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What was it, she wondered, about this man’s eyes? They were quite cool, quite calculating, but somewhere in the wintry depths there was also something else—something offputtingly sexual.
‘I never got around to asking you whether you have any questions about the company,’ he said, ‘or, for that matter, about your role in it. Have you?’
‘What did your last secretary do?’ Francesca asked ‘I mean, the one who left three years ago. What duties did she have?’
He looked at her with a trace of irony on his mouth. ‘Do you intend to fill her shoes?’ he asked. ‘No one else has managed that.’
‘I’m willing to give it a try,’ she said evenly. ‘I know you don’t think very much of me—’
‘Oh, but I think your secretarial skills are surprisingly as good as your father described.’ His voice was cool and his choice of words blunt enough to leave her in no doubt as to where the remainder of his thoughts lay.
Francesca kept her temper. She was normally an even-tempered person, but then, admittedly, no one had ever been quite so abrupt to her before. She had only been in the job one day but already she was beginning to realise exactly how cushioned her life had been. When she walked into the building she was surrounded by people purposefully going somewhere, hurrying to jobs because, no doubt, they needed the pay-packet that came with employment.
‘Irene,’ he said into the silence, ‘was my right-hand man. She not only typed, she also knew the workings of this company almost as well as I do. When I asked for information on a client she could provide it almost without needing to go to a file for reference.’
‘Sounds a paragon,’ Francesca said wryly.
‘I think it’s called devotion. The assortment of secretaries I’ve had since then have been in the job simply for the money.’
‘Which,’ she pointed out, ‘is one thing, at least, you can’t accuse me of.’
‘No,’ he returned without emphasis, ‘but your lack of need to earn a living does mean that it’s fairly immaterial what you bring to this job, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘You’re not prepared to give me a fighting chance, are you?’ she asked, and he shrugged, neither confirming or denying that. He simply continued to look at her steadily, shrewdly, with cool judgement in his pale eyes.
‘How did you start all this?’ she asked, changing the subject because she didn’t want to let him get under her skin. Again.
‘With a loan from the bank,’ he replied drily, as if it had been a particularly stupid question because the answer was so self-evident.
‘And after the loan from the bank came what?’
‘A small outlet in the Midlands. Our products were good, though, and we moved in at a fortuitous point in the market. Any more questions?’
He waited politely and she clamped her teeth together. It wasn’t difficult to tell that he found her a bore. She stood up, shaking her head, and when she looked back towards him as she left his office his attention was already elsewhere, his face frowning as he skimmed through something on the computer on his desk.
She quietly closed the door behind her, feeling for almost the first time in her life that she had been politely rebuffed.
When you thought about it, she decided, it was funny—funny to have the shoe on the other foot, not to be the focus of admiring attention. Except that she didn’t much feel like laughing, even though she knew that her reactions were childish and that she would have to stop acting like a damned spoiled brat who sulked when she was not in the limelight. She had never before considered herself a spoiled brat and it was silly acting like one, she told herself, just because Oliver Kemp, a man whom she didn’t like anyway, found her uninteresting.
At ten-thirty the outer door opened and one of the managers strolled in. He was in his mid-thirties, fair-haired, and the minute he saw her his eyebrows flew up.
‘Well,’ he drawled, darting a quick eye at the connecting door and then obviously deciding that the coast was clear, ‘where have you been hiding yourself, my lovely?’
Francesca stopped what she was doing and said calmly, ‘You must be Mr Robinson. Mr Kemp is expecting you. I’ll just buzz and tell him that you’ve arrived.’
‘Brad. And no need just yet. I’m five minutes early anyway.’ He eyed the door again and adjusted his flamboyantly coloured tie.
Francesca watched him in silence as he perched familiarly on the edge of her desk and leant towards her. She knew this type, this make and model.
‘When did the wind blow you in?’ he asked.
Probably married, she thought, but still felt as though he was entitled by divine right to do just whatsoever he pleased. Probably, she decided, he felt as though it was his duty to spread himself around the female population, or at least around those remotely presentable.
‘I’ve been here since yesterday,’ Francesca answered coolly, ‘and I wasn’t blown in by the wind.’
‘No, but you look as though you should have been. Ethereal, almost, with that hair of yours.’ He reached out to touch her hair, and she saw Oliver Kemp watching them with widening eyes. How long had he been standing there? She hadn’t heard the click of his door opening.
‘Mr Kemp,’ she said, standing up, ‘I was just about to show Mr Robinson in.’
Mr Robinson had gone an embarrassed shade of red and had hopped off the desk as though suddenly discovering that it was made of burning embers.
Oliver didn’t say a word, and his dark-fringed, pale eyes were expressionless. He simply turned his back. The now very subdued manager bustled in behind him and the door was firmly shut.
Francesca released a long breath. She felt inappropriately as though she had been caught red-handed doing something unthinkable.
When an hour and a half later Brad Robinson hurried out of the office, making sure not to look in her direction, she found that she was concentrating a little too hard on what she was doing, and when Oliver Kemp moved across to her desk the colour flooded into her face.
