Bedded By The Boss: The Boss's Demand / Something about the Boss... / Beguiling the Boss

She wrenched her eyes back to the plants and poured water onto the decorative gravel she’d used to cover the soil. The glossy leaves brought life to the room. It was almost cheerful now, especially since she’d convinced him to let her move in a couple of stunning abstract paintings that had languished in a little-used conference room.

“Sara.”

Her breath caught—as always—at the sound of her name in his low, husky voice. “Yes?” She continued watering, resisting the urge to turn and look at him.

“It’s not your job to water plants in my office, or to make my chair more comfortable.” The odd tone of his voice made her look up.

“I know, I just…” She didn’t really know exactly what she was doing. Going the extra mile or something.

“Just as I don’t expect you to make my coffee, I don’t expect you to concern yourself with such trivialities. It’s late and you have a home to go to.”

She flinched at the stab of pain she felt at his rejection of her efforts. She had only herself to blame. He hadn’t asked for any of it.

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m annoying you with all this…stuff.” She gestured around the room at the paintings, the plants, the new coffee machine for the viciously strong coffee he brewed. Her heart sank a little. Okay, so she was overdoing it.

“On the contrary. You’ve made my office very pleasant.” He said it quietly, gave her an unexpected, cautious look that squeezed her heart a little.

“To be honest, I enjoy this sort of stuff, you know, cheering things up.” She hugged the watering can to her chest. “I have a lot of time on my hands when I’m not here. I’m not used to being on my own. I have a big family back home—four sisters and three brothers.” The words tumbled out and the pitch of her voice rose. “My mom was sick for a long time and I took care of her. I’m used to being busy, looking after things, looking after people, you know. I’m not used to going home all alone, I…”

Shut up Sara!

What on earth was she doing running off at the mouth about how pathetically lonely she’d been lately? That wasn’t his problem. It had been her decision to move here. To cook for one. To have conversations with herself over the tiny counter in her kitchen. To move the furniture around in her cramped apartment because she had nothing better to do.

To harass her boss with misplaced nurturing instincts. She felt a flush creep above her blouse as she realized what she’d been doing.

His body motionless, Elan spoke softly. “I appreciate the trouble you’ve taken. It’s a gift to understand the needs of others without being asked.” He held her gaze, a guarded expression shadowing his hard features. “Your thoughtfulness is a complement to your excellent work.”

She blinked and bit her lip as a rush of emotion sprang from something raw inside her. His devastating seriousness and the gravity of such a huge compliment—his first—nearly unhinged her. The urge to cry warred with the urge to explode into raucous laughter.

“Thank you,” she managed.

He immediately turned away and began sorting through some papers. Had his dark complexion darkened yet further? She dismissed the thought. He cleared his throat and loosened his necktie with a long finger.

She inhaled a deep breath and accidentally splashed herself with water from the can as she wheeled around to face the door.

“Good night,” she muttered as she hustled toward it, feet silent on the carpet.

“Good night, Sara.” Low and slightly strangled, as if his tie was still too tight, his words followed her out to her desk, down in the elevator, across the parking lot and home to her silent apartment.

Elan leaned back in his chair and watched as Sara gave a sales pitch to potential clients from Canada. Her trial month was nearly up and she’d proved beyond a shadow of a doubt she was more than worthy of her position.

“As I’ve demonstrated, our technology is capable of reducing the amount of sediment in the crude oil to well below the required level. The new techniques we have developed allow previously unprofitable fields to be exploited productively. We provide a complete package of services, from drilling to refining, that allow our customers to take advantage of cutting-edge technology and expertise without investing in their own infrastructure.”

Her sharp mind and talent for incisive analysis impressed him. They were intriguingly at odds with a soft, warm side of her that caught him off guard with caring gestures. For someone so young she seemed unusually wise, her intelligence matched and even outmeasured by a natural compassion that rather awed him. And those little flashes of humor she surprised him with, well…

The late-afternoon sun shone through the window, glazing her delicate features with gold and sparking fiery highlights in her hair. Her hair looked so soft. He wondered how it would feel between his fingers, under his palms as he cupped her head, tipping it back to claim her mouth in a kiss.

