She broke off her babbling when she heard Jared cough over a laugh.
Harold still looked puzzled, but he smiled. "So you finished the session?"
Jared spoke. "Actually, we were two questions from finishing when your laptop crashed, Harold." He shrugged. "Just one of those things, so we didn't get our certificate of completion."
Candy tried to maneuver around Harold, being careful not to touch his leather pants.
"What? No certificate?" Harold pouted, which was so not attractive on a fifty-year-old bald man. "Then how do I know you actually did the counseling? For all I know, you've spent the last two hours playing checkers online."
More like naked Twister. Candy couldn't think of a single doggone thing to say and starting inching down the hall, noticing there were quite a few curious heads poking out of offices.
"I can guarantee you that we were not playing checkers," Jared said in a serious voice. "And you'll see the results of your counseling when we hand you Chunk o' Chocolate completed next week. We're going to work on it tonight."
"Tonight? You're working late?" Harold's ears perked up, presumably at the idea of employees working overtime without compensation.
"Yes. We'll work on it all night if we have to."
A gurgling sound left Candy's mouth before she could stop it.
"Are you okay, Candy?" Harold's eyes swung toward her.
She didn't dare look at Jared. She blinked at Harold and grabbed her neck. "No, actually, I have something stuck in my throat. Excuse me, I'm going to go get a drink."
Without waiting for an answer, she got the heck out of there, rushing down the hall on wobbly ankles. First stop was the ladies' room.
Jan from payroll was walking down the hall with a stack of mail in her hand. She fell into step beside Candy.
"How was Harold's kooky Internet counseling?" Jan asked in a whisper.
Since Jan had been one of the few Stratford Marketing women who had been nice to her, Candy couldn't blow her off the way she really wanted to.
She gave Jan a weak smile. "It wasn't as kooky as I thought it would be."
Jan flipped her dark hair over her shoulder and grinned. "But at least you got to do it with a hottie like Jared Kincaid. With my luck, Harold would stick me in counseling with the office geek."
Oh, Lord, Candy was blushing. She could feel the heat stain spreading across her cheeks. "You just treat it like any other work assignment."
Yeah, right. If you were a hooker, maybe.
"What's Jared like? Is he really the cool customer he looks to be?"
Cool wasn't the word she would use.
"He was very… accommodating." Candy choked on the word as she came to a halt outside the ladies' room. "Excuse me, Jan. I have to use the rest room."
Jan stopped next to her. "Well, while you're in there, you might want to fix your blouse. It seems to have gotten crooked during your counseling session."
She winked and started off down the hall.
Candy glanced down in horror. A good deal of her stomach was flashing through the Titanic-sized hole in the middle of her blouse.
And Harold hadn't even seemed to notice.
Maybe his eyes were going the same way as his hair.
Yanking her blouse halves together, she pushed open the door and wondered how long until the last employee would leave the building for the day.
She just might want to hide in the rest room until then.
@ Jared didn't know what the hell he was doing.
Everything had seemed a lot easier when he and Candy had been seminaked and moaning in Harold's office earlier.
Now things were complicated.
Candy had avoided him the rest of the day, and he had been unable to work because of all the confusing feelings tumbling around inside him. Feelings that were about as welcome as the stomach flu.
Feelings that had him standing outside her door sweating in his wool coat like it was July.
As he rang the doorbell to her apartment, he wondered exactly why Candy had agreed to meet him tonight. He also wondered exactly why he had agreed to meet Candy tonight. He didn't know what he wanted any more than he knew what she wanted.
Aside from sex, that is. If she even wanted any more of that. And just why in the hell did he care so much?
Candy opened the door and smiled shyly at him. "Hi."
Oh, damn, she was wearing jeans that hugged every inch of her hips and rounded ass. A red turtleneck sweater stretched optimistically across her breasts and pulled northward toward her belly button when she reached up to run a hand through her hair.
The flash of skin left him dazed and hard. And possessive. He didn't want anyone else to see Candy's skin but him.
That sweater was the same one she'd been wearing the day they met, and it made her face glow golden. She'd put some kind of shiny wet-looking stuff on her lips and he wanted to eat it off, one little nibble at a time.
After an embarrassing pause, he managed to say, "Hi. You look great."
Oh, now there was an original compliment.
"Thanks. Do you want to come in or did you have plans to go somewhere?" Candy tucked her hands behind her back and rocked on the balls of her feet in sexy little black boots.
"Actually, we should get going. I made dinner plans."
Alarm crossed her face. "I'm not dressed for dinner."
"Don't worry, this place is casual." And blissfully close. His place was only twenty minutes from Candy's.
"Oh, okay. Let me get my coat. Come on in." She turned and disappeared into her apartment. "Do I need the Chunk o' Chocolate file? Or do you have copies?"
Naive girl. She actually thought they were going to do work? He'd been called a lot of things over the years, but never stupid. Any man asinine enough to discuss how to market chocolate when he had Candy Appleton alone in his condo was… not Jared.
"I have copies." In his desk back at the office.
Jared stepped into her living room and was immediately assaulted by an excess of floral patterns. Jesus, Candy had a whole meadow growing in there, various rioting prints covering a sofa, a loveseat, and an overstuffed chair.
Violent red poppies danced across her curtains, and every table was littered with little things that he wouldn't even claim to know the name of. Things like little tiny wicker chairs with plants growing out of their seats, and wooden cats. The coffee table held a bowl full of lemons on it, and a round ball of orange fur that was probably a live cat was sleeping next to it.
He pictured those poppy curtains hanging in his apartment and shuddered. Not that he wanted Candy to live with him or anything. But love did not extend to ugly drapes.
The L word brought him up short. What the hell was he thinking? He did not love her. He was interested in her. He wanted to get to know her. He had great admiration for her brain and her breasts, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with love.
Did it?
Candy stuffed her arms into a very fluffy camel-colored coat, with huge quantities of white fur pluming around her face.
He didn't even know her.
She smiled. "I'm ready," she said in a breathless siren voice.
He did know she was trouble. But sometimes getting into trouble was so much fun.
"Is something wrong, Jared?"
"No, not at all. Why do you ask?"
She shrugged and the fur nearly swallowed her face. "You just look a little serious. I was worried that maybe you're embarrassed because we diddled around in Harold's office."
Diddled? He was pretty sure he'd just been insulted.
"Diddling is not what I would call it. And I'm not embarrassed. I don't get embarrassed. Especially not when I enjoyed being with you and would do it again in a heartbeat." He was conscious his voice was rising, but shit, he couldn't help it.