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She was late that night, so took the Mercedes home. As late as it was, her cousin Astra was still out working. ‘Astra works too hard,’ she remarked to her other lovely cousin, Fennia.
‘She loves it,’ Fennia answered. ‘Had a good day?’
‘Given I nearly wrote off an Aston Martin with a Mercedes, can’t complain,’ she smiled, and shared the experience with her cousin over a sumptuous casserole Fennia had made while waiting for her two cousins to come home.
‘Men!’ Fennia opined.
‘I was in the wrong,’ Yancie pointed out.
‘I know! But—men!’
They laughed. They’d roomed together, the three cousins, at boarding-school. They’d shared each other’s secrets, mopped up—in the early days—each other’s tears when their mothers had hopped from relationship to relationship. Stable backgrounds—forget it! They’d had so many ‘uncles’, it had needed a young mind to keep up with it.
They’d tried hard not to be judgmental, but it had been just a touch embarrassing not knowing which ‘uncle’ had been coming with their mothers to pick them up at each term-end.
Aunt Delia was the rock they’d each leaned towards. Aunt Delia had been ten years old when her widowed mother had remarried, and in three years had produced three daughters. It was the younger girls’ dreadfully strict upbringing, Aunt Delia had explained, by a father who seemed to have few sensitivities, that was responsible for the way each of her half-sisters, in turn, had rebelled. Yancie’s mother apparently had been well ‘off the rails’ before Yancie’s father had been killed. Fennia’s mother was twice married—and on the lookout for husband number three. And Astra’s mother had twice divorced and was at present living with someone.
With that kind of a background, the three cousins had been sixteen when, fearing they might have inherited some wayward gene from their mothers, they had vowed that they were going to guard with everything they had against turning out like their mothers. They wanted nothing of their mothers’ explosive and sometimes quite awful relationships which—in the main—brought nothing but disaster.
To date, six years on, it hadn’t been a problem. In general the cousins had nothing against men. And so far, thank goodness, none of them had felt the smallest inclination to be wayward where men were concerned. Though it was true that if they ever went out on a date and did dip their toes in unchartered, experimental waters it was mainly with someone fairly safe whom they’d known for ages—usually the brother or relation of someone with whom they’d been at boarding-school.
Yancie drove to work the following morning growing more and more comfortable with her lot. She was still in frequent telephone contact with her stepfather—who now employed a housekeeper—but she still had no wish to return to live in the same house as Estelle. Yancie enjoyed living again with her cousins. Fennia, despite her business training, thoroughly enjoyed the job she had found working with toddlers in a day nursery, and Astra, the most academic of the three of them, was working all hours as a financial adviser, and loving it.
Yancie drove into the vast garages of the Addison Kirk Group and exchanged her uniform jacket and neat shoes for a pair of Wellingtons and an over-large overall.
The men she worked with were getting more and more used to seeing her about the place. But even though—as she unreeled the water hose prior to tackling the wheel arches on yesterday’s Mercedes—she knew she must look a sketch in her present outfit it still didn’t prevent one courageous colleague from commenting, ‘You still look terrific even in that get-up!’
She had no wish to be thought stand-offish. ‘You reckon?’ she answered.
‘There’s no substitute for style—and you’ve got it, plus,’ he stated, and looked so serious, she had to laugh—which caused him to ask her for a date.
Her laugh faded. ‘I never mix business with pleasure,’ she replied, and turned away to concentrate on turning the water on.
She was happily absorbed in her task when Wilf Fisher, one of the mechanics and a family man, came over to thank her for going out of her way to drop a spare electric kettle off to his mother yesterday.
‘It was a pleasure,’ she assured him, though it had been a fifty-mile round trip on which she headed as soon as she’d seen Mr Clements safely to his destination.
‘I couldn’t have got it to her before tomorrow otherwise,’ he explained again. ‘And, well, quite honestly, the wife does get a little bit fed up with me having to drive up there to sort the old dear out all the time.’
Yancie sympathised; she knew all about mothers and their urgent summonses. ‘Think nothing of it,’ she smiled. ‘Any time.’
Wilf went on his way, clearly feeling better for her offer of ‘Any time’, and Yancie, her smile fading, fell to thinking how, if she hadn’t been where she shouldn’t yesterday, then she wouldn’t have had that run-in—very nearly literally—with Mr Aston Martin.
