Beyond All Reason

‘An hour or so after you left,’ she said.

‘Very nice girls,’ he murmured, and she had the sneaking suspicion that he was leading up to something, though what, she couldn’t quite figure out. ‘Have you known them a long time?’

‘Years. I grew up with Alice, in fact. I’m an only child and she was like a sister to me.’

‘Down-to-earth, sensible girl,’ he mused, leaning back in the chair, his long, lithe body dwarfing it.

‘Yes, well, we all are,’ Abigail said tartly. ‘Reality isn’t something you can escape from when you have to strive for every little foothold you gain in life.’

‘That sounds like philosophising to me.’

‘I guess it does,’ she answered with a reluctant grin. ‘I didn’t lead a deprived existence, I always knew that there would be food on the table, but that luxuries were out of the question. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘have I answered all your questions? Do you feel that you now know me? Can we return to work?’

‘There is all that paperwork on the takeovers to work through, isn’t there?’ he agreed, raising his eyebrows, as if only now giving that any thought at all.

‘Yes, there is!’ She didn’t want to sound eager, but on the other hand she had no desire to continue their fraught conversation. In fact, she would have happily taken on a charging bull with her notepad if it would have provided the necessary distraction from Ross’s intimate probing.

‘And you’re right, there’s a pile of paperwork waiting on my desk to be sifted. Usual stuff. Letters from clients, contracts that need signing, statements to look at. Routine things, but they do take up one’s time.’

‘Yes, they do!’ she agreed lustily.

‘But it can all wait, I think. At least until we have another cup of coffee.’ He held out his cup with barely concealed amusement and she threw him a furious look.

Playing games. That was what it was all about, she thought, rapidly refilling his cup and handing it back to him. Games that had been initiated from curiosity. She hated games. She had always been a serious girl, with her feet firmly planted on the ground, and her head where it should be, not spinning somewhere in the clouds.

The only man who had ever played games with her had been Ellis, with his smooth patter. Had his games been initiated through curiosity as well? Or boredom? Or maybe they had been the effect of their enforced late nights alone in an empty office? Whatever, they had taught her a bitter lesson, and she felt a sweeping resentment that Ross was toying with her as well.

Martin was not a game-player. He took life seriously as well. She had a fleeting mental image of him. Pleasant-looking, with neatly combed brown hair and blue eyes. A thoroughly nice chap, as her friend Alice had whispered to her at some point during the engagement party.

She wondered, in a flash of sudden insight, whether she hadn’t allowed herself to enter into a relationship with him because he was just so different from Ellis, because he was sincere at a time when sincerity was the one thing she desperately needed.

She had met him at a dinner party, where they had automatically paired off, being both single, and it had just developed from there. No heady passion, no thunder and lightning, just a quiet, unfussy friendship between two people who shared similar interests. But would she have responded to him if that disastrous romance only months previously had not left such a sour taste in her mouth?

The thought confused her.

‘The food was very good,’ he mused, holding her gaze until the unsteadiness that she had been feeling since they had entered the boardroom threatened to take over completely. ‘I never knew that you were such a good cook.’

Abigail sighed in resignation. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

They both knew what she meant. He had broken through the carefully controlled barrier that had always separated her private life from her working life by turning up at that engagement party, and he wasn’t about to desist until his perverse curiosity about her was satisfied.

‘I’m not a bad cook,’ she said. ‘Why are you suddenly so interested?’

‘What makes you think that I haven’t been interested in you from the start?’

It was a curious way to answer her question and for a minute it threw her into speechless silence. Her mind flew back over the past eighteen months, and snippets of conversation between them resurfaced from the depths of her subconscious, like little eels wriggling free from the rocks under which they had been firmly buried.

She remembered times when he had asked her about herself, about what she did in the evenings, what movies she liked, whether she ever went to the theatre. And she could remember her responses with equal clarity. The uninformative, abrupt answers, the firm closing of any door between them that he might have been trying to open.

