Kitabı oku: «The Boss's Proposal», sayfa 3

‘I don’t think I could bear working for a man who considered himself God’s gift to the female sex,’ Vicky informed him coldly.

‘I don’t believe that’s quite what I—’

‘Someone who assumes that every woman in the room is eager and panting to climb into bed with him, someone who can’t exist without a comb in his jacket pocket and a sporty car to prop up his self-image—’

‘You seem to have totally misunders—’

‘Swanning around, giving orders in between gazing at himself in the nearest mirror and then when all’s said and done assuming that it’s his right to do as he likes with whomever he wants, because he happened to be born with a passably good-looking face—’

‘Hold on!’

Just at that very instant the telephone rang, and Vicky leapt up out of her chair and hurried into the hall to answer it. She was still trembling from her tirade because his passing remark had brought back a flood of memories, memories of Shaun and his serial infidelity, his addiction to proving his power over women, his swaggering, arrogant assumption that it was his right to break any female’s heart if he so wanted. Her brain was still whirring around in angry circles when she heard Pat Down’s voice down the line and it took her a few seconds to register that Chloe would be dropped back earlier than planned.

‘I’m ever so sorry, Vicky, but my mum’s been rushed to hospital with a heart attack so I shall drop her off in about ten minutes, if that’s all right with you.’ The voice down the line was just managing to bear up.

‘Ten minutes…’ Vicky repeated on a sharply indrawn breath.

‘Sorry.’

‘No, no, that’s absolutely fine. Do you need me to hang on to Jess for you?’ But no, she would take Jess with her to see her mother and she’d be by in a little under ten minutes.

Vicky hung up and flew into the sitting room like a whirlwind.

‘It’s time for you to go!’ she ordered him frantically. ‘I…I…I’ve suddenly remembered a very important appointment. In fact, that was the person in charge…calling to see whether I was still interested…in the job…’

‘On a Saturday?’ Max asked, not moving.

With a groan of desperation, Vicky grabbed his arm and began pulling him to his feet. Bad move. It appeared to make him even less inclined to vacate the sofa.

‘Get up!’ she finally shouted. ‘Can’t you see I’m in a rush?’

‘And I’m trying to figure out why. No respectable company drags interviewees in on a weekend. Have you applied for something shady, perhaps? Some seedy stripping job in a nightclub somewhere?’

‘Do I look like the sort of girl who’s willing to strip in a nightclub?’ she virtually screeched, hustling him to the sitting room door and attempting to shoo him out in the style of a chicken trying to get rid of a wolf from its parlour.

‘Give me a minute to think about that one,’ he said slowly, stopping in his tracks to her intense frustration. She glared at him and he grinned back at her.

It was the first time he had really smiled and the effect was breathtaking. Literally, it made her gasp. It changed the hard contours of his face and gave him a boyish, sexy look that was as far removed from the plastic smiles of his brother as chalk was from cheese.

‘Not funny,’ she said sharply.

‘Take the job?’

In under five minutes there would be the sound of a car stopping outside the house, the ring of the doorbell and her daughter would come bouncing through the front door, bringing her infectious smile, her rosy cheeks and a seething nest of potential catastrophes.

She had to get rid of him.

‘All right! Now will you please leave my house so that I can get on with…with…with my life?’

He straightened up and looked at her with a shadow of surprise. ‘Starting Monday?’

‘Starting Monday,’ she agreed, hopping in frustration from one leg to another.

She managed to propel him to the front door, which she swiftly pulled open, breathing a sigh of relief that a small blue car wasn’t hurtling down the lane in the direction of her cottage.

‘Report to Personnel,’ he told her, ‘then come to my office and we’ll take it from there.’

‘Goodbye!’

‘And perhaps you could do something about your eccentric line in conversation?’

‘I shall see you on Monday!’ She urged him out of the door and watched as he headed down the short path to the road, making sure that his car was safely out of sight before she closed it back. When it was, she slammed shut the door and leaned heavily against it, wondering what the hell she had just done.

It had been imperative that he left the premises before Chloe returned, she argued silently to herself, and what better method of shifting him than to agree to his proposals? Even though the logical, rational side of her brain freely accepted this as a worthwhile argument, the rest of her was appalled at the hole she had dug and into which she had recklessly jumped.