She owned that the near calamity had truly unnerved her. For all she had made light of it to Fennia, and to Astra too when she had come home, Yancie had not been able to get to sleep last night for thinking about it. She had so nearly caused a very serious accident. And, to make matters worse, when the driver of the other car had followed her to remonstrate with her, what had she done but called him a grumpy old devil and accused him, totally falsely, of being in the wrong lane?
She had been in the wrong, Yancie knew that. Apart from the fact the ‘grumpy old devil’ wasn’t old at all—why couldn’t she get the memory of his face out of her head? She knew she’d know him again anywhere—not that she would see him again. She must have been in a panic yesterday when she had thought that he’d find out more about her from the car registration number. Records of that nature were difficult to access, weren’t they? And, in any case, everything about him had spoken of him being some kind of executive. This morning she doubted he’d have time to bother contacting the police about an accident that had never happened.
Yancie usually had quite a few driving jobs on a Friday. But this Friday, although she caught Kevin Veasey looking over to her several times, he didn’t have even one task for her.
She kept busy, however, washing cars, going for sandwiches or running any other errand anyone wanted doing. Then at three o’clock, to her delight, she got the plummiest job of them all. Word had come down, from the head of the whole outfit, no less, that her presence was requested on the top floor at four o’clock.
She had never driven Thomson Wakefield before. Indeed, she had never so much as clapped eyes on him. In fact, having worked for Addison’s for three weeks now, she had been beginning to suspect—to the blazes with any sex discrimination law—that old Mr Wakefield would die rather than let some female drive him.
But, not so! Why she thought Thomson Wakefield must be old, she couldn’t have said. Probably because it didn’t seem likely that someone still wet behind the ears would have the honour of holding his exalted position.
But what was she bothering her head with such thoughts for? He wanted her to drive him—her! Inwardly beaming, Yancie, after her car-washing activities, would have loved to have taken a shower before she presented herself on the top floor.
Not to worry, though; she had a fresh shirt in her locker, and a quick freshen-up of her make-up and a comb run through her shoulder-length ash-blonde hair, and she’d be as good as new.
It puzzled her when, at half past three, hair combed, fresh lipstick applied, she went and asked Kevin what car she would be driving and he replied he’d had no instructions yet about where she was going. His instructions were that she present herself at four.
‘I’ll sort a vehicle out when I come back,’ she decided. Given the choice, she fancied the Jaguar, but, of course, Mr Wakefield might have his own preference.
Yancie made her way to the top floor with her head filled with speculations on how far afield the chief man might want to be driven. Working overtime never bothered her, so if he had it in mind to be driven up to Scotland that was all right by her—though she’d have to ring either Astra or Fennia to tell them not to expect her home.
All of which was just so much flight of fancy, she smiled to herself as, finding the door she was looking for, she knocked lightly and went in.
‘Yancie Dawkins?’ enquired the woman in her mid-forties Kevin had told her was Thomas Wakefield’s PA.
‘That’s right,’ Yancie answered easily, her upbringing and education making her feel perfectly at ease in any company. ‘Mr Wakefield is expecting me.’
‘If you’d like to take a seat,’ Veronica Taylor suggested pleasantly.
Yancie took the seat indicated, and waited. And waited. Four-fifteen came and went—and still she waited. ‘Does Mr Wakefield know I’m here?’ she asked his PA.
‘Oh, yes,’ his PA answered, her tone as pleasant as ever.
Four-thirty came—and went. Wishing she’d brought a book to read, Yancie wondered if perhaps the great man had been held up on a phone call. For thirty minutes!
Another ten minutes passed, by which time Yancie had gone from feeling completely at ease to feeling just a shade uncomfortable. Okay, so he was a busy man, but…Be patient, he’s paying you, and you need this job. Hang it all, she loved her job. It wasn’t taxing on the brain—but who needed taxing? The freedom the job allowed was limitless. Indeed, it didn’t seem like a job of work at all.
Even so, having cautioned herself to be patient, when another few minutes of her having absolutely nothing to do went by, Yancie was considering telling Veronica Taylor to ring down to the garage and let her know when the old man surfaced. Then Yancie heard sounds on the other side of the door she’d assumed connected the two offices—and that reassured her that the old boy hadn’t expired while she waited.
She pinned a ‘Yes, sir’ look on her face—it cost nothing—and the door opened. So too did her mouth. More—her jaw dropped. Oh, no! It couldn’t be! She didn’t believe it! She just didn’t believe it.
