Suzanne Sullivan impressed the hell out of him.
Despite his father raising him never to make the mistake of trusting a woman, he knew better than to underestimate women. More than once in his line of work, the threat had been female. The women he’d dated hadn’t been dingbats—not all of them, anyway—so he understood that brains combined with beauty weren’t an impossibility.
But he’d never met a woman like Suzanne.
* * *
It wasn’t easy, and Suzanne wasn’t happy that her employees’ work plans for the day had been upended yet again, but that didn’t make it any less satisfying to finally get all the servers back up and running. Even better, while they were at it they mapped out a new plan to make their system even more impervious to attacks.
She looked down at her watch, surprised to see that it was almost seven thirty. “I didn’t mean to work everyone so late.” Just because other tech companies operated around the clock, didn’t mean hers did. Sure, she worked a zillion hours, but that was different. This was her company. It was her responsibility to make sure she took care of everyone, no matter what. “Please apologize to your families for me.”
Everyone told her they were more than happy to work late, but she knew they must all be starved and ready to head home. Lord knew she was desperate for a long soak in the bath with a big glass of wine.
Finally pushing back her chair, she belatedly realized she was still wearing her running clothes. She could hardly remember even going for a run. Only the feel of Roman’s arms around her in the park remained.
She spun around on her swivel chair and found him standing nearby. Everyone else was already gone. “Have you been there the whole time?”
“I briefly stepped away a couple of times, but you were always in my line of sight.” She should have been indignant at being watched like a toddler who couldn’t be trusted not to stumble into danger, but Roman was so unobtrusive that it was getting more and more difficult to muster up any anger at him for doing the job her brothers had hired him for.
When it came to her brothers, on the other hand, she could still be furious. And she was. One day, she’d pay them back for trying to take over her life like this. Preferably when they didn’t see payback coming.
Her phone alarm went off and a message popped up on her screen: Rosa’s online bullying meeting, 8 p.m.
“I have a meeting in thirty minutes.”
“Another meeting?” He frowned, looking more forbidding than usual. Sexier too, she thought with a small sigh. She hadn’t yet figured out how to stop feeling weak in the knees—and hot all over—around him. “You’ve had a long day already. Can you reschedule?”
“No. I really need to be there. Which means we’ve got to take the world’s fastest shower.” She blushed as she realized the way that sounded—as if she were suggesting they shower together. “In separate showers, I mean,” she clarified before she belatedly remembered that letting her accidental suggestion of a co-shower linger would have been perfect for the mock seduction she was supposed to be staging.
“I knew what you meant.”
Was it her imagination, or did his voice sound a little strangled? As though the thought of the two of them in the shower together had the same effect on him as it did on her—instantly heating up every cell in her body.
“I’ll show you where the men’s showers are on the way back to my office.”
He shook his head. “I can’t leave you alone in the building for that long.”
She was too tired and hungry to keep herself from snapping, “So that means we really do need to shower together, don’t we?”
“I’m fine like this, Suzanne.”
He always said her name like that—so serious and sober, and yet warm and rumbly too. It made her blood heat up more each time he said it. Worse, no matter how much she tried to deny it, she couldn’t help but want to find out exactly what it would sound like if he said her name when they were sweaty and barely dressed…and not from a run.
“If you feel anywhere near as gross as I do right now,” she said, “it wouldn’t be fair to make you stay this way. You can use my private shower.” Before he could protest, she said, “I won’t leave my office while you’re in there. Scout’s honor.”
“Let me guess,” he said as they headed toward her office. “Instead of selling Girl Scout cookies on the corner, you masterminded a computer program that did it for you.”
“Sometimes the simplest way of doing something is best.” She smiled, thinking back to how much she’d enjoyed working on this at school. “But that definitely doesn’t apply to selling Girl Scout cookies. It was a lot of fun figuring out not only how to sell enough boxes to make lots of money for charity, but also how to win the grand prize for our local troop.” They’d reached her office by then, so she said, “I need to send a couple of quick emails, so why don’t you shower first?”