Sam laughed at the threat he uttered at least twice a week. She’d met Heather a couple of times during lunch, and though Sam liked her, Heather was a bit self-absorbed.
“So, what did you do?” she asked.
“I refused to let her borrow my Vette. The last time she took it out, she hit a pole and cost me three thousand dollars in damage.”
“Yikes.” Sam cringed for him. Adrian loved his vintage 1969 Stingray. “Was she hurt?”
“Thankfully, no, but my car is still sulking over it.”
Sam laughed again, but then, she always did that around him. Adrian had a dry, sharp wit that never missed a beat. “Well, I’m glad you stopped by. My Perforce is acting up again. I can’t get it to integrate my changes.” Which meant that the stupid server had her locked out and every time she tried to update a page on their Web site, it refused to let her.
She hated Perforce, and it hated her. But they were required to use it so that upper management could keep track of who made what changes to the Web site, and out of the entire network services department, Adrian was the only one who really understood the program.
“What’s it doing?” he asked as he came to stand beside her.
Sam couldn’t breathe as he leaned down to read her screen. His face was so close to hers that all she had to do was move a mere two inches and she would be able to place her lips against that strong, sculpted jaw.
“Scroll down.”
She heard Adrian’s words, but they didn’t register. She was too busy watching the way his incredibly broad shoulders hunched as he leaned with one hand against her desk.
He glanced down at her.
Sam blinked and looked back at the screen. “I’m scrolling,” she said as she reached for her mouse.
“There’s your problem,” he said as he read the gobbledy-gook. “You haven’t enabled your baseline merges.”
“And in English that would mean?”
Adrian laughed that rich, deep laugh that made her burn even more. He covered her hand with his on the mouse and showed her how to choose the right options.
He surrounded her with his masculine warmth. Sam swallowed at the disturbing sensation of his hand on hers as fire coursed through her. He had beautiful, strong hands. His long, lean fingers were tapered and perfect. Worse, every time she looked at them, she couldn’t help wondering what they would feel like on her body, touching her, caressing her.
Seducing her.
His cell phone rang. Adrian straightened and pulled the phone from its cradle on his belt. He checked the caller ID, then flipped it open like Captain Kirk. “Yeah, Scott, what’s wrong?”
“Radius is down,” Scott, their network security specialist, said over the speaker phone, “and I can’t get it up and running.”
“Did you reboot?”
“Duh.”
Adrian indicated her chair with his head.
Sam got up and watched as he set the phone aside, took a seat in her chair, and opened a DOS window on her computer. He tapped swiftly on her keyboard, then picked his phone back up. “It’s not cycling.”
“I know, and I can’t fix it.”
“All right,” Adrian said with saintly patience. “I’ll be up there in a few minutes.”
He clicked off his phone, but before he could move his phone rang at the same time his pager went off and the overhead paging system called his name. Adrian answered his cell phone again and checked his pager.
“Did you get the hacker alert?” Scott asked.
“Hang on,” Adrian said, then he reached for her desk phone to answer his page.
“Hi, Randy,” he said as he tucked the phone between his shoulder and cheek and started typing on her keyboard. “I’m in the process of switching the main databases over to my SQL. We should be ready to fly by five.” He paused as he listened and switched her computer from the Windows over to Linux.
Sam watched in awe as he flawlessly entered line after line of stuff she couldn’t even begin to follow or understand.
“No,” Adrian said to Randy, “our customers won’t notice at all, except the searches will take less time.” He entered more lines as he listened to their senior director, Randy Jacobs, on the phone.
Another page went off for him.
Adrian nodded as he listened to Randy. “Yeah, I’ll get to it. Would you mind holding for just a second?”
He picked up his cell phone. “Scott, it’s not a hacker. It’s an invalid SID. Someone is using a bookmark with an old Session ID attached to it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. I’m looking at it right now.”
“Okay, thanks.”Adrian gave her a sheepish smile as he clicked off his cell phone and picked up the other line on her desk phone.
Biting her lips to keep from smiling at the chaos, Sam felt for him. At twenty-six, Adrian was known to everyone in the company as the boy genius. He had taken a billion-dollar corporation from the 1980s mainframe mentality into the twenty-first century Web-based e-commerce. He had single-handedly built the entire programming side of their million-dollar business retail site, and put together a Web design team that was second to none.
