“No, I wouldn’t. I would like to hear that I did well, and I’m not sure I did. I was too ignorant to have been of any real use to you today,” she said honestly.
Alex’s face turned serious also, and he answered her quietly, “Yes, you were, but you also had some very bright ideas today, for all your ignorance and inexperience. I was pleased with you and your work today. You did well.”
Diana glowed. This man’s opinion was something that she found she respected, and his compliment made her happier than she should have liked to admit. Her face was carefully expressionless, but her eyes had a bit of a shine that they hadn’t had before, and Alex’s eyes were keener than she knew. He was suddenly brisk.
“I would like you to take these papers home to study. They contain information concerning our past contracts and percent output. Also, towards the back, I have some proposals that I’d like you to prepare an opinion on for tomorrow. Can you manage to be here around eight in the morning?” She nodded, secretly shocked. He continued, “Good. We have a lot to do tomorrow before eleven. Plan on having lunch like we did today, there’s not going to be much time between meetings. By tomorrow your desk should be here and we’ll see about getting you settled in.”
“Shall I type up a summary and appraisal of these proposals?” she asked, frowning in concentration as she leafed through the pages he handed her.
“It would be a good idea.”
“All right. Anything else you would like?” Diana suddenly saw things in the question as soon as she said it, and she wished she had phrased it differently. Alex, however, answered her seriously. “No, I think you have quite enough to do with just what I’ve given you.” He glanced at his watch. “And for right now, I think you’d better get home so you can get to work.”
She chuckled, “Whatever you say, boss.”
Swiftly glancing at her, he retorted, “That’s right, my girl. Whatever I say.”
“And what you say goes. Isn’t that what you mean?” she teased, and getting up, she moved to the door. She had the most uncomfortable feeling of being watched, but refused to look around.
Alex said lazily, “Hey, lady,” and she turned. He stated clearly, “I’ll remind you about that remark someday. Just so that you know whose say goes first.”
Diana sketched a smart salute and went out while listening to Alex’s laughter.
Making her way through the outer office, she noticed that Carrie had already gone home, then stopped in shocked surprise. Already? Checking her wristwatch, she saw it was nearing six-thirty. Hurrying out the door and to the elevator, she marvelled at the way the day had flown by. Making her way out of the building and to the space where her car was parked, she glanced towards the construction site several yards away, but it was empty. She unlocked her car and got in.
New York traffic was, as usual, hectic and maddening. Finally reaching the outskirts of the downtown section, Diana managed to make a little better time in the suburban areas. Her mind, however, was not occupied with the time it took to get to her little apartment, located in a converted old house in a relatively quiet part of the country. It was well out of the confines of the city, close to Elmsford, and Diana much preferred to commute to work so that she could enjoy more peaceful surroundings. Right now, she happened to be busy contemplating the motives and desires of the remarkable man she worked for. Somehow, after meeting and working with Alexander Mason, she could not reconcile her preconceived notions of him with her real-life impressions. She had thought of him before as the sort of man that would do anything for profit or gain and not be bothered by his conscience. That he was a shrewd businessman was certain, but the ruthless tycoon that the newspapers criticised was not the impression that she had got. Of course, she wisely realised that she had yet to see all the different sides to the man’s personality, but what she had seen so far, she had liked. Liked maybe too much. Shaking her head as she turned down the side street that led to her apartment, she resolved not to think about it.
That, however, was hard to do. Letting herself into the apartment, she paused to kick off her shoes with a sigh, before going into her small kitchen to whip herself up a quick supper. She found herself moving in quick, hurried movements around the kitchen as if she were to dash back to work like they had for lunch. Sighing wryly, she admitted to herself how much she was still keyed up. She decided to get out her homework for the night and get that out of the way while she was still in the mood.
Looking at the different notes that Alex had given her, she again found herself thinking in high gear and coming up with ideas quicker than she could get them on to paper. Finding a major flaw in one of the contract proposals, she sat down at her typewriter to try and figure out a revision. The typewriter keys fairly flew as her fingers moved in pace with her thoughts.