The rational side of her knew that it was stupid to let what had happened between her and Ellis affect the way she looked at the rest of the male sex, she knew that the constant erosive effects of her mother were a legacy she should leave behind. But she couldn’t help herself. Ross Anderson, she had known from the very start, was precisely the sort of man she should steer clear of, and she had made sure that she listened to her head and obeyed its instructions.

He continued to stare at her in that unsettling way of his, until she said nervously, with a little laugh, ‘Of course I did far too much food! There was an awful lot left over. I shall be eating cold chicken and beef in various guises until doomsday.’

‘Sounds a dismal prospect,’ he murmured softly, tracing the rim of the cup with one long finger.

‘Do you do a lot of cooking?’ she asked awkwardly, wondering when the inquisition would come to an end.

‘Not if I can help it, no. In fact, I spend most of my eating time in various establishments. It suits me.’

‘Sounds an unhealthy habit,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘You’re probably lacking all the essential minerals and vitamins your body needs to grow.’ It had been a nervous quip, but once she had said it she groaned inwardly at her clumsiness. What on earth had taken possession of her? Where was all the cool self-control that had been in evidence ever since she had started working for him?

‘Do you think so?’ he asked seriously enough, although there was something wickedly amused in his voice.

She kept her eyes firmly averted from his body.

‘My mother was a great believer in eating up all one’s greens,’ she said by way of reply. ‘I guess her constant reminders about carrots and eyesight and broccoli and strong bones must have stuck.’ She tried a cheerful laugh. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t afford to eat out every night of the week even if I wanted to.’

‘An unhealthy habit,’ he agreed, ‘as you said.’ He looked down and idly rotated the coffee-cup in his hand. ‘Your boyfriend didn’t strike me as someone who craves expensive meals either.’ He hardly looked as though her response to that observation was of paramount importance. His voice was casual, off-hand, speculative. Still, she felt her body stiffen. Wasn’t it inevitable that he would drag poor Martin into the conversation? She frowned and wondered why she was now mentally referring to him as Poor Martin. Silly.

‘In fact,’ Ross was saying in the voice of someone who had rummaged through his mental database and unearthed some mildly interesting memory, ‘I was subjected to quite a lecture on the shameful, profligate ways of the rich.’

Abigail didn’t say anything but she gave an inward groan of despair. As soon as Ross had walked through the front door, capturing everyone’s immediate attention, Martin had seen it his duty to jostle for attention, and his method had been to talk much louder than he usually did and to hold forth on subjects with perverse dogmatism. It had been a side to him which she hadn’t seen before, but then again, she had never seen him in competition, however needless, with a man like Ross.

She had missed his lecture on the rich. She had, she thought, probably been clearing away the dishes and taking refuge in the kitchen. She could imagine it all too well, though. In fact, after all the guests had left, he had said to her in a disapproving voice, ‘Overpowering man, your boss. I can’t imagine working for someone like that, but then I guess he’s got what it takes to run a company like his.’ He had made that sound like a distasteful threat but she had been too exhausted by then to pay a great deal of attention to what he was saying.

Martin had a managerial job in a computer company, and he was quite happy with that. His ambitions did not soar to dizzy heights and he was fond of telling her that his parents were perfectly content with their lives, and they never had a great deal of money to throw around. His father was a retired schoolteacher and his mother helped out on a part-time basis at a local flower shop.

‘There’s more to life than money,’ she heard herself say stoutly. ‘Anyway——’ she glanced away from that hard-boned, intimidating face ‘—Martin’s not usually so…so…’ She searched around for the right phrase and finally said, ‘Outspoken. He’s a warm, generous person.’ Her voice had risen slightly and the sudden lift of Ross’s dark brows made her glare at him with irritation.

‘I’m sure he is,’ he replied as though her warm outburst had surprised him. ‘After all, you’re marrying the man.’

‘And what exactly is that supposed to mean?’ She stood up, flustered, not giving him time to respond. ‘I really think we ought to be getting back to the office,’ she said.

‘And since when do the secretaries dictate the orders?’ Ross enquired, with an edge of flint in his voice.

