“What the hell?” The stall door clapped open. “You can’t be in here.”
She stepped out, pale face flushing red with high emotion, every bit as enticingly beautiful as he remembered.
He had to consciously keep his gaze from wandering to the open collar of her striped shirt and well-cut, single-button blazer. Her outfit was professional and conservative, exactly as it should be for her role as assistant to their head of legal.
He still found her entirely too sexy.
“I just acquired the building with the company.” He leaned on the partition that separated the sink area from the vanity nook. “I can go anywhere I want. What areyoudoing here?”
“In this room?” She pointed to the floor. “Trying not to vomit over the fact that I slept with a married man. Who haschildren. You absolute disgusting scumbag. Howdareyou lie to me about something like that?”
Her anger was incendiary. Thrilling. She radiated the energy of a typhoon, terrifying yet awe-inspiring. There was also something perversely gratifying in her temper. She wasn’t merely offended.How dare you lie tome. It was personal. She was jealous.
He shouldn’t like that. At all. But he did.
“You’re referring to Zurina?” He lifted one patronizing brow. “She’s my sister-in-law.”
“Oh.” Her hard boil of fury simmered down to an annoyed scowl. She narrowed her eyes on him, though. “You really aren’t married? Because—”
“I am exactly as I presented to you when we met. You are the one with something to explain. How the hell do you come to be working for my father?” That was highly suspicious.Highly.
“I don’t.” She was taken aback. “I work for Oladele. Aside from when your father walked by us ten minutes ago, I’d never seen or spoken to him.” She moved to the sink to wash her hands.
“You want me to believe your working here is a coincidence?”
“Unlessyouplanned it, then yes. That’s exactly what it is. I told you I was starting a new job covering a mat leave.”
“You let me believe that was in Australia. Or San Francisco.” He didn’t know what he’d thought, but he sure as hell hadn’t imagined she was cominghere.
“You said you live on yourplane. Maybe if you’d stuck around, instead of skittering away like a spider under a door, I would have told you I was coming to Madrid.” She shook out a cloth hand towel and wet it under the tap. “You could have simply let me leave without asking me to come back. That second trip down the hall really was a walk of shame.” She gave the wet towel a hard wring and dabbed a corner of it under her eyes, fixing her smudged makeup.
Tears? He might have been more disturbed by that if he wasn’t seeing them here, amid an outright war with his father.
“Zurina called me with an emergency.” He hadn’t liked leaving without a word, but he hadn’t relished knocking on doors to find her, then trying to explain.
He hadn’t liked that there’d been a part of him that had leaped toward asking her to accompany him. For that reason, a clean break had seemed easier. Safer.
But the clean break hadn’t happened.
“Go back to explaining how you’re here,” he demanded.
“You really think I’m here by design? Until Oladele said it a few minutes ago, I didn’t know your last name.” She pivoted to face him, forcing him to quit ogling the shape of her ass in her blue trousers.
“You didn’t investigate the company you were applying at?” he asked skeptically.
“I used a placement agency. They gave me an abstract, but I wasn’t told it was LV Global until I’d been offered the job. I spoke to Oladele at one point, but that was about my duties. When I did look it up, it said the president had passed awayover a year ago and that his father had come out of retirement to run things.” She threw the damp towel in the laundry basket. “Frankly, I didn’t need to know more than that. My priority was to be closer to my sister and gain experience in legal. I’ve been meaning to read more about the company, but I’ve been busy moving continents and visiting with family.”
This all seemed too tidy for him to believe. On the other hand, there was very little on line that linked him to his father. He certainly didn’t take any pains to acknowledge his relationship to Lorenzo.
She waved at the door. “Is Oladele out there, wondering why you’re accosting her EA in the toilet?”
“She’s downstairs.” He stole a quick glance at his phone. The file hadn’t been forwarded yet so they had another minute. “You can’t work for me.”
“I don’t. I work for Oladele.”
“She works for LV Global, which I have just acquired. You work for me.”
“So? Are you unable to be professional because we had a brief interaction in the past?”
