“Oh, Esa, lighten up. Where’s your sense of fun?” Lexie murmured with a little laugh before she set off for the house.
Esa ground her back teeth. Was her own mother in on the clobber Esa with the message that she’s a grouchy bore plot as well?
She turned down one of her mother’s delicious lunches, saying she had some important errands she needed to run. She didn’t tell her mellow, easygoing parents that her crucial errand involved finding a way to chew out their flighty youngest daughter.
Esa broke a few land speed records driving downtown to Rachel’s office. She planned to coax Rachel’s administrative assistant into giving Esa the name of her sister’s hotel. But she’d forgotten that it was Saturday and had instead found only a skeleton staff at the offices of Metro Sexy. The receptionist recognized her as Rachel’s sister, however, and allowed her to go to Rachel’s office in order to leave a note. Esa would probably speak to Rachel before she got it, but in the meantime it gave Esa an outlet for her fury.
Esa had been in the midst of penning her nasty, scathing missive when seemingly out of nowhere Finn Madigan walked into Rachel’s office.
Her first reaction to seeing his unmistakable form just feet away from her was amazement that she was experiencing a hallucination. But surely hallucinations weren’t so clear. No, the hard angles of his face, the eyes that were currently narrowed on her into concentrated pinpoints of vivid blue light, the sheer vibrancy that seemed to roll off his long, lean body in waves…one couldn’t imagine anything that breathtaking.
What could he be doing here?
Then he’d called her Kitten and Esa felt like howling in irritation. Of course the frivolous, promiscuous sex kitten that he supposed her to be was worth going to any length for a virile male to locate.
“What…why are you here?” Esa croaked through a dry throat as Finn Madigan ate up the space between them.
“I told you. We have some unfinished business.”
Esa swallowed heavily but it couldn’t abate the rapid leaping of the pulse at her throat. “I-I—”
“You walked out on me,” he finished succinctly. He was so big that the top of Rachel’s desk only reached him at mid-thigh. Esa found herself staring up at a tall tower of glowering man.
“I-I can explain about that,” Esa said in a rush.
He crossed his arms. “Okay. I’m listening.”
Esa glanced down in blind desperation at the note she’d been leaving Rachel and frowned. In her anger she’d not only inadvertently called Rachel her childhood name of Kitten, she’d also spelled interfering wrong. She hastily turned over the note and stood. She couldn’t think straight with Finn Madigan staring down at her from such a superior height.
“I realized that I had to be somewhere else,” she said. She picked up a marble paperweight on Rachel’s desk and began fiddling with it nervously.
“And you don’t think you could have let me know that before you left without saying a word?”
“It just came to me all of a sudden while I was…” She trailed off.
“While you were sitting on my bed waiting for me so that we could do it right?”
The paperweight landed with a loud thud on Rachel’s desk. Her gaze shot up to meet Finn’s. How could his voice have sounded soft and suggestive when his eyes burned through her like surgical lasers? He’d taken her so off guard that she said the first thing that came to mind.
“You got it right the first time.”
“That’s what I thought. So how come you scrammed?”
Esa’s backbone straightened when she registered his grin. Finn was clearly just as cocky as she’d guessed that first time she’d salivated over him while he strutted around the side of the highway like the king rooster in a hen house.
“I told you,” she said with a chilly tone as she rearranged Rachel’s paperweight, hoping the large crack that nearly cleaved it in half had been there before. “I had to be someplace else. I’m not quite sure why I owe you an explanation anyway. How did you find me here?”
“Where?”
“Where? Here,” Esa explained with
a trace of exasperation as she glanced around Rachel’s office.
“No, I mean where did you have to be in such a hellfire hurry last night?”
She glared at him. He screamed of insouciant incredulity as he stood there with his arms crossed, his hip slightly cocked and a smirk on his handsome face that stated loud and clear that even though he was asking, he wouldn’t believe a word she was about to say. He had a lot of nerve, treating her like she was a second grader who kept insisting that her homework was devoured by the hungry bear that occasionally took up residence beneath her bed.
“I remembered I had a date,” she told him with affected indifference as she picked up her purse from where she’d left it on the floor.