It was such a picturesque day that it could make me sick. Birds were chirping, the grass on the golf course was green and perfectly manicured. A man-made outcropping of rocks lined the lake, which was home to a flock of ducks that occasionally dunked their heads underwater to snag a juicy bit of whatever it was ducks ate. Even the weather was nice.

I stepped out of the golf cart and looked at my caddy, who was actually wearing the hat I’d told her to wear, much to my surprise. “Five-iron, please.”

Natasha looked like she would rather bash me over the head with a golf club than hand me one. “And which one is that, master?” she asked sarcastically.

“The one with a five on it. No wonder I don’t pay you.”

She slid the club out of the bag and walked toward me with a look of pure fire in her eyes. I tried not to notice the way her hips swayed in the boyish khaki pants she wore, or the way her black polo fit her form so well and gave me a tantalizing glimpse of her cleavage. She looked absolutely ridiculous in the floppy hat I’d told her she had to wear to be my caddy, but it was admittedly a cute kind of ridiculous. The hat was the kind every guy wore back in the fifties.

I took the club from her, feeling a flicker of excitement when our fingers touched.

It was strange, with her, my desire to purge her from my life only got stronger the longer I spent with her. She’d been working for me over a week now, and I’d already lost count of how many times she had fucked up my routine. Yet at the same time, a strange, confusing part of me kind of enjoyed the challenge of bringing her in line. There might have even been a protective part of me that felt a need to save her from herself. After all, I’d seen how likely she was to fall down a flight of stairs or walk into traffic by mistake. Keeping her at my side might have been more about keeping her alive than it was about whatever this strange game we were playing was.

“Remind me again how this counts as a business event?” she asked.

“Well,” I said. “See those men over there?” I pointed to Alec and Von, who were playing the hole behind us a few hundred yards away. “Those are two Swedish entrepreneurs who are looking to launch a chain of restaurants in the U.S. Word is, their goal is to be nationwide within five years. I want them to choose Galleon, so I show up to the same golf outing as them. I give them their space, but let them see me around—by coincidence, of course. When everyone stops to grab a few drinks in the clubhouse after our round, who knows, maybe we’ll end up talking some business with them.”

“And you needed to dress me up like a clown to accomplish that?” I asked.

“To be honest? I didn’t think you’d actually wear the clothes I had Linda bring you.”

I’d seen Natasha blush plenty of times, but the red that flushed her face now might have been the first angry blush I’d seen.

I couldn’t help grinning a little, which felt strange. I’d never been the type to smile easily or find amusement in much of anything. At least not since Valerie.

“You know,” she said, words laced with anger. “Everybody in your office thinks you’re just keeping me around as a kind of sex slave. Dressing me up like this isn’t going to help dispel the rumors.”

“So what if they do? It’ll keep any of the guys in the office from thinking it’d be a good idea to hit on you.”

“What?” she asked. “No one is allowed to hit on me, now?”

“Unless they want to be fired, no. They had better not.”

She folded her arms over her chest, which had the incidental effect of pressing her breasts together in a distracting way. “Is that part of my punishment, then? You want to make sure I can’t even hope to meet a guy while I’m your slave?”

“No. It’s because you work for me. You’re mine. I don’t want anybody touching what’s mine. Simple as that.”

“Yours?” she asks incredulously. “And what happens if I don’t want to be a dusty trophy on your shelf?”

“Then you can quit. Until then, you are playing by my rules.”

“You’re a real bastard. You know that?” She pressed her lips together in an angry line, looked at my golf bag, and then hopped in the golf cart and sped off. I watched after her, nearly laughing out loud when she had to drive a loop and come back after a few seconds. She got out of the cart angrily, rifled through the pouch on the front of my golf bag, and snatched the keys out. “I forgot these. Okay?” she snapped, face blazing red, and then she got back in the cart and drove off.

I shook my head. The damn woman really had a way of pissing me off and intriguing me at the same time.

It was almost nine in the evening and I was still at the office. I did everything I could to keep my life to a strict schedule, but staying late for work was a surprisingly small disruption to my routine, and it was one I didn’t mind.

The difference was that Natasha was still in the office, too, meaning the entire building was empty except for cleaning staff, myself, and the intern.

I was at my desk, trying to make sure I had the last details perfectly in place for a briefing with one of our biggest clients tomorrow. My stomach was rumbling because I’d actually lost track of the dinner I’d packed. I was sure I left it in the break room fridge, but when I checked for it at my usual dinner time thirty minutes ago, it was gone.

Natasha stuck her head in the office. “You realize I’m not working out here, right? You’ve never actually given me any kind of job except to follow you around and annoy you, so I was wondering if I could go home yet.”

I glared at her. She’d already asked about three times to go home for the evening, and I was almost ready to give in and let her go. I was starting to doubt my own motives for keeping her around and punishing her. The incident with the banana was days ago now, and if I was being completely honest, I knew I’d probably put her through more than enough to make up for it by now. But it wasn’t that simple anymore.

I took in her chestnut hair and brown eyes as she dangled in the doorway, sticking only her head and shoulders in my office like she thought she might need to make a quick escape if things turned south.

“There’s actually one thing you could do before you go,” I said. “Go get some Chinese for us or something.”

She stepped in the room then, widening her eyes and covering her mouth in an exaggerated portrayal of shock. “You? Eating takeout food? Aren’t you worried you’re going to turn into a ball of blubber and I’ll have to roll you out of the office tonight?”

“I eat the way I do because I want my mind sharp. The right nutrients at the right time of day keep your energy levels stable and your mood good.”

