Can't Get Enough (21 page)

MONDAY MORNING. Claire sat in her car and tried to pretend it was like
any other Monday for a full ten minutes, but she still couldn't force
herself to get out and face the working week. She didn't ever want to
see Jack again. She certainly didn't want to see him while she was
sporting this lurid black eye. Apart from purely aesthetic reasons—and
she didn't care about him thinking she was ugly, she really didn't—it
made pretending that last Friday never happened impossible. Why had she
let him kiss her? A whole weekend of pounding the pavement, swimming
lap after lap and riding her bike till her backside felt like it would
never be the same again, had not even put a dint in her regret and
self-recrimination. She'd spent nearly two years ignoring the man and
telling herself she was superior to the other women in the office who
fell all over him, then he'd barely glanced at her and she was ripping
her clothes off in an elevator for him, and writhing around all over
his kitchen sink. Just the thought of it made her flush with
humiliation. And remembered desire. Which only made the humiliation
more humiliating. Did she have no self-respect whatsoever?

Which brought her back to how to handle the current situation. She was
still discarding options when the elevator pinged to a halt on her
floor. She adjusted the enormous Jackie-O-esquesunglasses she'd bought
on the weekend, then began weaving her way through the warren of
workstations on the way to her office.

She was braced to cope with stares and shock when people saw the
shiner—she'd dealt with it all weekend—but most people were too busy to
notice her, and Tom wasn't at his desk. She slipped virtually unnoticed
into her office and for a cowardly second toyed with the idea of
keeping on the glasses
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all day. But she knew that it would just add fuel to the fire if she
tried to hide her eye. The trick to pulling this off with the minimum
of fuss and bother was to brazen it out. She'd decided on a nice,
innocuous explanation for her eye—she'd had an accident while training.
No connection between her and Jack. No need for either of them to bring
it up, even if he remembered. And he might not, right? He'd had a lot
to drink….

She grunted with self-disgust.

Like he didn't remember. As if she could get that lucky. How on earth was she going to look at him?

And why had she felt it was her responsibility to save him from himself
in the first place? Lastly, why had Beck foisted Jack, of all people,
onto her project?

Feeling ridiculously exposed and vulnerable, she turned on her
computer, then carefully slid off the sunglasses. Her in-tray was
groaning with mail and memos, and she dragged it toward herself
gratefully—anything to stop her mind from running in circles like a
mouse in a wheel. She was engrossed in paperwork when Tom entered
loaded up with muffins and take-out coffees from downstairs.

"Now, I knew you wouldn't have had time to have breakfast, as usual,"
he said brightly. She lifted her head to thank him, and he almost lost
his grip on the coffees as he registered her damaged eye.

"Good golly Miss Molly! What on earth happened to you?" he squeaked. For a second there she'd forgotten about the eye.

"Bit of an accident out training. Looks worse than it is," she said,
hoping she sounded dismissive but instead sounding nervous.

She tried to smile calmly as Tom came closer, his face screwed up with
a mixture of fascination and disgust as he studied her bruise.

"Man, that is
sooooo
bad. I have never seen a worse shiner in my life. Does it hurt? It
looks like it hurts." She felt her smile slip a little. If she couldn't
even cope with Tom, how was she going to face Jack?

"It's fine. Really. And it'll be gone in a few days' time."

"Are you kidding? That thing is going to go yellow and brown and purple
and green—you just wait." Her smile felt as though it was set in
concrete, and she reached for the muffin bag Tom had dumped
unceremoniously on the desk.

"Don't suppose there are any blueberry in here?" she asked, desperate
to divert him. But Tom was still hyped about her eye. He leaned out of
her office doorway.

"Hey, Kirsty , Helen, Roy —come check out Claire's shiner! It's unreal!" he hollered.
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It was going to be a long day.

As Tom herded his colleagues into her office so he could show her off
like a sideshow freak, she was vaguely aware of a stir on the other
side of the floor. A hushed quiet, closely followed by lots of feminine
discussion. But Tom was pointing out the many different colors of
purple in her bruise to Kirsty , and she didn't see the human bouquet
until it appeared in her doorway.

