Turning the Good Girl Bad

‘And, anyway, remember the girlfriends? Susie, Maria, Leah? All tall, all blonde, all dressed in tight, short dresses? And that was just in my first month. And the parade of starry-eyed PAs before me? All tall, blonde, blah-blah-blah?’

‘Haven’t seen any of his famous blondes for a while.’

‘Oh, he’ll have one stashed somewhere. And, regardless, he wouldn’t notice me—not in the way you mean—if I burst into his office doing the Dance of the Seven Veils.’

Catherine delved into her purse and laid some notes on the table without waiting for the bill. ‘I’m paying—the least I can do after rushing you into a bout of indigestion. But can we go? Like...now? Right now?’

‘All right,’ Nell said, ‘but I still don’t get why we have to hurry. We’re not late.’

Catherine didn’t plan on enlightening her—because she couldn’t explain, even to herself, the unformed sense of panic that had been racing through her veins ever since she’d left the office. Telling herself that everything was fine and she was merely suffering from a guilty conscience and an over-active imagination didn’t seem to be working. And the panic just kept growing.

Catherine bade Nell a preoccupied farewell at level eight and, the moment she was alone in the elevator, jabbed irritably at the button for level ten. Although she knew the elevator wouldn’t ascend any faster just because she hit the button a thousand times.

She breathed a sigh of relief when the doors opened at her floor—only to choke on it as she rounded the corner from the lift lobby.

Max was sitting in her chair, eyes glued to her computer screen.

Ohhhhhhhh.

Not much of a thought, but all she could manage initially.

She reminded herself that she’d turned everything off, that the flash drive was in her drawer, the printed pages shoved in her briefcase, and there was no way he could be looking at Passion Flower. He was probably looking for the Queensland report to make some changes.

So breathe. Breathe and be normal.

‘Is there something you wanted urgently?’ she asked, forcing herself not to run to her desk but to walk slowly, calmly.

Max raised his head and looked at her—slack-jawed, marvelling, astounded.

And Catherine knew.

Max’s voice, when it finally came, was unbelievably husky. ‘You wrote this?’

THREE

Catherine’s brain was limping around the edges of semi-formed words, refusing to fasten on to any of them long enough for her to string a response together.

Max shook his head, as if he’d sustained a blow and was reeling. ‘You wrote this.’ This time it wasn’t a question.

Automatically Catherine’s hand moved to where her top button should have been primly done up.

Max’s stunned eyes followed her hand—could he see her pulse throbbing there?—moved lower, lower. Until every inch of her had been examined.

Catherine was lost—no button, no earrings. Coping the next best way, she whipped off her glasses and started polishing them ineffectually.

Thinking. Thinking. Thinking.

‘“His fingers slid through the heavy chestnut silk as he looked down at her, his vivid blue gaze on Jennifer’s hazel eyes through the round tortoiseshell rims of her spectacles...”’ Max recited, watching her as though spellbound.

He knew it by heart! Catherine put her glasses back on and took the only route open to her: she threw herself on her sword with an unvarnished ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry?’

‘For bringing it here—doing it at work. I’ve just...just had a lot of time on my hands lately, while you’ve been travelling.’ Catherine braced herself for the inevitable: she was going to get the sack. She deserved it. She stiffened her spine and said again, ‘I’m sorry.’

But apparently Max was too stunned to respond. All he could do was stare.

And it was unbearable. Yes, she was three hundred per cent in the wrong—crush on her boss—groan—turning him into Alex—ugh—bringing the book to work and using Max’s equipment, supplies and the time he was paying for—cringe. But come on! Do the humane thing and drop the axe, get it over with—sack her, tell her to—

‘Why?’ Max asked suddenly.

Oh. A word at last. But not what she was expecting.

‘Because,’ Catherine said.

Clearly she wasn’t going to win any prizes for writing snappy dialogue with a comeback like that—but what the hell was that? Why? Why what? Why was she sorry? Why was she writing it? Why was it in the office?

She had a vision of that meteorite she’d wished for earlier, plummeting towards the earth, targeting the Sydney Central Business District.

Max stood slowly, like a man in a dream. His eyes did another slow rove along her body before he walked around her desk and stopped beside her.

‘And you...’ he breathed, still visibly stunned. ‘She’s you. Jennifer Andrews is you. The chestnut hair, the glasses, the hazel eyes—you’re Jennifer.’

