Maybe, he thought as he finally headed down the hall to the conference room, she’d gotten stuck on a business call of her own. While he hadn’t actually seen her do any business beyond shadowing him the past couple of days, an actress of her caliber and popularity had to be overwhelmed with offers and publicity requests from her agent and publicist. He was amazed, actually, that she’d been able to put it all aside to focus on researching her role.

Or, perhaps her taxi was stuck in downtown gridlock.

Or, maybe it was simply that she’d gotten sick of sitting in his meetings and had decided to sleep in rather than beat him to his office for a third day in a row.

He thought about asking Bethany to get in touch with Tatiana, but if she’d decided to blow off shadowing him today, frankly, it should be a relief that she wasn’t here. After all, he’d been more distracted than he wanted to admit. So distracted by Tatiana’s beauty and sweetness and intelligence, in fact, that what had begun as teasing, then turned into laughter, had been teetering on the brink of becoming so much more.

Ian never thought he’d have something to thank Chelsea for, but if she hadn’t barged into his office yesterday, it would have been too damned easy to pull Tatiana against him to finally taste the gorgeous mouth that had been tempting him nearly every waking—and dreaming—moment since he’d met her.

Reminding himself that this was his chance to focus one hundred percent on work again, he stepped into the conference room and began the meeting.

* * *

It wasn’t uncommon for these weekly planning meetings to run from breakfast all the way into the lunch hour. Today, in particular, was bound to be a long one as they prepared to move forward the second Flynn Thomas agreed to the new offer.

Every ounce of Ian’s attention should have been on the information and plans that his executive staff were presenting. But all he’d been able to think about for the past hour and a half was Tatiana.

Damn it, where was she?

He pushed his chair back. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go take care of something. Please continue without me. Bethany, may I speak with you outside for a moment?” The moment they were in the hall, he asked her, “Has Tatiana been in touch yet?”

His assistant frowned. “No, I assumed her plans for the day must have changed, but that she let only you know about it. Would you like me to give her a call to see if I can find out where she is so that you can get back to the meeting?”

He shook his head, knowing he wouldn’t be able to focus on a damned thing until he knew that Tatiana was all right. “I’ll call her myself.”

He wanted to believe it was traffic or work or boredom that had her staying away today, but what if none of those reasons were right? Yesterday afternoon, Tatiana had said, point-blank, that she was falling for him...and in response, he’d not only completely shut her down, he’d also tossed harsh words back at her.

Words he’d regretted the second they were out of his mouth.

Ian cursed as he headed into his office then pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts list for her number. Even if she was upset with him, he still hoped she would pick up, if only to reassure him that she was fine…or to tell him exactly what she thought of him being such a jerk to her. Then again, he thought as he realized a strange buzzing was coming from the cushions of his couch, he simply couldn’t imagine Tatiana snapping at him, even if she was angry.

What he could still see clearly, however, was the fire—and the hurt—that had flashed through her eyes when he’d told her to forget about the two of them ever acting on their attraction.

Moving toward his couch, he hung up on her voice mail and hit the Call Again button. Moments later, when the buzzing started up again, he reached between the cushions and pulled out her phone.

She’d told him she was messy. Now he was starting to get a sense of just how far that messiness extended, if she’d managed to lose her phone in his office during the few minutes they’d actually been able to spend there the day before.

Ian put her phone in his pocket and stopped at his assistant’s desk. “I need to head out for a while.”

“Is everything okay? Where is Tatiana?”

Clearly, she was now as concerned as he was about the beautiful actress they’d both spent so many hours with in the past couple of days. “That’s what I’m going to go find out.” Bethany’s eyebrows went up in surprise. In the ten years she’d worked for him, he’d never missed a single planning meeting, even that week he’d had a 104-degree fever and could barely walk a straight line. “If she does happen to call or come by while I’m gone, tell her to call her cell phone, would you?” He walked past the full conference room without breaking his stride.

The ride in his town car from the office to her condo should have taken fifteen minutes, tops, but traffic really was bad today. Normally, he answered email on his phone to make up for the lost travel time, but he couldn’t stop thinking—and worrying—about Tatiana long enough to type in a coherent reply to so much as one.

She’d fallen asleep during that meeting yesterday, and he suddenly worried that she hadn’t come to the office because she wasn’t feeling well. If she was sick, would she know that she could call him or his parents or any of his brothers or sister for help?

Telling himself that he would have done the same for any of his siblings who were supposed to meet him over an hour ago, Ian told his driver to keep heading to Tatiana’s place, then got out to cover the rest of the distance on foot.

* * *

When Tatiana’s doorbell rang for her meeting with a model who was transitioning into acting and the young woman’s mother, she put aside her script and got up to answer it. She’d never made so many notes in the margins of a script...or gotten so little out of any of them.

Every line of dialogue she’d played out in her head this morning had sounded wrong, worse now than they had before she’d started to shadow Ian. It would be easiest to blame the screenwriter, but her problems with the part weren’t his fault. They were hers, and hers alone.

She knew she was overthinking it, and yet the more she tried to relax and trust that she’d figure out her character before filming began, the tenser she became. By this point, she’d been gripping and crumpling the pages so hard that they looked as if a teething infant had been gnawing on them.

Plus, even though she’d vowed the night before not to keep feeling weird about what she’d said to Ian in his office yesterday afternoon, she couldn’t stop thinking about the way he’d shut her out. And how much it had hurt.