Page 36 of Worth Every Risk

“For my back.”

“You’re young to have back problems.”

“Oh, no. I don’t have back problems. I just really like a firm mattress.”

He strums his fingertips on the desk for a few tense moments. “I’m not sure you living in the house is a good idea.”

My stomach drops, and I swallow with an audible click.Crap. He’s kicking me out. I knew I’d get fired. “Oh.”This is definitely because of the sauna. “Why not?”

He lets my question sit for a while, but he shifts in his chair ever so slightly, as though he’s drawing his shoulder bladestogether beneath his shirt. “There’s a free room in the staff block at the end of the garden.”

He totally avoided the question.“You’re not firing me?”

“No.”

“But you do want me to move out?”

“I think it would be advisable, yes. If you like the bed so much here, I can have it moved across.”

Advisable, why?“What about night-time? What if Lucie wakes and I’m not there?”

He frowns like this isn’t something he’s considered. He has a plan, but he hasn’t thought it through.He’s winging it.

He sits back in his chair, head turned slightly to the side so he’s not facing me dead on. His eyes narrow a fraction, but he keeps them trained on me, while he strokes his jaw with his thumb and index finger. He looks like a model, sitting there like that, as though the photographer told him to ‘look as sexy as possible’ and he instinctively knew how to do it. I feel a rush of heat expand from my chest and rise up my neck.

Seconds pass as I wait for him to speak. I don’t dare look away, even though I know my cheeks are probably flaming.

Finally, he says, “I’m assuming you want to keep this job?”

“Yes. Although not if you don’t want me. I don’t want to work in an environment where my employer doesn’t want me.”

“I want you.”

His voice is emotionless, his face immovable, but the air sparks between us again, a fission of invisible particles flowing from him to me and back again.

He hasn’t broken eye contact with me for minutes now; I’m surprised the weight of his gaze hasn’t made my muscles tremble. I can’t take it any longer. I plaster a plastic smile on my face that stretches it in ways it isn’t supposed to move. “Great.”

“Is that all?”

Is that all? “You called me in here. There wasn’t anything I wanted to say.”

“You didn’t want to talk to me at all?”

“Not really.”

“You don’t want to say anything about what happened this morning outside the sauna? You, who normally can’t stop talking, have nothing to say about it?”

My mind races as I try to work out what he wants from me. I didn’t have Mr Hawkston down as the direct communication type of guy. I thought we’d brush that excruciating incident under the proverbial rug.

A few moments of my brain scrambling for an answer has me concluding I can’t work out what he wants, and he’sstillstaring at me. The pressure is too much, so I do the most ill-advised, dangerous thing in this scenario. I start talking.

“When you question me about this, all I’m seeing in my imagination is you, completely naked. I can’t talk about this with you and not see it, so if that’s something you don’t want me to do, then we should stop talking about it.”

His eyebrows pull together. “Is this making you uncomfortable?”

Understatement of the century.“A bit. Not in a bad way.”

“Good.” He strums his fingertips on the desk again. “I don’t want anything festering between us, especially if it’s likely to render our working relationship untenable, in which case you’d have to leave. And like I said, I don’t want that. Open communication generally works best in these scenarios.”

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