Catherine wasn’t going to bother denying it. But she wasn’t going to confirm it either. And, in any case, she was too busy trying to form a reply to what she just knew his next question—the important question—would be.

‘So who’s the tall, black-haired, blue-eyed man? Who’s Alex?’

Yep. Next question—right on cue. Because Max wasn’t an idiot.

‘I made him up,’ Catherine said, too quickly, backing away a step.

‘You didn’t draw on a flesh-and-blood model?’

Catherine fingered one naked earlobe. ‘N-not too...too heavily. Not really.’

‘You seem a little flustered, Cathy,’ Max said, softly, closing the distance again.

Catherine wondered if the air between them, impregnated with his scent, had some mysterious connection to her insides. Because she sure felt strange, breathing it in.

‘I just don’t want you to think I’m—’

Catherine heard the pathetic squeak that had replaced her voice and stopped herself. Enough. Catherine North did not do pathetic squeaks—not old Catherine, not new Catherine, not any Catherine.

She took a deep breath, settled herself. ‘I know I shouldn’t be working on personal matters in the office,’ she said, and was pleased with that businesslike steering of the conversation into more appropriate waters. Because, really, it was her less than professional behaviour that should be the topic under discussion here—not the colour of her eyes or the model for her hero! ‘So I’m sorry.’

For the third time, and now can you just sack me?

‘You described the gardens perfectly,’ Max said, uncooperatively. ‘I’ve often wondered what you look at when you gaze out of my office window. You do it a lot, you know.’

‘I do? Ah... Well, I...I do draw on real life for descriptions of...of places. Now, could we—’

‘And my leather chairs?’

‘The setting is...is incidental. It has no bearing on anything. I just...just like those chairs. And they seemed...’ Catherine’s words dried up as Max continued to look at her with that slightly dazed and wholly speculative expression.

‘So. Black hair, blue eyes, six-two.’ He repeated the description slowly. ‘What does he do for a living, I wonder? Engineer, by any chance?’

The flare of horror in Catherine’s eyes must have confirmed that nicely for him, because he grinned.

‘Lots of men are engineers,’ she said.

Uh-oh, little squeak there.

‘Shall we start eliminating the ones with brown or green eyes? The fair-haired engineers? The short ones? And the engineers who—?’

‘Look, Alex Taylor is a figment of my imagination,’ Catherine said shortly, and walked stiffly past Max to put her bag in the cupboard. She sat in her chair, whipped her hair back, coiled it into as tight a knot as she could and stuck a pencil through it to hold it. Better. ‘Now, are you going to sack me or not?’

‘Huh?’ He stared at her. ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course I’m not going to sack you.’

She closed her eyes, just briefly, to savour the relief of that. ‘Then shall we get back to work? You did say I was going to be busy.’

Max leaned over her desk, arms straight, hands flat on the wood either side of hers, where they were clutching the nearest thing she could find—which happened to be a stapler.

‘He’s me, isn’t he?’ Max asked.

Catherine laughed, as though that were too silly to consider.

But Max apparently wasn’t going to be sidetracked, and she didn’t blame him after that unconvincing titter.

‘Well?’ he prompted.

‘The book is fiction,’ she said. Well, that was actually the truth! ‘The characters are made up.’ Okay—that part was a lie. ‘Now, can we get back to reality?’ And that was the important thing.

Max leaned closer. Catherine could smell his spicy cologne. Vanilla, a touch of sandalwood, a hint of amber. Heaven.

‘Sure we can,’ he said. ‘Fiction is fun, Catherine, but the real world is where it’s at.’

Catherine accidentally stapled her thumb, but didn’t feel it.

The real world... The world RJ Harrow had opened her eyes to. Where bosses tried to get their assistants into bed and if the assistant said no her life became a living hell. Where she got waylaid in corridors and shoved against walls and mauled in hotel rooms and there was nothing she could do about it because apparently it was her own fault for looking the way she did.

The real world sucked—hello, word of the day! That was the whole point of Passion Flower. So there was no confusing reality with fantasy. Because in Passion Flower the assistant could say whatever she damned well wanted: yes, no, maybe, drop dead.

But of course in Passion Flower, bespectacled, hazel-eyed personal assistant Jennifer said a passionate yes to tall, black-haired, blue-eyed Alex the engineer.