Unfortunately, though, everyone in the company turned to him every time something went wrong with the site. Which meant he was always on call and always rushing from one department to the next, putting out fires and trying his best to explain extremely complicated things to people who had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
Adrian came into the office every morning by five-thirty, and seldom went home before eight at night.
The stress on him had to be excruciating, and yet he was the most easygoing boss she’d ever known. She couldn’t count the number of times a day someone was complaining, if not shouting, about something, or begging him to help them, and yet he never let the strain of it show.
“Scott,” Adrian said at his cell phone, “go get a cup of coffee. I’m headed upstairs as soon as I finish with Randy.” He returned to her phone. “I’m back, Randy.” He listened for a few minutes more, then nodded. “All right,” he said, pulling the Palm Pilot off his belt. “I’ll put it on my schedule.”
Sam watched as he added yet another meeting to his already booked calendar.
“Okay,” he said to Randy. “I’m on it. See you later.”
Adrian left the chair, then hesitated at the opening of Sam’s cube as she resumed her seat. In a rare show of uneasiness, he picked up the wooden medieval knight her brother had given her. “This is new.”
She nodded. “Teddy got it Thanksgiving when he went to Germany.”
“It’s neat,” he said, putting it back on the shelf with the rest of the knights. She had been collecting them for years. She figured they were as close as she’d ever come to having a real knight in shining armor.
He glanced around her cube at the large Santa and snowmen cutouts she had pinned up, the small Christmas tree she had next to her monitor, and the stack of holiday catalogues by her keyboard. “You really love Christmas, don’t you?”
Sam glanced down at her Santa and reindeer sweater and smiled. “My favorite time of year. Don’t you like it?”
He shrugged. “It’s a day off, I guess.”
Still Adrian hesitated, fiddling with her nameplate.
How odd. It was so unlike him to be fidgety. This was a man who made million-dollar decisions and held meetings with the stars of the Fortune 500 without even a minor qualm.
What on earth could he be nervous about?
“Would you mind if I asked a giant favor?”
Her heart pounded. Oh, baby, ask me anything!
“What’cha need?”
He dropped his gaze down to her nameplate as he slid it back and forth in its holder. “Since Heather has totally screwed up my clothes again, I was wondering if you’d mind going shopping with me after work? I’d take Randir, but even I can tell his clothes don’t match.”
“I heard that!” Randir said laughingly from the next cube.
Sam smiled. The guys in her department teased each other mercilessly, and it was what she loved most about her job. Everyone got along well and no one minded the incessant quips and taunts that were hurled about as often as Adrian got paged.
“Anyway,” Adrian said, ignoring Randir’s interruption. “Would you mind? I’ll buy you dinner.”
Yes! Her heart skipped a beat as she did her best to appear calm, while inside, what she really wanted to do was turn cartwheels. “I don’t mind.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Great,” he said with a slight smile. “Then I guess I better go to Scott before he hyperventilates.”
“Okay, see you later.”
Adrian took one last look at Sam as she returned her attention to her monitor. He clenched his teeth as he watched her fingers stroking the keys on her keyboard.
That woman had the lightest touch he’d ever seen, and he ached to feel those hands on his body. Ached to take them into his mouth and nibble every inch of them.
Worse, what he really wanted to do was pick her up from that chair, take her into his office, and toss everything on top of his desk onto the floor before laying her down on top of it.
Oh, yeah, he could already taste her lips as he peeled the thick sweater and jeans off her body. Feel her hot and wet for him as he coaxed and teased her body into blind ecstasy.
His groin tightened in pain at the thought.
Stop it! he snapped at himself. He was her team leader, and she was one of his best employees. Company policy stringently forbade dating between management and staff, and violation of that policy meant immediate dismissal.
Yeah, but the woman made him seriously hot.
Dangerously hot.
She always wore her long, dark hair pulled back from her face where it fell in thick waves down to her waist. He’d spent hours at night fantasizing about that hair draped on his chest, or spread out across his pillow.
And she had the palest eyes he’d ever seen. She’d told him once they were green, and it pained him that he had absolutely no idea what that color meant.