Tempting the New Boss(11)
After locating the iPad as fast as possible, she sat back down.
For the first time since she’d been introduced to him, his intense stare made her feel self-conscious. Maybe it was the nice eyes comment or that almost-there touch to her pearls in the limo that she was thinking she must have imagined. He watched her steadily. Since they were the only passengers on the six-hour flight, and he was proving to be staring-prone, she supposed she was in for a lot of that.
Camilla tried not to take it personally as her new boss cocked his head and studied her like she was one of the chips in the thing-a-ma-jiggy he’d invented and built his fortune selling. Thing-a-ma-jiggy. With that kind of know-how, little wonder she’d gone to law school. But you didn’t need to know a product to do M&A.
“I might not have said this before, but I’m really excited to be joining your company and to have this opportunity to work for you.”
Now that it was just the two of them, he really should be asking her to call him by his first name. She was about to suggest it, more of that etiquette training, when he said, “Listen, do you think we could, you know, have sex? I could pay you extra of course. I know it’s not part of your job, but I’d love to strip you bare to just those pearls and bury myself in your—”
“What?” Only it came out more like a squeak. Enough to stop him in his tracks, though.
Of all the…! Fury pounded through her veins, shock and embarrassment and white-hot anger coursing through her, all at the same time. As soon as she got over the stun-gun effect of it, she was going to tell him what to do with that question, etiquette be damned.
The little lawyer’s mouth dropped open. That was Mason’s first clue. Her creamy complexion turned bright red. Okay, that was his second. She wasn’t even playing with her pearls anymore, for which he was grateful, since she’d been turning him on with the casual gesture all afternoon. But that shriek. He might have made a mistake.
“I don’t mean anything by that. If you don’t want to, don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.”
For a minute, she appeared speechless. Then she said, “You don’t need a corporate lawyer, you need an employment lawyer.”
“Why? I’m employed.”
“You just propositioned me.”
“Is that illegal or something?”
“Yes. It is.”
“Oh, well, that’s why they invented lawyers, I guess. So you could point that kind of thing out.”
She stood up, looking around as if she needed to find the exit. Good luck with that. They were a mile high. He glanced back down to the trade magazine he had brought along to read, more disappointed than he cared to admit. The suggestion may have been spur of the moment, but he had fiercely wanted her to say yes, a little dazzled by her warmth, drawn to her and hoping she had been attracted to him. “No, really.” Her voice climbed a decibel. “You can’t say that kind of thing.”
He nodded absently, looking up in surprise when she snatched his reading material away and his hands clasped on empty air.
She glared down at him. “Is this what Marcia meant by teaching you social skills?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The Spock thing isn’t cutting it anymore. To think I had just been feeling so warm and fuzzy about my first day.”
“Warm and fuzzy? I’m not sure I—”
She shook a finger at him. “I need this job. So I’m going to ignore what you said, personally speaking, and not slap your face so hard it’ll make your head spin worse than The Exorcist.”
Although he rarely understood pop cultural references, he got that one. But she meant the girl possessed by the devil in the movie, not the exorcist himself. It was the girl who was writhing around, her head spinning and so on. He knew a thing or two about that at this very second.
“Calm down.”
“Don’t you tell me to calm down!” But she took a deep breath and said in a more modulated voice, “I’m advising you, as your lawyer, that you can’t proposition employees.”
He looked at her, tilting his head, wrinkling his brow. “Even for money?”
“Especially for money!”
He shrugged. “Well, I don’t see why not. I’m paying you to be here anyway, aren’t I?”
“Look, I don’t know if you’re teasing me—” She scrutinized him for a second then added, “And I sense you’re not. But just don’t blurt out things like that. You’re the CEO of a public company.”
“If you won’t have sex with me, can I have my magazine back?”
She flung it behind her with vigor worthy of the first pitch in the one or two ballgames he had actually watched. Guess not. Maybe he should get the Annual Report out of his briefcase and turn back to that.