And now Max had read all about that passionate yes. Max knew she was Jennifer. Knew he was Alex. Did that mean...? Did Max think Catherine was asking for it? Because of what happened in the book? Because of the way she looked today? Because of that night, two weeks ago, when she’d let her guard down?

Max was doing that through-the-pupils-into-the-brain stare while he waited for her to say something, but she was incapable of speech.

And then he leaned a smidgeon closer. ‘Cathy, there’s one thing. About Alex. He’s not quite—’

‘You’ve completely misunderstood,’ she said, cutting him off.

She calmly removed the staple from her thumb, as though she regularly stapled a body part, and repositioned the stapler back on the desk.

‘Alex Taylor is a...a composite. The black hair comes from a man whose name is Luke. And then there’s my neighbour, Rick, who has the most amazing amber eyes—because, you see, I am in the process of changing Alex’s eyes from blue to amber; it’s a much more unusual colour, you know. And the engineer part is from all the Rutherford Property guys—you, of course, and Damian, and Carl.’

‘Carl?’

‘Yes, Carl—who is brilliant if only you’d look past his shyness. Really brilliant—and kind, and creative. Did you know he paints?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Max snapped. And—thank God—he removed his hands from her desk and straightened. He plucked a ruler off her desk and started flexing it.

There was silence as Max stared at her, flexing the ruler. Flexing, flexing. And then it snapped, and he looked at it as though he had no idea how it had ended up in his hands.

Her with the stapler, him with the ruler. God help the paperclips, the way they were going!

‘Right—composite—got it,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to have to play the boss card, Catherine, and tell you to direct your attention to something worthwhile while I’m in Queensland for the next week. Like the...the filing. I’d like the old files sorted and archived.’

Catherine’s eyes shot to his. She wanted to protest that he’d only just got back after too long away, but she swallowed the words. It wasn’t her job to question the boss about his comings and goings—just to book them. And then do the filing while she imagined him with a horse-faced blonde bimbo in his hotel room.

Long, silent growl.

‘When would you like your flight booked?’ she asked tightly.

‘Tomorrow. First flight to Cairns.’

Catherine sat looking at him, wanting to call back the whole disastrous day.

Max’s gaze tangled with hers for endless moments.

Suddenly he seemed to come to a conclusion. Forking one hand through his hair, he turned on his heel, broken ruler clenched in one fist, went into his office, and quietly closed the door.

* * *

Max had said he’d be gone a week. But he was now two days overdue. And it was driving Catherine nuts.

Once Max had left for Queensland he’d reverted to passing on his instructions via Damian, responding to her phone messages via text or email and not once actually speaking to her.

Catherine tossed another pile of old files onto her desk for sorting. She hated filing! She hated everything. Her head was aching because she’d been pinning her hair too tightly for a week and two days. She was wearing thicker tights and they were making her itch. She’d bought new shirts that buttoned so high they were choking her. All to counteract the Passion Flower effect.

The least Max could do was show up and appreciate her new take on ultra-conservatism, and get it through his thick head that she knew the difference between fantasy and reality.

Catherine threw herself into the fray and it wasn’t long before she was tackling the ‘home run’—the top drawers of Max’s ten ancient filing cabinets. The oldest, mustiest files. And they were hard to reach for someone who was only five feet four.

She was standing on an upturned wastepaper basket when the accident happened.

She’d tugged one of the drawers open, hands buried blindly in it to extract the first few files, when the wastepaper basket slid out from under her. She fell backwards, pulling one file with her and scattering papers in an airbound muddle. The filing drawer, tugged along by the force of Catherine’s other flailing hand, slid fully out, disengaged from the cabinet and started a heavy descent to the floor.

‘Cathy?’

She heard Max’s herald from the lift lobby as she hit the floor almost simultaneously with the drawer, which landed next to her as she let out a mangled ouhmph sound.

Winded. Great! How was she supposed to look ultra-conservative lying on a carpet of loose pages, gasping for breath, next to a filing drawer?

Well, the filing alcove was tucked away. Hopefully Max would think she’d left the office on some errand and go into his own office. She could wait out the diaphragm spasms in peace, then get up, straighten her clothes, and walk back to her desk as though nothing had happened.

‘Cathy?’ he called again, obviously having reached her desk and found her missing.

