Her Impossible Boss

by Cathy Williams

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I…I can stay on if you want me to. I’ve been giving it a bit of thought. It’s not as though I have a job to go back for, and I love working here—working with Samantha. I know when she starts school she won’t need me to be around during the day, but that doesn’t matter. I could look around for something to do here. You see, I have dual nationality, so that wouldn’t be a problem…’ Her voice trailed off and she sifted her fingers through her hair and looked at him. ‘It’s not as though I would live here or anything…’ The sound of her pride being washed down the drain was as loud as a fog horn in her ears. ‘Claire would be happy to have me continue to stay with her. She’s hardly ever around, anyway…she spends so much time with Tom. In fact, I would probably be doing her a favour…looking after her place when she’s not there.’

  ‘This isn’t what we signed up for, Tess.’

  The gentleness of his voice brought a lump to the back of her throat. He was letting her down and making sure not to be brutal about it. But at the end of the day being let down remained the same, whether it was done brutally or not. She sat on her hands, not trusting herself to speak for a few fraught seconds.

  ‘I know. I never wanted to get involved with you.’

  ‘Because I’m not the type of guy you ever saw yourself getting involved with.’

  ‘Right. But…’ She lifted her eyes bravely to his face and swallowed hard. ‘I did. I let myself get involved with you and I just need to know if there’s any chance for us.’ She couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she had fallen in love with him. He didn’t want to hear anything she was saying. It was written all over his face. ‘Even though,’ she qualified gamely, ‘it isn’t what either of us signed up for.’

  Matt was still. A series of flashbacks was playing in his head like a very rapid slideshow. His wife, his marriage, his resolve never to put himself in such a position again. The women he had dated since then had been ships in the night, and he had enjoyed having it that way. He had determined not to take on commitments he knew he would eventually dislike and resent. However ideal the woman in question might seem, it would only be a matter of time before she was shorn of her halo and revealed to have all the needs and expectations that would be guaranteed to drag him under. And was Tess the ideal woman anyway? She had never held down a job aside from this one. She had spent her life cheerfully drifting, content to live in the shadow of her sisters. She wasn’t independent. She was hopeless when it came to most things of a practical nature. Her personality was so diametrically the opposite of his that he sometimes had to take a step back and marvel.

  Yes, those differences were charming at the moment, but they would irritate him on a long-term basis. He was sure of it. Nor, he admitted to himself, did he care for the fact that she was, in effect, offering him an ultimatum. Ask her to stay or else watch her walk away. Matt didn’t like ultimatums. He especially didn’t like them insofar as they applied to his private life.

  ‘You have some time remaining here,’ he heard himself say brusquely. ‘Why start asking about the future? Why not just enjoy what we have?’ In his way, it was as close as he could come to expressing his feelings. He could promise her nothing.

  ‘What would be the point?’ Tess cried out with anguished feeling.

  ‘So in other words,’ Matt filled in, his voice unyielding, ‘unless I can promise you marriage, you see no reason to stick around?’

  ‘I told you…I don’t want marriage…’ ‘Come off it, Tess! Are you going to tell me that you would be happy to get a part-time job over here and shack up in your sister’s apartment just so that you could be at my beck and call?’

  ‘I wouldn’t see it that way,’ she muttered inaudibly.

  ‘I’m honest enough to tell you that you would be making a big mistake.’ Feeling suddenly restricted, Matt stood up and paced through the room. She had effected small changes in the time she had been coming to the apartment. There was a little frame of some pressed flowers she had done with Samantha. Some of her CDs had found their way over and were sitting on his antique sideboard. A handful of pictures had been developed, and she had framed those and arranged them on the windowsill. He glared at all those intimate touches, which he had never asked for but to which, he thought bad-temperedly, he had become accustomed.

  ‘We’ve had fun together. I would like us to continue having fun together until you leave. But if you don’t want to then that’s your choice.’

  He hardened himself to the sound of her silence. He wasn’t ending this because he was cruel. He was ending this because he was a hell of a lot more experienced than she was and he could foretell the mistake it would be even if she was wilfully choosing to close her eyes to it.

  He needed to lead by example, and he would. It was what he had always done. It didn’t feel good, but he couldn’t allow himself to give her false hope. More false hope. Because it was obvious that she had been mulling over their situation longer than she had let on.

  Mind made up, he turned to look at her. He brushed aside a momentary feeling of panic and clenched his jaw.

  ‘You’re going to have to be strong to take what I’m going to say now, Tess. We’re not suited for one another. You’re right when you say that your choice of ideal man would be the opposite of someone like me. I have a hell of a lot more experience than you, and trust me when I say that I would drive you round the bend.’

  ‘What you’re saying is that I would drive you round the bend.’ She breathed in deeply, angry with herself for having revealed so much, and angry with him for his patronising tone of voice. ‘You don’t mind sleeping with me, but I’m just not good enough for you to have a proper relationship with!’

  Dark colour accented his high cheekbones. ‘This has nothing to do with whether you’re good enough for me or not!’ he roared, losing control.