Jack was holding the largest bunch of flowers Claire had ever seen. A
veritable riot of color, so large that only his head and legs were
visible at either end of the damn thing. Tom and Kirsty and Helen and
Roy all looked from her to Jack and back again, then smiled knowingly.
She didn't need to be a rocket scientist to work out what they were
thinking. Or to understand why her heart was suddenly racing. Damn him.

A sudden memory of how his stubbled cheek had felt against the soft
skin of her neck flashed across her brain, and a wave of heat followed
quickly in its wake. She felt dizzy, and unbearably transparent. He
could probably read every thought crossing her mind. She could just
imagine him laughing with his buddies over the uptight chick at work
who'd turned to butter the moment he'd crooked his little finger.

"Um, did you want to see me, Jack?" she managed to say finally. Her
voice came out squeaky and breathy, and Kirsty and Helen nudged each
other meaningfully.

Jack was staring at her face, a small frown creasing his brow.

"Jack?"

He blinked, then looked from her to the flowers to the interested spectators crowded around her desk.

"Yes. Yes, that would be good," he said awkwardly.

She waited for her uninvited guests to slowly, reluctantly ease from
the room. Tom lingered the longest, shooting one last speculative look
over his shoulder as he exited. She waited till they were all gone
before crossing to the door and closing it. Taking a deep breath, she
turned to face Jack.

HE'D GIVEN HERa black eye. Jack couldn't believe it. He'd given women a
lot of things over the years—flowers, chocolates, orgasms. But never a
black eye.

He didn't know what to do. He'd come down here with a game plan—hand
over the flowers, apologize for leaving her high and dry with Hillcrest
and manfully skirt around the topic of having sobbed his heart out on
her shoulder. But now she was sporting a painful-looking shiner and all
bets were off. Guilt and regret swamped him. He'd hurt her—she'd come
around to be his friend and he'd hurt her.

"This is really awkward. I've never given a woman a black eye before,"
he heard himself say. Very smooth. She was staring at him as if he was
a few chromosomes short of being fully human.
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"What I mean is…I'm really sorry. I didn't realize. These flowers were
for bailing on the Hillcrest meeting, and for, you know, the
other…thing. But that eye…I'm really sorry." She'd gone pale. She broke
eye contact with him, her gaze shifting over his shoulder. Why couldn't
he just say what he meant? Why couldn't he say that he wouldn't hurt
her for all the world? That seeing her like this, knowing he'd done
this to her, made him feel sick to the stomach?

"It's fine, it was an accident. There's no need to talk about it.
Really," she said. Of their own accord, his eyes found her breasts. She
was wearing a high-necked, dark red blouse, but he knew what lay
beneath her librarian's wardrobe now. It was amazing that he'd never
noticed before, really. She was a very attractive woman. And
passionate. He couldn't forget the way she'd responded to his touch.

He wrenched his eyes away from her chest. What was he doing? This was a
woman he'd blubbered all over like an idiot. A woman who'd made her
feelings about him pretty clear. A woman who was sporting a glowing
shiner thanks to his drunken grief. He shouldn't be thinking about
pushing her up against the desk and lifting her neat little skirt. It
was too late, however—the erection he'd thought he'd tamed that morning
was back with a vengeance.

Confused and angry with himself, he thrust the flowers into her arms.

"Here. I'm sorry," he said, ready to make a run for it. But she just
stared at the bouquet, her eyes shifting over his shoulder again.

"I can't take them," she said, thrusting the flowers back at him. This
wasn't how it was supposed to go. She had to take the flowers. She had
to accept his apology, because he was not having this hanging over him.
She already had enough on him, she wasn't having this. It was bad
enough that he couldn't get her out of his head, that she peopled his
dreams and haunted his subconscious.

"But they're yours," he insisted, shoving them back at her.

"But I don't want them."

Back to him.

"You have to take them."

