Securities expert Eric Jameson stood watching the monitor on his desk with an almost unblinking intensity as it showed the woman he hadn’t been able to take his brooding blue eyes off of for the last thirty minutes.
His housekeeper and quiet obsession…Winter Jones.
It had become a guilty pleasure of his to tap into the remote view of his state-of-the-art security system to catch a glimpse of her mesmerizing beauty while he was away on business. And today was no exception. Since he couldn’t be in her presence like he wanted to be, this was the next best thing.
When he’d had the system installed after moving into the north Scottsdale mansion a couple of years ago, he had never once thought he would become a voyeur into his own home just to feast his eyes on the quietly beautiful woman that made his home run so smoothly. But here he was time after time doing just that with no guilt whatsoever.
As an employee, Winter was always the perfect model of quiet competence. She never complained and she asked for very little. But as a woman, those same traits had given her an aura of mystery that had intrigued him and made him want to know more.
Briefly he wondered for the first time if he was breaking some kind of law by spying on his housekeeper with his less than pure intentions.
Probably. He thought running his fingers through the thick mass of his short wavy brown hair.
But he was too far gone to even care. Nothing at this point could deter him from getting his daily fix of her.
He never thought he’d see the day that he would find himself lusting after someone who worked for him. He’d built his reputation on a certain code of ethics and one of the major ones he practiced in business was to never pursue a woman he had a close working relationship with. Things got messy that way and he’d seen enough examples to make him not be tempted to go there.
Business stayed business and pleasure stayed separate. It had been his credo until the day he met Winter. Now after months of denying his need for her, he was ready to blow that rule right out the water. Looking back, he should have known from the first day they’d met that his perfectly ordered world was going to come to an end.
All the signs had been there.
After having his last housekeeper steal him blind and the one before her all but stalk him, he had ordered Pam, his PA to scour some local temp agencies. His requirements were simple: hire a more trustworthy housekeeper that wouldn’t have a tendency to turn his home into a five finger discount store or view him as target for a potential husband.
With that to go on, Pam had whittled it down to four candidates for him to interview. To be sure, he had run background checks on them all beforehand just to make sure they were even worth taking time out of his already busy schedule.
From the start the name Winter Jones had stuck out from the rest of the candidates because he’d never know anyone with that season for a first name before. And upon reading the background report on her, he’d been mildly curious about the contradictory nature of the woman profiled. On paper she had come off as just another sheltered young woman who really hadn’t made her mark on the world yet. But then when he saw her communications degree and the fact that she’d left everything she knew in her native Georgia to come to Arizona, he knew that there was another more interesting layer to her. Either she was running from something or running to something. Which was it? His curiosity had won out in the end.
He had scheduled Winter to be the first candidate that he interviewed that day and had found himself even then feeling a stirring of anticipation. Despite all his experience with people and human nature in his line of work as a securities expert, he’d had been ill prepared for the reaction he would have to her and how she would rock his world off its axis completely.