‘I apologise,’ she said calmly, breathing deeply to clear her head and restore her balance, ‘but I refuse to be subjected further to this dissection of my private life.’

He looked as though he was about to debate that point, but in the end he shrugged his broad shoulders and stood up, reaching out to hand her her notepad.

‘You’ll be needing this,’ he murmured with amusement, and their eyes met. To hide behind again, he might just as well have said, and she took it without rising to the bait.

Why did he have this effect on her? she wondered desperately. Why did he have this tight, strangling effect on her? Martin never did. They spent their time chatting, going for walks, and she never felt as if the world was closing in on her.

She put it down to dislike, and yet there were times when they worked so well together that she felt almost a mental bond with him. It was aggravating. Of course, she should never have accepted this job in the first place. She should have gone to work for some safe, fatherly figure with a receding hairline and a comfortable paunch. Someone whose presence didn’t threaten her. She would have too, if the job description and the pay package hadn’t been so irresistible.

They walked back to the office in silence. She could feel his presence alongside her, dark, oppressive, alarming.

‘Rebecca was quite taken with that boss of yours,’ Martin had said the night before. ‘Began giggling and batting her eyelashes the minute he came through that door with that I’m-better-than-everyone-else air about him.’ His voice had been laden with derision. ‘Still, he’s the sort of chap women fancy, I suppose. Bit too aggressive by half for you, though, I should think,’ he had added, looking at her for confirmation, and she had agreed fervently, although her wayward mind had conjured up an image of Ross naked, in bed, his muscled body relaxed, his mouth curved into that cynical, charming smile, and she had forced the image away with angry recoil.

Now that wayward mind of hers was threatening to invade her calm again, and she resolutely thrust it back.

Ross went straight through to his office, expecting her to follow, which she did, breathing a sigh of relief as he returned his attention to work.

He ploughed through documents on his desk, leaning forward to explain to her what he wanted done, listing meetings that he wanted set up within the next fortnight. She kept her head bent, taking notes, nodding, watching the strong forearms, the dark hair curling over the gold metal band of his watch with stubborn fascination.

‘These columns need updating,’ he told her, his eyes flicking over the paper. ‘The correct figures are attached at the back. You’ll have to go through them and replace whatever needs replacing.’

She craned forward to see what he was talking about and he said impatiently, ‘Come around the desk. You’ll twist your neck in that position.’

‘Yes, of course, Mr Anderson,’ she said neutrally, moving around to stand behind him.

He had rolled the sleeves of his shirt to the elbows and she stole a surreptitious glance at his powerful forearms. She wished that she hadn’t because immediately a disjointed thought rushed into her head: what had he and Fiona done last night? She imagined him caressing the tall, elegant blonde with those strong hands, and crossly shoved the unpleasant image to the back of her mind.

‘Look,’ he said, jabbing his finger at a row of black figures, ‘here. These are last month’s sales figures, which need replacing, but I want you to keep these graphs handy.’ He sifted through to the graphs and she leant forward slightly to follow what he was saying, frowning and trying to puzzle out how she could update sixteen pages of information without having to redo the whole thing from top to bottom.

She peered forward, her eyes intent, and the silky cowlnecked shirt gaped to expose a tantalising glimpse of pale breasts restrained by the small cups of her lacy bra. She didn’t notice. Her mind was busy trying to work out the complexities of the job in front of her. It was only when she glanced away from the report that her eyes fell on what Ross had already observed, judging from the expression on his face.

He had turned the swivel chair so that he was directly facing her and there was a lazy grin on his lips. She straightened quickly and looked at him, forcing herself to meet his gleaming dark eyes.

He clasped his fingers together, challenging her to say something, which she didn’t. His eyes drifted from hers and did a leisurely sweep of her body, resting briefly on her breasts, which hung heavy and aching under the stare. Her nipples pressed against the lacy material and she had to force herself not to surrender to the terrible, crazy thought of what it would feel like to have Ross touch them, with more than just his eyes.

