Page 14 of The Boss's Forbidden Assistant

‘I wonder if you shouldn’t call me Harper?’

He closed his eyes, as if to push away that very idea.

She swayed forward, unable to stop herself, even when her sensible, rational brain was shouting at her to stop, to remember the awful danger that could come from this. To remember the pain of her past, the embarrassment, the professional limbo she’d found herself in, having had an affair with her married boss.

But this was different. For one thing, Salvador wasn’t married. For another, she wasn’t so naïve and innocent any more. She’d grown a lot since her affair with Peter. She no longer expected any other person to hold the key to her happiness, and certainly not Salvador. She would be on his island for two weeks. It no longer seemed possible to be here and fight this. So what was the alternative? To quit? To leave him completely in the lurch? Or to stay and accept that something was going to happen, something that was bigger than them, completely out of their control?

‘This is not...’ he began with a shake of his head, fixing her with a dark stare, a plea in his own eyes. But a plea for what? Did he wish this weren’t happening? Or was he asking her to initiate something? Did he feel that, as her boss, he couldn’t be the one to act first? Then again, he’d stripped out of his shirt right in front of her.

She licked her lower lip, breath unsteady, eyes finding his.

‘Mr da Rocha,’ she said, low and huskily. ‘I don’t know what’s happening between us, but it’s obvious that neither of us is immune to this...chemistry.’ She was pleased to have been able to pluck the perfect word from thin air. After all, what else explained the literal reaction they shared every time they were close to one another?

‘And what are you suggesting?’

‘That we stop fighting it,’ she said quietly, moving closer then, surprising herself with how daring she was being, and how little she cared about going out on a limb like this. She lifted a hand, tentatively touching his chest. There it was—that hiss of breath between his teeth, the sign that he was losing his vice-like grip on any ability to control things.

‘That we maybe even give into it.’ She blinked up at him, letting her fingers trail his chest now, side to side, swirling circles, feeling his flesh shift beneath her enquiry.

‘You work for me,’ he pointed out in a voice that was strained by the effort of staying right where he was.

‘Yes,’ she agreed simply.

‘Company policy—’

‘Yes. But don’t you own the company?’

He frowned. ‘That doesn’t give me a free hand to disregard Human Resources.’

He was giving her a way out. She should stop this—surely she wasn’t stupid enough to make this mistake again? But it was different. What she’d felt for Peter was nothing compared to the desire ravaging her system whenever Salvador was near.

‘I saw the way you looked at me,’ she whispered. ‘That night and ever since.’

‘How do I look at you?’ he asked, the plea back in his eyes.

Her lips lifted at one side. ‘Like you’re wondering if I’m wearing a camisole beneath my blouse. Like you’re wondering if I’m wearing a lace thong. Like you want to remove both from my body.’

He tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling. ‘You are playing with fire.’

‘Aren’t we both?’

He dropped his head so that he was facing her once more. ‘But you’ve already been burned.’ He lifted a finger, running it over her cheek. She flinched, the words cutting through the desire that had made everything else seem so far away, as if her past was a part of a whole other person’s life.

‘What?’

He dropped his finger to her chin, then lower to her décolletage, frowning as his finger moved almost against his will to the valley between her breasts and the pearl button there.

‘But you’re right.’

She swallowed.

‘I have been looking at you and thinking, exactly as you said. It is like you read my mind.’ Her button came undone easily. She was trembling, completely awash with so many conflicting emotions that the desire he was stirring easily blotted out anything else.

He moved to the next button, and the next, until her shirt parted, as his had earlier. Rather than removing it, he pulled her silk camisole from the waist of her skirt so his hands could touch her bare waist then move higher, his eyes on hers, challenging her, waiting for her to stop him. He moved slowly, so she had ample opportunity to do exactly that, but in truth she wanted him to hurry up, to reach her breasts, to touch them—as she’d been desperate for him to do since the other night when he’d stared at her like a starving man led to a buffet.

She thrust her chest forward and he laughed softly, but it was a laugh devoid of humour, a laugh of surprise, fear and surrender. Then he finally cupped her breasts, feeling their weight in his palms, palms that were rougher than she’d thought they would be—coarse, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. She didn’t care. She liked the contrast of soft and smooth to hard and demanding.

She groaned, tilting back her head, her dark hair forming a curtain down her back, her body quivering at the demanding touch. He felt every inch of her: the underside of her breasts, their curved roundedness and mostly her nipples, which he ran his fingers over at first and then circled, pulled, plucked one by one, then in unison, gently then hard until her knees almost gave way beneath her and the heat between her legs built to an unbearable crescendo. If he was to touch her there, she knew she’d come. Straight away, no further foreplay needed. She was on fire, absolutely exploding with it.

---