He wanted a lot more than that.
‘What have you got?’ he asked.
‘I wasn’t sure which you’d like so I brought a selection,’ she said, looking at him. For a moment the air seemed to crackle and then she was looking down at the box, her eyes hidden by silky lashes. ‘There’s lemon drizzle, chocolate, coffee, sticky ginger and, um, passion cake.’
The scent of vanilla rose enticingly from the box, taking him straight back to his childhood—that sweet moment when he’d been allowed to lick the remains of the mixture from the spoon; when he’d sunk his teeth into a cake still warm from the oven.
He was no longer a boy but he resisted one temptation only to look up and find himself confronted by the reach-out-and-touch-me lure of warm breasts.
Was this how it had been for his father? An obsessive urge to possess one woman wiping everything from his mind. One woman becoming his entire world.
Stick to the cake...
‘You weren’t kidding when you said you’d been on a baking binge, Miss Gordon,’ he said, taking the first piece his fingers touched, anything to distract him. ‘Did the Fairview recommend it as occupational therapy?’
‘Tash, please. Everyone calls me Tash.’
‘I prefer Natasha,’ he said, sucking the icing from his thumb, and she blushed. Not the swift suffusion of heat that rose to her face in that moment when they’d confronted one another in Morgan’s office and seen how it would be if they ever let their guard down, but a real girlish blush.
‘Nobody calls me that,’ she said. ‘Only my mother. When I’ve done something to exasperate her.’
‘That would be your mother and me, then.’
‘Point taken.’ The corner of her mouth tilted upwards in a wry sketch at a smile. ‘I’d be annoyed with me if I were you. I’m pretty annoyed myself, to be honest. It wasn’t much fun having to phone my parents and warn them that they and their neighbours and everyone they knew would be reading about my breakdown in the evening paper. Warn them that they’d probably have reporters ringing them at home, knocking on the door. Which they did, by the way.’
‘No comment.’
The smile deepened to reveal a small crease in her cheek. She’d once had a dimple...
‘It’s not true, by the way. About the Fairview. In case you were in any doubt. Just so that we’re on the same page here, Miles Morgan and I parted company less than fifteen minutes after you left the office.’
‘He fired you?’ He should have waited. Gone back. Followed his gut instinct to grab her hand and take her with him... ‘I’m not big on employment law but I’m fairly sure he can’t have it both ways. He can’t dismiss you when you’re on sick leave.’
‘You’re probably right,’ she admitted, ‘but I refused to cooperate with his plan to have my sanity publicly questioned and hide away in the Fairview in the cause of saving the firm’s reputation.’
‘I saw the paper.’
‘Everyone saw the paper,’ she said. ‘I’m supposedly giving my brain a rest in the Fairview while I consider my future.’
‘You didn’t deny it,’ he pointed out.