Page 16 of Craving Her Christmas Boss

It became the routine. Every lunchbreak, every day.

‘Silent night’—an oversized toy abacus for his niece Donna, who was still learning her numbers.

‘White Christmas’—a giant suitcase on wheels for his cousin Clara, who apparently always had too much baggage.

‘Santa Claus is coming to town’—a Jeroboam of champagne for his great aunt Hilary, who only liked to live it up on Christmas Day, with an oversized twirly straw for her to suck it straight from the bottle.

The presents got more outrageous, more pointed, and more impossible to wrap. And all the while Imogen tried to wrap them Ryan smiled, talked and teased. As hard as she tried not to, she anticipated it—longed for it, lived for it.

Day by day, minute by minute, she was eternally braced for his presence, aching for his appearance, and so on edge she was about to explode. The weekend without work passed slowly and painfully, but the moment of seeing him again first thing on Monday was even more painful with the way her heart raced.

He was wrong. This wasn’t instinct—some great inner perception—this was plain old-fashioned lust. It was the instinct to procreate with a fit, healthy male.Veryfit. Her body wanted his surrounding hers, filling hers.

He wanted her, too—but ‘couldn’t see beyond that’. She knew why. Once he’d had her, his ‘instinct’ would be to move on. The marauding male was always driven by an innate need to spread his seed far and wide.

He’d said it didn’t need to be complicated. She sure didn’t want complicated. But the desire to be with him was complicating everything right now. Maybe it would be better if she gave into it? Just the once? Then she could forget about it. You always want what you can’t have, so if she had him then she wouldn’t want to many more —right?

She argued with herself round and round and round again.

If she was the one in control, she was the one calling the shots and calling an end to it, then mightn’t she be okay?

They had been no one before or after George. And she had last seen George over a year ago. A long year—which was probably why her desire Ryan was so intense, right?

He’d said anything between them would impact on her job—how could she trust him on that? But he wasn’t here permanently as her boss, was he? Just a couple of months while he oversaw the transition and recruited and trained a new manager. Then he’d be gone and she could keep working, keep studying.

One morning she could stand it no longer. She pulled on the Jade blouse, her scarlet bra already fastened underneath, and matching knickers. She held her breath as he walked in. Saw his gaze over his shirt. And then he looked at her computer rather than her.

‘I need some data from last week.’ His frown was something else.

‘Yes.’

‘I want on my desk before you go home tonight.’

‘Yes, Ryan,’ she said clearly, filled with desire and daring and a kind of defiance. ‘Absolutely.’

FIVE

He hadn’t comenearher all day—not even when she had wrapped gifts in her lunch break. She had sat at her desk all afternoon, growing colder by the minute, eventually frozen with humiliation as she pulled the data and assembled the figures. At ten past six, when the others had already left for the day, she knocked on the frame of his open door and walked right in. With a flick of her wrist the papers swooshed beside his keyboard.

‘What’s that?’

‘The report. On your desk.’

He looked up then, and she gasped at the brilliance of his eyes—bright blue and blazing into her.

‘It wasn’t thereportI wanted my desk.’ He stood.

Instinct made her take a small step back, but he followed—too fast.

‘Yes,’ he said crisply. ‘Isn’t that what you said to me earlier,Ms Hall? Or did I imagine that?’

‘I—’

‘Did you or did you not sayyes?’

Oh, when his eyes lit up with humour and heat like that there wasn’t a woman in the world who wouldn’t part her legs. ‘Yes.’ It was a whimper.

‘And you know my feelings about that shirt.’

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