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  “Will you be back today, Mr. Mackenzie?” Nikki called from behind the reception desk.

  “Probably.” He glanced at the girl over his shoulder, then muttered to himself, “Unless the little fugitive gives me trouble.”

  “Excuse me?” Nikki asked as she practically fell over the desk in her efforts to hear him.

  “Just talking to myself.”

  As he rode the elevator down to the garage, the sadness he’d seen behind the determination in Daisy’s eyes the day before flashed into his mind. More disturbing, that image was followed closely by the memory of her velvety skin on his just before she’d pulled her hand away.

  Alec cursed under his breath and swept the unsettling thoughts from his mind. Then he got into his car, gunned the engine and peeled out of the parking garage. Nothing mattered now except securing the Santa Margarita contract. And to do that, he had to do something he said he’d never do, something he wasn’t even sure he knew how to do.

  Grovel.

  “Money?” Daisy Kincaid repeated the word into the phone she had tucked between her ear and her shoulder.

  “Yes,” her oldest brother, Tom, answered with longsuffering patience. “Green stuff? Exchangeable for goods and services worldwide? You’ve heard of it, surely.”

  “Very funny. You know what a miser I am. My savings will float me,” she said as she looked around her drop-cloth-draped kitchen which was strewn with paint cans and pans and brushes. “That is, if I stop my midnight runs to the twenty-four-hour Home Depot.”

  “Oh, good Lord. Tell me you’re not painting again.”

  “Uh,” she stalled. “Did I say I was painting?”

  “Daze, your house is going to start looking like a kaleidoscope if you open a can of paint every time you get stressed out.”

  “I’m not stressed out,” she said, and her stomach chose that moment to remind her she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. She sighed, then wrapped her brush in plastic wrap so it wouldn’t dry out and climbed down the ladder. “I’m just reviewing my options.”

  Tom was quiet a moment, and she could almost see his mouth twisting into a who-are-you-trying-to-kid frown. “I thought you said you already had an offer.”

  “I do,” she said, then added sheepishly, “sort of.” Over the years, she’d had many offers from both colleagues and competitors of Alec’s, so all she really had to do was get out some résumés. She knew for sure that Todd Herly would love to get his hands on her, if only to win one more round in the friendliest feud in history. Somehow, though, the prospect of working anywhere but Mackenzie depressed her.

  She opened a can of tuna, gave the fishy smelling water to her cat, Bam Bam, then quickly put together a sandwich as Tom, the most responsible of her three older brothers, began a long-winded, well-intentioned lecture.

  Out of habit, she listened to him yammer on as she ate, even though her mind was in the next county. What she was really thinking about was that on a normal Tuesday afternoon she’d be grabbing bites of a brown sack lunch at her desk instead of stenciling the trim around her kitchen cabinets and listening to her brother. But nothing about her life was normal, she thought as Bam Bam looked up at her, blinked lazily and licked his chops. No job, no income, no Alec.

  “I’ve got a handle on it, Tom,” she said, feeling suddenly tired. “I’ve got résumés ready to go to my two best prospects and I have a Rolodex full of business cards from Alec’s colleagues. Some of them have been trying to poach me since the beginning.”

  Tom laughed. “Good. That ought to send Mackenzie off his hinges. At least it’ll give him something to think about before he starts taking his next assistant for granted.”

  Daisy tried not to think about how Alec probably wouldn’t care at all. Surely he’d seen his business associates slipping her their business cards at meetings and ground breakings and grand opening parties and saying things like, “If you ever decide to leave this bum, blah, blah, blah.” At the time, she’d just laughed and filed the information away for a rainy day, but now…

  Well, now it was pouring. In buckets.

  “If it makes you happy, I’ll place a few more calls when I’m done here,” she said as she cleaned and put away the dishes in that compulsive way she wished she could stop but never could.

  “Good. And call if you need anything. Anything, you hear? You’ve been doing for other people long enough. Let someone help you for a change.”