She told herself that she would turn up on Monday and work for a few weeks, then apologetically make her excuses and leave. She mentally listed some of the plus points that could be gained from her manoeuvre. This required more thought, but in the end she decided that, aside from the financial windfall to be had, she would also be able to keep an eye on him and allay his suspicious interest in her which she had sensed from the very beginning. Wasn’t it a good idea for her to be in place so that she could make sure that he didn’t start telephoning Australia and asking his friend about her? For starters he would learn about the pregnancy. Her connection with his brother might take longer, because she had been adamant about keeping her work life distinct from her private life and had discouraged Shaun from ever showing up at her workplace once they had started dating. But he could find out if he persevered. At least she would be on the spot to laughingly fend off any questions and deter him from snooping. She’d seen the curiosity her odd behaviour had aroused in him and she suspected that he was the sort of man to whom any intrigue was simply something to be unravelled. He could probably do The Times crossword in a matter of seconds.

Less palatable was the unpleasant suspicion that something about him had got under her skin. She’d learned so many lessons from Shaun, enough to put her off men for a lifetime. She would rather shoot herself than admit any kind of attraction to his brother.

In the end, though, she now had a problematic situation which she would have to deal with in whatever manner was at her disposal.

CHAPTER THREE

VICKY spent the remainder of the weekend repenting for her reckless agreement to work for Max Forbes. The reason why she had rushed into her hasty decision was rapidly forgotten under the onslaught of serious drawbacks. By the time Monday morning rolled around, she found herself slipping on her customary secretarial garb with a leaden heart which was only partially alleviated when, once at the office, she was informed by the personnel officer that Max only worked part-time at this particular office. When the young girl mentioned his name, her eyelids fluttered and her cheeks turned bright red. Vicky wondered sceptically whether all the female employees of the company responded in the same way to the mere mention of their boss. If that was the case, then she would have more to contend with than the dangerous fragility of her situation—namely overriding nausea at being surrounded by mesmerised females from nine in the morning to five-thirty at night.

No wonder he rated himself as such a potent sex symbol. She almost clicked her tongue in annoyance.

‘I don’t suppose he’s in London now, is he?’ she asked the personnel officer, whose name was Mandy and whose fashion statement included disconcertingly long and brightly painted blue fingernails.

‘Actually, I believe he’s set aside his morning to show you the ropes.’

‘Oh, grand!’ Vicky exclaimed with dismay, which she hid under a scarily bright smile. The smile remained plastered to her face as she was shown the now familiar route up to his office, only slipping when Mandy deserted her and she found herself pushing back the door to his sanctuary.

After a break of a day and a half, during which the image of him had not left her head for longer than five minutes at a stretch, the sight of him now, in the flesh, was even more alarming than she remembered.

Had he been so big and muscular when she had seen him on Saturday or had he somehow grown in the interim? Even sitting behind the desk, reclining in his leather chair, his size seemed to spring out at her and reduce her to nervous, powerless pulp. He had discarded his jacket; his blue and white pin-striped shirt was cuffed to the elbows.

‘Ah,’ was his first word, which smacked of satisfaction, ‘I wasn’t too sure that you’d make it here. Good trip in? I gather you’ve already been through the nitty-gritty with Mandy. I’ve set aside a couple of hours to fill you in on some of the more straightforward bits of the job, then I’m afraid I’ve got to leave you to get on with it. So sit down and I’ll begin briefing you on your duties.’ He paused to recline comfortably in his chair. ‘First of all, the coffee machine—it’s in the corner of your office outside…’

Vicky, who had primly fished out a notepad and pen from her voluminous handbag, fixed him with a long, beady stare and he grinned at her.

‘Just a joke.’

‘I do realise that tea-and coffee-making is included in my job specification, but I hope it only plays a minor role.’ She heard herself with a small, inner groan of disgust. The more addled he made her feel, the more unnatural her patterns of speech seemed to become, and right now she was feeling very, very addled.

