Her Impossible Boss

by Cathy Williams

  ‘I…I came with Claire,’ she stammered, before remembering that she was in the process of moving on and therefore letting herself go weak at the knees at the sight of him just wasn’t going to do. But he looked so sexy. Had he come with someone? Even if he hadn’t, he would surely be leaving with someone. All eyes were on him, sidelong glances, but then he was head and shoulders above every other man at the party.

  He was also in a bad mood, and her spirits deflated because she knew why. He had come to a party and the last person he wanted to bump into would be her, when he thought that he was well and truly rid of her.

  ‘I never expected to see you!’ Tess forced herself to laugh. ‘What a coincidence! But I guess Manhattan is smaller than you think! Mary says that London is like that! She’ll be out having a drink somewhere, and before she knows it she recognises someone!’

  ‘Pull the other one, Tess. You must have known that I was going to be here.’ Matt swallowed the contents of his whisky in one, and dumped the empty glass on the table at which she was sitting. He shoved his hands in his pockets. Did she think that he was going to stand here and make nice with a lot of polite conversation? Well, he wasn’t in the mood. ‘Why would I know that?’

  ‘Because this is a company do. My company do, not to put too fine a point on it. So telling me that you had no idea that I might possibly attend my own party doesn’t really wash.’

  ‘Your party…’ Claire hadn’t mentioned it. She didn’t know the circumstances of her departure from Matt’s employment. Tess had told her that she had contracted a bug, and that with only a short period of time left had been given leave to get well and then enjoy some time out by herself rather than spend her remaining days working once she recovered. Claire would have expected her to have known about the party, and as Tess had asked no questions Claire had offered no information beyond the fact that it was a very dressy affair.

  Matt’s lips curled as he looked down at her generous breasts, pushing against the soft dark green fabric. ‘Is that why you made a point of coming?’ he rasped. ‘You knew that I was going to be here and you thought that it would be a good opportunity to show me what I was missing? Well, it won’t work.’ All of a sudden he needed another drink. He glanced around, frowning, and like magic a waiter bearing drinks on a large circular tray appeared. Matt took a glass of wine, though he would rather have had a whisky, and drank half.

  Tess had got lost trying to work out what he was attempting to say to her.

  ‘I didn’t know you were going to be here,’ she protested truthfully. ‘Claire never mentioned that it was a company do!’ She was adding up the implications behind his remark, which had been delivered in a derisive tone of voice targeted to offend, and she was suddenly shaking with anger. ‘And even if I had known that you were going to be here—which I didn’t—I would never have come here to…to show you what you were missing!’

  ‘No? Then why the over-the-top sexy dress? Not to mention the fact that you’re not wearing a bra!’

  The mere mention of that did horrible things to her body, reminding her of how easy it was to respond to him even when he wasn’t touching her. Even, it would seem, when he was being rude and arrogant and insulting.

  ‘This isn’t for your benefit!’ Her nipples were throbbing and she was mortified at her reaction. She felt that he must be able to see what he was doing to her with those laser-sharp, all-seeing black eyes of his.

  ‘No? Because, like I said, it won’t work. I’ve seen that ploy too many times. It’s lost its effect over the years. We’re no longer involved, and the best thing you could do for yourself is to move on.’

  ‘I can’t believe how arrogant you are, Matt Strickland! I…I can’t believe what I ever saw in you!’

  ‘I would bet that it wouldn’t take much to remind you.’

  The look in his eyes had changed suddenly. Tess’s breath caught sharply in her throat. That simmering, hot gaze was not what she needed—not now! Did it give him a kick to put her meagre will-power to the test? To prove how much of a hold he still had over her? She wanted to weep in frustration.

  Perversely, Matt was relishing this hostile clash of words. He had been chatting and socialising like a man on a tour of duty—looking covertly at his watch, mentally bemoaning the fact that the party still had hours to run. Now he was having fun, in a grim, highly charged sort of way. And he couldn’t peel his eyes away from her delectable body. If there hadn’t been a roomful of people watching, he would have been sorely tempted to remind her of just what she had seen in him! He pictured himself yanking down that flimsy piece of nothing shielding her glorious breasts, cupping their fullness in his big hands, teasing her nipples with the abrasive pads of his fingers.

  From where the memory had been lying, close to the surface, he recalled their last evening together, when he had brought her to a shuddering orgasm in the kitchen of his apartment. He had a graphic flashback to the feel of her body writhing against his fingers. He could even recall the soft fall of that yellow dress she had been wearing.

