Page 44 of Snowbound in Her Boss's Bed

He shrugged with a smile. “There’s a lot of space and I only hire those who are efficient.”

“You like a lot of space, don’t you?” she asked, offhandedly thrusting them back into the dangerous territory of personal divulgence.

Did she mean to ask such personal questions?

He doubted it. She was just making conversation.

Of course, making conversation was where things had started yesterday, as well.

“LA sprawls, and yet there is no room,” he said, choosing his words carefully so as not to fall into the trap of divulgence. “I’m drawn to the contrast here. A sprawling natural environment in which human spaces are compact. Where they know their place.”

“‘Know their place,’ huh? That’s not a loaded statement or anything.”

Catching her eyes, he allowed himself a moment to wonder at their whiskey glow before he answered her, “I should say, where humans recall that they are subordinate to the forces and powers of nature. No man, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful, how loved or cherished, is greater than all this around us.” He gestured toward the storm outside and the hundreds of thousands of acres of mountainous forest it hid. “Or really ever in control,” he added, appreciating the irony of that embedded in their current situation.

The storm was an exercise in humility.

As well as a reminder that he appreciated as a man with the world constantly at his fingertips.

Lack of control, however. Was a lesson he had been introduced to long ago, with the losses of his adopted family to the sea barely a decade past the loss of his birth family to a flash-flooded road before them.

Death was always a lesson in control.

In Los Angeles, it was too easy to think that a big dream, engineering and money was all that it took to switch things around—to give people the power over nature and life—but it simply wasn’t true.

Nothing was ever really in anyone’s control.

But Miri was a California girl, through and through.

Had she had a chance to learn that lesson yet?

He watched her face closely for what she might give away without words.

Her response disclosed little.

A half smile gracing her face, she said, “That’s actually rather profound. I was expecting it to be more of a ‘king of the mountain’ thing.”

Smiling, he shook his head. “The woman who raised me shudders in her grave at even the idea of that kind of arrogance. Among other things, she was a Bay Area hippie in the sixties. Respect for nature was her jam. I keep having to remind you that I haven’t always been one of the richest men in the world.”

Lifting an eyebrow, she challenged him. “It’s just too impossible to believe that you used to be normal.”

Raising his own brow to meet hers, he said, “Just a regular Joe, in every way.”

“I doubt that. You have born and bred bougie written all over you.”

Enjoying the spark that flashed in her eyes, he said, “If by bougie, you’re suggesting I went to good schools, I won’t deny it.”

She snorted. “I’m suggesting private schools and a brand-new car when you turned sixteen. You probably grew up spoiled and don’t even realize it.”

He laughed but a shadow crept into the sound.

He had been spoiled, and even—to some extent—in the ways that she thought.

But mostly he had been spoiled in love and affection.

For which he was grateful.

It wasn’t a claim a lot of two-time orphans could make.

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