‘Very minor,’ he agreed gravely. ‘In fact, I do frequently make myself a cup of coffee and it’s been known for me to make one for my secretary as well.’ He rested his elbows on his desk and brought the tips of his fingers together so that he could survey her over them. It made her feel like a specimen in a laboratory.

‘Have you maintained an office in London?’ she asked politely. ‘I ask because Mandy in Personnel mentioned that you split your time between here and London.’

‘And New York, Madrid and Glasgow…I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to read any of the company literature…’ He got up and strode towards a glass-fronted sleekly black bookcase that adorned one wall of the office and extracted a handful of glossy brochures, which he proceeded to hand over to her; then, instead of returning to his swivel chair, he perched on his desk, so that she had an uncomfortably close-up view of his muscular thighs, stretching taut against the fine wool fabric of his trousers.

‘No, I haven’t.’ She idly flicked through one and her hand stopped as she saw a picture of Shaun standing next to Max and between them a man who could only have been their father. The blood in her veins started to curdle.

‘My brother,’ Max said shortly, following her gaze.

‘The three of you founded the business?’ Her voice was devoid of expression, even though she discovered that she was surprisingly curious about what his version of past events would be, because there always were the two sides to every story, but a shutter had dropped over his eyes.

‘Not quite. You can look at that stuff later, perhaps take it home with you. For now, I’ll fill you in on some of the projects we’re working on.’ He nodded at the door, inviting her to precede him out of his office and into hers which lay just through the door and which housed the filing cabinets. Like all the rest of the furniture in both the offices, the cabinets were all in black wood with chrome handles.

‘Normally, my last secretary would have been responsible for taking you through this, but in this case, there’s been no last secretary and the last temp didn’t seem to grasp the meaning of the words “filing system”, so she would have been of no use whatsoever. Anyway—’ he gesticulated towards three cabinets ‘—the files are kept in there and should be in alphabetical order, although I’d advise you to go through the lot of them yourself. Louise found the alphabet a little exhausting. Those files over there are in the process of being looked at for whatever reason and those need updating. Your computer is over there and I’m afraid there’s a stack of work for you to get your teeth into.’

‘What kind of work?’ Vicky idly went to the large U-shaped desk and flicked through the top file, which seemed comprised of lengthy technical documents and detailed price quotations.

‘You’ll naturally also be expected to handle all my business engagements and update my diary at least twice a day. Oh, yes, and meetings—I’ll expect you to come along to some of the more important ones to take notes. Occasionally, there may be a social function I’ll want you to attend.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ Vicky said quickly, without thinking.

‘All things in life are possible,’ he told her softly, moving across to her. ‘How else can anyone ever achieve anything in life, if they automatically assume that some things are not possible? Why will the occasional social function be out of the question? Is there any particular reason?’

‘No. I just thought…that…social functions might require a more glamorous escort than your secretary…’

‘Mmm. I see.’ He left it there, neither pressing the point nor, she noticed, denying her claim to plainness. ‘Now, files.’ He moved smoothly round the desk so that he was facing the computer, switched it on and then beckoned her across to join him.

Standing next to him was an exercise in nerve-tingling embarrassment. He dwarfed her. Shaun had somehow never seemed that tall. Maybe he’d just been a little shorter, just as he’d been a little thinner, his features a little more blurred. Perhaps the mould, having been used once, had not quite managed to replicate itself the second time around.

‘Familiar with this program?’

Vicky nodded.

‘Good, then you’ll have no problem finding your way around. You’ll have to go through those files and update the computer, and there are one or two problems on a couple of them—discrepancies with the fees, order problems. I’m afraid you’re being thrown in at the deep end but you’ll have to find your way around the best you can, because the position requires a fair amount of initiative and responsibility. Tell me about your job with James?’

He strolled over to the coffee machine, and while he waited for it to kick into action he turned to face her with his arms folded.

Vicky groped her way for an adequate and truthful account of what she had done as far as work went without implying socialising of any nature. In fact, she had socialised a fair amount with James and his wife Carol, and had even babysat for them on a few occasions. ‘I started off as his secretary, but I’m a pretty quick learner and, quite soon, I was being given a fair amount of responsibility. Looking after some of the smaller, more problematic customers, liaising with the service people as well as doing the usual administrative and typing stuff.’