Catherine closed her eyes. Two minutes was all she needed. Go into your office, she begged silently. Two minutes, that’s all. Two—

‘Cathy?’

By this time Max was sounding puzzled, irritated, and a little alarmed.

Oooohhh, this was not going to work.

‘Catherine North! Where the hell are you?’

Followed by a string of graphic curses.

She willed her diaphragm into submission and managed to draw an uncomplicated breath. One more. A third.

Right. Time to get up—so she could at least be found on her feet.

But she’d only managed to raise herself on one elbow when Max hurtled past the open door of the filing alcove. Stopped. Turned. Charged back, another string of curses accompanying him.

Catherine raised herself on her other elbow. ‘No wonder you wanted the files cleared out,’ she said, with only a faint wheeze. ‘They’re a health hazard.’

‘I’ll tell you what you can do with the files,’ Max ground out. Kicking loose pages out of his way, he shoved the errant drawer aside with such ferocity that Catherine hoped he’d refrain from filling her in on the intricacies of that particular suggestion.

In seconds he was kneeling beside her. ‘What happened? Should I call an ambulance? I’ll call an ambulance.’

‘You will not call an ambulance,’ Catherine said. ‘Because I’m fine.’

‘You’re not,’ Max contradicted flatly. ‘You didn’t answer when I called. Did you hit your head?’

‘Yes, but—’

Without waiting for the rest, Max delved one of his hands into her hair and Catherine groaned. There went her tight chignon; she could feel waves of hair springing out all over the place.

All it took was the groan for him to dig deeper. ‘There? Does it hurt there?’

‘No, it doesn’t hurt there,’ Catherine said waspishly. She reached a hand up to her head. ‘Oh, what are you doing to my hair? Do you know how long that takes to pin?’

‘So don’t pin it,’ Max said. He got to his feet, effortlessly drawing Catherine up beside him, then put his arm around her. ‘My office,’ he said, and started shepherding her along.

Catherine groaned again. This was too awful. Not only the embarrassment of being discovered in such an undignified position, but the fact that Max had his arm around her, so she was breathing in that erotic scent of his—that mixture of special cologne, ultra-clean clothes, and Max’s own personal essence. At close range it was too wonderful to be borne.

‘I’m fine, I promise you,’ she said feebly.

‘Nearly there,’ Max soothed, shouldering open his office door, settling her on the leather couch against the wall, crouching beside her. ‘All right, now just lie there.’

Catherine would have preferred one of the matching chairs where she normally sat. A couch was so...intimate. It reminded her of an Alex-Jennifer scene—Jennifer reclining on a chaise-longue, hair tumbling over her shoulders; Alex staring down at her with burning eyes...

Max smoothed a hand across the top of her head and Catherine groaned again.

‘See?’ Max said accusingly. ‘You are hurt!’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Catherine grumbled and, using her hands for leverage, tried to sit up.

‘Look,’ Max demanded, grasping the hands pushing against the leather of the couch and lowering her again. ‘You’re shaking like a leaf.’

It was true. And Catherine was very glad to have the fall as an excuse—because her body’s trembling reaction had nothing to do with that fall and everything to do with Max’s proximity to her.

‘All right, a headache and a teensy bit of shock,’ she lied. ‘Now, can I get up?’

Max squashed himself onto the edge of the couch beside her and put his hand to her forehead—feeling her temperature, of all things. Well, he was an engineer, not a doctor.

‘I guess that’s a no,’ Catherine said dryly. ‘Although I think you should consider doing a first-aid course.’

‘I thought I was managing pretty well.’

‘Hmph. It’s a good thing I didn’t injure my back, the way you dragged me off the floor.’

‘What—was I supposed to leave you there?’

‘And I don’t have a fever, so you can move your hand.’ Next thing he’d be asking her to stick out her tongue—and there was no saying what she’d do with it once it was out of her mouth!

Max removed his hand. ‘How am I supposed to know if I don’t check?’

‘Because you don’t get a fever from—’ Catherine broke off in exasperation. ‘Oh, never mind! Just tell me when you’re free for that first-aid course.’

‘Why didn’t you answer when I called?’

‘I was flat-out at the time.’

The bone-melting smile. ‘A double entendre—so your brain’s working at least. Are you sure you didn’t break anything? Perhaps I’d better check—’

‘If you do, I’ll walk out of this office and never come back.’ Just to think of those hands wandering over her bones was enough to heat her blood to boiling point.

