“Sure,” the kid said with heavy sarcasm.

His briefcase had landed upside down against the wall by his feet. “Well, I’m not, and I’m not stealing and I’m not going to hurt—” He reached for the briefcase as he talked, but the kid moved faster than he did, kicking at the case, and sending it flying ten feet across the floor. It ended up near the strange-looking tree. “No, you don’t, mister!”

“Oh, come on. That’s my briefcase…what’s left of it,” he said, eyeing the heavy scuff mark on the side of the case.

“Can you prove it?” the kid asked.

He looked at the boy, then the woman. They hardly looked like a gang, but they were ganging up on him. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m supposed to be here. The question is,” he said as the woman moved a bit closer and he could see that her eyes really were a deep, almost emerald green, “why are you two here?”

EVEN AS BRITTANY braced herself to do whatever it took to fend off this mountain of a man in front of her, she knew it wasn’t right. With the bright lights on, there was no furtive criminal in front of her, but a large man, dressed all in black, wearing clothes that weren’t cheap, and frowning at her and the kid as if they were aliens.

“We…we should get Security.” She glanced at the boy she hadn’t even known was in the complex until he joined in the attack. “Go and get help, please.”

“Yes, get Security,” the man said quickly in a deep voice.

“We don’t need no police in here,” the boy said as he glared at the man. “I can take care of him.” He moved a bit closer, his fists raised. “No problem.”

She would have laughed if the kid hadn’t seemed so serious and the man hadn’t seemed so angry. “No, you go and get help. I…I’ll…” She stumbled over her bravado as she looked back at the man. He was huge.

Dark eyes were on her, angry eyes in a sharply chiseled face. Sandy-blond hair, worn longer than was fashionable, was mussed, only adding to a strangely edgy feeling that the man seemed to radiate. Big? Shoot, he was a mountain and probably outweighed her by eighty or a hundred pounds. She remembered the feel of him against her, over her, controlling her and she inched back a bit, aware of how impossible it would be to control him.

All she’d seen was a flash, someone there, then there was impact, her body tangling with his, strength everywhere, and she’d had a flash of terror that she was being attacked, or even kidnapped. Her father had told her often enough when she was growing up that she had to take precautions against some nutcase thinking he could make money by kidnapping her. And she’d been told when you are attacked never to stop fighting. But it all seemed foolish now.

If the man hadn’t been off balance in the first place, she never would have been able to upset him, let alone keep him from doing whatever he wanted to do. But the longer she looked at him, she knew that nothing made sense. He was obviously color-challenged, but his clothes were expensive, as expensive as the black boots he wore with them. And the briefcase on the floor wouldn’t be carried by a thug.

“Security can figure this out,” she said, her voice lower now.

“No,” the kid said immediately.

But the man just shrugged his massive shoulders, leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms on his chest. After one glance at his watch, another less-than-cheap thing about him, the dark eyes were on her. “That’s fine by me.”

She wished she was controlling this, but knew she wasn’t. She knew she’d never controlled anything about this encounter. “Okay,” she said, and turned to the boy, but he wasn’t there. She looked back at the front doors, but there was no one in sight. He had gone to get help, and she hadn’t even heard him move.

She exhaled with relief that help was coming, that the kid had done as she’d originally asked, but that was short-lived when the stranger murmured, “He took off.”

“He’s getting Security.”

“Not in this lifetime,” the man said in a deep voice as he narrowed his eyes on her.

“Where did he go?”

“I didn’t see him go, but trust me, he’s long gone.”

“No,” she said quickly, looking back over her shoulder at the empty area around them. “He’s gone for help.”

“He’s your kid?”

“No. I don’t even know him,” she admitted as she looked back at the stranger. “But he’ll get help.”

“You trust that kid?”

She hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but she’d never been cynical, either. “I think he’ll come back.”

“He could, but speaking from personal experience and not being the trusting sort, why would he come back if he’d just been caught where he shouldn’t be and had attacked someone he shouldn’t have attacked?” His eyes flicked over her, making her stomach tighten. “My guess is, it’s just you and me now.”

Brittany took a step back, and knew she didn’t want it to be “just you and me,” with any man, especially not with this giant of a man who was looking at her with an intensity that made her thought processes amazingly scrambled.

She knew she should get out of there. She should run like hell. She looked for her purse, and saw it, right behind the stranger, the heel of his boot either pressing it against the wall or stepping on it. She couldn’t tell. And she wasn’t going closer to get a better look, either.

“Hey, what’s going on here?” someone yelled from behind them.

She turned and saw a security guard rushing into the conference area. “See, I told you he was getting help,” she said to the stranger.

He looked past her. “Not unless he’s wearing overalls now.”

She turned back and saw the guard coming toward them, followed by a tiny, dark-haired woman in pink overalls, but no sign of the kid. The guard stopped when he saw the two of them, but the woman didn’t stop until she was right by them. She looked from Brittany to the stranger, then settled on the man. “I was in the security room when they said you called in. I came to see what was happening.”

“That’s what I was trying to figure out myself.” The man stood a bit straighter and Brittany was vaguely aware that her purse fell to one side.

“Where’s the boy?” Brittany asked as she turned back to the guard.

The middle-aged man in the gray uniform shrugged. “Boy? What boy?”

Brittany looked past him. “A boy, maybe eight or nine years old, in baggy clothes, a baseball cap?” She looked back at the guard. “He went to get you.”

“No, ma’am, never saw a kid.” He motioned to the stranger. “Mr. Terrel here called Security and Mrs. Blake was there when the call came, and then we heard the commotion.”

Mr. Terrel? Brittany turned to those dark eyes still holding steady on her. Matthew Terrel? A C.E.O.? He wasn’t like any C.E.O. she’d met in her life. No three-piece suit or pinstriped shirt. Shoot, and she’d attacked him, the man she was supposed to meet, the man who was going to “watch out for her” for her father. Shoot and double shoot.

“I thought there was a break-in, and I had visions of graffiti all over the place.” The pink-overalled woman looked around as she spoke. “I couldn’t bear it if this was spoiled. That tree’s perfect and everything’s going so well.”

“Amy, don’t worry. I think everything’s okay. I saw the back door was open, called Security then came in to check.” Matthew Terrel looked back at Brittany, and she was startled to see what might have been the shadow of a smile in his dark eyes. He couldn’t be starting to enjoy this. “I barely got inside before I was attacked. Some kid who must have been staying late at the day care got me, right after she did.” He motioned toward Brittany and she barely hid a flinch when his hand almost struck her shoulder. “She came out of the shadows screaming something about a fire.”

“You hit me first,” she said, then realized how truly ridiculous that sounded. Matthew Terrel attacking someone? That was the wrong road to go down, and she knew that it was time to stop the madness. “I’d tried to turn on the lights and couldn’t find a switch that worked, then I ran into someone and he…he grabbed me, and it scared me, and I was just protecting myself.”