It Started With... Collection. Miranda Lee

one with the bar and the sofa in it. Before her courage failed her again she marched over and flung open the door.

      Justin almost dropped the ice-tray he was holding. He hadn’t expected to see Rachel again. Not that day, anyway. After she’d left he’d tried to work, but he’d been too distracted, and too depressed to concentrate. In the end, he’d come in here in search of some liquid relaxation.

      ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ she threw at him.

      Her accusing tone—plus her unexpected reappearance—didn’t bring out the best in him.

      ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ he countered belligerently. ‘I’m getting myself some ice to put in my Scotch. But the bloody stuff’s stuck.’

      ‘But…but you never drink during the day!’

      ‘Actually, you’re wrong there,’ he said drily. ‘I often drink during the day. Just not usually during the week.’ He gave the ice-tray another bang on the granite bar-top and ice cubes flew everywhere.

      ‘Don’t do that!’ he roared at her when she hurried over and began picking up the ice cubes. Damn it all, the last thing he wanted was for her to start bending over in front of him.

      She ignored him and picked them up anyway, giving him a good eyeful of her derrie`re-to-die-for. ‘You shouldn’t drink alone, you know,’ she said as she straightened and dropped several cubes into his glass.

      ‘What do you care?’ he snapped, irritated by her presence beyond belief. ‘You’re not my keeper. You’re not even my PA any more.’

      ‘I am, if you still want me to be. I came back to tell you I don’t want to resign. I want to keep working for you.’

      He laughed. ‘And you think that’s good news? What if I said I don’t want you working for me any more? What if I said your resigning was exactly what I wanted?’

      ‘I don’t believe you.’

      ‘She doesn’t believe me,’ he muttered disbelievingly, and quaffed back a mind-numbing mouthful of whisky. ‘So what do I have to say to make you believe me?’

      ‘There’s nothing you can say,’ she pronounced, and gave him one of those defiant looks of hers. Damn, but she had a mouth on her. What he wouldn’t like her to do with it!

      He tossed back another decent swig and decided to shock her into leaving again.

      ‘What if I told you that since Saturday night whenever I look at you I’m mentally undressing you? What if I confessed that after you made that joke about you not wearing any underwear it became my favourite fantasy, you not wearing any underwear around the office? What if, when you accused me of having screwed you good and proper, my first thought was that I hadn’t screwed you nearly enough?’

      She just stared at him, clearly speechless.

      ‘That’s only the half of it,’ he went on after another fortifying swallow of straight Scotch. ‘When you brought me that coffee this morning after Guy left it wasn’t coffee I wanted from you but sex. I wondered what you’d do if I asked you to lock the door and just let me do it to you right then and there across my desk. From behind,’ he added for good measure.

      Her eyes grew wider but she still hadn’t said a word. She seemed rooted to the spot, frozen by his appalling admissions.

      The trouble was, giving voice to his secret sexual fantasies about her had also had the inevitable effect on his body. Or was it just her, standing there in front of him, within kissing distance?

      ‘Well? What would you have done?’ he demanded to know, his raging hormones sparking more recklessness.

      She finally found her tongue. ‘I…I don’t know,’ came her astonishing answer.

      ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ he shot back, floored by such an ambiguous reply.

      ‘I mean I don’t know. I was angry with you back then. Why don’t you ask me now?’

      My God, she meant it. She actually meant it.

      His hand tightened around his glass and his head spun. So that was why she’d come back, was it? Because she wanted him to seduce her again. He’d suspected this might be the case when she’d come in this morning looking good enough to eat, but he’d been hoping he was wrong.

      Any hope of that, or that he could keep resisting temptation disappeared as swiftly as the rest of his Scotch. Emptying the glass, he banged it back down on the bar-top and faced his nemesis.

      ‘Would you go and lock the door, Rachel?’ he asked in a gravelly voice. ‘Not the one that separates this room from my office. Or the one separating my office from yours. The one out in your office. The one that lets the outside world in.’

      She did it. She actually did it. Justin’s mind reeled with shock. But nothing could stop him now.

      ‘Now come here to me,’ he ordered thickly when she reappeared in the open doorway, looking both beautiful and nervous.

      She came, her cheeks flushed with excitement and her eyes glittering brightly.

      ‘I’ve been wanting to do this,’ he growled, and reached up to release the clip. As her hair tumbled down around her face and shoulders Justin knew that he wasn’t simply crossing a line here, he was about to propel them both into a world from which there was no turning back, a word where lust ruled and love was nothing but a distant memory. She had no conception of the demons in his mind, or the dark desires that had been driving him crazy since Saturday night. She probably thought he loved her.

      Now, that was one transgression he would not be guilty of. Deception. The games he wanted to play with her were sexual, not emotional.

      ‘You do realise I don’t love you,’ he said as he flicked open the buttons on her jacket.

      ‘Yes,’ she surprised him by admitting, though her voice was trembling and her eyes had gone all smoky.

      ‘I will never fall in love with you,’ he added even as his hands slipped inside her jacket to play with her breasts through her bra. God, but her nipples were hard. So incredibly hard.

      And so was he.

      ‘I…I don’t expect you to,’ she replied somewhat breathlessly.

      ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,’ he told her before his conscience shut down entirely.

      ‘But I want you to,’ she choked out.

      ‘Want me to do what?’ he murmured as he slipped the jacket off her shoulders and let it fall to the carpet.

      ‘Wh…whatever,’ she stammered.

      Justin suspected she was too turned on to know what she was saying. He was rapidly getting to the point of no return himself.

      For a split-second, he almost pulled back and saved her from herself. And from him. But she chose that moment to reach round and unhook her bra herself. Blood roared into his ears as she bared her beautiful breasts to his male gaze. And then she did something even more provocative. She dropped the wisp of a bra on the floor then reached up and rotated her outstretched palms over her rock-like nipples.

      Any hope of salvation fled. He was lost, and so, he realised when he looked down into her dilating pupils, was she.

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

      THE phone was ringing when Rachel arrived home that night around seven. She raced to answer it, thinking—no, hoping—it might be Justin.

      ‘Yes?’ she said as she snatched it up to her ear.

      ‘Rach, I was just about to give up and hang up.’

      ‘Isabel!’