You can do this. You can stay cool, Maria. The internal pep talk reverberated through her brain but she still found it difficult to keep a level head.
She was beginning to loathe Garrett Rule more and more every single day. The more she’d been exposed to him, the more she’d come to detest his air of arrogance and the complete command he seemed to have over every situation. She hated his supreme intellect and the fact that he was always, always right.
She hated his temper, his good looks, his complete conceit. She hated the way he guarded his privacy as if his life was more important than anyone else’s. She hated the females who called the hotel at odd hours demanding to speak to him . . . and she hated even more his continued rejection of the women’s overtures as if he couldn’t care less . . . as if they were beneath him.
She hated the fact that somehow, somewhere along the line, she’d become nothing more than his glorified secretary. The work he was doing had little to do with the hotel, it was Rule Corporation business, and she didn’t have time to be his at his beck and call. She hated having to work so physically close to him . . . and she hated that the damn butterflies in her stomach had only gotten worse the longer she knew him.
But most of all, she hated his complete and utter disregard for courtesy . . . and the fact that he continued to ignore her as if she didn’t exist.
Fucker.
She smiled sweetly, as if her only ambition in life was to serve him. “Yes, of course. It’s on your desk,” she replied in the same soothing, placating tone she’d been using with him for the past few weeks . . . a tone that, for some reason, was almost impossible to maintain today.
The look he pierced her with would have made a lesser woman wilt and fade away, but Maria only held his eyes and stared back while she waited for the rejoinder she knew was coming.
He regarded her with set features and said in a low, tempered voice, “I didn’t see it.”
“It’s there,” she fired back smoothly.
His gaze became pointed and a subtle tension seemed to fill his large frame. “It’s not there.”
His voice held that damn arrogance she detested. Asshole. She blinked up at him and attempted a look of patience she was far from feeling, trying her best not to make it sound as if she were instructing a six year old. “It’s in the legal-size manila folder underneath the red paperweight.” She hated the crystal paperweight that had simply turned up in his office one day. She hated the blood red lines running through it; it was overly ostentatious and far too fragile for everyday use.
His mouth flattened. “There’s nothing under the paperweight.”
She took a deep breath and pasted such a large smile on her face that her eyes were forced into narrow slits. Why would he lie about this? She knew damn good and well where she’d placed the folder. With an exercise in control, she kept her tone neutral. “I put it there this morning, not thirty minutes ago.”
It was obvious he didn’t care to be argued with; his body shifted and the muscles under his suit corded into lines of strain. His casual position disappeared completely as he stood to his full height. “You must be mistaken.”
She took a deep breath and without speaking, stood to her feet with a fluid motion and immediately smoothed the lines of her simple grey skirt. Refusing to make eye contact with him, she kept her gaze on the doorframe as she began walking toward the entrance to his office . . . the office that should have been hers by now. When the hell would he go back to St. Louis and leave her in peace?
When she reached his side and would have passed through, he halted her forward motion with a detaining hand on her arm.
The move paralyzed her immediately.
He never touched her.
Never. It was an unwritten rule between them.
But now, his fingers grasped the fleshy part of her bare upper arm and no matter how hard she fought against it, at the first touch of his callused fingers, she immediately stiffened with nerves and her pulse rate accelerated. As his scent hit her nostrils in a conflagration of sexual heat that she refused to acknowledge, a fine trembling took hold of her legs.
A dangerous sizzle filled the air as he stood only inches away, looming over her. Trying with everything she had to appear unaffected, she ran her eyes up and down his length, attempting a dismissive expression that she knew was a pathetic fail. There was no question that he was intimidating when he wanted to be, his designer suit molding his tall, powerful body, enhancing his stance of authority. His eyes were hot and dark as he stared down into hers. “Is something bothering you today? Cat pissed in your Post Toasties this morning?”
Her breath snagged; he was so close she could see the gold striations running through his pupils. “You know very well that I don’t have a cat.”