door of the house earlier, so he knew she was up.
Despite himself, a sense of anticipation rose as he approached the kitchen. What interesting food might she have concocted for their breakfast? What might she be wearing today? Last night’s curry had been death-defying, quite exhilarating, actually, and very, very tasty once he’d got over the initial burn and the unusualness of it and had suppressed the urge to cough until he was red in the face and gasping.
‘You’re getting bored, old man. Some might even say pathetic.’ He muttered the words in disgust. Infatuated with what his assistant cooked and wore? Her food would probably give him ulcers or, at the least, permanent tastebud damage, and her clothing was so bright he needed sunglasses to look at her.
Maybe he was simply infatuated, full stop.
Grey cast that thought aside. He didn’t do infatuation. He made choices in favour of carefully thought out short-term liaisons with no emotions involved.
Yes. On that thought he stomp-hobbled into the kitchen. He would grump his interest in her to a quick death. She might dislike him for it, but that was a small price to pay to make them both forget any attraction they might have felt. He blithely ignored the fact that he had been grumpy since Sophia had arrived and it hadn’t seemed to put her off all that much.
‘You confiscated my laptop last night.’
‘Good morning. You’re up. Did you sleep well?’ She swung around, searching his face while colour crept into her cheeks. It revealed both her guilt and her consciousness of him, and it rattled Grey’s composure far more than he would have thought possible.
They weren’t doing that any more. He’d decided. He had attacked her verbally to ensure there were no reminders. He growled some more. ‘Don’t ignore what I said.’
‘I’m not.’ Her face shone with good humour and a hint of mischief, just as though she didn’t care less about his grouchiness. In fact as though she enjoyed it, which wasn’t exactly what he’d set out to achieve. She couldn’t like him being grumpy?
How did this one bright, fluffy woman manage to undermine him at every turn anyway? Grey’s irritability rose further.
Sophia fiddled with a button on her blouse—the one right at the centre of her breasts. ‘I just put your laptop into the office for you—’
‘Don’t bother with the innocent act.’ And she was driving him insane with that button.
To shore up his defences he said harshly and with abandoned licence, ‘Your face is an open book. I can see everything you’re thinking at any given moment.’
Her eyes widened and her gaze darted about the room in a trapped and guilty fashion. ‘Can you really? My sisters bemoan the fact that I sometimes blurt exactly what’s on my mind, but they haven’t said anything about expressions on my face.’ She glanced once towards the laundry room door, as though she’d like to run through it and keep running. ‘Well, I’m sorry if you were annoyed that I took your laptop away.’ She seemed to deliberately pull herself back to matters at hand. ‘I realise you’re frustrated at present but surely you could tell you needed rest by then? You’ve got injuries, medical conditions that will suffer if you push yourself too hard.’
Yes, he had pushed himself hard yesterday, had paid for it in the pain in his ankle and other general feelings of weariness, but how could he avoid that with a company to run? Now Grey wanted to defend his choices again, instead of focusing on her behaviour. How did she do that to him?
‘If I’d really pushed over the line last night you’d have yelled for your laptop back before I got halfway down the stairs.’ Her confidence said more about her understanding of his limits of tolerance than he had given her credit for.
He also noted the absence of any assurance that she wouldn’t apply similar tactics in the future. Annoying woman. Insightful, too.
His gaze roved over the still crimson-streaked hair, lingering on the ponytail tied with a matching crimson ribbon. A jet-black figure-hugging blouse, cream trousers and yesterday’s crimson boots covered her from head to foot… Was that cat fur on her blouse, just a few little strands of white?
‘Domestic to the core,’ he muttered in a tone that somehow changed from his intended gruffness to almost admiration. With a snort, Grey hobbled forward to sink into a chair at the table. She probably had a dozen cats in her apartment in Melbourne, making her home look cosy and welcoming. Rather, shedding hair all over the place. A non-domestic-seeking man’s nightmare!
Maybe he needed food, fuel for his brain so he could think more clearly.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear what you said.’ She took a saucepan off the stove and spooned its contents into two bowls. On the bench, the coffee percolator belched out a scent that wasn’t quite ordinary.
‘It was nothing.’ Grey poured water into his glass and didn’t feel any anticipation about the food whatsoever. He ate to keep up his strength and she was all he had in the way of someone to conveniently provide meals while he focused on other things. She could dish up the blandest most ordinary foods and he would feel no differently.
He’d been off on a flight of some kind of weird, incapacity-induced fancy when he’d thought he anticipated her next meal. Now he had his thoughts under control. He’d reprimanded Sophia, achieved what he’d set out to do.
He’d killed the attraction stone-dead as effectively, hadn’t he, a sarcastic voice in his head put in.
Grey suppressed a second snort and grumbled, ‘What’s for breakfast? I’m hungry. It’s making my head explode. And I brought the brace for you to put on. You seem to feel I shouldn’t do it myself.’
‘No, and I’m sure you want to do everything possible to get better.’ She knelt at his feet and laced him up. Her movements were brisk and impersonal while those big sherry-coloured eyes fixed with way too much focus on first his foot and then his chin, his neck, even his ear.
Anything to avoid looking into his eyes, it seemed.
‘Just one more tug to make sure it’s snug enough.’ She suited actions to words.
In a moment she would get up, move away from him. Then he wouldn’t be able to smell her soft scent, touch the head bent to conceal her expression…
Grey’s hand disengaged itself from his brain function. There could be no other explanation for the fact that he reached out to touch the silken hair on that down-bent head. A feather-light touch she wouldn’t feel, wouldn’t know about.
Yet he felt that touch and reacted to it in a way he couldn’t explain. She had beautiful soft hair and a heart as big as Australia that drove her to send him demented with whatever manage-her-employer plan she had tucked away in that smart and sassy head of hers.
Inexplicably, a knot of something that felt like tenderness filled his chest. Grey yanked his hand back and leaned away from her.
‘How does that feel?’ She raised her gaze as she asked the question.
‘The brace is as comfortable as it will get.’ And her eyes were pools of liquid brown, her mouth soft and temptingly kissable.
She smiled that sunny smile even as she backed away from him and busied herself at the kitchen bench.
‘Uh, here’s breakfast.’ Sophia carried the bowls to the table and avoided looking into his eyes. She placed his bowl in front of him, pushed another of sliced bananas in some sort of brown, sticky sauce his way and returned to the bench to pour mugs of whatever she had brewed in the coffee percolator.
‘The cereal is five grain porridge, slow cooked for forty minutes on the stove—triticale, oats, barley, wheat and rye.’ She ticked the ingredients off on her fingers. ‘I’ve percolated my own blend of morning coffee. It’s decaf, but the cardamom flavour is so good you won’t notice the absence of a caffeine kick.’
‘I usually have toast or one of those