Alex heard the sniffling even before the elevator doors fully opened, and he saw the young woman sitting before the massive U-shaped desk, her fist jammed against her nose as she tried to silence the offending organ.

Indira Sen looked up warily as he approached her desk.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Winters.” Her voice was fuzzy, as if it had been wrapped in gauze and beaten into submission—though not necessarily in that order. “Is Mr. Howard expecting you?”

He had to smile at the question. Of all the administrative assistants in the building, it was only this woman who treated him like the Director of Research and Development and Hank Howard like the Chief Executive Officer, rather than the other way around. The other admins more or less bowed him through the doors, grateful for the favor of his presence and happy to interrupt whatever their bosses had been doing in order to introduce him.

Alex had unwillingly witnessed some interesting scenes that way, one of which had convinced him that two of his vice-presidents were engaged in a steamy extramarital affair.

He shook his head in remembrance. That had been one awkward human resource meeting afterward.

Ignoring the question, Alex gazed down at the assistant. A glimpse of the refuse container behind her desk showed it to be full of crumpled-up tissues, and her overlarge, brown eyes were reddened with what he guessed was a hell of a cold. Too bad because her eyes were her best feature. Wide and velvety brown, like melting chocolate, they had a trick of looking at him as if they already knew all his secrets.

Not today, however. Today, those big, dark eyes were glaring up at him, as if blaming him for interrupting her little sniffle-fest.

“You should be at home,” he said to her, “with a cold like that.”

He watched as she plucked a new tissue from the pink-patterned box on her desk and wiped it carelessly across her slightly less pink nose.

“Thanks for the advice,” she told him, “but I’m fine.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. The sharp tone was unlike anything he’d ever heard before from her. He’d known Indy for, what…two years? Or was it closer to three? A good long time, in any case, long enough to know that she was polite and professional, never brusque.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, unable to explain his own sudden interest. Perhaps it was the sudden Jekyll-and-Hyde version of an employee whom he could have sworn was completely two-dimensional. “Did you get caught in the rain last night?”

Indy glared up at him. Yes, it was definitely a glare.

Alex hid a smile. He’d heard of nasty sick people whose tempers frayed at the first sign of impending illness, but he’d never witnessed such a drastic transformation in the flesh before.

“No, sir,” Indy said between clenched teeth. He could tell that it was only his position at the head of the company that wrested the words from her unwilling throat. “I was indoors all last night. Last night was perfectly…lovely.”

He could have sworn from the flash in her beautiful eyes that she was about to say something completely different.”

“I was indoors all last night.”

Innocent words, yet they conjured up an exceeding graphic picture. Indoors…in bed?

Alex swept his eyes over her flushed, cross face to her impeccable blouse and skirt combination in well-toned neutral colors. Her hair was piled messily on top of her head today, but he knew that it was very long from the few times he’d seen it loose at the company’s holiday parties—long and glossy black with the slightest hint of a wave in it. It would look incredible spread out against a pillow—or wrapped around a man’s fist.

Her throat and neck were golden-brown and smooth. The cream-colored blouse showed just the beginning of a tantalizing swell of generous breasts and a hint of black lace beneath. She wore none of her characteristic gold jewelry today, which he thought strange. Too sick to dress properly that morning, perhaps?

He started to frown. He didn’t want to run the type of company where his employees felt they had to drag themselves into work, even when they were obviously ill. He pushed himself hard, and he expected the same from his staff—but there had to be limits.

Alex cleared his throat before he spoke. The hesitation allowed him to formulate a diplomatic suggestion. What a thought! Him, who was known for his bluntness, tiptoeing around an assistant. Some of the executives he knew would have marveled at him.

“I think you should take the rest of the day off,” he said to Indy, flashing her his best smile.

The young woman sitting before him crumpled the tissue in her hand down to a tiny ball.

“And I think you should mind your own business,” she said, her voice both hoarse and sweet. Without waiting to see his reaction, she pressed a button on the phone in front of her and announced his presence to her boss.

“Mr. Howard will see you now…Sir.”

* * * *

Alex had made the trip down to the fifth floor to discuss the quarterly projections with the director but instead found himself regaling Hank Howard with the story of his encounter with the other man’s assistant.

Hank laughed until Alex thought his rotund frame would burst. In between giggles, he gasped out incredulous questions.

“How could you not know?” the man asked over and over again.

By now, Alex had started to lose his famous patience. “How could I not know what?”