  She promised that she would before she hung up, then she climbed the ladder and unwrapped her brush.

  What was she waiting for? she asked herself as she dipped the short bristles into a jar of thick paint. She should be happy to be moving on in her career. After all, being someone’s assistant wasn’t why she’d worked so hard to put herself through college. And it wasn’t why she’d stuck it out even in the face of holding down a full-time job and taking care of her father and older brothers.

  No, she’d done all that because she had a dream, a dream that she refused to abandon just because she was currently stuck on one of life’s sandbars. Once she’d saved enough money, she was going to take her business know-how and her passion for taking care of people and she was going to pour it all into owning and running her own bed-and-breakfast. She knew she had a long way to go and many things to learn yet but she was still hanging on tightly to the vision she had for her inn. After all, she’d been tinkering with it ever since she was eight years old and her mother had taken her to stay at one of Santa Barbara’s best B&Bs—a trip that unexpectedly had turned out to be their last “girls only” weekend together before her mom had passed away.

  Daisy sighed, brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with her wrist and refocused on the situation at hand. Now that she’d left Mackenzie, she realized that she’d been staying on there for two reasons she was not proud of: an unrequited crush and a salary she’d be hard-pressed to make anywhere else. The first one she’d put behind her the moment she’d seen Alec’s eyes turn hard and brittle as he essentially told her to take her two-weeks’ notice and stick it. The second one she knew she would eventually, through diligence and determination, replace.

  So what was she waiting for? And even as she asked herself, she realized she’d known the answer since she’d walked out of Alec’s office. In her deepest-held fantasies, she was still waiting for him to run over here, drop to one knee, tell her he couldn’t live without her and beg her to come back.

  But since it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen, she knew it was time to buckle down and find another job tout de suite.

  As soon as she finished this coat of paint.

  “You certainly have been busy,” a deep voice said from behind her.

  Daisy jumped, jerked sideways to look over her shoulder and saw Alec, then panicked when her quick movement caused the ladder to teeter unsteadily. “Alec!” she yelped as she clutched desperately at the rough wood, heard the clatter of the brush when it hit the countertop below her. In a split second of pure terror, the ladder pitched one way, she pitched the other, and the battle was lost. She prayed, she cursed—and then fell right into Alec’s waiting arms.

  So much for fantasies.

  “Oof!” Her lungs emptied in one painful rush and she gasped, sucking oxygen in through clenched teeth. She heard Alec swallow a muffled curse and felt him stagger back a step, forcing her to wrap her arms around his neck and hold on to try to keep from falling again. Her face burned hotly as the strong arms that held her tightened and drew her closer and, just like that, her need for fresh air was forgotten.

  Daisy’s senses tingled and popped as Alec held her close with one arm, supported her bare, paint-spattered legs with the other and steadied them both. She felt the steely muscles of his shoulder flexing beneath her cheek, smelled his very masculine scent that she knew instinctively had nothing to do with cologne, saw the thudding of his heart pulsing beneath the stubble at his jaw.

  They only stood like that for a moment, but as they did, neither of them relaxed their
hold. For that time, standing there in a kitchen that smelled of fresh paint and tuna sandwiches, the world hung suspended like ripe fruit weighing down a slender branch.

  “Degree of difficulty,” Alec said finally, affecting a sports announcer’s voice, “8.5.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “I think the Russian judges are going to give you extra points for that catch, Alec.”

  “I’ll take all the extra points I can get,” he said in a heavy, sexy voice that sent spirals of heat zooming through her, licking at her in places she wished it wouldn’t.

  Daisy squirmed. “You can…” She swallowed thickly, both dreading the moment’s end and anxious to see what would happen if it didn’t. “You can let me down now.”

  His face was close, his expression guarded, but the corners of his mouth had crept up subtly and his blue eyes had taken on a wicked gleam. For a second, she had a strange feeling he was going to refuse but then he gently released her legs and held her close while he eased her slowly down the front of his strong, muscled length.