Horrified, Yancie saw at once that ‘old’ Mr Thomson Wakefield, for this surely must be he, was not old at all! He was tall, dark-haired, had hard grey eyes—and was somewhere in his mid-thirties. She had thought she had never clapped eyes on him before—but she had! Even minus his Aston Martin—she recognised him.
Oh, mother! Yancie stared, wanting to die, at the grim, unsmiling countenance of the man standing there coldly surveying her—a man who clearly had no intention of making things easy for her. She tried hard to sort her brain patterns out, to think up some kind of defence. But what defence was there?
So much for her hiding the firm’s logo on her shirt yesterday—a fact he hadn’t missed, she was suddenly positive. This man—this man, who’d made it to the top of his tree—was, she all at once knew, a man from which little escaped. What he didn’t know, she just knew, he troubled to find out.
This man knew, as he’d known yesterday, exactly what her brooch had concealed. Though he hadn’t needed to see the Addison Kirk logo; he’d probably recognised the car she had been driving. In all probability he had only very recently—perhaps even the day before—been a passenger in it!
‘Mr Wakefield?’ she enquired, hoping there was some wonderful mistake and that this man—this man who yesterday, by his swift and skilful reactions, had managed to avoid what would have been an almighty collision—and earned a load of lip from her for his trouble—was not, by some miracle, the head of the Addison Kirk Group.
He didn’t bother to confirm but, ignoring her completely, instructed his PA, ‘Hold my calls for five minutes, please.’ She had called him a grumpy old devil—it was going to take that long?
He held his office door open for her to go through. Yancie stood up, uncertain whether or not to walk to the other door, and keep on walking. ‘I’ll attend to you later’, this man had yesterday threatened—he must have pegged her as employed by the company before he’d even said it. ‘Later’, Yancie knew, had just arrived—but she wasn’t the sort to run away.
CHAPTER TWO
YANCIE crossed into Thomson Wakefield’s office. It was large and, as well as having the usual office furnishings, also housed a comfortable-looking sofa, and a couple of easy chairs grouped around a low coffee table.
She had thought his dismissal of her from the company he headed would take seconds; she would have preferred it. But, no. Not the most talkative of men she had ever known, he pointed to a chair on the other side of his large desk.
She took the seat and while he sat facing her so she began to gather her scattered wits. Without question she was to be well and truly carpeted—she guessed few had called the head man a grumpy old devil—apart from all the rest that had gone with it—and got away with it. It surprised her that he hadn’t just instructed Kevin Veasey to sack her and be done with it.
That he hadn’t instructed Kevin gave her a ray of hope. She hung onto it. She loved her job. ‘I suppose you aren’t very interested in an apology,’ she opened politely when Thomson Wakefield, saying not one word, continued to study her as if she were some strange object on the end of a pin.
‘Are you sorry?’ he asked crisply.
Yesterday—forget it. Today—abjectly. To keep this job, she could be grovellingly sorry. Well, perhaps that was going a bit far—but she was prepared to go as far as pride would allow.
‘I don’t normally behave like that,’ she said prettily.
‘You mean you don’t normally very nearly cause a disaster, then refuse to accept blame?’
Yancie knew there and then that this man gave no quarter. A hint of a smile would do wonders for that unsmiling, sombre, see-nothing-to-laugh-at, though in actual fact quite good-looking face.
‘I was in the wrong—on both counts.’ She did a swift about-turn from her attitude of yesterday.
‘Your driving was appalling!’ Thomson Wakefield agreed stonily.
‘Not all the time!’ she dared to argue, saw that hadn’t gone down well, and added swiftly, ‘Up until that point, when I suddenly realised I was driving on an empty fuel tank, my driving was first-class.’ She’d be modest tomorrow—today her job was on the line—not to say by a gossamer thread.
He nodded as if conceding her point. ‘I’d been tracking you for some miles,’ he openly let her know.
That jolted her. Oh, why hadn’t somebody told her that the boss man had an Aston Martin? It might have clicked when she’d first become aware of the car yesterday, might have given her a chance to think she should take some kind of action. Well, possibly not. ‘You pegged me as one of yours miles before our—er—introduction?’ she enquired.
Thomson Wakefield studied her for some seconds without speaking, his glance taking in her almost white ash-blonde hair, her bluest of blue eyes, her dainty features and perfect skin.
