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right here on Nick Brannagh’s office floor.  
    Miri started walking backward as if trying to escape it. To escape him. One step, then another. She was almost at the door, almost safe, when the heel of her right shoe flexed against a loose floorboard and snapped.  
    He stepped forward and caught her easily. Too easily, as if her stupid overheated body had planned for it to happen. Needed it to happen. Helplessly, Miri felt herself pulled flush to hard muscle, his chest rumbling against her cheek when he laughed softly. “Hey, are you okay?”  
    Such a ridiculous question to ask in her condition. She couldn’t even remember how to speak. She nodded into his T-shirt, fully distracted by the woody, masculine scent of him and the warmth of his chest. He felt like steel.
    “Are you okay?” he echoed, easing her back to look down at her.  
    No, of course she wasn’t okay. Her body was jelly, her brain had melted, and she was in this man’s — this jerk’s — arms. That didn’t add up to okay. And now her body wanted him more than it wanted its next heartbeat. It wanted him to…. Oh, God.
    “I have to go.” Her hands fisted his T-shirt as she frantically tried to control her arousal. She felt his arms close harder around her. Inviting her to stay. There was no mistaking the offer.
    “Hey, take it easy,” he suggested softly into the top of her head, the warmth of his breath sending another curve of raw heat low to her belly. “You’re shaking.” He chuckled. “It’s nothing I said, is it?”
      “I…have to go,” she mumbled into his chest. Sliding a tentative foot backward, Miri uncurled her hands and pushed from him, feeling his arms relax around her, then drop. But she should have known her escape wouldn’t go smoothly. After all, her humiliation wasn’t complete. Miri almost sobbed when she felt her ankle buckle on the broken heel, and she made a wild grab for him again.  
    “Steady,” he murmured, one hand slipping around her waist, the other taking her arm to keep her balanced. “I think you need to sit down for a minute, Miri.”  
    Of course she didn’t need to sit down. She needed to cry. But first she needed to die, and that meant finding that cliff after all. Frantically, she wriggled her foot free of the broken pump and kicked it aside. A quick glance down at the heel told her it was beyond repair. Pulling her other foot free, she kicked the shoe away and started for the door, fighting the urge to run.  
    The voice behind her rumbled without mercy. “Don’t you want your shoes?”  
    A ridiculous question. As if she’d want a memento of her day from hell?  
    Miri sucked in a lungful of air to quell the urge to swear and started the long, bare-footed, and thoroughly undignified walk to her car. The longest walk of her twenty-four years. Sinking into the driver’s seat, she sat still for a moment, trying to steady her indignation, anger, and every hormone raging around in her body. “Omigod, omigod,” she chanted under her breath, finally braving a look back at the mill’s entrance.  
    He was watching her. Why wouldn’t he be? She was a joke, after all.
    And then her car wouldn’t start.  
    Frantically, she turned the engine over and over, her eyes burning with tears of humiliation. If he comes out to help, it truly will be the end. He’ll find a red-faced corpse behind the wheel .
    “Start, you shitty heap of junk.”  
    Her vicious order must have done something to the Beetle’s conscience, since at the fourth turn of the key, the car powered to life.  
    Miri drove away, telling herself not to look at his face in the rearview mirror. But she looked anyway.  
    He was still grinning.

CHAPTER TWO

    “Fecking eejit!”
    Jesus. What the hell was up Fitz’s ass today? He’d been Irish-cursing all morning over the smallest thing. Except this time it didn’t sound small.  
    Nick dragged his work-booted feet off the desk and went to investigate, although he had a fair