  Her damned double-crossing body caught fire as his hands moved down her back, slipping lower and lower as he guided her to the ground, until finally he was almost touching her butt. Breathing had practically become an Olympic sport in and of itself by the time her feet finally, mercifully, touched the cold tile floor and she stumbled back against the counter.

  She reached behind her and gripped the edge of the countertop, watching as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his stylishly worn-out jeans.

  “Not at the new job yet, huh?” he asked, and his composed manner was so at odds with her own flustered one that it drove her kind of crazy.

  “You gave me a two-week vacation I wasn’t expecting, remember?” she reminded him with a synthetic smile.

  “Ah, yes. There is that.” He looked around the kitchen. “I can sure think of better ways to spend a vacation than this, though.”

  “I’m sure you can,” she said, sweetness coating each word. “But planning time was woefully short.”

  Alec’s answering smile was a cool, gorgeous stretch across his face. She stared at his mouth and felt a flush of pleasure sweep through her as she imagined his lips on hers, his hands caressing her, his chest pressed up against hers. And suddenly she realized she hadn’t put her crush quite as far behind her as she’d previously thought.

  That awareness shocked her into action. Forcing back a wave of unwanted desire, Daisy struggled to organize her thoughts. What was he doing here? Had he come to apologize as she’d hoped? And, most important of all, what the hell had just happened between them?

  Their last conversation—and the humiliating event that had sparked it—careened back into her mind, dispelling the rosy glow she was already using to color the encounter they’d just shared. “Why are you here, Alec? What do you want?”

  Alec watched Daisy lean back against the counter and saw the full, firm breasts he’d never known were hiding beneath her conservative work clothes straining against her T-shirt. At that moment he knew exactly what he wanted, and that realization made him want to turn around and run out of her house before he slipped up and did something about it.

  But he couldn’t run away, not this time, so he drank his fill, surveying her from her bare feet and her long tanned legs to her denim cutoffs and a T-shirt that molded those tempting breasts and revealed a sliver of her flat stomach.

  It was, by far, the sexiest handyman get-up he’d ever seen.

  But in the next moment he savagely exorcised those thoughts. So what if he suddenly found her attractive? The timing stunk, no question about it, and the last thing he needed was to complicate their situation further. After all, it was common knowledge on Nikki’s grapevine that Daisy was planning a love-marriage-children combo at some point in her future. And that was a concept that ran just slightly counter to Alec’s own commitment-free, casual-sex, eternal-independence plan. Alec went out with women who understood that, and if for some reason they forgot, their relationship usually wound down in a hurry.

  Anyway, he was here to grovel, he reminded himself, letting the thought resurrect the hurt and anger he’d felt when she’d deserted him—and the frustration he’d felt at having to give in to Joseph Baldwin’s demands.

  “Daisy,” he said simply, his voice harder and louder and harsher than he’d meant it to be. “I want you to come back to work.”

  Her expression shifted and altered, as if she were trying to understand a language she’d only just learned. She tipped her head to the side and considered him. “This is quite a change of heart for you, isn’t it? Just yesterday, you pretty much told me not to let the door smack me on the butt on the way out.”

  The memory of how the swell of her butt had just felt under his hands rushed back, making him smile when he didn’t feel like smiling at all. “I have a hot temper. You know that—”

  “You do not,” she scoffed. “You’re the most even-tempered man I know.” She narrowed her eyes and peered closer at him. “Unless it’s a Jekyll and Hyde thing you’ve been bottling up all this time.”

  Clearly she was going to make swallowing a whole crow very hard. “Actually,” he said, beginning to enjoy their sparring in spite of himself. “I think I can honestly say I’m not a schizophrenic madman.”

  She made a show of being relieved. “Well, that’s reassuring.”

  “Daisy, come back to work,” he said, stepping toward her. “I need you.”

  She pressed herself against the counter and it made him feel like a bully. “I told you I can’t do that,” she said.

