Penthouse Suite (4 page)

Kate, feeling as if she’d swallowed a sponge that was slowly expanding in her esophagus, moved into the opposite corner of the enclosure and tried not to look at Max.

“Cool down, bossman. It wasn’t the plumbing this time, only a little problem with a hot tub. Bubble bath isn’t a good idea in a hot tub. It makes the sides too slippery.”

“Oh? Do you take many bubble baths?”

“No, never had the time. I’m a shower person. Once I camped out by a lake for two weeks. There’s nothing like taking a bath in ice water every morning. Get the juices flowing.”

Juices flowing? He felt as if the elevator were a blender, and his juices were being whipped into a frenzy. Picturing Kate bathing in clear lake water pushed the blender setting to full speed. He simply couldn’t speak.

It was only two more floors to the lobby, Kate saw with relief, hoping her trembling legs would
support her that much longer. He was apparently going out for an early morning swim—unless they were holding a Mr. America contest in the lobby.

Taking a deep breath, Max forced himself to count to ten before he finally spoke. “I trust you were able to handle the situation satisfactorily, Kate … Ms. Weston.”

“Except for getting soaked in the process.”

“I know, you’re wet again,” he said in a strained voice, and closed his eyes.

Kate heard the tightness in his speech. His lips were grimly pressed together, and his hands were gripping the ends of the towel fiercely.

Her gaze trailed further down his body, and she moaned at the visible expression of his discomfort straining against the fabric of his swimsuit. She was stunned. It had to be the fact that they were shut off from the world.

Sure, she thought, and the rate of her pulse was due to the hot water she’d just taken a swim in, not the man standing beside her. She had to do something, say something to diffuse the tension, or he was going to go into orbit, and she’d be right behind him.

Freckles
, Max was saying to himself. He’d been right. Her face was definitely dusted with a smattering of light freckles. They were scattered across her neck and down the triangle of skin framed in the V-shaped opening of the coveralls. He groaned. His mind seemed determined to burrow beneath those coveralls no matter where he tried to cast his thoughts.

“I’m sorry about the way I look,” Kate began. “I had no idea that I was going swimming, or I would have taken another uniform with me.” She took a step and heard the water squish in her shoes.

“Kate.” The low, controlled way he said her name seemed to be more of a caress than a rebuke. He opened his eyes and looked down at her. “You really are wet, aren’t you?” He reached across and hit the stop button on the elevator panel and turned back to Kate.

Kate swallowed with difficulty. What was the man going to do, she wondered.

Max pulled the towel from around his neck and dabbed it across her forehead and cheeks. He moved it behind her ears and down her neck.

“I can’t let an employee catch pneumonia,” he murmured hypnotically, “not in the line of duty. What kind of an employer would I be if I didn’t take care of my crew?”

Kate closed her eyes and tilted her head back so that he could wipe away the moisture. He lifted the collar of the uniform so that he could blot her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. Kate gasped.

“Are you all right, Kate?” His question was a gravelly whisper.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. All right? She didn’t know. The sides of the elevator were closing in. The very air they were breathing had turned hot, and she felt as though she were going to faint.

For a moment Kate wasn’t sure whether Max was going to strangle her or kiss her. Death, she decided, was only two Sylvester Stallone lips away, and she swayed toward Max. Then his arms were around her, and he began to lower his head.

“It’s as warm in here as it was in Dorothea’s hot tub,” she blurted out as she reached up to push him away. Instead her fingers curled around his shoulders and held on.

“Yes. Dorothea,” he repeated groggily.

“But once I got her out of the hot tub she was fine.” Kate was rambling, not knowing what she was saying, attempting only to fill the silence. “She’s some character, Dorothea. Seventy years old if she’s a day, and she sleeps in the nude. Can you believe that?”

“Nude!” Kate’s words pierced Max’s mental fog. He shook his head as though he had been sleepwalking and slid back to clasp Kate’s arms in a death grip. What was he doing? He’d almost kissed an employee in the elevator. Even now his body yearned to cover the distance he’d put between them. Stopping the elevator was a mistake. He reached behind Kate and pressed the release button. The machine began to move again.