She raised an eyebrow. “So that’s the problem then. Your nutrients must be way off, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a good mood, except when you were groping me that one time.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d blushed, but I thought I felt a little bit of warmth spreading in my cheeks then. “I wasn’t groping you. I was trying to get the coffee out of your shirt before it stained.”

“Right. You just started with my boobs.”

“They were the… closest thing I could reach.”

She blew out a surprised laugh and fixed me with an intoxicating smile. “Is what your brother says true? About your secretary fetish?”

“I’ve never had a secretary fetish.”

“Past tense,” she noted.

I grinned. “Listen. If you want to interview me, you’d better go get some food. Quickly. I think we have about ten minutes before the only noises I can make are frothing and growling sounds. I don’t handle hungry well.”

“I’m pretty sure frothing doesn’t make a sound, for the record.”

She saw the look on my face and raised her hands defensively. “Okay, okay. What do you want from the Chinese place?”

“Anything, but make sure you get crab rangoons. I haven’t had them in years and I think I’d do anything for one right now.”

“Anything?” she asked with a mischievous little sparkle in her eye.

She came back thirty minutes later with two huge brown bags full of food. It was the worst kind of food in a nutritional sense. I thought my dietician would probably have a heart attack if she saw, and I was sure I’d feel like shit the next morning, but for some reason I didn’t care. Maybe it was just the ravenous hunger in my stomach, or maybe Natasha, the walking disaster, was rubbing off on me.

I started pulling out containers while I looked for the crab rangoons and then realized Natasha was just watching me.

“What?” I asked.

“I feel like I need to call your handler or something. Are you sure nothing is wrong?”

I set down the waxy paper bag filled with rangoons and shrugged. “Why would something be wrong?”

“Oh,” she said casually. “No idea.”

I bit into the rangoon and leaned back in my chair, smiling as I chewed. “Damn, these are good. I used to get them all the time in college. Some places make them into kind of a wing shape with a pocket of filling at the bottom and a big crusty flap at the top. But these? These are the best kind.” I turned over the rangoon in my fingers, showing her the four, smaller pointed tips of crunchy pastry that spiked up from the juicy and crunchy pocket of crab and cream-filled deliciousness at the center.

“I’m glad you like them.”

“Are you going to eat, or are you just going to stand there being weird?”

She sighed, sat down, and opened the most boring container she possibly could. It was just a bunch of plain white rice. It seemed like something was bothering her, but I wasn’t sure if I was exactly the person she would prefer to confide in, so I settled for enjoying the meal across from her for a few minutes without making any conversation.

She eventually looked up from the rice, which she was barely touching. Her forehead was knotted together. “What was the deal with everything you did at my apartment?” she asked.

The question surprised me. I set down the stick of skewered beef I’d been working on. “It was nothing.”

“No. Nothing would’ve been using your bazillions of dollars to call some personal assistant to come dump me back at my place. What you did was actually considerate. And you gave my dog a carrot. I know you did, so don’t even try to deny it.”

“Was the carrot the tipping point, or?”

“No,” she said. “There’s no tipping point. I’m just tired of thinking I have a read on you and then you go and do something that doesn’t make any sense. You hire me to punish me. You practically force me to be your slave. You demean me whenever you get a chance. Then you also make dirty jokes, flirt with me, grope me, and do something confusingly considerate when I get blackout drunk. You even fixed my stupid window in the kitchen that never opened.” She gave a defeated kind of shrug. “I’m just tired of it. I want to know if I’m supposed to hate you or like you, and you’re making me feel like the emotional equivalent of a pinball.”

I leaned back in my chair. “A pinball between hate and like,” I said. “So that means you like me, at times?”

She rolled her eyes in that way she had. It wasn’t disrespectful or immature like it would be from someone else. It was playful and sexy. It made it feel like we were in on some joke together. “It also means I hate you, at times.”

Warning bells were going off in my brain. Disengage. Abort. End this. Now.

The security system I’d spent two years building inside my body wanted to do anything to keep me from taking this conversation any farther, but Natasha had a way of bypassing all of that. I couldn’t control myself around her. Not always.

“Well,” I said. “That makes two of us.”

She flashed a half-smile. “So that means you like me, at times?”

“At times,” I said. “And generally at the times when it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”

She chewed her lip. “When was a time that you liked me, for curiosity’s sake, of course.”

“When you had the balls to point out the schedule conflict with WeConnect at dinner. When you wore the ridiculous caddy outfit I asked you to wear. When you tried to slip sugar into my coffee. When I could tell you were turned on when I was cleaning that coffee off your... shirt.”

She lowered her eyes and took in a deep, shuddering kind of breath. “And how could you tell I was turned on?”

“The same way I can tell now,” I said. “You’re hardly breathing or blinking. Your cheeks and chest are red. You’re sitting as straight as an arrow. Every part of your body is on high-alert. I bet your skin feels like it’s prickling with electricity.

She absently rubbed her hand over her arm, where the hairs were standing on end and her skin was rising with goosebumps. “Wrong,” she said quietly. “It’s more like sunlight. Like there’s a warm light making me feel hot all over.” She paused, looking up at me and chewing her lip again in a way that had me seriously questioning all the promises I’d made myself about avoiding complications.

“And this warm feeling,” I said. “What does it make you want to do?”

She grinned. “Honestly? It’s making me crave bananas.”

I felt jarred out of the moment by the sheer ridiculousness of it. “What?” I asked.

“Something cold. Like the banana split I picked up after I got the Chinese. I left it in the break room and there’s enough for two.”