Belatedly coming to terms with how her not-so-innocent enjoyment could be misinterpreted, she quickly opened her eyes. Straightening in her chair, she tried to wipe the pleasure from her expression and willed her unruly body to calm down.
Her spoon clattered to the table in her haste to let it go. “Um, it’s very good. You were right.” She forced her gaze to meet his, afraid of what she would see, but unwilling to play the coward. “I guess I got a little carried away there.”
Blue eyes looked back at her with hunger, but he shook his head. “Relax. You look like you think I’m going to pounce.”
“Aren’t you?” She wasn’t an idiot and she wasn’t a tease. She knew what her reaction had to have looked like to him.
A total come-on, despite all she’d said about not wanting to get involved.
“You’ve made your view of a relationship between the two of us very clear, Tara.” He spoke as if instructing a small child and perversely she wanted to tell him she was anything but. “I’m not going to read an invitation in a former model’s obvious love of feeding her starved sweet tooth.”
“Thank you.” And she should feel grateful. Extremely grateful.
Not disappointed.
“No problem. Now, enjoy your dessert.”
He’d let her off the hook with his assurance, so why did she feel even further enmeshed in his web than before?
“So, how was dinner?” Danette asked in a low undertone as she and Tara worked on slides for a presentation their manager was supposed to give to Angelo and the top management string the following morning.
Tara looked around, thankful no one was nearby enough to overhear her friend’s question. The dinner last night had been strictly business, but that wasn’t necessarily how others would interpret it.
After her affair with Baron, she’d been the butt of enough gossip to last her a lifetime. “Shh. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
Danette’s hazel eyes widened, darkening to green with a knowing gleam. “So it wasn’t just business.”
“No,” Tara snapped, then realized her answer had come out wrong. “I mean yes…I mean it was business and only business.” If she didn’t count the orgasmic dessert. “Okay?”
“I don’t know. Angelo Gordon is a real hottie and you seem pretty frazzled for a woman who had a strictly business date last night.”
“It wasn’t a date at all.”
“Are you saying he didn’t make a move on you?”
How did she answer that? Had their conversation at the beginning of dinner been a move? She thought maybe it had, but then he’d backed off pretty easily.
She took too long to answer and Danette’s expression turned gleefully calculating. “So, he is attracted to you.”
That was something she couldn’t deny without lying. “Could we drop this discussion? We’ve got work to do.”
“Sure, but, hon, just answer one question…if last night was all business and no play, why are you blushing to the roots of your gorgeous hair?”
Tara still hadn’t come up with an adequate reply to her friend’s teasing comment by the time the other woman left work to get ready for her very real date with a budding journalist.
It had bugged her all day. For something like the hundredth time since waking that morning, she shoved thoughts of Angelo to the back of her mind. She forced herself to concentrate on the papers in front of her.
With no distractions around her and fierce effort, it worked. She was so engrossed that security came to tell her all external entrances but the main one had been secured for the evening before she realized what time it was. She looked at her watch and was shocked to see it was well after seven.
She should have left over two hours ago.
Muscles cramped from long hours of sitting in the same position protested and she stood to stretch. Her tummy growled, but her eyes were drawn back to the almost completed report on her desk. Just another hour or so and she would be done.
“Why are you still here?”
She jumped at the sound of Angelo’s voice, her entire body flushing with warmth and she hadn’t even turned to look at him.
When she did, she felt like she’d been hit by a truck. Why did the man have to be so darn sexy? Most of his management team was at least a decade older, balding and showing the effects of middle age in their belt size, but not Angelo. He was tall and lean with muscles to die for and if he was much over thirty, she’d eat the report she’d been editing.
“I was working on a project and got lost to the time.”