His groin tightened in pain at the thought.

Stop it! he snapped at himself. He was her team leader, and she was one of his best employees. Company policy stringently forbade dating between management and staff, and violation of that policy meant immediate dismissal.

Yeah, but the woman made him seriously hot.

Dangerously hot.

She always wore her long, dark hair pulled back from her face where it fell in thick waves down to her waist. He’d spent hours at night fantasizing about that hair draped on his chest, or spread out across his pillow.

And she had the palest eyes he’d ever seen. She’d told him once they were green, and it pained him that he had absolutely no idea what that color meant.

But from what he could see, green had to be beautiful.

Her eyes were a bit large for her pixie face, and they were always bright and teasing when she looked at him.

He could stare into those eyes for an eternity.

Adrian ran his gaze over her lush curves, and he hardened even more as raw, demanding desire tore through him. Sam had once complained about her weight, but he couldn’t find any fault with it. After growing up with a skinny, frail mother and sister, he couldn’t stand to see a woman with no meat on her bones.

Her full, voluptuous body made him absolutely crazy with unspent lust. And for the last year, he’d been forced to learn to live with a raging erection every time he got near her, or heard the sound of her smooth Southern drawl.

Sam paused and looked up at him. “Did you need something else?”

Yeah, I need you to smile at me.

Touch me.

Better still, I need you to climb me like a ladder …

“No,” he said as another page sounded for him.

Adrian turned away from her and answered the page with his cell phone as he headed upstairs to tend Scott’s antsy twitters.

*   *   *

Sam clenched her hands as her computer clock showed ten after five. An anxious tremor went through her as she feared Adrian might have changed his mind about going out with her.

Taking a deep breath for courage, she shut down her computer, then walked the short distance to Adrian’s office.

He had his back to her as he typed like lightning on his keyboard while talking on the phone. “It’s switched,” he said. “Everything is clear … No, I ran the logs, and as of yesterday, we’ve cleared seven hundred thousand dollars in orders since the end of October … Yeah,” he said with a light laugh. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

He hung up the phone, and she saw him rub his hand over his eyes as if he had a headache. His cell phone rang. Without breaking stride, he answered it.