‘You’re different from the rest of our drivers, I’ll give you that,’ he pronounced curtly, leaving her to guess whether he meant that she had started to ask questions in what was his interview, or if he meant her feminine features.
She opted for the latter. ‘I’m the only female driver this particular part of the group has,’ she commented. ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed as light dawned. ‘But you already knew that.’
‘It took but a few moments for my PA to discover which female driver in our livery was on that stretch of the motorway yesterday,’ he conceded coolly.
Uh-oh. If he knew that much, it was pretty certain he also knew that she shouldn’t have been anywhere near that section of the motorway yesterday! Yancie sensed even more trouble. Although, fingers crossed, he still hadn’t said those diabolical words she didn’t want to hear—You’re out. Though it could be, of course, that, after giving her a tongue-lashing—let him try—he had plans for Kevin Veasey to tell her she had washed her last car at Addison Kirk. Somebody had almost certainly instructed Kevin not to let her take any of the vehicles out that day; of that Yancie all at once realised she could be certain. Silence, just then, however, seemed the better part of discretion.
‘So,’ Thomson Wakefield went on, ‘perhaps, Miss Dawkins, you would care to tell me your version of the events yesterday. The events that led up to you almost demolishing not one motor vehicle, but two—leaving aside the perilous way you very nearly dispatched the two of us into the next world.’
Well, no, actually, I wouldn’t. But he was waiting. ‘It’s very kind of you to give me a fair hearing—er—in the circumstances,’ she smiled; he had no charm, so she tried him with some of hers.
Water off a duck’s back! Those grey eyes were staying on her, and were noting her smile, her lovely even teeth—her boarding-school had been most particular about teeth—but Yancie soon saw that not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash was he to be charmed.
‘So?’ He was waiting.
‘Well, as I mentioned, I suddenly saw that I was driving with a nearly empty tank.’ Silence, he was still waiting; it forced her to go on. ‘It was then that, simultaneously, I realised several things.’ Silence. Oh, bubbles to it! If she’d known for certain that she was going to be out of a job after all this, Yancie was sure she would have packed it in right then. But hope sprang eternal—so she ploughed on. ‘At the same time as realising I was driving on a nearly empty tank, I realised I wouldn’t have enough juice to get me back to London, let alone to pick up Mr C—’ Yancie broke off abruptly. Oh, grief, she shouldn’t have been driving to pick up Mr Clements, she should have been there, waiting. ‘S-so…’ Damn that stutter, this man was making her nervous—it had never happened before—and she didn’t like it. ‘And—er—and then, coincidentally, I saw the “services” sign and there just wasn’t time to think…’
‘Merely to act!’ Thomson Wakefield butted in sharply.
Who was telling this, her or him? With a start of surprise, Yancie realised that she was beginning to get angry. She seldom, if ever, got angry. Though, having been left cooling her heels for near enough forty-five minutes while waiting for this man to deign to see her, perhaps, she considered, getting a little angry was justified.
Though hang on a minute. Didn’t she truly want this job? Yes, she did. ‘You’re right, of course.’ She tried another charm-filled smile—that had absolutely, one hundred per cent not the slightest effect on the stern-faced individual opposite. ‘I was wrong, wrong, totally wrong to cross over into your lane the way I did,’ she added hurriedly. ‘It was a momentary lapse of attention. And I promise you I have never, ever, driven so carelessly before. Nor will I ever again,’ she further promised, having in fact learned a very salutary lesson yesterday, but hoping he didn’t think she was laying it on with a trowel.
Thomson Wakefield had nothing to say for many stretched, long seconds, and rather than let him gain the impression she was desperately toadying up to him Yancie said nothing more.
‘So you concede,’ he said at length, ‘that the error was yours yesterday, and not my keenness to “be the centre of attention” in my Aston Martin?’
Did he have to bring that up? That niggle of anger flickered again—and she realised, much though she wanted to hang onto her job, that she had grovelled all that she was going to. ‘I’ve admitted I was totally in the wrong,’ she answered, unsmiling. To blazes with trying to charm him—she guessed he lived on a diet of lemons and vinegar.
He was as unimpressed by her unsmiling look as he had been by her smiling one. ‘I see you’re wearing some identification today.’