“Indy,” Hank said, struggling to get his breathing under control. “About who she’s seeing.”

“Seeing?”

“Dating, I mean.”

“I know what the word ‘seeing’ implies,” Alex told him peevishly. “Why should I know or care who your assistant is dating?”

He’d never speculated on Ms. Sen’s personal life. She seemed so cool and polite usually, never fawning over him the way the other assistants did, some of whom made it all too obvious that a more personal connection would be welcomed. Alex had been carefully professional in response—maybe, he realized for the first time, because he didn’t like that cool reaction Indy always gave him.

“I thought she tucked herself back into her box every night,” he told his colleague, “and recharged for the next day.”

He was proud of this witticism until he saw Hank gaping at him like he’d lost it. It wasn’t such a bad joke, was it?

“Do you think she’s cold and robotic?” Hank asked him, his red eyebrows rising to meet his gingery hair. “Because everyone on this floor calls her ‘Sexy Sen’…though they only do that behind her back.”

Sexy Sen. Not a terribly clever nickname but, Alex suddenly realized, rather apt. Personally, he preferred svelte blonde women, those who fit in easily between the pages of a fashion magazine spread. Oh, and he liked them spread.

Then, for a second, he thought of Indy’s long black hair draped across his naked chest and something clenched hard inside his stomach.

Sexy Sen. It definitely fit.

Hank was talking again, and Alex wrenched his attention back to the other man.

“Indy’s been dating Dr. Mehta.”

The name got Alex’s attention. Ray Mehta was the most brilliant scientist in his R&D team, the one he was paying a fantastic salary to so that he could find new ways to treat diseases.

Ray Mehta…and Indy. Outwardly, she was a perfect match for the tall, thin Indian man, but Alex somehow couldn’t see the pair together.

Hank was still talking. “All the girls were after him, but she got him. They were together for a few months until last week, when she heard rumors that he was cheating on her. I take it she meant to confront him about it last night. And, well, I guess it didn’t go so well for her.”

“So she isn’t sick?” Disgust clouded Alex’s voice. “She’s sniffling over some man?”

His friend looked amused. “Not some man. Ray Mehta. You could tell that she thought the world of him.”

“In the science lab, sure, he’s great,” Alex conceded. “That’s why I hired him. But as a sex symbol? I don’t know.”

“You wouldn’t know,” Hank agreed. “You’re about as purely a man’s man as I’ve ever met. It always amazes me that the women flock to you.”

This last part was said with considerable tongue in cheek. For years, Hank had been telling Alex that he had too large a share of male attractiveness to the opposite sex. Poor Hank. The love of his life was a small, quiet lady who found her husband’s gregariousness a constant source of shame.

“Hey, that’s an idea,” the man said suddenly, straightening up in his chair.

Alex was instantly wary. Whenever Hank got enthusiastic about anything outside of his work portfolio, it was usually something completely ludicrous…like ice fishing. A part of Alex’s ass was still numb from an interminable weekend last winter spent locked in a freezing hut.

“Indy needs taking out of herself,” Hank told him. “She’s been moping around the office for the last week, and now, with the other shoe finally fallen, she’s going to be miserable for the rest of the year.”

“And?”

Alex thought he was braced for the rest. He wasn’t.

“And, I think you should take her out. Give her a few days on the town in true Alex Winters style. Dazzle her. Make her forget she ever knew a man named Mehta.”

“What’s in it for me?” Alex asked dryly. “You get a happy assistant, and I get a woman who thinks I want her and who may prove difficult to deal with afterward.”

He’d had enough experience with that sort of woman—the kind that ended up crying over a broken relationship. Nowadays he preferred his lovers to know what the deal was up front—as much sex as they could handle but with no emotional commitment. No commitment of any kind, in fact. Life was hard enough without the baggage.

And Indy Sen, sexy though she may be, was the kind of woman who came handcuffed to baggage…the kind that wanted a commitment or nothing.

Ray Mehta had no doubt learned that fact the hard way.

“Indy’s not like that,” Hank told him, despite all evidence to the contrary. “She’s a sensible lady. If you tell her what the situation is up front, there should be no problem.”

“Won’t that defeat the purpose of the exercise?” When the other man looked blank, Alex expanded. “To boost her self-confidence?”

Hank shifted in his chair. “She’ll figure it out.”

It was Alex’s experience that most women didn’t figure it out. They wanted happy endings, and all he could provide was a good night.

