Turning the Good Girl Bad. Avril Tremayne

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