What the hell was happening to her? Not even Ellis had ever awakened this depth of arousal in her. True, her body had willingly responded to his when he had made that first pass in the semi-darkness of his office, and true, over the ensuing weeks she had enjoyed their stolen caresses, the husky timbre of his voice as he had explored her body with his hands, sometimes at the most inappropriate moments, but what she felt now was so intense that she almost caught her breath.

She had thought that her fling with Ellis had been an aberration, a temporary insanity. Certainly one of the nice things about Martin was that he hadn’t pushed her into sex. They were both content to kiss, but he had not frantically tried to get her into bed, and that had been a relief. Desire was no basis for a long-term relationship. She had found that out the hard way.

‘I think I’ve got that,’ she said coolly, moving back around to her chair and not looking at him.

He was still smiling in a way that made her want to hit him, and eventually she said crisply, ‘And by the way, I still have that Haynes report to do. I had to phone around several people to get the information you wanted and some of them weren’t in when I called. I should have it ready and on your desk by this afternoon.’

‘Very enterprising,’ he said silkily. ‘What would I do without you?’

‘Find someone else, I expect,’ Abigail returned neutrally.

‘Easier said than done. But stupid speculating over a problem that doesn’t exist, isn’t it?’

She didn’t say anything. She was remembering Martin’s desire to start a family and the adjunct that when they did so she would leave work. At the time—and it had only been mentioned once—she had given it little thought, not wanting to immerse herself in details such as those when they weren’t even married yet.

‘Or does it?’ he asked softly, reading her expression, and she went red. When she wasn’t careful, when she wasn’t guarding her expression, this man could see right through her, to what she was thinking. A dangerous skill. ‘Married women usually lose interest in their jobs,’ he murmured, picking up his fountain pen and thoughtfully twirling it with his long fingers. ‘Their honeymoon seems to scramble their brains and they come back with their heads still in the clouds and their minds on children and nappies. You seem to have your head screwed on all right at the moment, despite the tired eyes and the late arrival yesterday, but——’ he looked at her ‘-—your lover strikes me as the sort of man who can’t wait to get the little woman behind the kitchen sink. Am I right?’

CHAPTER THREE

ABIGAIL’S hand was still poised over her notepad. It was beginning to ache, and she lowered it.

The hard cold sunshine streamed in through the large glass panes and threw Ross’s face into disturbing shadow so that she found it difficult to read his expression. Was he merely expressing curiosity or was he really worried that she was about to stack her papers neatly together on her desk and take her leave?

‘I don’t know what gives you that idea,’ she stammered, and he stopped twirling the fountain pen in his fingers, putting it on the desk so that he could lean back in his chair, looking at her through his lashes.

‘Isn’t he?’ he asked by way of response, and she felt like a butterfly pinned against the wall.

‘These letters,’ she suggested coaxingly, in an attempt to change the conversation, and his lips twisted into a crooked smile,

‘Won’t work, Abby,’ he said softly, and she felt herself begin to bristle from head to toe. She didn’t have to sit here and be cross-examined! Explaining her personal life to him wasn’t part of her secretarial duties. She hadn’t asked him to turn up on her doorstep the evening before, but he had anyway, and now he was acting as though the brief visit entitled him to make sweeping statements on her relationship with Martin. It was ludicrous!

‘I understand that you might be worried about my leaving this job when I get married——’ she began, and be cut in in a voice that took her by surprise,

‘When? Has a date been set?’

‘No, but engagements normally lead to weddings, don’t they?’ she said in a dulcet voice.

His jaw hardened, and he stood up, walking to the window to stare down. She could see the reflection of his face on the glass, the stiff line of his back. She saw it all with a sense of dismayed fascination.

‘Of course he’s not suited to you at all,’ he informed her, not turning around, and she stood up, the notepad dropping to the ground. Her hands were trembling and she couldn’t believe her ears.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard me.’ He swung around to face her and his black, brilliant eyes swept over her from head to toe. ‘If you marry that boy you’ll be making the biggest mistake in your life.’

‘He is not a boy!’ was all she could find to say to that, which sounded utterly inadequate.

