the lips said. ‘And there was I hoping you were just pleased to see me.’
His mouth hung open a little. Brain still struggling. Much to his disgust, he managed a faint grunt.
‘Sorry...couldn’t resist,’ she said, and offered her slim hand. ‘Don’t you just love Mae West?’
Daniel stared at the hand for a second or so, at the long red fingernails that matched her lips, then a movement at chest level distracted him. A staff pass on a lanyard was around her neck but, due to the impressive cleavage it was hanging just below, it was twirling gently in some unseen breeze, the photo and name obscured.
She frowned slightly. ‘Not a Mae fan, then.’
He nodded, but he wasn’t sure if he was agreeing or disagreeing.
‘Chloe Michaels,’ she said, grabbing his hand and shaking it firmly. ‘Orchid specialist and new girl at Kew.’
‘Daniel Bradford,’ he said, shaking back vigorously. Maybe a little too vigorously. He let go, but then he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hand. He stuffed it back in his pocket.
‘I know,’ she said, and a wry smile curved those red lips.
‘You’ve read the papers...’
She gave a little shrug. ‘Well, a girl would have to be dead to not have seen something of your recent press coverage. However, I knew who you were before that. I’ve got one of your books at home.’
Air emptied from his lungs and he felt his torso relax. Plants and horticulture. Finally, he’d come across a woman who could talk sense. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. And he genuinely meant it.
She just nodded and the smile grew brighter. ‘The guys in the tropical nursery said I’d find you here, and I just thought I’d come and introduce myself,’ she said, turning to leave.
Daniel had just started to feel somewhere close to normal again, but her exit gave him another view he hadn’t quite been ready for... The way that pencil skirt tightened round her backside was positively sinful.
She looked over her shoulder before she exited the temperate orchid display through the opposite door. Daniel snapped his gaze upwards. She hadn’t caught him checking her out, had she? That was a schoolboy error.
‘By the way,’ she said, nodding in his direction, ‘incoming at eleven o’clock.’
He hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant, but it wasn’t until she’d disappeared into the next zone that he even started to try and work it out.
A bang on the glass above him made him jump. He pivoted round and looked up to find his two pursuers in the fern enclosure at the top of the stairs, faces pressed up against the glass, grinning like mad.
Oh, heck.
One of them spotted the door further along the wall. Her eyes lit up and she started waving a pen and a notepad at him.
Daniel did what any sensible man in his position would have done.
He ran.
A skirt this tight and heels this high did not help with an elegant exit, Chloe thought as she kept her back straight and cemented her gaze on the door. She’d thought she’d need the extra confidence her favourite pair of shoes gave her this morning but, when they were teamed with the skirt, every step was barely more than a hobble, and it took a torturously long time until she was out of the orchid display area and amidst the agaves and cacti of the adjoining section.
She paused for a heartbeat as the glass door swung shut behind her, then blinked a few times and carried on walking.
He hadn’t recognised her.
She’d been prepared to go in smiling, laugh that embarrassing incident in their past off and put it down to not being able to hold her liquor. In short, she’d planned to be every bit as sophisticated as her wardrobe suggested she could be.
But she hadn’t needed to.
She pressed a palm against her sternum. Her heart was fluttering like a hummingbird.
That was good, wasn’t it? That he hadn’t connected Chloe Michaels the horticultural student with Chloe Michaels, new Head Orchid Keeper. They could just start afresh, behave like mature adults.
Inwardly, Chloe winced as she continued walking along the metal-grilled flooring, past an array of spiky plants from across the globe.
Okay, last time they’d met, Daniel Bradford hadn’t had any problems behaving maturely and appropriately. Any misbehaving had been purely down to her. Her cheeks flushed at the memory, even all these years later.
She was being stupid. He must have taught loads of courses over the years, met hundreds of awestruck students. Why would he remember one frizzy-haired mouse who’d hidden her ample curves in men’s T-shirts and baggy trousers? He wouldn’t. It made sense he hadn’t even remembered her name.
Or her face.
That, too, made sense. She looked very different now.
This Cinderella hadn’t needed a fairy godmother to give her a makeover; she’d done it herself the summer she’d left horticultural college. No pumpkins, no fairy dust. Just the horrified look on Prince Charming’s face had been enough to shove her in the right direction. The Mouse was long gone; long live the new Chloe Michaels. And she’d been doing a very good job of reigning supreme for almost a decade.
Only...
A little part of her—a previously undiscovered masochistic part of her—had obviously been hoping he would remember, because now disappointment was sucking her insides flat like a deflated balloon. She sighed. She never had had any sense where the gorgeous Daniel Bradford had been concerned. But show her a human being with a double X chromosome who did.
It was something to do with those long legs, that lean physique, those pale green, almost glacial eyes. Add a hint of rawness to the package, the sense that he’d just barely made it back from the last expedition into a dark and remote jungle, and it tended to do strange things to a girl’s head.
Maybe that could explain the way she’d acted back there, the things she’d said...
Mae West? What had she been thinking?
While she knew the ‘new and improved’ Chloe had easy self-assurance, there was confidence and there was sheer recklessness. She’d intended to be calm and professional. She certainly hadn’t intended to tease him...flirt with him.
However, a little voice in her head had been pushing her, feeding her lines, especially when his eyeballs had all but popped out of his head when he’d been trying to read her spinning name tag. There had been something so satisfying about seeing him that close to drooling that she just hadn’t been able to stop herself.
It wouldn’t happen again, though. Couldn’t.
But Chloe’s lips curved as she pushed the main door of the conservatory open and walked out into the spring sunshine. She wiped the smile off her face—literally—with a manicured hand and shook her head.
It didn’t matter just how much saliva had pooled in the bottom of Daniel Bradford’s mouth when he’d looked at her, because she was never, ever going down that road again. And it didn’t matter just how ferocious the monster crush she’d had on him ten years ago had been, because there was one thing she was certain of...
She’d shoot herself before she got within kissing distance of him ever again.
* * *
Daniel hung from a spot halfway up the climbing wall at his local sports centre and peered down at the top of his friend’s helmet. ‘Hurry up, Al,’ he called out. ‘You’re out of shape. Must have spent too much time lolling on a sun lounger while you were on