Perish the thought. He would never become involved with an employee. Such an action would be an inexcusable abuse of his authority.

He had never kissed one of his assistants. Though not through any lack of effort on their part. A woman who would throw herself at a man in a professional environment could never command his respect or his affection.

He could not quite understand the appeal he held for them. He did not think his face held such dazzling beauty as to enslave a fellow human. His body was thick and heavy from his work with the horses, not the kind of elegant male form he imagined women would prefer.

Of course there was his wealth. He’d always been wealthy, even before he’d bought a small drilling company coming off a local oil boom and turned it into the thriving oil services corporation it was today. The oil that ran in his blood had enriched his family and his country before he was born. Was this the irresistible appeal he held for women?

No matter. Sara’s predecessors had all departed the company of their own free will, rankling under the low opinion he held of them.

But none of them possessed her talent. Already she performed duties far beyond the role she was hired for. Sara was an asset he would hate to lose. And he wouldn’t lose her if he could help it.

He’d arranged to have Sara fly with him to the firm’s newest drilling site tomorrow. The trip would broaden her understanding of their work and prepare her to take on greater responsibilities.

The object of his thoughts walked across the conference room to the whiteboard and began to sketch out a formula one of the clients had asked to see. His gaze drifted to her hips, to the lush curve of her backside that shifted beneath her suit as she strained to reach the top of the board.

Suddenly his slacks felt a trifle snug. Perhaps he should send his tailor in London some new measurements? He shifted in his chair, tugged at his tie, which now closed too tightly around his neck, constricted his breathing.

Sara dropped her pen. As she bent forward to retrieve it, her skirt strained tightly over the firm length of her thighs and cupped her buttocks. Elan jolted forward in his chair, as a thunderbolt of sensation rammed through him.

He cleared his throat and grabbed hold of his pen, scribbled some meaningless notes on his papers as he struggled to get his errant body back under control.

Her suit was too revealing.

It was indecent and undignified to display so much of one’s physique in a business environment. He would have Jill Took from Human Resources address the matter with her.

Slowly he lifted his eyes again as Sara cheerfully explained the calculations involved in an aspect of the refining process. He surveyed the offending suit with an eye to detailed critique, and was chagrined that on closer examination he could not find fault with it. It was not close-fitting. The skirt came well below the knee. It was demure in cut and color.

The problem lay within the suit. And within him.

Three

“Seventy-six bottles of beer on the wall, seventy-six bottles of beer…” Her voice was cracking, her throat clenched with terror.

“You’ve survived, Sara, open your eyes.” Elan’s words penetrated her shattered consciousness.

“Oh, God.” Her whole body was rigid. Her eyelids squeezed tight as she struggled to shut out reality.

“We’re above the clouds now. There’s no danger.” His low voice rose over the mellow drone of the jet engines.

Gingerly she opened her eyes, and the bright light gleaming through the row of tiny oval windows threatened to blind her. Silhouetted against it was Elan’s face, features creased with concern.

She realized she was clutching both his hands in a death grip. But she couldn’t let go. Desire had nothing to do with it. She clung to him out of sheer terror.

“See, it’s not so bad. The plane cruises along. You can’t even see the ground from up here.”

“Oh, God.” The thought of the ground miles and miles below made her stomach drop.

“Are you going to be ill?”

Oh, God, please don’t let me throw up. “I don’t think so.”

“Good.”

“I’m sorry I’m such a …” Wimp? Wuss? Weak woman?

“Don’t apologize, Sara. Many people are afraid of flying.” He gave her hands a quick reassuring squeeze.

She took a deep breath, and another. They were airborne. Oh, God.

“You’ve never flown before?” His look of tender concern caused a swell of emotion to rise to her throat. She swallowed hard.

“No.”