  She was searching around for her bag, which she located in the kitchen. ‘I still have a couple of weeks left working for you.’ She held her head up high. ‘I’d really appreciate it if I could see as little of you as possible.’

  ‘That,’ Matt said tightly, ‘can be arranged. Consider yourself relieved of your duties.’ Angry frustration ripped through him. He could barely look at her, and yet at the same time was driven to watch in glowering, hostile outrage as she headed towards the door, only pausing when her fingers were curled around the doorknob.

  ‘Would you mind if I at least said goodbye to Samantha?’ she asked jerkily, and Matt nodded an affirmation.

  Which meant that there was nothing left to be said. It had all gone horribly, catastrophically wrong, but indecision pinned her to the spot until she told herself that it was pointless.

  She closed the door quietly and firmly behind her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DESPERATE to convince Claire that she was on the mend, Tess lay in bed trying to think happy thoughts.

  For the first time in two months, she was rudderless. She literally felt like one of the walking wounded. She had told Claire that she felt she might be coming down with something. Actually, she did feel she might be coming down with something. She had woken up every morning—every morning for five interminable days, during which time she had heard nothing from him, not a text, not a phone call—with a vague feeling of nausea.

  She no longer knew how to plan her days, and no longer had any interest in doing anything, anyway. She would be leaving the country in just over a week, and all she really wanted to do was hibernate. She wanted to scuttle somewhere dark and safe and warm, like a mole, and sleep until the memory of Matt had faded from her consciousness, allowing her to pick herself up and carry on.

  She finally understood how much she had allowed him to become the axis of her entire universe. In a matter of just a couple of months she had given away all of her carefree independence, and now that the umbilical cord had been slashed she was floundering like someone deprived of oxygen. She missed him. She missed Samantha, with whom she spoke daily. S
he had seen her two days previously, and had obviously looked so dreadful that her mumbling something about being a bit under the weather had been one hundred percent convincing.

  Claire had been sympathetic to start with, and had made a production of keeping her distance.

  ‘I can’t afford to catch anything,’ she had apologised. ‘Life’s too hectic at the moment for me to take time out with an infection.’

  Tess was beginning to think that she might actually be willing herself into a state of ill health. She could barely keep a thing down. If things continued in this manner she would have to be ferried back to Ireland in an air ambulance.

  However, now, after five days, Claire was running out of patience.

  Tess still lay with her eyes closed, telling herself that her nausea was all in her mind, when the bedroom door was flung open.

  ‘It’s nearly ten-thirty!’ Claire was dressed to go shopping in one of her signature summer outfits—a silky short dress which would have cost the earth and a pair of complicated gladiator-style sandals—and was munching on a sandwich the size of a brick.

  Tess tried to duck under the duvet.

  ‘You can’t still be under the weather, Tess!’

  ‘You know I’ve never been a morning person.’ She averted her eyes from the sandwich because it was making her stomach lurch.

  ‘Well, it’s Saturday, and you’re coming shopping with me. You can’t spend the rest of your time here feeling sorry for yourself because you have a bit of a stomach bug! You’ll get back to Ireland and you’ll kick yourself because you wasted your last week and a half. Might I remind you that there’s nothing to do back home?’

  ‘I’m going to do that teaching course. I told you!’ After years of never settling down to anything, one good thing, at least, had come of her stay in Manhattan. She had been pushed into coming to New York so that she could find direction, and she had.

  ‘Well, whatever,’ Claire dismissed bracingly, ‘you’re still going to get out of that bed and come shopping with me—because tonight you’re coming to a party! And I’ve already got a ticket for you so don’t even think of telling me that you can’t go because your tummy hurts! We’re going to get you something glamorous and wonderful and you’re going to have a brilliant time!’

  That was Claire-speak for do-as-you’re-told-or-you-won’t-hear-the-end-of-it.

  ‘I’ll give you half an hour, Tess, and then I’ll expect to see you up and ready to take on Manhattan!’

  Tess had no idea where they would be going that night. She obediently spent the day traipsing behind Claire, making a heroic effort to show enthusiasm over the clothes that were paraded in front of her and being compelled to try on. At five-thirty they returned to the apartment and she was instructed to ‘get your act together and change as quickly as possible because the taxi’s booked for seven.’ She was also instructed to look happy, because there was nothing worse than a party-pooper.

  Tess did as she was told because she knew that her sister had a point. She really would have to start moving on. She couldn’t continue to feel sorry for herself indefinitely. Matt had never promised her anything. He had never, ever given any indication that what they had would extend beyond her stay in America. She had been the one guilty of misinterpreting their relationship. She had flung herself headlong into something that defied all common sense and had started building castles in the air because she had been naïve.

  When she thought logically about it, she and Matt stood on opposite sides of a great divide. He was the sophisticated, accomplished and confident product of a birthright of wealth and power. Not only had he grown up within the cocoon of a privileged background, but he had expanded a thousandfold on his fabulous inheritance. He had taken over his father’s massive business concerns and diversified and branched out because it was in his nature. He was too clever to stand still and so he hadn’t.