Which meant, she was positive, that he’d taken note yesterday that she’d covered the firm’s logo on her shirt with a brooch. ‘My name tag was on my jacket yesterday,’ she replied pleasantly. Well, it had been—when she’d been driving Mr Clements. ‘My jacket was on the passenger seat,’ she explained.
She had thought he might keep on that theme, reprimand her for pinning the mother-of-pearl brooch over the Addison Kirk logo on her shirt. But, to her surprise, he left that particularly issue there, and commented instead, ‘You’ve been with us a very short while,’ and with a straight, cold, no-nonsense kind of look asked, ‘Do you enjoy your work, Miss Dawkins?’
It came as something of a relief not to have to lie or prevaricate—she had an idea that she wasn’t very good at either. ‘I love it,’ she smiled.
She saw his glance flick from her eyes to her curving mouth, but he was as unreceptive to her charm as ever. ‘Presumably you wish to keep your job?’
Yancie at once saw another glimmer of hope. By the sound of it he was more interested in giving her a grilling than dismissing her. ‘I do,’ she assured him sincerely.
‘Why?’ Just the one word.
Grilling? He was giving her a roasting! ‘I’ve never done anything but housekeeping before,’ she began to explain, by then certain that this very thorough man who knew she had been with the firm a very short while also knew that the previous occupation she’d listed on her application form was that of housekeeper. ‘I thought I’d like a change. And I really love my work,’ she smiled. She loved the freedom, the use of a car. ‘I am a good driver,’ she thought to mention. Though at his steady, grey-eyed stare she felt obliged to add, ‘Normally.’
‘You do appreciate that while you’re wearing the company’s uniform, and driving one of the company vehicles, that you are an ambassador for Addison Kirk?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed, ready to agree to anything as the feeling started to grow that, by the skin of her teeth, it looked as if she might be able to hang onto her job.
‘You also appreciate that any bad driving and subsequent insolence to another road user reflects extremely badly on the company?’
Oh, for Pete’s sake! Yancie could feel herself getting annoyed again—what was it with this man? Quickly, she lowered her eyes. She couldn’t afford to be annoyed. She couldn’t afford that this shrewd man opposite should read in her eyes that she’d by far prefer to tell him to go take a running jump than answer him. She swallowed hard on her annoyance.
‘Yes, I do appreciate that,’ she replied as evenly as she could—and raised her eyes to see, astonishingly, the merest twitch at the right-hand corner of his mouth—for all the world as though she amused him!
In the next moment, however, his expression was as stern and as uncompromising as it had been throughout the interview. ‘Good,’ he said, and a wave of relief started to wash over Yancie. Surely that ‘Good’ must mean ‘Right, you’ve had a wigging, now clear off and don’t do it again’. She consequently got something of a shock when, his expression lightening very slightly, he stared fully and totally imperviously into her lovely blue eyes, and enquired, ‘What were you doing on that stretch of the motorway yesterday?’
Crunch! With no little sense of disquiet, Yancie saw she had lost the tenuous hold she had on her job, as it suddenly went shooting from her grasp. And, because of it, her brain, usually lively and active, seemed to seize up. She should have been ready for this; but wasn’t.
‘I—er—I—er—paid for the petrol I used myself,’ she heard herself say idiotically. ‘I have authority to book petrol and oil to the company, but wh-when I stopped at that service station I paid…’ Her voice trailed off at the realisation that—oh, you fool—she had just, by her statement, confirmed that she hadn’t been on that stretch of the road on the firm’s business.
Thomson Wakefield looked over to her, but if he was waiting to hear more he wasn’t getting it. Her tongue, like her brain, had gone into reverse.
‘That was very fair of you, Miss Dawkins—to pay for the petrol,’ he commented silkily—but she suspected that sort of tone. And a second later knew she was right to suspect it when he continued, ‘And the milometer? How did you square that?’
Like she was going to tell him! Like she was going to tell him any of the ‘wrinkles’ that went on down in the transport section! How, when Wilf Fisher had asked her to make that fifty-mile round trip on unofficial business, he’d said to give the correct mileage but, if asked why the extra mileage covered, to state that her passenger had asked her to do an errand. Either that, or the said passenger had asked her to take him to see a friend or family member. Since their passengers were almost exclusively board members or someone very high up in the executive tree, nobody, according to Wilf, would dream of questioning why the top brass had needed to do the extra mileage. Certainly, no one in the transport section.