“I thought Americans flew everywhere.”

“Some do, I guess. Not me.” She still couldn’t believe they were above the clouds. At the thought a fresh surge of horror seized her gut. She saw her anxiety reflected in Elan’s pained expression.

He wrenched one of his big hands free from her rigor-mortis clench. As Sara shuddered with—fear?—he unbuckled his seat belt in one swift motion and slid his arm around her shoulder.

The warmth of his sturdy arm encircling her shivering torso soothed her as she leaned into it. She took a deep breath. Maybe she could survive this after all.

“Your family didn’t fly abroad on vacation?”

She let out a snort of laughter. A nervous explosion. “No, we rarely left the city limits. My family’s finances were strictly hand to mouth.”

“They were poor?”

“Very.”

“Oh.” His lips pursed as he appeared to consider the information. Would it make him think less of her? Surely not. It was hardly her fault. Though she didn’t plan to be poor again if she could help it.

“But you’re from Wisconsin, aren’t you? How did you come to Nevada?”

“By road.”

“On your bicycle?” His eyebrows shot up.

She laughed again. The release of laughter and the comfort of his reassuring embrace steadied her nerves.

“No, I drove a car. An old clunker. It died as soon as I got here. That’s why I ride a bike now.”

He smiled. “I’m relieved to hear it. But you’ll buy another car, no?”

“Eventually.”

As soon as I pay off tens of thousands of dollars in debt. She didn’t really want him to know about that. Her personal burdens were nobody’s business.

“The color is returning to your cheeks.” He spoke softly. The deep, mellow tone of his voice was intimate, assuring. She gradually became conscious of the way their bodies were entwined. Elan still leaned into her airplane seat, his strength wrapped around her.

His broad chest pushed into her shoulder. The firm surface of his pectorals rubbed against her, heating her through the thin fabric of their clothes. The vibrations from the jet’s engine hummed through them both, causing little shock waves of sensation to surge through her, heating and arousing her from head to toe.

The color returned to her cheeks in a blaze of glory.

She tore her eyes from him. As her fear ebbed it was being replaced by an entirely different sensation.

Lust.

His hand rested on her waist just below her right breast. A curl of heat rose in her belly as she became aware of the pad of each long, dexterous finger pushing gently against her skin, warming her through her blouse. Her breast stirred beneath her shirt. Her nipple hardened, craving his touch.

And she was conscious of the scent of him—earthy, musky, with an exotic note of fragrance that wound itself through the air around her.

Elan.

Secret fantasies were coming to life. Dreams stalking the daylight. Her most humiliating craven longing fulfilled in the touch of this man.

Her boss.

As her body tingled with the sensation of sheer physical excitement, her mind struggled with the knowledge that his embrace was purely a gesture of compassion. If he knew what was going on in her body, in her mind, he’d recoil in horror.

But she couldn’t help wanting to prolong the illicit pleasure, the dangerous high of being held in the arms of the man whose allure was the torment of her days and the solace of her lonely nights.

Yes, she dreamed about him—waking dreams, as well as sleeping dreams. Fantasies, the shame-laced release of all the pent-up emotion bottled inside her at the end of a long day spent in close proximity to him.

But never as close as this.

On impulse she looked at him and her heart seized as she read the expression in his narrowed eyes.

I want you.

His irises were nearly black, indistinguishable from his pupils, fathomless depths, wells that drew from a dark, secretive soul. But at that moment she knew exactly what was on his mind.

Just as he knew exactly what was on hers.

In a sudden flurry of activity they disentangled themselves. She cleared her throat and smoothed the front of her blouse. He snatched up his Wall Street Journal and arranged it in his lap with a good deal of rustling.

He fiddled with his tie. Ran his fingers through his hair. Unhooked his cuff links and rolled up his sleeves. He shuffled his paper, appearing to scan the columns with keen interest.

Avoiding her glance.

