Good grief—could she jabber more?
Clearly, this had occurred to Max too because he raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say a word.
Trying not to let his silence intimidate her, Cara passed him a plate, which he took with an abrupt nod of thanks, and she watched him load it up with food before tucking in.
‘So, Max,’ she said, taking a plate for herself and filling it with small triangular-cut sandwiches stuffed with soft cheese and prosciutto and a spoonful of fluffy couscous speckled with herbs and tiny pieces of red pepper. ‘How do you know Poppy? She didn’t tell me anything about you—other than that you’re friends.’
He gave a small shrug. ‘We met at university.’
Cara waited for him to elaborate.
He didn’t. He just kept on eating.
Okay, so he wasn’t the sort to offer up personal details about himself and liked to keep things super professional with colleagues, but perhaps she’d be able to get more out of him once they’d built up a rapport between them.
That was okay. It was early days yet. She could bide her time.
At least she had some company for lunch, even if he wasn’t interested in talking much. She’d spent all her lunchtimes at her last place of work alone, either sitting in the local park or eating a sandwich at her desk, forcing the food past her constricted throat, trying not to care about being excluded from the raucous group of PAs who regularly lunched together. The Cobra Clique, she’d called them in her head.
Not to their faces.
Never to their faces.
Because, after making the mistake of assuming she’d be welcomed into their group when she’d first started working there—still riding on a wave of pride and excitement about landing such a coveted job—she’d soon realised that she’d stepped right into the middle of a viper’s nest. Especially after the backlash began to snap its tail a couple of days into her first week.
Fighting the roll of nausea that always assaulted her when she thought about it, she took a large bite of sandwich and chewed hard, forcing herself to swallow, determined not to let what had happened bother her any more. They’d won and she was not going to let them keep on winning.
‘It’s a beautiful house you have, Max,’ she said, to distract herself from the memories still determinedly circling her head. ‘Have you been here long?’
His gaze shot to hers and she was alarmed to see him frown. ‘Three years,’ he said, with a clip of finality to his voice, as if wanting to make it clear he didn’t want to discuss the subject any more.
Okay then.
From the atmosphere that now hummed between them, you’d have thought she’d asked him how much cold hard cash he’d laid down for the place. Perhaps people did ask him that regularly and he was fed up with answering it. Or maybe he thought she’d ask for a bigger wage if she thought he was loaded.
Whatever the reason, his frostiness had now totally destroyed her appetite, so she was pushing the couscous around her plate when Max stood up, making her jump in her seat.
‘Let me know how much I owe you for lunch and I’ll get it out of petty cash before you leave,’ he said, turning abruptly on the spot and heading over to the dishwasher to load his empty plate into it.
His movements were jerky and fast, as if he was really irritated about something now.
It couldn’t be her, could it?
No.
Could it?
He must just be keen to get back to work.
As soon as he left the room, she let out the breath she’d been holding, feeling the tension in her neck muscles release a little.
The words frying pan and fire flitted through her head, but she dismissed them. If he was a friend of Poppy’s he couldn’t be that bad. She must have just caught him on a bad day. And, as her friend Sarah had pointed out after she’d cried on her shoulder about making a mess of her recent job interviews, she was bound to be prone to paranoia after her last experience.
Once she’d cleared up in the kitchen, Cara got straight back to work, using the link Max gave her to log in to his online diary and work through his travel requirements for the next month. His former ire seemed to have abated somewhat and their interaction from that point onwards was more relaxed, but still very professional. Blessedly, concentrating on the work soothed her and the headache that had started at the end of lunch began to lift as she worked methodically through her tasks.
Mid-afternoon, Max broke off from writing his document for a couple of minutes to outline some research he wanted her to do on a few businesses he was considering targeting. To her frustration, she had to throw every molecule of energy into making scrupulous notes in order to keep focused on the task in hand and not on the way Max’s masculine scent made her senses reel and her skin heat with awareness every time he leaned closer to point something out on the computer they were huddled around.