  The quick refusal surprised him, although he knew it shouldn’t. In the past twenty-four hours, he’d learned more about Daisy Kincaid’s stubborn streak than he had in the previous three years. “Why can’t you?”

  The same sadness he’d glimpsed the other day flickered in her eyes, then she shook her head. “Why can’t you just let it alone?”

  He watched as a few dark curls escaped her loose ponytail and tumbled down to frame her face. “Listen, I’ll give you whatever you want,” he said, his gaze fixated on a cinnamon-colored curl. “An office. A raise. Whatever you need.”

  A thoughtful light replaced the sadness in her eyes for a moment and he hurried to press his advantage. “I’ll double your salary. Hell, I’ll double whatever offer you’ve got from…who did you say you took a job with?”

  Her mouth tightened into a frown. “I didn’t. And this isn’t about money, Alec,” she said, and something about the tone of her voice let him know that avenue was closed. “Besides, I’m done with being an assistant.”

  “You want a different job? No problem. What do you want it to be?” Even as he said it, the salesmanship in his own voice made him cringe.

  She must have heard it, too, because she gave him a suspicious look. “What’s going on, Alec?”

  “Listen,” he said, backing off a bit. “Just come to Santa Margarita with me. We can figure it out from there.”

  At that, excitement touched every feature on her pretty face. “Santa Margarita? What do you mean?”

  Relief filled him. He had her. This is going to work. “Didn’t I tell you? I want you to come with me.”

  She bit into her soft bottom lip and considered his invitation. Her mouth was full but not lush, her teeth straight and white. As he stared, he felt his breath go shallow and his body respond to the temptation of her nearness.

  Daisy opened her mouth to speak, then closed it, shaking her head. Her hesitation was downright endearing. It made him feel like a heel.

  “I can’t be your assistant anymore, Alec,” she said finally.

  “You don’t have to be my assistant,” he said as if that concept were preposterous. What could he offer her that was attractive enough to entice her back? Think, Mackenzie. Just because groveling wasn’t on his résumé didn’t mean he couldn’t figure this out. “You have your business degree now, right?” he asked and she nodded. “You can run the business office. Problem solved.
”

  She looked down at the fallen ladder and the paint splotch where the brush had hit the tile counter. She bent to right the ladder, and the soft denim of her shorts did something sinful to her rear. His pulse spiked as he watched her, and frankly it made him incredibly uneasy.

  “You couldn’t do it,” she said as she ripped a paper towel from its holder and wiped the countertop with hard, jerky strokes. “I’d be back to making your dinner reservations and picking up your dry cleaning in no time.”

  Something in her words nagged at his conscience, but the feeling fled as desperation fogged up his mind. “Daze, if it’s a deal breaker, I’ll make your dinner reservations and pick up your dry cleaning.”

  The hand that held the paper towel stilled as she regarded him with a sly smile. But then she looked down at her bare feet and her unpolished toenails and shook her head again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “My answer is still no.”

  A giant steel band tightened around his chest when he came to stand before her and took her hands in his. Her scent enveloped him, so sweet and familiar that for one insane moment he almost pulled her closer. But instead, he drew in a deep, satisfying breath and waited until she’d lifted her eyes to meet his. “Daisy, I don’t know how else to say this.” His throat felt strangely tight, so tight he had to clear it before he continued. “I need you. I can’t do this without you. Please.”

  And it wasn’t until he’d said the words that he realized he really meant them. He did need her. She was as integral to his business as his CAD program, his laptop, his cell phone and his PDA. What had he been thinking of to let her go?

  She wasn’t wearing her glasses. This close, her eyes looked huge, soulful. She held his gaze unflinchingly, and the intensity made him feel like he was somehow being pulled inside her. Damn, where had this woman been hiding all these years?

  Finally she withdrew her hands from his, tucked them into the back pockets of her frayed cutoffs and nearly leveled him with a single look. “Okay, Alec,” she said on a sigh. “You’re not going to like it, but these are my nonnegotiable terms.”