Sara leaned stiffly back into her seat. She had no idea where her briefcase was. In the paralytic terror that had accompanied her onto the aircraft she’d been aware of nothing but an urge to run screaming back down the ramp to the safety of terra firma.

Oddly, though, she wasn’t afraid anymore.

Fear seemed a paltry emotion after the intense, primal madness that seized and shook her as Elan held her.

She cleared her throat. “Um, I can’t seem to remember where I put my briefcase.”

He gave her a quick look of alarm and pointed to where it lay at her feet.

“Thank you.” She rifled inside it, bending forward and letting her hair hang down to conceal her crimson face. She pulled out a report she wanted to proofread and made a big show of finding her place and uncapping her pen.

She sneaked a glance at him. His expression was stony as he read his paper. He snapped the big pages open and scrutinized the tiny print with focused intensity. She attempted to concentrate on the dense scientific text in front of her, but her mind couldn’t make sense of the words.

“I’m sorry.” The words formed on her lips of their own accord.

I’m sorry I can’t stop wanting you in just the way you despise.

“For what?” He didn’t look up from his paper.

“For being a gibbering idiot. I had no idea I was going to react like that. I guess I’m officially a white-knuckle flier.” She bit her lip. It was humiliating to see how little control she’d displayed in the face of fear.

“It’s no matter,” he said brusquely, without glancing up from the text. He snapped open another page, appeared to study it for a moment, then looked up. “There’s no shame in showing fear of flying through the clouds.”

His stony features softened as he looked at her. Sara swallowed hard as a strange surge of emotion threatened to overflow its boundaries. Fear, embarrassment and forbidden lust all roiled inside her, her poor nerve-racked body a fragile vessel for so much unfamiliar torment.

Poor Sara! He could see how greatly she suffered. She’d not betrayed even a moment of hesitation, had not mentioned her lack of flying experience until her fears overcame her as they boarded the aircraft.

Her obvious terror filled him with a powerful protective instinct that shook him to the core. He wanted nothing more than to put his arms around her and comfort her.

And the protective urge frightened him far more than any of the transient sexual thoughts that bedeviled him in her presence.

He’d left his home and his cruel father behind to build his own life, free of ties and obligations he had no use for. He needed no one and no one needed him—until he saw the fear that racked her delicate body and brought tears to her pale jade eyes. He couldn’t sit and watch her suffer. And holding her was a pleasure beyond imagining. At his touch she softened and relaxed. Her shivering eased and her flesh warmed. She leaned into his embrace, welcomed his touch. Welcomed him.

Desire had seized him. Desire to offer her far more than comfort, to take far more than the satisfaction of soothing her fears.

He wanted to experience the sweet agony of her soft body pressed against his. To sink his fingertips into her lush curves. To fill her with the joy that swept through him each time she flashed her lovely smile in his direction.

And she was his for the taking. He could see that.

That knowledge alone should extinguish his desire.

“I bet you were a kid the first time you flew in a plane.” Her voice startled him out of his tortured contemplation and forced him to refocus on the paper he’d been pretending to read.

“Yes, age eleven.” He didn’t dare look up. Those wide eyes cast a spell on him that right now he had no power to resist.

“Were you taking a vacation with your parents?”

A vacation? Did the concept even exist in his country? “No.”

“Well?” Her lips twitched in a half smile as she waited for him to expand. Soft, delicate lips, thin and mobile.

That begged his mouth to close over them.

He struggled to wrench his mind back to her question about his first plane ride. And the memory it conjured dampened his feelings of pleasure.

“I left my home in Oman for the first time to fly to boarding school in England.”

That day he’d left everything he knew, everyone he held dear, to find himself alone and afraid in a strange, cold country where no one understood his speech and customs. It had been a journey from which he would never truly return.

“Were you frightened?”

“Yes. Though perhaps not as you might imagine. I enjoyed the flight. Young boys take pleasure in the power of big machines.” He forced what he hoped looked like a natural smile.

“Why did your parents send you away to school?”

Why indeed? Not so he could receive an excellent education, though that had been a result. Not so he could become familiar with the ways of western culture, though in time he had.