‘I do apologise,’ she began, stammering, and he looked at her with raised eyebrows.
‘By all means. What for, though?’
She had been so sure that he had been going to say something to her, in that coldly sarcastic way of his, about not flirting with management that his question took her by surprise.
‘I didn’t invite Mr Robinson to sit on my desk…’ she began, faltering and going a deeper red. ‘He—’
‘He’s an inveterate flirt, Miss Wade,’ Oliver cut in unsmilingly. ‘I’ve caught him sitting on more desktops than I care to remember, but he’s a damned good salesman.’
‘Of course,’ she murmured with relief.
‘That’s not to say that I condone a lot of time-wasting during office hours,’ he added.
‘No.’ She paused. ‘Though I know how to handle men like Brad Robinson, anyway.’
‘I’m sure. I expect you’re quite accustomed to men who flirt the minute they clap eyes on you.’
He didn’t say that as a compliment and he was already looking at his watch.
‘I’ve got a few files here,’ he said, moving round the desk and perching next to her. Her eyes travelled along his muscular forearms to where his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and she felt a sudden twinge of uneasy awareness.
‘Yes, sir,’ she mumbled, disconcerted by her reaction.
His dark-fringed eyes slid across to hers and he said drily, ‘You can call me Oliver. I don’t believe in a hierarchical system, where my employees salute every time I walk past. Bad for the morale.’
‘You’ve studied psychology?’ Francesca asked, and he raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, flustered, ‘I…’
‘Don’t mean to be sarcastic all the time?’ He sat on the edge of the desk. ‘I suspect that that’s because you’ve never had to curb your tongue, have you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean, Miss Wade, is that your privileged background has opened a great many doors for you. People are often subservient to wealth, and I suspect that you’ve come to expect subservience as part and parcel of everyday life.’
‘That’s not true,’ she said in a weak voice, but there was more than an ounce of truth in what he was saying. She had not gone through life demanding special treatment, but on the other hand it had frequently been given to her.
‘This is your first job,’ he continued relentlessly, ‘and probably for the first time in your life you’re going to have to realise that no one here is going to treat you as anything other than another employee in this organisation.’ She felt his cold blue eyes skewering into her dispassionately.
‘I don’t want to be treated any differently from anyone else,’ Francesca said defensively. She looked away from the hard, sexy contours of his face, which anyway was only addling her mind still further, and stared at the stack of files on which his hand was resting.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ He slipped off the desk and turned his attention back to the files. ‘There are letters in these which need typing and I’ve highlighted a few things which I want you to sort out. You’ll have to phone the regional managers and arrange appointments for them to come and see me. As far as the Smith Holdings one is concerned, make sure that you get Jeffrey Lake to see me no later than lunchtime tomorrow.’ He looked down at her. ‘Any questions?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Francesca murmured, and a ghost of a smile crossed his face.
‘You’re very confident, aren’t you?’
‘Don’t tell me that there’s something wrong with that!’
‘Nothing at all.’
She looked up at him and their eyes met. ‘I guess you’d be able to analyse that trait in me as well? Wealth breeds self-confidence, doesn’t it? Maybe you start off from the vantage point of thinking that everyone is inferior, so it’s an easy step towards thinking that you’re capable of anything.’
‘Very good,’ he drawled, and his expression was veiled. ‘Too much self-confidence is as bad as too little, though. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to fall flat on your face just because you’re too proud to ask questions.’
‘I don’t intend to fall flat on my face,’ she returned calmly, ‘and I’m not so completely stupid that I don’t realise the value of asking questions when I need to.’
‘Good.’ He walked towards the door and she watched his loose-limbed stride with angry fascination. ‘I won’t be back for the rest of the day,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘If you need me I’ll be contactable on my mobile phone until seven, then anything after that will have to wait until tomorrow.’
Once he had gone she turned to the computer and methodically began working her way through the files, calling the regional managers, arranging appointments.
Every so often, though, her mind would flit back to him. It irked her that he treated her like a child—an over-indulged child who appeared capable of handling the job but of not much else beyond that. There was always a cool dismissiveness in his voice when he addressed her, and even when he had perched on the desk and offered her his little pearls of insight into her personality the basic uninterest had still been there. To him she was a case study in everything that he disapproved of. Someone who would either do her job well or not.
Her father, had he known, would have had a good laugh at that, she thought.
She worked steadily through lunch, and it was only when the door was pushed open that she realised with some surprise that it was after four.
‘Hi.’
One word—a monosyllable—and Francesca knew instantly that she wasn’t going to warm to the girl standing by her desk, looking at her with assessing eyes. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Could you give these to your boss for signing? I take it he’s not in.’
‘No. Who shall I say left them?’
‘Helen. I work in the accounts department.’