‘So you should have no problem coming to grips with all this…’ He nodded vaguely at the files. ‘I knew it. I took one look at you and knew that you’d be able to do the job with your eyes closed.’

‘I haven’t even started, as yet,’ Vicky informed him warily. Heaping praise on her before she even got going was not so good, considering her long-range plan to quit the job as soon as was possible, without arousing needless suspicion.

‘I think the first thing we need to sort out is my diary for the next month…’ He went into his office and returned several seconds later with an electronic diary and a conventional leatherbound one, which he handed to her. ‘Right. Now, let’s start with tomorrow…’ He pulled across one of the spare chairs from in front of the desk and strategically positioned it next to her so that, while he was no longer towering over her, he was now so close to her that with the flick of his pen on the keypad, his forearm casually but insistently brushed hers. She kept flicking side-long, uncomfortable glances at the fine dark hairs sprinkling his powerful arms. He seemed so much more real than his twin, so much more substantial.

He began listing, very rapidly, his plans for the day, which she checked against the entries in the black diary. Some of the handwriting was poor enough to require several long seconds of tortuous interpretation and, after one particularly puzzling entry, she glanced up to find him looking at her.

‘I’m beginning to understand what you meant by problems with temps,’ she said with the ghost of a smile. ‘If the filing system bears any resemblance to the handwriting in here, then I shall have several hours sorting out some basic stuff before I can even start to do my job.’

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Up close, as he was, he noticed that her skin was as flawlessly smooth as it appeared to be from a distance, and her hair, severely tied back, still managed to break free around her ears so that the tiny tendrils gave her the look of a saint whose halo had slipped to one side. Feeling his arm brush against hers, a passing touch that he could have avoided but chose not to, filled him with an almost sinful sense of excitement. He’d never known how powerful female modesty could be. Here she was, dressed in three times as much clothing as the woman he had last dated—Lord, three months ago—and yet the effect of all those clothes on him was positively suffocating. She had removed her jacket, but her blouse was buttoned up prudishly to the neck with small pearl buttons of the type worn by grannies. He could indistinctly make out the outline of her bra underneath. He wondered, and this sent a little electric shock to his groin, what it would feel like to undo those prim buttons, fingers touching skin underneath the shirt, anticipation building to a frenzy. He imagined her hands loosely tied to the bedstead with silk scarves while he undressed her, taking his time and exploring each exposed bit of skin with his tongue. He would drive her wild, enjoying her uncontrolled writhing. Naturally she would plead with him not to stop, to rip aside her bra and relieve her aching breasts with his mouth.

When he glanced her way, it was to find her looking at him as though she could read every salaciously impure thought in his head, and he flushed darkly. Good heavens! The woman was his secretary!

‘Believe me now?’ he asked roughly, sounding, he thought, the Big Bad Wolf when confronted with Little Red Riding Hood. He grinned to himself at the unconscious parallel, because right now he would have liked nothing better than to eat her up, every inch of her defensive little body, starting with her pale, slender neck and moving all the way down to the patch of hair between her thighs that would naturally be daintily shielded behind granny-style underwear.

He cleared his throat and dragged his thoughts back to meetings, calendars and business appointments. She was asking him something and he made a huge effort to concentrate and reply in a normal voice.

‘I see you’re in London twice this week,’ she was saying, gazing down with satisfaction at the diary entries. Two business meetings in Temple, another in Uxbridge.

‘So I am. Perhaps—’ he frowned ‘—I ought to cancel those and spend a bit more time here, until you get accustomed to the running of the office.’

Vicky was quick to sit on any such suggestion. ‘There’s no need for that.’ She realised that his recumbent arm was too close for comfort, and she discreetly but firmly edged hers away. ‘In fact, having a couple of days on my own will be perfect for me to fill myself in on the files and the customers and also catch up with some of that backlog of typing.’

He could see her trying very hard to look regretful and felt a sulky and childish tug on his masculine pride that the thought of spending time along with him in the office was obviously a fate only slightly better than death, as far as she was concerned. What appealing work experience lay in store for both of them at this rate!

