Tempting the New Boss(61)

She shook her head, and he turned away quickly. “I thought we did all this last night. Settled all this.”

“We settled that we feel something for each other, but not what we should do about it.”

The curls on the back of his neck just brushed his collar, and she wished she could reach out to him. A pad of hotel stationary rested on the nearby desk, and he ripped off a sheet, then folded it in two. “I know what I want to do about it.”

“I need time.”

“Yes, you said that.” The sheet was folded into quarters, then even smaller until it was a square that fit neatly in his palm. “How much time?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

He launched the wad of paper at the wastebasket but missed. “Is this because of what happened at breakfast? I’m not used to that kind of situation. If I did something wrong, I didn’t mean to. It was the sperm thing, right?”

“No, you did fine,” she lied. “You don’t know my family, my brother. All breakfast did was remind me how different we are.”

“I said I wanted to know them.”

“Well, you didn’t make a very good start this morning,” she snapped.

He bent to retrieve the misfired paper and dropped it in safely.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a rush. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

He glanced sideways at her. “And you’re not going to give me a chance, are you?”

She was about to say it wasn’t about her family, but that wasn’t true. It was, partly anyway. The rest was about her and what she wanted out of life. Trite as it was, the plane crash had reminded her of her own mortality. If death came sooner than she expected, would she be content to say she had spent the last years of her life paying off her student loans and doing a profession she hated in a city that had never felt like home? There had to be some better way to figure out her future, and she needed some time, finally, to try to come up with one.

“What does that matter anyway?” he went on, his voice clipped. “I live in New York. You live in New York. How often would I even see your family? Do you see even them? When it was just us, it was fine.”

She sighed, sitting in the chair by the bed. “It’s not just us. We don’t live in a hermetically sealed airplane all the time or on a deserted trail.”

“A plane is not hermetically sealed,” he muttered.

“You asked me why I hadn’t been with anyone in so long. It was because I realized there wasn’t any future in it with the guys I dated in the city. I don’t want to be with a workaholic New Yorker who thinks that money is everything and who lives in a five hundred square foot box forty floors up. I want to be away from all that someday.”

He stared at her. After a minute he said, “My apartment is a four-story townhouse on the upper east side. You could probably fit your parent’s house in it three times over.”

“It’s not about money.”

“What is it about then?” His face was flushed, and he jabbed his hands into the pockets of those nice new khakis. “You don’t want me? Is that what you’re saying here?”

She took a deep breath. He stood before her chair, close enough for her to reach out and touch the lean cheek she knew would be warm or circle one thick wrist and coax a long-fingered hand from a pocket. Bring the palm to her lips and place a gentle kiss there.

But she wasn’t doing either of them any favors if she wasn’t honest. “You’re a wonderful guy. I never imagined when I walked into your office two days ago— God, was that only two days?”

He didn’t smile, and she stumbled on.

“I never imagined how much I would enjoy being with you, like you…”

He said nothing.

“But I can’t work for somebody I’m sleeping with, and I don’t know what you’re envisioning otherwise. I need to take a good look at my life right now, take this opportunity to think, since I’m out of a job and everything anyway.”

She tried smiling again, but it faded away quickly. For once she didn’t feel much like smiling. She got to the point.

“I can’t just drop my career or what’s left of it, with no other plans for the future but to be your girlfriend, if that’s even what you’re talking about. By your own admission, you’ve never even had one.”

“You’re not arguing a case here.” His tone was sharp. “And I said I’d marry you.”

“Mason! Come on. That’s not realistic. We just met each other.”

He turned away, moving back to the desk, passing up the pad of paper for a ballpoint pen, flicking it around on the surface pad with one finger until it toppled off the edge. He shoved his wayward hand back into his pants pocket again as if to stop any further nervous movements. “You hate being a lawyer. Why can’t you give it up? And don’t say the fucking loans,” he hastened to add. “I can take care of those. You know that.”