CHASING TROUBLE

He had stepped over a line with her the last few days; now it was time to get their relationship back on track. “I have some papers I need to go through before we look around the castle tomorrow, so feel free to look around. You can get something ready to eat too if you’d like,” he drawled as he opened the door and placed the bags out in the hallway. “I take it you can cook?”

“Of course I can cook.”

“Of course you can,” Nicholas parroted wryly; he should have known this capable PA could do anything she set her mind to.

Caroline frowned. “But I thought the housekeeper opened the gates for us?”

“From the gate house.” Nicholas nodded, dark eyes mocking as he saw Caroline’s puzzlement. “Mrs McTaggart doesn’t live in, Care.” He shrugged. “I told her we would be fine here on our own, so she made us coffee as a welcome, and she’ll have left some supplies in the fridge for the makings of dinner this evening and breakfast in the morning.”

Caroline thought she would rather have had the awkwardness of staying with Nicholas’ friends or family than finding herself alone with him in this totally private and secluded house. She just couldn’t seem to make up her mind about what she wanted. She moistened dry lips as she avoided so much as looking at Nicholas, who stood only feet away from her. “Perhaps we would be more… comfortable in a hotel?”

“If you mean that you would be more comfortable in a hotel, then say so,” Nicholas shot back. His eyes were narrowed to dark, glassy slits, his jaw tight, his mouth thinned with displeasure as Caroline looked at him beneath lowered lashes. “Do you imagine that just because we’re alone here I’m going to want to finish what we started the other night?”All rights © NôvelDrama.Org.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Caroline felt the warmth in her cheeks. “I just thought-”

“I’m well aware of what you thought, Care,” he cut in fully.

Why-after all the soul-searching, all the warnings Caroline had given herself the last forty-eight hours about the danger of revealing her newly realized feelings for Nicholas -did that assurance actually fill her with disappointment rather than relief?

She turned away. “I’ll see what Mrs McTaggart left for our dinner.”

“Care?”

She stiffened before turning slowly back to face him, her expression guarded. “Yes?”

Nicholas hated the way that she looked at him now. As if she didn’t trust him. As if she saw him as nothing more than a playboy. Nicholas didn’t believe that even as a callow youth his actions had been ruled by that particular part of his anatomy. Even in his late teens and early twenties his main driving force had been to succeed. That success hadn’t allowed for the emotional baggage of a wife and children, necessitating him choosing carefully when it had come to the women he became involved with, with the sole intention that no one got hurt.

Those years of caution had gone completely out of the window the moment he’d kissed her.

“I’m going to use the office,” he dismissed her irritably. “Choose any bedroom you want; I’ll sort something out for myself later.” He strode impatiently from the room before he did or said something he or Caroline might regret. He needed space away from her to think. But once he had settled into the spacious office with its view over the back gardens he found it difficult to concentrate on the papers he had taken from his briefcase and placed on the desk in front of him. He couldn’t get Caroline out of his head.

What was he going to do about her? What did he want to do about her?

Those, Nicholas decided ruefully, were two distinctly different questions. What he needed to do was everything in his power to put their relationship back on the employer-employee basis as it should have been right from the beginning…. Because he knew that nothing else would be possible. He wasn’t ready for any sort of relationship… He was sure of that.

What he wanted, what he ached to do, was strip every piece of clothing from Caroline’s body before making sweet, intoxicating love to her!

_________

Surprisingly, once alone in the warmth and charm of the rambling kitchen, Caroline actually found she was enjoying herself as she took out prawns, steaks, potatoes and a mixture of vegetables from the refrigerator. Along with the selection of herbs strung up amongst the pots and pans in the middle of the kitchen, she had more than enough ingredients to show Nicholas just how well she could cook.

She even found herself humming happily as she made prawn cocktails, before seasoning the steaks with sea-salt ready for cooking, and then preparing the garlic potatoes and a melange of fresh vegetables mixed with toasted almonds. She even found the ingredients to prepare a lemon souff l e for dessert as her piece de resistance.

It seemed like years since she had actually had the time to enjoy cooking a meal.

“I hope that’s going to taste as good as it smells!”

Her earlier tension returned at the first sound of Nicholas’ voice as he entered the kitchen almost two hours later. “I hope so too.” She kept her voice deliberately neutral.

Nicholas looked at her for several long seconds, looking broodingly handsome in a black sweater with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows and a pair of faded-blue denims that rested low down on his hips.” Do you think we could call a truce for this evening, Care?” he finally murmured.

She gave a pained frown. “I thought we had already tried that.”

“Then maybe we should try harder,” he suggested. “I don’t know about you, but this tension between us is starting to get to me.”

More than get to him, Nicholas acknowledged ruefully, having done absolutely nothing during the almost-two hours he had sat in the office except stare out of the window as he’d tried to find some sort of solution to the problem between himself and Caroline.

He didn’t want to quit her job because of him and he knew Caroline well enough to know that she would if things continued to get so complicated. It wouldn’t be worth it, especially after he went back to New York.

“I’m no happier about it than you are, Nicholas,” Caroline admitted huskily.