It wasn’t thoughts of Dorothea that had set off this chain reaction. It was Kate’s unexpected appearance before he had been able to leash his feelings. It was the close confinement with Kate. It was because he knew that he was out of control.

The elevator doors opened and Max blinked, realizing that they could be seen. He forced himself to slow his breathing. For a long minute he looked at Kate before he released his hold on her shoulders and reached out to hold open the door.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” he said in a strained voice. “I don’t often lose control like that. I certainly don’t.… I … I expect that I’d better check on Dorothea. We’ll talk later.”

He stood stiffly, waiting for an equally stunned Kate to step outside. He jabbed at the “Close” button, muttering half under his breath. “Sexual harassment, she’ll accuse you of sexual harassment. You’ll be guilty as hell, and you haven’t even kissed her yet.”

The elevator doors had closed and the blinking
light had moved up to nine before Kate got a grip on herself. Reserved? Stuffy? The man she’d just shared the elevator with didn’t seem staid to her. Uptight, maybe. Sexually repressed, perhaps. But stuffy he wasn’t. He seemed more rattled than reserved. Maybe it was just her. They seemed to rub each other the wrong way.

Kate touched her shoulders where Max had held them. The coveralls were almost dry there. They had definitely heated up the elevator, she thought, and smiled. Who was she kidding? It was her own body heat that was drying her coveralls. The sight of Max Sorrenson in that swimsuit had certainly raised her temperature. She’d better find a way to avoid that man. Whenever they came together, it was volcano time.

After stopping by the laundry for a fresh supply of coveralls, Kate paused in the doorway of her room, caught by the orange streaks of a bright new day painting the sky in the east. A cool, sweet breeze held an invigorating promise, and Kate hurried to change and get ready for whatever else the day would bring.

Working at La Casa del Sol was better than taking any how-to class or watching an old movie. The only problem was that this kind of real life adventure starred a man, a man whose impact was undeniable. And men didn’t play any part in the immediate future she’d planned for herself.

She wasn’t the love ’em and leave ’em type. She’d loved once, but the man hadn’t understood her devotion to her mother and had left.

No use dredging up old hurts, Kate decided, shaking her head. She’d loved her mother and she didn’t regret that there’d only been the two of them. She didn’t regret the six years she’d spent
caring for her mother, either. But she didn’t intend to make the mistake of falling in love. Certainly not with some reserved executive who lived in a penthouse suite.

Kate glanced around the carefully manicured hotel grounds and sighed. The quiet elegance of the old red tiled roof, the cream-colored walls, the flowers, and the white sand beach beyond had a calming effect.

Kate took a deep breath. Max was a man, and he’d reacted as a man. They’d caught each other by surprise. So what if he had wanted to kiss her? He hadn’t. So what if she’d wanted him to? She was safe. After all, she was only going to be there for two weeks. The next time they met he’d probably have forgotten all about what had almost happened.

Kate was good at a lot of things, but lying wasn’t one of them. Max Sorrenson might forget, but she wasn’t sure that she could. It was a whole new ball game for her, and she didn’t know the rules.

Wiping her face vigorously, Kate tried to erase the picture of Max from her mind, gave up, and changed into a fresh uniform. Her boss was probably the most handsome man she’d ever seen. And there was absolutely no part of him that she hadn’t seen or that she didn’t want to see again.
Let’s face it, kid, he’s probably the most exotic adventure a woman could ever have, and you’re in the adventure business, aren’t you?

Kate tucked her damp hair beneath another orange cap, placed her beeper in her pocket, and made her way to the employees’ dining room. She poured herself a mug of coffee and carried it out the side entrance.

Through the rose garden was a section of beach
almost hidden from the hotel by a vine-covered brick wall. The water went from transparent aquamarine to dark blue-black in the distance. Bordered by smooth white sand, clean and unmarked, the beach stretched out before her, running like a grosgrain ribbon into the gray mist. The raucous cry of the birds was the only sound as the streaks of light painted the sky. Kate sat down and leaned against the cool brick of the alcove and enjoyed the serenity of the morning.