Plus, he had a rule against dating colleagues at work, and this would definitely violate it.

“No, thanks,” he told the other man. “I don’t need that kind of complication in my life. Now, about those quarterly projections—”

* * * *

Indy exited the washroom without even trying to catch a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror by the inner door. What was the point? No one cared if her eyeliner was smeared or her skirt was tucked into the back of her tights.

No one would ever care about her again.

With a quick involuntary gulp, she thought of her parents, dead now for the past twelve years, the victims of a drunk driver who’d ended up killing himself too in the smash-up. Avoiding thinking about them was far harder than evading her reflection in each shiny surface she passed—and Mavrell Pharmaceuticals had a lot of shiny surfaces. The higher-ups probably thought the modern design work showed how cutting-edge and forward-looking they were. Instead, it simply looked like they had intended to design a spaceship and ended up with an office complex—an extremely ugly office complex.

No, she wouldn’t let herself think about Mamaji and Papaji, but her mind had different plans.

If her parents had still been alive…

How many of her thoughts over the past few years had started out that way?

The answer was too many.

An Indian girl without a family can hardly learn how to be a proper Indian girl.

Ray’s warmly accented voice murmured constantly in her ear like a malicious spirit. All of his pronouncements—and he was fond of making pronouncements—that had once seemed caring and old-fashioned now came off as bombastic and prejudiced.

It had taken her a full week to come to terms with the fact that he’d never intended to get involved in a real relationship with her. He’d only been looking for sex, which she—as an improper Indian girl—had been more than willing to provide.

Foolishly, she’d thought, between the pronouncement and the solid family values he was always going on about, that he’d meant to show the same commitment to her that he’d immediately demanded from her.

Instead of letting the relationship naturally progress to exclusivity, Ray had demanded from day one that she sleep only with him. After showing that flattering speed in buttoning her down into monogamy, it hadn’t occurred to her that he wasn’t equally committed to her in that regard. They’d spent so much time together—and so many nights—that she knew he couldn’t be cheating. Between work and her, he simply had no time.

Yet all the while they’d been together, his family back in India had been arranging a marriage for him.

He’d calmly announced his impending nuptials to her without batting an eyelid. He’d even suggested she should have been similarly set up—if she’d still possessed the all-important family to make the arrangements.

He hadn’t cheated on her, he’d pointed out. She should have known ‘she wasn’t good enough for him’ from the start. That was an actual quote. ‘Not good enough for him,’ like they were in some old Bollywood movie where class and social stature kept the star-crossed lovers apart. Except, even in those old movies, the poor orphan girl eventually proved herself worthy of the hero’s love.

Things didn’t work that way in her and Ray Mehta’s story.

Fuck men. Fuck them all.

For an instant, Alex Winters’ lean, handsome face flashed through her mind. Perhaps it wasn’t really surprising. Weren’t they all brothers under the skin? All looking for good times and good fucks without wanting the work that came with a deeper commitment?

Weren’t they all Alex Winters?

Indy knew that pretty much every unattached female at Mavrell lusted after the CEO. Since he’d appeared on the cover of a major finance magazine last year, she suspected that another few thousand women around the country could be added to that list.

Indy wondered what it was they saw in him.

He was sexy. There was no doubt that. His tall figure carried a suggestion of both strength and agility. She hadn’t been surprised to read in the magazine that he was an avid swimmer. The company gym boasted an Olympic-sized pool, and she’d heard that he could be found there on most mornings.

His face wasn’t terrible, either. Actually, she had to admit that his features were perfectly balanced between beauty and austerity. It was a potent, utterly masculine combination. Piercing blue-gray eyes didn’t hurt. Nor, in his late thirties, did a full head of thick, dark-brown hair. Poor Hank’s gingery hair was starting to thin out on several fronts, and he’d taken to ordering miracle cures on the internet, a habit which he thought he hid well from her. It was nearly impossible to hide things from your assistant, who had access to both your calendar and your email.

Yes, Alex Winters was fine to look at, but men with his looks and success didn’t get to his age in the single state without putting in some hard work avoiding commitment.

Just like Ray. Only she’d let the fact that he was Indian, and therefore supposed to want the same goals she did, fool her.

Indy slid behind her desk with a sniffle. She wouldn’t think about Ray. She’d promised herself.

But hadn’t Ray taught her that promises were meant to be broken?