Three hours later, she leaned back in her chair with a tired sigh. It had taken more time and work than she had anticipated, but she had finally come up with a type of contract proposal that would be close to acceptable, providing Alex liked it. Her mouth twisted and she corrected herself, “Providing Mr. Mason liked it.”
Now she was so tired that she barely took time to perform the actions necessary for going to bed before stumbling over to crawl between the covers. She caught herself before she drifted too close to sleep and remembered to set her alarm for five o’clock in the morning. After fiddling with the alarm, she rolled over and was almost asleep before she was settled.
Darkness and loud noise: a loud steady, buzzing noise that sounded very close, very like…her alarm! Diana rolled over and, trying to see her clock, made a grab for the general direction and missed. Grabbing again, she succeeded in locating the clock, but instead of getting hold of it, she only managed to push it farther away from her and out of reach. By now she was fully awake and fully annoyed with the raucous noise emanating from that damn clock. She bounced out of bed, turned on the bedroom light and switched off the alarm. Then she went over to the window, a big, cheerful affair that was intended to let a lot of fresh sunlight and air in. She felt like swearing. The sun wasn’t even up at five o’clock! She grumbled, “God knows any sane person wouldn’t be,” and went to make herself some coffee. While it was brewing, she padded off to her bedroom again to sort out an outfit to wear, then she went off to start some hot bath water. After a good reviving soak in the tub and steamy cup of coffee, she felt almost human again.
Sitting in her bedroom in front of her dresser mirror, she took stock of her appearance. Shadows were under her eyes from such a short night’s sleep and her face looked to herself to be a pasty sort of pudding colour. Resignedly, she reached for her make-up jars. Fifteen minutes later, a vibrant, glowing face looked back when she peered in the mirror. “Thank the Lord for such wonderful blessings as coffee-makers and cosmetics!” she looked towards heaven as she muttered.
Another fifteen minutes and she was on her way.
Knots of tension slowly hardened in her stomach as she tried to cope with the thickening traffic and her own shortening temper. Her nerves were stretched very thinly during the next forty minutes or so that it took her to commute to the New York office. Her confidence dwindled with the passing miles as she thought of what she could have done with the revised proposal. She felt even worse when she considered that she hadn’t even started on the other proposals that Alex had given her.
Diana, reaching the parking lot reserved for the workers at Mason Steel, ended up parking not with a sigh of relief from the journey’s end but with a groan of apprehension at the day ahead. Moving towards the building, she mentally composed herself for the immediate future.
The stares were again directed her way as she walked to the elevator doors, but this time she did not really notice. All her attention was concentrated on her own thoughts. She walked on into the cubicle.
“Say there! Hi, Miss Carrington, remember me?” asked the young elevator operator. She blinked a little in surprise at having her reverie interrupted, then she smiled.
“Of course I remember you,” she said warmly, looking down at him with friendliness. The young man had the same engaging grin. “You never told me your name, though.”
He looked pleased. “No, ma’am, I didn’t. My first name is Jerry. I’d be honoured if you called me that, ma’am.”
Diana laughed. “All right, Jerry it is.”
Jerry looked at her a little hesitantly. “How do you like working for Mr. Mason, Miss Carrington?” he asked. His tone of voice had a note of awe in it. Diana was privately amused. However, she knew better than to show it.
She answered quietly, “I don’t really know how I’ll feel once I’m settled in, but right at the moment I’m quite enjoying it. Mr. Mason is very nice.”
Jerry’s eyes lit up, and he asked enthusiastically, “Do you really think so, too? I think he’s the most kindest man in the whole world!”
Wondering what “Mr. Mason” had done to deserve such fervent praise, she commented, “I wonder if he evokes that kind of response from all his employees.”