‘All right, all right.’ Short laugh. ‘God, you’re such a firebrand, Cathy. I love it.’

Firebrand. Catherine’s breath jammed. Jennifer was the firebrand. Catherine wrote her that way because she couldn’t be like that herself any more, not since RJ... Uh-oh. Not a good idea to be thinking about RJ. Or Passion Flower. Or tongues. Or fires in the blood.

‘Stay there,’ Max commanded, standing in one smooth, decisive movement. ‘Five minutes.’

But it was less than three minutes later when Max returned, a glass of water in one hand and two tablets in the other.

‘For your headache,’ he explained, and watched as Catherine downed them. ‘Now,’ he said when she’d finished her last swallow of water. ‘Explain.’

Catherine looked at him blankly. ‘Explain what?’

‘What the hell you were doing.’ He passed a hand that was none too steady over his eyes.

Whaaaat?

‘I was doing the filing. As requested by my boss.’

‘I didn’t mean for you to kill yourself!’

‘And I didn’t.’

‘Couldn’t you get someone else to get the files for you if they were too high?’ He started pacing in front of her. ‘In fact, why are they so high?’

‘I have no idea. I guess your last assistant was taller.’

‘Elise,’ Max said, matter-of-fact. ‘Yes, I guess she was.’ He looked at Catherine’s feet, her hideous flat shoes. ‘She wore high heels, too.’

‘Well, it seems your various Elises—’ oozed Catherine, dripping poisoned honey ‘—never threw out a piece of paper in their lives! I’ve found files so old they should be given a gold watch!’

‘Do you need help going through them?’ Max asked, ignoring her sarcasm to cut straight to the point.

Instantly Catherine’s back was up. No way was she going to get landed with a leggy blonde ‘Elise’ to help her. ‘I’m nearly finished. I can handle it.’

Max looked at her sceptically.

‘I can,’ she insisted.

Max was silent, studying her for a long moment. Then he got to his feet and walked over to look out of the window. ‘So...how’s the book going?’

Catherine pokered up. ‘If you think that’s the reason I haven’t finished—’

‘That’s not what I—’ Max broke off, spinning around. ‘I just...had an idea. You know...for a scene. I thought of it while I was in Queensland.’

Catherine opened her mouth to tell him to mind his own damned business—but for some reason out came, ‘A scene?’ instead. Because—arrggghhh!—she was interested. Intrigued, even. And clearly insane.

In. Sane.

‘Yeah. A cocktail function where Alex is trying to woo investors,’ he said. ‘Jennifer has planned the event. And something goes wrong. She...she twists her ankle or...or hits her head, maybe...? And Alex has to rescue her, and he calls the doctor and...and stuff.’

‘What kind of party? I mean, black tie?’ Catherine frowned, thoughtful. ‘Because Jennifer doesn’t dress up.’

He hurried over to her, sat on the edge of the couch again. ‘This could be the first time she does though, couldn’t it? And he’s thinking, Wow, who knew?’

She stared at him, her brain ticking over. ‘Hmm... Maybe I could try that.’

His eyes were so warm, so serious. For a heart-stopping moment Catherine thought he was going to touch her. She flinched backwards and Max jumped to his feet.

‘I just wondered, that’s all,’ he said, and paced to the other side of the room, jamming his hands under his armpits. ‘That’s how he’d treat her, right? Alex? How he’d be with Jennifer if she needed help?’

Okay, maybe she had a concussion and Max had some bizarre kind of interstate-travel version of jet lag. Because there was no rational explanation for this conversation.

‘I think I should get back to work.’

Max unjammed his hands, shoving them into his hair instead. ‘Not until the doctor has a look at you,’ he said, and all but ripped the phone off his desk. ‘I’ll call him, then go and bring Damian up to speed. Give you some privacy while the doc’s here.’

Alex...calling the doctor. Max...calling the doctor. This was weird. Too weird.

Catherine was so fidgety she could barely respond to the doctor’s questions. And when she was pronounced fit and well and was back at her desk with the filing she couldn’t concentrate. Because whenever she saw Max’s bold handwriting on a document she’d remember how it had felt to have his arm around her, his hands in her hair, that look of worry creasing his forehead and darkening his eyes, him talking to her about Passion Flower.