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Matt Bradford stared across the conference
room table and felt his balls clench. His managers stepped out for
the lunch break twenty minutes ago, but the glass-walled space was
not totally empty. One person remained. One hot and very off-limits
person who broke his concentration just by breathing – Kari
Reynolds.
With straight brown hair, green eyes and body that even her proper
navy business suit couldn’t hide, she qualified as pure temptation.
Curvy with big eyes and a full mouth. Then there was the necklace.
She wore a string of pearls every single day, and every single night
he fantasized about her spread out on his sheets wearing nothing
else.
“You don’t have to babysit me, you know.” She
delivered the comment without looking up. Her fingernails drummed
against the mahogany tabletop as her gaze stayed focused on the
yellow legal pad in front of her.
“I’m not hungry.” Now that was a damn lie, but
food was not the issue. She was.
She’d come to Coleman Engineering on an interim assignment
and at the insistence of corporate headquarters. Matt ran the San
Diego satellite office but the owner in New York City, Rob Coleman,
set the rules. When a manager there crossed a line with an assistant
a few months back, Coleman instituted a company-wide human resources
campaign on proper workplace behavior. Matt’s division claimed
a clean record, but that didn’t matter. Everyone had to attend
the training by the outside consulting group, which landed Kari
and her mile-long legs right in his path.
Matt had never even dated a woman from the office. He hadn’t
wanted to take the chance of having his advances misunderstood.
But keeping his hands off Kari and his staring to a minimum was
killing him. It was as if Rob had invented this twisted sensual
game to torture him.
“I leave on Friday,” she said.
That was news to Matt. That left only a few more days of watching
her and wanting. “Since when?”
She glanced up at him. “I thought you’d be relieved
to be rid of me after three weeks of constant contact.”
“Admittedly, before you came I wasn’t looking forward
to interrupting the workday for lectures on topics that seemed like
common sense, but you made it interesting.” He left out the
part where he spent half the night mentally undressing her.
As if she could read his mind, she smiled. Leaning back in her
chair with her arms folded under her breasts, she crossed one leg
over the other. “In other words, you got used to me.”
That heated look, the dip of her blouse, the peek of the shadowed
valley beneath the open button, the sexy way her leg swung around
in the air. In any other place, in any other time, he would swear
she was sending a signal.
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