Her Impossible Boss by Cathy Williams Page B

I lost count of the number of times I travelled to Connecticut only to find that Catrina had taken Samantha off on a trip, destination unknown, leaving a bewildered maid to try and explain in broken English that there would be no visit that weekend. Toys were routinely left at an empty house. I never knew whether Samantha got them or not.’
    Matt’s eyes glittered with open pain and bitter regret. This was a man who opened up to no one, and Tess wasn’t sure whether this flood of confidence and self-recrimination was something he would live to rue, but she stroked his face with a trembling hand while her mind frantically spun off at another devastating angle.
    While she had been busily telling herself that what she felt for Matt was an understandable case of lust, she had failed to recognise that it ran much deeper than that. She had long stopped being a concerned spectator to someone else’s problems. She hadn’t forsaken hersocial life because she lusted after Matt Strickland and was driven to spend as much time in his company as she could, like a lovelorn teenager. She had forsaken her life because she had unwittingly become sucked into his. It had been easy, at first, to dismiss him as the sort of man who took advantage of everything and everyone around him, but slowly but surely she had begun glimpsing other sides of his complex, absorbing personality.
    She had watched him subdue his natural inclination to dominate so that he could make strides in getting to know his daughter. She had been ensnared by a wit and intelligence that was far greater than she had originally imagined. She had been seduced by those snatches of humanity she saw in his less guarded moments.
    She had fallen in love with the whole man, and the time she had spent ignoring that reality hadn’t served to protect her—it had just rendered her horribly defenceless.
    Looking back now, Tess could see that love had just been waiting round the corner, ready to ambush her and turn her world on its head. Matt Strickland had overwhelmed her. She had been waiting for something gentle and careful, and had been unprepared for the chaos and power of real love, gutsy and demanding, when it finally came. She had expected that the guy who won her heart would be kind and sensitive. She had been utterly unprotected against a man who’d broken through to her heart like a battering ram and grabbed it when she hadn’t even been looking—when she hadn’t even taken the time to steel herself.
    Her heart was racing. Inexperience left her unsure as to what to do. She had never considered herselfextraordinary because she hadn’t fallen into bed with any man. It just had never happened, and she had accepted that with a shrug of her shoulders.
    ‘My relationship with Samantha became distant,’ he said heavily. ‘Stilted. Nothing I did, when I
did
manage to see her, could reverse the effects of the separation, and God only knows what Catrina had been telling her when I wasn’t around. And just when I thought that some progress was being made.
this.!’
    ‘You came here,’ Tess murmured.
    ‘Where else? You know the situation better than anyone.’
    He gazed at her with those stunning eyes and her breathing became laboured. Without warning, the atmosphere shifted. She could sense him grow still. It was impossible to think straight and nor could she tear her eyes away from his dark, outrageously sexy face. She wanted him so badly that it was a physical pain inside her, and her craving was made all the more irresistible because of the intensity of the emotion underlying it. She leaned forward and kissed him very chastely on his cheek, and the shock of contact almost had her reeling back.
    ‘It’ll be all right,’ she whispered huskily. ‘Samantha may have been disappointed at the way today turned out, but you’ve already started building the blocks of a relationship with her and she’ll have that to fall back on.’
    She was losing herself in the intensity of