“Oh, I don’t know, ma’am! But if he does half as much for the rest of them as he does for me…” and there he stopped with a hand clapped over his mouth in a most tantalising way. Diana had looked at Jerry with an increasing interest as he had talked, and was very intrigued with the secretive way he had left the statement open. She just couldn’t resist.
“What does he do for you, Jerry?”
He looked at her doubtfully. “He made me promise not to tell anyone.” He chewed his lower lip in an agony of indecision. She opened her mouth to speak when he said suddenly, “I bet he tells you all sorts of secrets and you never tell a soul. Well, I’ll tell you.”
Diana protested, “Jerry, I don’t think you should.”
He grinned. “But I want someone to know how nice Mr. Mason is, and all. You see, I quit high school when I was sixteen, ’cause I didn’t think I needed it. But Mr. Mason talked me into goin’ back to school and finishin’ my education. Well, I said, ‘Mr. Mason, I just can’t afford to do that, ’cause I’m just barely squeezin’ by as it is.’ Mr. Mason just looked at me and he says, ‘Don’t you worry about it, son. Just you go and enroll for some night courses and I’ll take care of the rest.’
“So I went on down to the school nearest my neighbourhood, and enrolled the very next day. And do you know what happened when I got my next pay-check, Miss Carrington? I got a two and a half dollar raise! Two and a half dollars! ’Course, I got to work my hours to get the money, but Miss Carrington, that was the nicest thing anybody has ever done for me in my life. I can even afford to buy new clothes if I need them!” Diana felt a peculiar lump as she heard these words.
She said sincerely, “Jerry, I think it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard of anybody doing for someone else, giving a person the chance to better his own life by education.”
He said solemnly, “Yes, ma’am, and I’m goin’ to repay his kindness someday. Just you wait and see, someday I’m goin’ to do somethin’ for him.”
Diana noticed that the elevator had stopped and the doors had been open for some time. “Oh, lord, if I don’t get to work, I don’t think Mr. Mason is going to be nice to me at all,” she laughed, and shook her head at Jerry.
He smiled too, then said earnestly, “If I might say so, Miss Carrington, it is nice to have you here.”
Looking down that empty corridor once again, she turned her head and answered quietly, “Thank you, Jerry. I think I’ll find it nice to be here. I’ll see you later.” She stepped out into the hall.
“Have a nice day, Miss Carrington,” he called before the doors closed shut.
Diana grimaced, remembering the unread reports in her arms. The day hadn’t even begun, and she wasn’t very sure that it would be at all nice.
She walked into Carrie’s office and glanced at the desk.
It was empty. She probably didn’t get here until nine o’clock or so, Diana surmised. Moving to the other door, she knocked lightly and waited.
“Come in!” a voice snapped. It had a particularly ominous tone, a foreboding of bad temper and little patience.
She opened the door and stepped lightly in, and was immediately struck anew by the physical largeness of the man as she quietly moved into the room. Now that she was actually looking at him, she couldn’t believe that she would ever get used to his bulk. Alex was pacing the room in long angry strides, his hair ruffled up as if he had been raking his fingers through it. He wore a dark grey pair of slacks and a grey waistcoat over a white shirt, and his tie was loosened. A jacket lay across the back of his chair in a crumpled-up fashion, and Diana inwardly winced to think of such a lovely expensive material being so abused. She automatically went to straighten it up, and was halted by the harshness of Alex’s voice.
He snapped, “Where the hell have you been?”
She turned in amazement. “Am I late?” she asked in surprise. She looked at the small desk clock. It read three minutes past eight o’clock. She had walked in to the office one minute late. She turned towards Alex, frowning a little in puzzlement. “I’m not all that late, surely? You did say eight, didn’t you?”
Sighing in exasperation, Alex nodded and ran his fingers through his hair, ruffling it up even worse. He stood with one hand on his hip and acknowledged, “Yes, I did say eight. I’m sorry I snapped at you like that.” It was said briefly, absentmindedly. Almost, she thought with resentment, as if he didn’t really mean it. Alex had continued talking. “…gave you a report last night that I needed to have read by morning, do you remember going over the Anderson report last night?”