So his father could punish his mother. Rip her favorite child from her arms and banish him to a far land. Simply to show her that he could.

Anger still burned in his gut at the memory of his mother weeping as his father’s aides dragged her screaming son away from her for the last time. Elan never saw her again. Her health was already frail—a neurological ailment—and after he was sent away her decline was swift, her death sudden.

And he could never forgive his father for taking her life as surely as if he’d slashed a knife at her throat.

He realized Sara was waiting for an answer to her question. “They thought it would turn me into a man.”

That, too, was true. His father had reviled his close relationship with his mother. Abhorred how when he was little he’d liked to crawl into her bed to seek comfort from his nightmares, how he followed her on her daily rounds, laughing with her and the women, enjoying her gentle humor and loving caresses.

No son of mine will hide himself in the skirts of a woman! His father’s words still rang in his ears.

“Leaving home so young must have been hard.” Sara’s voice trembled a little as she said the words softly. He realized she must be responding to emotion on his face. A twinge of embarrassment warred with an urge to tell her more.

“Yes. I spoke little English. I’d rarely been to the nearest city, let alone out of the country. I’d spent every day in the bosom of my family, and suddenly I was torn from all I’d ever known. Strange people, strange language, strange food and the English weather…”

Words poured from his tongue unbidden as Sara’s kind eyes watched him. “I missed the bright sun of my home almost as much as I missed my family.”

“I’ve heard the weather in England is a bit grim.” She smiled tentatively.

“My horses were as surprised as I was. They couldn’t understand why the sun had vanished and water kept falling from the skies. They at least enjoyed lush green grass.”

“You took horses with you to boarding school?” Her eyes twinkled with curiosity and interest that only fired Elan’s impulse to share memories he’d kept locked away for so long.

“Yes. I brought my two favorite stallions with me. The school insisted on gelding them. They said stallions couldn’t run with the other horses.”

The painful memory of his close companions being deprived of their manhood stung him. It seemed so symbolic at the time. The three of them together were humbled aliens in a strange land, stripped of their former power and position and all they knew. But together they’d found a way to survive. They’d learned a new language, figured out the rules and learned to play by them.

That long, hard exile from his country and from everyone he’d ever loved had made him into the man he was today.

“Aren’t stallions supposed to be dangerous?” The innocent awe in Sara’s eyes lifted the gloom descending on him.

“They must be handled with care. But a man who’s ridden a stallion can never truly be satisfied with any other horse. To harness the feral power of the herd leader and to move with him as one is an experience like no other.”

A delicate flush spread up across Sara’s chin and cheeks. At first he was surprised, then he realized his words must have triggered a rather different image than the one he intended.

Perhaps she imagined how it would feel to ride him.

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as Sara’s blush darkened a shade further.

To be sure, the image intrigued him, too.

The thought of her slim thighs squeezing him, her long, delicate fingers wound into his hair, her hips moving against him, urging him on—

Elan quickly rearranged his paper to cover his lap. His breathing was in danger of becoming audible and he struggled to focus his mind on something that would douse his desire.

Sara’s lips parted as she wrenched her eyes from his face and rifled through her briefcase. Her skin flushed crimson right down to her blouse. Fair skin could be a terrible disadvantage. Her thoughts were literally written all over her face.

But he couldn’t help wondering what other parts of her body might redden in response to his presence. Nipples blushing like ripe berries. The delicate flower of her sex a pink rose inviting him to taste its nectar, beckoning him to bury his face in its soft petals—

He cleared his throat loudly and rustled his newspaper. “Pardon me. Something in my throat.” Mercifully his dark skin did not betray the sudden flush of heat surging though his body.

He was rock-hard, straining painfully against the zipper of his pants. He regretted removing his jacket, but if he rose to retrieve it from the seats on the other side of the aircraft, his situation would be very evident. Only the Wall Street Journal prevented his lust from being clearly visible to its instigator.