‘Well, you can’t miraculously work your way through everything on your own. I’m going to have to answer a few questions, presumably.’ Now, he sounded piqued. The cool, self-confident, self-assured, mature and winningly charming adult seemed to have been replaced by a sulking thirteen-year-old. Where that emotion had come from he had no idea as it had never been in evidence before.

‘I realise that,’ Vicky said, briefly looking at him and then resuming her perusal of the file in front of her. ‘Whenever I need you to help, I shall ask. I think finding my way around the business and what you do here is going to take the longest. I’ll read up all the company literature, but Mrs Hogg—’

‘Ms Hogg.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Ms Hogg. Geraldine prefers good, healthy outdoor pursuits with her formidable sister to the company of men any day of the week.’ He grinned and she reluctantly grinned back.

‘Well, as I was saying…’ What had she been saying? ‘Ms Hogg didn’t get much of a chance to fill me in on this particular branch of your company. She mentioned that it’s a fairly new concern—’

‘But growing at an almost unprecedented rate,’ he carried on for her, ‘hence my involvement. Virtually all of our customers are new to us and have to be treated with kid gloves, aside from one or two whose mother company is based in London and whose subsidiaries coincidentally operate in this general area. I’m pretty busy for the rest of the day, but I can always pop over to your house some time after wor—’

‘No!’ Vicky heard the panic in her voice with alarm. The important thing was to lull any suspicions he might have of her to sleep, not stoke them into a frenzy by overreacting to obvious situations. ‘I mean, I have very…very definite views on business and pleasure.’

‘Does that mean that you shed your working personality the minute you walk out of the office building?’ He stared at her narrowly, head cocked insolently to one side, as though conjuring up a mental picture. ‘Intriguing. As the office doors swing shut behind you, do you wrench the clips out of your hair and hitch up your neat, little tailored skirt?’

‘Of course I don’t,’ Vicky said coolly. ‘I just think that it’s important to separate leisure time from work time, or else the two begin flowing into one another and somewhere down the road you realise that there’s no part of your life that isn’t free from work.’ Neat, little tailored skirt? How could four small words be invested with such a derogatory meaning? He made her sound like an old age pensioner and, without thinking, she let her fingers flutter to the top button of her shirt, firmly done up, protecting her from unwanted attention. She had never been like this. There had been a time, not that long ago, when she’d used to wear short skirts and pretty, attractive tops, but that had been before she had learnt that prudery was the only defence against Shaun’s lecherous hands. The sight of her primly buttoned up had sometimes been enough to deter him from invading her body and she had grown accustomed to the way of dressing until now, she realised with a start, most of her clothes conformed to the prissy, unadventurous image she had meticulously cultivated over time.

‘But is it such a good idea to compartmentalise your life? Don’t you find that a little unhealthy?’ He’d pushed his chair a little way away from hers to enable him to scrutinise her face, which was now going a deep shade of pink. It occurred to her that they had successfully managed to veer away from the point of their conversation, which was namely to brief her on office business, and she struggled to find a way of bringing it back to the matter in hand. While she was busy grappling with the problem, he filled the brief silence with his sudden interest in her private life.

‘Reminds me of a split personality,’ he said thoughtfully, and she felt her hackles rise at the insinuation.

‘I assure you I’m perfectly normal,’ Vicky informed him in a voice that suggested closure of the topic. She meaningfully peered at the file in front of her, even fetching out a piece of paper to stare at it with frowning concentration, though her eyes weren’t registering much of what was written there.

‘I never implied that you weren’t!’ he protested in an offended voice. ‘I just think that it’s perfectly natural for work to spill over sometimes into leisure.’

‘Well, perhaps you’re right,’ Vicky said with a shrug. ‘Are you contactable when you’re in London or would you rather problems waited until you returned here?’

‘You can e-mail me any time, or telephone, of course, although I’m not often in the office.’ He allowed an acceptable period of silence to stretch between them, then he said in a considering tone, ‘Do you know, it’s been my experience that women who are fanatically guarded about their private life usually have something to hide…?’

He had unknowingly hit jackpot. He could sense it in the stillness of her body, which only lasted a matter of seconds but was enough to tell an entire story of its own.