Back at her.

"Do you have any idea how this looks?" she pointed out, thrusting the
flowers back at him one last time and then retreating behind her desk.

"It looks like I'm giving you flowers. Or it would, if you could stop being so damned uptight for ten seconds," he snapped.

She sucked in a breath and her hands found her hips. He willed himself
to not look at her breasts, and had to be content with snatching a
quick look before glancing away.
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"Take a look over your shoulder," she snapped at him.

Frowning, he turned and saw that half the floor was standing watching
their little interplay through the glass wall of Claire's office. Did
these people have no lives of their own?

"Think for a minute, Jack. You, the office playboy, bringing
me
flowers. And I have a black eye. What do you think people are going to make of that?"

He tossed the flowers on her desk, his temper really firing now. Did
she have to sound so disgusted by the prospect that people might think
there was something going on between them?

"I don't care what people think. And I thought we'd agreed I don't like being called the office playboy."

"Maybe you should have thought about that before you did all those laps
of the typing pool." He made an exasperated noise. She didn't like
that. Her lips went all thin, and her nostrils flared.

"I'm serious, Jack. I don't want to be another notch in your bedpost.
Now the whole office thinks we're sleeping with each other, thanks to
these stupid flowers."

"Sweetheart, I never make the same mistake twice, so don't get your
hopes up." It was out before he could think, a jibe straight from the
school yard, and he'd have to be blind to miss the flash of hurt in her
eyes before she put on her game face.

"Don't flatter yourself. I prefer my men a little more sophisticated,
not to mention sober." He'd deserved that, but it still made him see
red.

"For a moment there I forgot who I was dealing with, but thank you for the reminder, Little Miss Hospital Corners."

Before she could say anything else he'd flung her office door open.

"Excuse me, your attention please."

He waited until the whole floor had stopped what it was doing and
turned to face him. For a split second his impulse control kicked in,
but by then his mouth was fully engaged.

"For the record, Claire Marsden and I are not having sex." He heard her
horrified intake of breath and spun around to face her.

"Happy now?"

She could only stare at him. He managed to make it all the way to the
elevator before the remorse and guilt hit him. But by then it was too
late to do anything except keep going.

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SHE STOOD FROZENin place for a full minute after he'd gone. It was only
when Tom came and knocked awkwardly on her door that she found her
spine.

"Can I get you anything? Coffee? An aspirin?" he asked helpfully. She groaned and dropped into her chair.

"Do I look that pitiful?"

Tom just smiled weakly, obviously not wanting to lie.

"Should I…should I get a vase for these?" he asked, gesturing toward the flowers Jack had all but thrown at her.

"Hell, no. Take them away. Give them to the assistants, or your
girlfriend, or whoever. I never want to see them again," she said.

Tom eased them out from under her nose, and she made a show of getting
on with business so that the rest of the prying eyes in the office
would have nothing to feed off. She made a phone call, checked her
e-mail, opened some letters. All the while, her mind was a careful
blank. Somewhere, deep inside, was a tsunami of humiliation just
waiting to swamp her. But she was damned if she would give Jack Brook
the satisfaction of giving in to it with half the office watching.

"Okay, let's go."

She looked up to find Katherine in her doorway, a determined look on her face.

"Sorry, what?"

"Claire, I've just had no less than three phone calls from people on
your floor telling me that Jack Brook just brought you flowers and told
the whole building that you're not having sex. Come on, we're heading
out."

It didn't feel like a request, more like a demand, and because she was
still reeling from Jack's very public display, Claire meekly collected
her purse and followed Katherine to the stairwell. A few heads turned
and someone sniggered. Katherine sniffed haughtily and lifted her chin
high, true friend that she was, but, despite all her determination, a
hot tide washed up Claire's chest and into her face. Katherine led her
down a floor before stopping and sitting on a step. Claire obediently
followed suit, feeling completely out of her depth in this undiscovered
world of office romances.

"Okay, what's going on between you and Jack?" Katherine asked bluntly.