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party. And feel loved and wanted. Like she belonged in such a warm and wonderful place. Only it couldn’t have been that wonderful after all, she reminded herself firmly, or Tom wouldn’t have stepped out on Grace. He wouldn’t have slept with Iris and, in the process, both made a baby and destroyed the happiness of his family.
    “What was on my face?” Jack shifted his weight restlessly, abruptly looking as on edge and ready to do combat as she.
    Raw emotion. The kind of vulnerability that was missing now that he had his guard up once again. Determined to pierce his armor the way he so easily seemed able to get through hers, Daisy taunted him softly, “You were mortified that you weren’t able to keep me from crashing that Deveraux family party tonight. You were afraid that Tom was going to be ticked off at you—which he clearly was. So now you’re trying to make it up to him by keeping me in your line of vision.”
    To her disappointment, Jack didn’t even try to deny it. “You could have tried harder to lose me,” he said, as if he could have cared less how the evening turned out.
    “Maybe I didn’t want to,” Daisy baited Jack lazily. “Maybe I was curious.”
    The muscles in his shoulders and chest becoming more pronounced, Jack drained his root beer and tossedthe can into the trash barrel next to the soda machine. He turned back to her, his expression grim. “About what?” he demanded curtly.
    Daisy rubbed her bare toes against the cool concrete. She knew sparring with Jack this way was dangerous. But she couldn’t help it. She needed an outlet for her anger and frustration. Like it or not, this was it. “How far you’d go—or not go, as the case might be—to please Daddy Dearest. For instance—” Able to see she was getting to Jack at long last, Daisy let her lips curve in a soft, goading smile and tossed her soda can, too. “Would you deny yourself a chance to sleep with me?” Ignoring the racing of her heart and the weak funny feeling in her knees, Daisy held Jack’s eyes and undid the string tie at the back of her neck. When he didn’t move—didn’t react in any way—she reached behind her recklessly and released the zipper on her sundress.
    Jack’s expression grew even grimmer, more forbidding. Although obviously aroused, he was not in the least bit amused by her antics. “Don’t do this,” Jack said.
    “Why not?” Wanting to annoy him the way he had her, Daisy pushed the fabric past her hips, and stepped out of it. Her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it in her ears. “Am I getting to you?”
    His eyes narrowed. “Put your dress back on,” he ordered roughly.
    “I don’t think so.” Daisy reached for the clasp on her strapless bra.
    He caught her hand before she could undo it. Perspiration beaded on his temple. “This won’t help your situation.”
    Daisy laughed, softly and bitterly. “You mean itwon’t help you to be caught sleeping with the boss’s other daughter.”
    His fingers gently encircling her wrist, he forced her hand down between them. “It wouldn’t help either of us,” he said sternly.
    More tired than she could ever say, of being told what to do, think, even feel, Daisy replied back, “We’ll just see about that.” And before Jack Granger could respond, she stood on tiptoe, wrapped her free hand around the back of his neck, tilted his head down and pressed her lips to his.

CHAPTER THREE
    J ACK KNEW he could get fired for this, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself from responding to the fervor of her soft lips, any more than Daisy seemed able to put an end to what she was doing. Not that Jack hadn’t known going into this assignment that Daisy Templeton was wild and reckless to a fault. But this was something different, Jack realized as Daisy flattened the softness of her breasts against his chest as she kissed him. Even through the starched cotton of his shirt, and the transparent lace of her bra, he could feel her nipples budding,