  Compared to him, she was the equivalent of a minnow swimming next to a Great White. In her calmer moments she grudgingly conceded that there had never been a chance for them—not in any real sense of the word. Even if he had loved her madly—which he hadn’t—it would still have been a big deal for him to have committed to someone so far removed from his own social background.

  So moving on was her only option.

  When she was fully dressed she could almost feel confident that she was beginning to. At least she looked the part—which was some of the battle won, if nothing else.

  Claire rapped on the bedroom door at six-thirty and after twenty minutes of clinical inspection pronounced herself satisfied.

  She had ended up buying an off-the-shoulder long dress, deep green in colour, which was gathered at the bust and then fell to the ground. It should have made her look shapeless, but it didn’t.

  ‘You have the boobs for it,’ Claire had said approvingly, when Tess had emerged from the changing room. ‘And the colour goes with you complexion.’

  It was a style that couldn’t be worn with a bra, and Tess found herself thinking back to Matt’s possessive reaction to any thought of her going braless in public. She had found it so intoxicating at the time, and had read too much into it.

  Now, she felt a welcome spurt of rebellion as she followed Claire out to the taxi.

  It was a forty minute drive to a building which, she was told, was actually a very well known art gallery that rented out its premises for a select few. Outside a crowd of people, dressed to kill, were entering in an orderly line, showing tickets to two doormen.

  Inside, the party was in full swing. The art gallery was über-modern. A large, brilliantly white reception area branched out on either side to two massive rooms. In one, a quartet played melodious jazz music. In the other, people networked. There was the feel of a very expensive warehouse about the place. The walls in both the rooms adjoining the reception area were painted a pale slate-grey and adorned with large modernistic works of art. The lighting comprised thousands of spotlights which, to Tess’ relief, were dimmed to a mellow glow. It was like nothing she had ever seen before, and for a while she actually forgot her misery.

  Tom was waiting for them, and he and Claire both made a big effort to introduce her to people, but after fifteen minutes Tess could see that her sister was becoming bored with playing babysitter. She shooed her away because, actually, she was quite happy to wander around looking at the art work, and after a while she slunk into the room with the jazz band, so that she could sit and listen to the music.

  She had tucked herself at a table at the back of the room, with a glass of champagne in front of her, and was listening to a very perceptive song about unrequited love when a low, familiar voice behind her made her freeze in the act of raising the glass to her lips.

  She spun round and half stood. Just one look, one second, told her that she had not even begun to put Matt behind her. He was formally dressed and was wearing a red bow tie—the only splash of colour against the blackness of his suit and the crisp whiteness of his shirt.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Tess asked, in a daze.

  ‘I could ask you the same question.’ He had seen her from behind, walking into the room with the jazz musicians. There must be at least three hundred people at the do. Not only were the rooms on the ground floor crowded, but upstairs several more rooms were filled with employees and important clients. It had been pure coincidence that he had seen her, because he had spent most of his time upstairs, preferring the arrangement of comfortable leather sofas and chairs to the cocktail party atmosphere of the rooms on the ground floor. However, there had been no mistaking that caramel hair falling down her slender back as she weaved a path through the crowds. For a second he had been shocked enough to lose track of what was being said to him by one of the directors at his Boston office. Then he had made his excuses and followed her.

  It irked him that he had not been able to get her out of his head. Everything he had said to her had made perfect sense, and yet she was still managing to infiltrate his waking moments wi
th irritating consistency—like a high-frequency noise that had managed to lodge itself in his head, disrupting his thought patterns and making him lose concentration at inconvenient times.

  Of course it had only been a few days, and her absence had been made doubly worse by the fact that Samantha was constantly talking about her. She had accepted the fact that Tess had left. She had known that her stay in America would come to a close, and it was a source of unending relief to Matt that his daughter was in a much better place than she had been a few months ago and so had found it easier to adapt to the young student who had replaced Tess for a few weeks. But she still mentioned Tess daily. Matt had been forced to make noises about plans for Tess returning for a visit, perhaps the following Easter. Maybe sooner! He had been obliged to grit his teeth as he was shown all the photographs they had taken together. He had listened, nodding in agreement, as he was told how much Grandma and Grandpa would have loved her.

  He hadn’t been allowed to forget the woman! Little wonder that he had found himself following her into this room, standing for a while to watch as she leant forward at a table, one hand idly curled around the stem of a champagne flute, the other cupping her chin as she tapped her feet to the quartet.

  If he had been stupid enough to worry about her, he now scowled as any questions on that front were answered. She looked on top of the world. In fact she looked a knockout. And it was clear that she had come to pick up a guy. Why else would she be wearing something that left her shoulders bare and moulded the fullness of her breasts with such loving perfection?

  Tess was completely and utterly thrown by the sudden appearance of Matt. It was as if her feverish mind had summoned him up.