A Lyon's Share by Janet Dailey Read Free Book Online

juice, courtesy of the canteen," he announced.
    "I wish you hadn't mentioned coffee," Joan grimaced, walking around her desk to rummage through the center drawer for her comb. "I never feel myself in the mornings until I've had my first cup.
    "Yourself being the cool efficient paragon who rules the office?" Brandt questioned, a brow arching with complacent amusement.
    The comb in her hand faltered in mid-stroke through the slightly tangled locks of her long hair.
    "I don't rule the office," Joan asserted feeling more like a schoolgirl than an efficient secretary as her cheekbones gleamed with a rosy hue of embarrassment.
    "You blush very easily, don't you?"
    The color intensified. "It has something to do with being fair-skinned, I think." She kept her head averted from his discerning eyes as she began winding her hair into its prim coil at the nape of her neck.
    "Leave your hair down." he commanded huskily, covering the distance, between them when she wasn't looking. "It'll keep your ears warm. Besides—-" His fingers pulled part of her hair free from her unresisting hold, and Joan was too startled by his sudden nearness to protest. "The color of your hair is much too attractive to be concealed in that severe style. It's like spun gold when it's loose."
    "It's naturally that color," she stated as if he had accused her of achieving the color from a bottle.
    He laughed softly. "I guessed that."
    Joan fought back the clamoring of her senses. "It's too unpractical to wear it down. It keeps getting in the way."
    "Does it?" Disbelief was in his question as he tucked her hair behind her ears and turned away. "You never wear it down so how can you be sure?"
    "You'll see," she declared, shaking the rest of her hair free in frustration and dumping the pins, on top of the desk.
    The instant she surrendered to his stronger will, she knew she had made an irretrievable mistake. The cloud of hair about her shoulders made her feel instinctively feminine and vulnerable, the very sensations she needed to avoid or she would fall completely under the power of his magnetism. The invisible barrier between employer and employee had been breached last night when she had lain in his arms. She desperately needed to repair her defenses.
    With cold deliberateness, she ignored him the rest of the morning, completing the filing from the wire basket on her desk. On the surface, Joan was successful, but an inner radar kept her apprised of every movement Brandt made as he pored over the blueprint spread out on the drafting table.
    "I'm hungry." His low voice shattered the silence, causing Joan to spin abruptly around. "What are we having for lunch?"
    The blue depths of his eyes seemed to pull her into a whirlpool of emotional chaos. This strange intimacy that had crept between them made it nearly impossible for her to react naturally. Bells rang, warning her that she was becoming much too susceptible to his attraction but she couldn't think of what she might do to prevent it.
    "I don't know," she answered quickly, turning back to the file drawers before she succumbed to despair at her own vulnerability.
    "I'll see what the canteen has to offer."
    As she nibbled the cold sandwich later, Joan realized it was this constant sharing that was destroying her peace of mind. A business aloofness couldn't be maintained in these circumstances. She was conscious of his stirring interest in her or maybe it was curiosity as Brandt regarded her in a new light discovering the humanness behind her facade of efficiency.
    But wasn't she making too much of his new interest? What harm would there be in a friendship being developed between them? What was there to fear? If Brandt Lyon did begin to regard her as a woman, that didn't mean he was suddenly going to be overwhelmed by her average looks—not when someone like Angela lurked in his memory.
    "A penny for your thoughts," Brandt's voice snapped the thread of her musings.
    "They aren't worth it." Joan protested