‘I have nothing to hide,’ she informed him icily, ‘and at the risk of sounding impertinent on my first day here, I should just like to say that I resent your prying into my private life…’

‘I didn’t realise that I was prying into your private life, I thought that I was making a general statement…’ Her tone of voice didn’t appear to have put him off his stride and she saw, with dismay, the gleam lurking seductively in his eyes. ‘Of course—’ he dropped his eyes and inspected his nails briefly ‘—you’re entitled to your privacy, and if you have something that you’re ashamed of…’

‘I am not ashamed of anything!’

‘Okay! Okay!’ It was the oldest trick in the book and she knew it. He was making a show of backing away from confrontation while simultaneously appearing doubtful of her protestations of innocence.

‘What could I have to be ashamed of?’ she couldn’t help demanding indignantly, and this was met by a theatrical shrug of his broad shoulders.

‘Nothing.’

Vicky made the inarticulate sound of someone whose feathers have been severely ruffled.

‘Unless,’ he said as an afterthought, ‘it’s something to do with a man.’ He flicked a quick look at her to see how this one registered but her normal serenity was well and truly back in place. ‘You know, you’re entitled to have whatever relationships you want, be they with married men…’

Vicky, recognising that he was fishing for information, maintained her studious silence, chewing her lip as she peered down at sheaths of paper in a business like manner.

This was what she had feared most, this willingness on his part to cheerfully overstep the mark. He had no respect for anyone’s limits. If he got it into his head that jumping over them was what he wanted to do, then jump over them he would, and with a grin on his face.

‘Or even married women…’ He didn’t seriously believe that that was a possibility but he decided to voice his thoughts anyway, if only to keep this enticing conversation on the go. As expected, she shot him a dry look and didn’t bother to say anything.

‘Or perhaps it’s a toy boy? These things do happen…’

‘I’m not old enough for a toy boy,’ Vicky pointed out with a sigh of resignation. ‘No married men, or women, for that matter, no toy boy, no geriatric in his seventies, no skeletons, in fact…’ She sounded pleasingly truthful and couldn’t resist a smug smile in his direction.

‘Everyone has a skeleton or two,’ he said quickly, and she raised her eyebrows at him.

He wasn’t going to get anywhere with this one. She was now looking at him with crisp efficiency, raring to get going with whatever folder she’d been fingering for the past fifteen minutes. He admitted defeat, and for the next two hours they worked alongside one another. Instead of wasting time going through files individually, he dictated letters, briefly giving her a lowdown on each account as he covered them.

She picked things up fast. He’d spent so many months battling with various levels of incompetence that it was sheer bliss to work with someone who was capable of following his pace. Her questions were clipped and relevant, she grasped what she needed to do without requiring a lengthy process of repetition, and by the time Maria on Switchboard began putting through his calls once again he felt confident enough to leave her on her own to get on with things.

Through the office partition, he could see a sliver of her at her desk, one hand holding a pen, which she lightly tapped as she inspected whatever she had just typed onto the computer. She had shoved her hair into a bun, and ever so often she would absent-mindedly reposition her rebellious curls.

Max rolled his chair a few vital inches to the left, without altering the tenor of his conversation on the telephone, and guiltily watched her as she worked. It made him feel a bit like a lecher so, after a few minutes, he rolled himself back in front of his desk and made an effort to swivel towards the window behind him so that he no longer felt like a voyeur.

He only realised how keyed-up he was to her presence when she politely peeped into his office forty minutes later with a question.

‘I’ve been going through the filing cabinets,’ she began, and he indicated the chair for her to sit.

‘And…?’

‘It appears that two files have been made of this account, and filed under separate names.’ Vicky handed him the files, which boasted two different sets of handwriting. ‘Problem is that the information in both doesn’t correspond, even though it’s all to do with the same thing. It looks as though one of your secretaries dealt with something three months ago and then misfiled the folder. When the problem recurred, her replacement started a new file and basically told the client the complete opposite of what had been said to him previously.’ She stood up and leaned forward, flicking open both the files and then carefully indicating what she meant. One long strand of wayward hair escaped and skirted her neck, coiling in a perfect red-gold corkscrew curl.