Unworthy Heart: The Donnellys, Book 1 Read Online Free PDF

more knowing Maiya had been the one to find the issue instead of him. Definitely a healthy case of his ego talking, maybe a little bit of male pride too—which even he had to admit was stupid.
    She was senior to him in title, and tenure. He didn’t have a problem with it, but she wasn’t his manager and he wanted to be able to handle any business or issues on his project without her jumping in, or getting to them first.
    Maiya was a tiger lady, handling her team and any obstacles with a special kind of finesse rarely seen in management. Most people lost their heads when issues arose. Not Maiya. She kept her cool, got people to do whatever it was she needed, and they usually walked away smiling. It was impressive, to say the least. She’d earned her spot at the company and with it, the respect of all her peers.
    With fresh cup of coffee in hand, along with his laptop tucked under his arm, Ryan strolled into the empty conference room at three. Empty except for one person sitting at the table typing away on her laptop. At the sight of her, all rankled pride and ego smoothed right out. But then his steps faltered and his breath caught in his throat. Last night’s fantasy parked itself front and center in his mind. With his mouth as dry as the desert, he swallowed, and unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Hey, Maiya.”
    “Hey, Ryan. Pull up a chair. We’ve got a lot of documents to go through.”
    “Where’s everyone else?”
    “Oh, yeah, everyone else. Hmm.” She tapped her bottom lip with her fingernail, a contemplative expression on her face and then looked around the room. “Well, looks like it’s just us, big guy. Everyone else had somewhere they needed to run off to. You know how it is, families and such. Fun times right?”
    Ryan took the seat next to her and opened his laptop. “My kind of fun.”
    She’d pulled her hair up into some sort of knot, and somehow made it stay with a pencil stuck through it. Amazing. She had a whole sexy, hot-librarian look going, and his dick was more than pleased to send up a salute in approval. Stifling his dirty thoughts, he signed in to his computer. “So what’s going on?”
    “It appears we’ve missed a technical element in the marketing layout.” She studied her screen. “We need to go back through our documentation and find where the gap is in the design solution.”
    “We submitted our mockup to them and they approved it. I can’t imagine what happened.” Ryan leaned close to her, causing their shoulders to touch, to peer at the document she was reading on her laptop. The heat of her body penetrated through their layers of clothes, warming his skin, and damn, she smelled good. Too good. He liked it. A slight lingering scent of cigarette smoke was there, but it didn’t seem to bother him like he figured it would.
    Maiya scrolled through the document. “This is the section where we should see the design and layout for the particular feature in question. For the life of me I can’t find the miss.”
    “Let me pull it up on my laptop and search for it too. I swear we had everything covered.” He pulled away and focused on his screen. Though he still sat close to her, their shoulders no longer touched. The immediate loss of her warmth against him sent a shiver rippling through his body.
    “Cold?”
    Damn, she noticed. “Um, no, not really.”
    “Okay then. I’m gonna grab some of the crap break room coffee. You need anything?”
    He glanced at her. “I’m good. Thanks.”
    Being stuck at work wasn’t such a hardship after all. There may be a mess to clean up for his project, but he couldn’t have picked a better person to be stuck with.
    Unable to catch her breath, Maiya drew on every ounce of self-control she possessed to keep from running from the conference room. With Ryan close to her while looking at her laptop screen, his scent—clean soap with a hint of cologne—hit her senses like a Mack truck and sent her head spinning.
    Every