on touch, her head turned so that they could make out the whole time. Micah’s hard chest was at her back, supporting her. He reached around to palm her breasts, rubbing her peaked nipples through the layers of her blouse and bra.

  It was incredibly frustrating, to be this close yet be separated by too much clothing. The indirect friction of his fingers was driving her mad.

  Finally she got the door unlocked. He pushed it open before she could. A moment later, the door was behind her, and Micah was standing in front of her, devouring her mouth.

  Rowan groaned as soon as they were able to kiss fully again, their open mouths drawing on each other, their tongues twisting deliciously together. She twined her arms around his neck, savoring his height and the way their bodies fit together. His physical perfection was almost overwhelming.

  His scent was all around her, beer and body spray, and she reveled in the rawness of it…of him.

  But when he started to undress her, standing right there in the middle of the apartment, she resisted. She was used to a bed and a set of sheets beneath which most of the action happened. Lights off, of course.

  Micah dropped his hands away from her blouse buttons as he concentrated again on kisses.

  The man could certainly kiss. His lips were soft and hard and everything in between. And his tongue was all over her mouth, teasing her, giving chase to her own tongue—slowly, inexorably, hunting her down.

 

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