Page 36 of The Boss's Forbidden Assistant

‘This is impossible,’ she said on a laugh in the late afternoon, closing her laptop and flipping onto the bed to look at him properly.

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you were a workaholic.’

‘I’d forgotten how much I like sex.’

Something jarred in the back of her brain, but there was a salient reminder too. She imprinted the words in her mind because she knew she’d need them later. He liked sex. Not her. Not even sex with her, though obviously he did enjoy that. But she had no reason to suspect she was any more entertaining to him than a woman picked up off the streets or in any random bar might have been. He’d been alone a long time, and she’d been there. Yes, they had chemistry, but maybe he would have felt that with any woman within a yard of his age.

This wasn’t special.

She wasn’t special.

‘I was thinking...’ he reached across her for his phone ‘...that we should eat out tonight.’

She frowned, her heart racing despite the direction her thoughts had just been taking. ‘Oh?’

‘You said you wanted to see the city.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, slightly breathlessly.

He kissed her quickly. ‘Then let’s.’

She groaned. ‘You’re a terrible influence.’

He lifted a brow. ‘Do you mind?’

‘I’ll make you a deal,’ Harper said, thinking quickly, knowing that it was fundamentally important to her in the circumstances to uphold her end of the bargain. She’d come here to work and she wasn’t going to let a fling with her boss derail that.

‘Go on.’

‘I need to finish reading this report.’ She gestured to her closed up laptop. ‘Let me do that and then you can have me for the night.’

‘I like the sound of that.’

So did Harper, but she kept her expression stern until she had his solemn agreement. Salvador was clearly a man of his word because he dressed without speaking and then moved to the door of the hotel room.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Out, so you can concentrate.’ He winked. ‘And so I’m not tempted.’

The problem was, with Salvador gone, she was almostmoredistracted. His smell was everywhere, as was the memory of his touch and the way they’d kissed and made love. She only had to look across the room in a moment of distraction to conjure the image they’d made in the mirror and her heart was bubbling with feelings that were powerful and sort of frightening. So she focussed on her work, instinctively understanding that so much was at stake for her if she didn’t remember her professionalism in the midst of all this.

Work first, Salvador second.

But Salvadorwasher work. His name, his very soul, was in every document she read, every email, every business transaction that was bursting with his confidence andpassion.So much passion! How had she missed that? She’d thought him arrogant and rude, a total jackass, but it wasn’t that at all. He was just overflowing with feelings, and he’d had no way of processing them.

Her heart panged because, in another life, Harper would have loved nothing more than to help him. To be with him as he made sense of his loss, to comfort and even love him back to life, to being able to enjoy life, but that wasn’t reality. It was never going to happen—not for her, or for him. They weren’t those people.

With a sigh, she re-dedicated herself to her report and managed to make it to the end. Some time before six, as she was starting to feel a little bored and lonely, the door opened and Salvador strode in carrying several good quality bags, the sort used by upscale boutiques.

‘You’ve been busy,’ she murmured with obvious curiosity.

‘Yes.’

‘Shopping?’ It wasn’t an activity she would have thought he’d enjoy.

He placed the bags at the foot of the bed and, not a moment later, there was a knock on the door. He strode towards it, opened it just long enough to retrieve a bottle of ice-cold champagne and two glasses from the hotel staff member then closed it swiftly with his foot.

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