She looked, Francesca thought, as though she had been wildly miscast. She looked, in fact, as though she should have been working at the cosmetic counter of a large department store. Her hair, dyed jet-black, was carefully styled and hung in a straight bob to her shoulders, and her face was impeccably made up in an assortment of shades which gave her the look of a highly painted doll—she was attractive in a very obvious sort of way, and was clearly in no mood to hurry on, from the way she was standing looking around her.
‘Actually,’ Helen said, dragging a chair to sit opposite Francesca, much to Francesca’s dismay, ‘we’ve been curious about you. One minute Oliver had given his temp the boot and Cathy was filling in, and the next minute here you are. How did you manage to land the job?’
‘Oh, usual way,’ Francesca lied vaguely, but the other girl let that one go past. She was clearly not madly interested in the ins and outs of how Francesca had found herself working for Oliver Kemp. But she wanted something, because she still made no move to depart.
‘We’re all dying of envy, anyway,’ Helen said, narrowing her blue eyes. ‘I’d do anything to work for Oliver, but my typing skills are lousy.’ She picked up a paperweight from the desk and idly turned it over while Francesca wondered what this bizarre conversation was leading to.
‘Well, I’m sure your job must be very interesting,’ Francesca said politely, and Helen laughed—a hard, brittle sound that jarred.
‘Oh, riveting, dear.’ She plonked the paperweight back down and stood up. ‘Well, I’m off; just thought I’d come and see what the competition was like.’
‘The competition?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She opened her eyes wide and failed to look guileless. ‘Thought you might be the brainy type that Oliver goes for, but you’re not. Still, just between the two of us, he can’t be that immune to a pretty face, can he?’
‘And, if he isn’t, you want to make sure that you’re the one in the firing-line?’
‘Got it in one.’ She smiled but without humour. ‘I’d give my right arm to get into the sack with him.’
‘Really?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘No,’ Francesca said coldly. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a lot of work to do.’
‘Sure.’ Helen walked towards the door. ‘He in tomorrow?’ she asked, and Francesca nodded. ‘Tell him I’ll come by to collect that stuff in the morning.’ And she was gone, leaving an unpleasant taste in Francesca’s mouth.
That, she thought acidly, was office politics—something else of which she had no experience.
She was ready to leave by five-thirty, and it was something of a relief to see Rupert at seven—sweet, uncomplicated Rupert, who wouldn’t know the meaning of ‘connive’ if it jumped in front of him waving a sign in neon lettering.
‘You look tired,’ he said as they walked towards his car—a sleek red Jaguar which he had obligingly parked in the very centre of the courtyard. ‘Tired yet extraordinarily gorgeous, considering all we’re doing is going out for a meal. Sure you won’t change your mind about coming out to a nightclub with me? We could dance till dawn and drink until at least midnight.’
Francesca laughed. He was incorrigible. He was also easy company. They drove to the restaurant—a French bistro in the theatre district—and he entertained her with a barrage of fairly trivial chat, which was quite amusing nevertheless. Rupert had always felt uncomfortable with pregnant pauses in conversation, and consequently he was adept at making small talk, which, she thought as they went into the restaurant, was just what she needed.
The restaurant was dimly lit, in accordance with someone’s clever notion that subdued lighting was conducive to a romantic atmosphere.
The proprietor knew them well and showed them to a little table in the corner, much loved by aficionados because it offered an excellent view of the other diners. Rupert liked it. From there he could watch the comings and goings of the largely pre and post theatre crowd who were wealthy enough to afford the exorbitant prices the place charged.
Privileges, Francesca thought suddenly—all those privileges that money could buy.
She had never known what it was like to have her choice of restaurant narrowed down to a hamburger bar because of financial considerations. Of course, she had eaten hamburgers, and she had enjoyed them, but then she had chosen to. She frowned and wondered why she was devoting so much time to these questions when they had never really bothered her before.
She was subdued over the meal, listening to Rupert ramble on in his harmless, amusing fashion. He was typical of all her friends—out for a good time, ever game for harmless, mostly expensive fun. But they all lacked something, didn’t they? she thought. It was as though reality hadn’t quite impinged upon them.
Then she thought of Oliver Kemp, and that irritated her. He was hardly what she would call a role model of a caring man—at least not as far as he had shown her—but still, he was somehow more substantial than anyone else she had ever met, wasn’t he?
Rupert was saying something and she nodded amiably enough, letting her eyes drift through the crowded restaurant, and she saw him just as he saw her. Their eyes tangled in the dimly lit room, and then, with a feeling of sinking horror, she watched as he and his companion walked towards their table.
At first she hardly noticed the woman with him. The only thing her eyes could focus on was the masculine figure in his dark suit with a cream silk tie around his neck.
‘Oh, God, Rupert,’ she whispered nervously. ‘Here comes my boss.’
They watched until Oliver had approached the table, then Rupert, ever ready with a tactless opening statement, said, smiling broadly, ‘So you’re the slave-driver I’ve been hearing so much about!’ He stood up, unruffled by Oliver’s cool, speculative expression, and said expansively, ‘Why don’t you pull up a couple of pews and join us?’