‘He’s way too pale, insignificant for you. You’d be bored to death within a year.’

‘I don’t believe that I’m hearing this! I don’t think I asked for your opinion!’

‘No, but you should be grateful for it. I’m saving you a lifetime of regret.’

He sat back down in the black chair, for all the world as though nothing had happened, as though he hadn’t just behaved in the most arrogant, high-handed manner conceivable. She looked at him furiously.

‘Oh, sit down,’ he told her impatiently, and she made a choking sound. ‘We have work to do, have you forgotten?’

‘How dare you tell me how to run my life?’ she bit out, sitting down with her hands pressed into her lap. ‘What gives you the right?’

‘I’m not telling you how to run your life,’ he grated, ‘I’m merely offering you advice.’

‘When I want advice, I’ll ask for it. Thank you!’

He shrugged in a gesture of dismissal, as though ready to move on to something else now that he had voiced his uninvited opinions, and she picked up the notepad from the floor, very tempted to hurl it at him.

‘Right,’ be said, staring down at the papers in front of him, and before she could utter another syllable he began dictating, his voice hard and rapid, the words flowing easily as he flicked through the stack of paperwork.

‘You don’t even know him,’ Abigail said through gritted teeth, when there was a pause before he moved on to the next document, and he said easily, expecting her to return to the subject,

‘I know enough. Don’t tell me that you’d be content to play the suburban housewife with a weekly allowance and a handful of screaming children.’

‘Lots of women do.’

‘But not you. You have an inner fire, Abigail. It’s there lurking-just beneath the calm surface.’

‘Thank you, Dr Anderson, for that valuable piece of insight. When can I expect your bill?’

He laughed. ‘Point proved. I don’t see that acid sense of humour going down at all well with the boyfriend.’

‘His name is Martin. And you’re never wrong, are you?’

‘I try not to make a habit of it.’ He began on the second letter and she stared down at the notepad, copying quickly as he spoke while her mind furiously tried to grapple with what he had just told her. Of course he didn’t know Martin, didn’t even know her, come to that, so as an onlooker he was highly unqualified to make sweeping generalisations about either of them. She knew that she should simply disregard every word he had just said, but anger tugged away at her, and as soon as he had stopped dictating she took up where she had left off.

‘Martin and I are very fond of each other,’ she said defensively, and he threw her an amused, mocking look.

‘I’m very fond of my cleaner, but I wouldn’t propose marrying her. So——’ he looked at her with gleaming eyes ‘—very fond of each other, are you?’

‘Yes, we are! I know that might not seem like a great deal to you, I know that that must seem the most boring thing on earth, but marriage is all about being fond of your partner.’

‘Oh, is it?’ He appeared to give this some thought, then he shook his head and drawled, ‘And I always thought a hint of excitement was a good thing.’

She knew what he was up to, of course. He was trying to provoke a reaction in her, trying to antagonise her into saying something which would compromise herself. She knew his tactics. She had sat in enough high-level meetings with him and had seen that particular ploy in action. He would needle in that cool, cynical way of his until he got the reaction he wanted, then he would pounce. She stared with intense fascination at the little scribblings on her notepad and didn’t reply.

‘I’ve jotted some notes in the margins of this report you did a couple days ago,’ he said, reaching across to slide it towards her, and she took it, still in silence.

‘Martin can be very exciting,’ she crossly heard herself say, ‘not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Of course,’ he murmured soothingly, and she wanted to hit him.

‘He’s a very warm, caring human being!’ she expanded in a high, indignant voice, her face hot.

‘I’m sure.’ The black eyes held hers for a moment, then he lowered them but not before she saw the amused glitter in them. Ha, ha, she thought, hilarious. What a riot, affording me the wisdom of his great mind.

‘Is that all?’ she asked stiffly. ‘May I leave now?’

He ignored her. ‘He told me that he’s looking forward to getting married, to settling down. He hopes to make it to accounts manager within the next two years. This was after he had delivered his informative lecture on the disgrace of being ambitious or having money.’