Her mother would have liked this place and the people, Kate thought, recalling Dorothea Jarrett and her lotus-shaped hot tub. A tub like that might have soothed her mother’s pain. Kate shook her head. For six years she’d done the best she knew how for her mother. Now she was doing exactly what her mother had hoped she’d do. She was getting on with her life.

Her mother had given her just one piece of advice: “Don’t go out and fall in love with the first man you meet who’s different, the way I did, Kate. Look around. See what the world has to offer. You’re inexperienced, and you might make a mistake.”

She wasn’t likely to test that advice. By setting a limit on her time in one place, she didn’t have to worry. She had no intention of falling in love, not for a very long time. She’d seen what could happen to a woman who fell in love with the wrong man.

Max Sorrenson was certainly the first man she’d met who was different. And he was the last man in the world she could allow herself to fall in love with—if she was interested in falling in love, which she wasn’t. There might not be any such thing as a class system anymore, but he still lived in the penthouse and she lived in the maintenance wing.

Kate didn’t know why she was allowing such thoughts to cross her mind. This adventure wasn’t even scheduled to run her allotted three months. By the end of the week, she’d be able to buy a new water pump for the car. After the next week, she’d be mobile again. Still, the Carnival Strip was nice, and she would have a full two months left on her schedule. She might not be too quick to move on. She’d take a good look around the area first, she decided.

Kate took a sip of the coffee, which was cold now and milky brown in the cup she held absently in her hand. She heard someone headed in the direction of her hiding place and she slipped back further into the alcove.

The pounding sound of footsteps on the path told her that it was a jogger long before Max Sorrenson moved lazily past her toward the empty beach. Thank goodness he’d covered up that bathing suit with a silvery jogging suit, she thought. He stopped at the edge of a clump of palm trees and dropped his gym pants. “Oh no!” Kate muttered. He was wearing a pair of indecently fitted maroon running shorts that were even more suggestive than the bathing suit.

His jacket quickly followed his pants, and Kate was treated to the sight of his powerful chest. He draped a matching maroon towel around his neck, slipped a gray sweat band around his head and, catching the ends of the towel in his hands, started off down the beach.

“Whatever you’re thinking, Kate Weston, forget it,” she said out loud. She wasn’t in the same league with a man like Max. She was simply working her way across the country, looking for her own place in the sun. She wasn’t brilliant. She’d
never been to college. The closest she’d come to culture was a dumb music appreciation course she’d started her adult education classes with—before she’d learned that pounding a hammer was more therapeutic than Mozart.

The truth was, she didn’t know who she was. Maybe she didn’t really want to. By not staying in one place too long she didn’t have to explain anything to anybody. She could be anyone she chose to be. She could even have a grand affair, as long as she set up boundaries and time limits.

Affair? What was she thinking of? Max Sorrenson wasn’t the kind of man who dallied with the hired help. He swam alone. He jogged alone. He worked alone. Kate wasn’t sure whether Max would know how to dally, if the occasion presented itself. She grinned. Maybe Max needed a grand adventure. What if—what if she shared hers with him?

The powerful figure of Max Sorrenson was growing smaller in the distance. She was wrong. He wasn’t a young Cesar Romero or an old Lorenzo Lamas. She’d been watching too many old movies and too much television. Max Sorrenson wasn’t some cardboard character on a screen. He was a real man, who was about a million light years away from somebody like her. Too bad, she thought. Getting to know him might have been the ultimate kind of hands-on, how-to class.

Kate reluctantly turned back to the hotel. She had work to do, work that would help her gain perspective by taking her mind off the man in the penthouse suite.

Down the beach, Max was carrying on a conversation with himself as he ran, something he never did. He always felt that if a thing was important
enough to do, it deserved his full attention. But today his running was automatic, and his conversation was turning into an argument.

“I need some fresh air,” Max’s logical self said with determination, “some exercise, that’s all. It’s just as Dorothea says, ‘a man can’t spend all his time with computers and finances without getting spooky.’

“She’s a handyman, Maxwell,” he argued. “She probably thinks that you’re some kind of pervert, running around nude, practically undressing her in the elevator.