Diana, feeling a little uncomfortable, said quietly, “That was on the bottom of the pile, I’m afraid, and I didn’t get to them all.”
Alex’s head snapped around and his eyes narrowed. “You didn’t get to them all,” he repeated in a very quiet voice. “Pray tell, what did you get to?”
She put the different folders down and searched through them. “Here,” she said, “I studied the Nelson proposal. There were a lot of problems I found in it, but the main problem was the wording used in the agreements. What they basically did was use a lot of words that really promised nothing. I sat down last night and retyped the whole thing. It took me several hours and I didn’t get to anything else.”
Alex walked over to the desk and, barely looking at the proffered revision, snapped, “That’s just great! The one report that could have waited a few days, and that had to be the only one you did! Where did you put the Anderson report?” He started to rummage around in the pile.
Diana felt a slow burning anger starting to flare up somewhere around her midriff but said calmly enough, “Maybe I can help you with it to make things go faster.”
He didn’t look up. “No,” he said shortly, “I don’t want help,” sounding, to her, like a child refusing help to tie his shoelaces.
She said, unable to stop herself, “Maybe I should go out and come back in to see if we can start off on a better foot!”
This time he did look up. His eyes were narrowed and he looked every bit as angry as she felt. “That,” he said very evenly, “won’t be necessary. Just finish the reports and proposals that you didn’t do last night.”
Diana flushed. “I’m sorry about not getting to all of them,” she offered quietly.
“So am I.” He didn’t look at her, and his tone was short.
“Look,” she began, feeling goaded by his lack of understanding, “are you going to want to beat me for it? I did my best.”
“Let’s just forget it, all right?” he snapped, his blue eyes and rigid jawline showing frustration. He half turned away from her and began to scan the papers held in his hand as he continued, “Your best just didn’t happen to be what I needed.”
Diana began to whistle soundlessly through her teeth. “Why do I feel like excess baggage?” she remarked to the room in general.
“What do you want me to do—pat you on the back for something you failed to do?” Alex threw down the papers
and swivelled back to face her, his face ominous.
“Hey, I didn’t fail at anything,” she responded swiftly, stabbing the air in front of her with one hand. “There was just too much material for one evening.”
“If you can’t handle the work load…” he began nastily. Enough was enough, Diana decided abruptly. If she didn’t get out right away, she would say something she would regret.
“Get out of the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat, is that it?” she asked stiffly. Without another word she pivoted on her heel and headed for the door. She heard a groan behind her.
“Diana!” Alex called. She kept on going, partly for fear of what she might say to him if she stayed, partly from fear of what he might say to her. Every step got faster and faster and her temper got closer and closer to the edge of control. By the time she had reached the door, she was walking very fast, and she wrenched it open, stormed through and slammed the door shut behind her. Eyes glowing with fury, she barely took in the fact that Carrie was standing behind her desk in the act of taking off a sweater. She swept by, ignoring Carrie’s greeting, and threw open the outer door. By this time Alex had the first door open and he called again, “Diana! Come back a moment—damn it, girl, I said come back!”
Chapter Two
Diana was out into the corridor and going swiftly down the hall before he caught up with her. She felt something grab hold of her arm and suddenly she was jerked around to face a very big man.
She hissed at him, “Will you let go of my arm, please, before I say something to you that I shouldn’t!” He was silent, and she stared up into his face with a puzzled anger.
He seemed infuriatingly calm as his eyes went over her face. Diana was breathing rather heavily from her temper and her colour was higher than usual. Eyes emanating sparks glared back at him. She looked very beautiful.
He turned back to the office and started walking back, never letting go of her arm. Diana immediately began to pull back and resist.
A Deeper Dimension Page 2