  ‘Has it occurred to you that I am moving on?’ Tess lied, tossing her head and trying hard to remember the name of the guy who had badgered her for a while and slipped her his business card.

  No. Quite frankly, it hadn’t. Nor was he having a good time assimilating the concept.

  ‘Maybe,’ she threw at him defiantly, ‘you’re really not the reason I wore this dress—considering I didn’t know that you were going to be here anyway! In fact, for your information, I’ve already been asked out on a date!’

  That was a red rag to a bull. Having just told her that she should move on with her life, Matt underwent a rapid turnaround and was outraged that she should be out on the prowl within seconds of their split.

  ‘Who by?’ he demanded, keeping his voice well modulated, although inside he was seething with what could only be termed jealousy. His weakness infuriated him.

  ‘Tony!’ The name came back to her in the nick of time. ‘Tony Grayson.’

  Sales manager. His career now looked perilously short-lived. Matt drained his glass, flicked back the sleeve of his shirt to look at his watch. ‘Well,’ he drawled with lazy indifference, ‘good luck with that one. I should be careful if I were you, though. New York isn’t a small village in Ireland. Give off too many obvious signals and you’ll have to be prepared to take the consequences. In other words, don’t go near the fire unless you’re happy to get burnt.’

  He turned on his heel and walked away. Like a punctured balloon, Tess felt herself deflate. She could no longer put on a show of having fun. She just wanted to leave, to get back to the apartment. Like a patient suffering a severe relapse, she needed immediate time and space to recover, because seeing Matt again had knocked her for six.

  Knowing that Claire would feel obliged to try and persuade her to stay, she didn’t bother to look for her. Instead, she took the coward’s way out and texted her a message. By the time she checked her mobile phone Tess would be at the apartment, in her pyjamas.

  Three days later, Tess emerged from the doctor’s surgery on wobbly legs. At Claire’s insistence, she had finally gone.

  ‘You can’t climb on a plane feeling under the weather!’ Claire had announced, in that voice of hers that permitted no argument. ‘The flight back is a nightmare—it’s so long, and if you start feeling really poorly on the plane it’s going to be awful. You obviously have some kind of persistent stomach bug and you have to go to my doctor and get it sorted. If you like, I can come with you.’

  Now Tess was weak with relief that she had turned down her sister’s offer to accompany her. What would she have said if she had been confronted with the news that Tess was pregnant?

  In a daze, she went to the nearest coffee shop and sat down, unseeing, in front of a cappuccino which, having ordered, she no longer wanted.

  Her initial reaction—one of sickening disbelief—had ebbed. Now it was replaced by a recognition that all the signs had been there. She had just miss
ed them. After their first time together, when she had been so convinced that there had been no danger of her falling pregnant because she was as regular as clockwork, she had gone to Claire’s doctor—the very same doctor who had broken the news to her twenty minutes ago—to have a contraceptive device inserted. The pill would have been easier, but Tess had an aversion to tablets.

  ‘You must be very fertile,’ the doctor had said, while Tess had sat here like a statue, trying to absorb what had just been said to her. She had been thinking that it certainly explained her dodgy stomach. A quick look in her diary had confirmed that her period had been late—something she hadn’t even noticed because between being on Cloud Nine and then catapulted back down to Planet Earth she just hadn’t been thinking straight. In fact, she hadn’t been thinking at all.

  Across from her, a woman leaned over and asked if she was all right and Tess returned a wan smile.

  ‘I’ve just had a bit of a shock,’ she said politely. ‘I’ll be fine once I drink this cup of coffee.’

  Of course she would have to tell Matt. He deserved to know. But just thinking about that brought her out in a cold sweat of nervous perspiration.

  Their last bruising encounter had left her in no doubt that he was over her. He had given her her walking papers and instructed her to move on—because he had. He had spoken to her in the patronising tone of someone dealing with a nuisance who showed promise of becoming a stalker. He had accused her of dressing to attract him, and she knew, deep down, that he hadn’t believed a word she had said about not knowing that he would be at the party. He wanted nothing further to do with her and what was he about to get? A lifelong connection that he hadn’t engineered. He had trusted her because she had told him that she had taken care of contraception, and in return for his trust he would find himself a father in a few months’ time.

  But to keep the truth from him would be immoral.

  Without giving herself the opportunity to dwell on what she knew she had to do, Tess stood up and hailed the first cab to his offices. If she thought too much about it she would think herself into a change of mind. She was having his baby.

  The traffic, as usual, was gridlocked, and Tess was a bag of nerves by the time she paid the cab driver and looked up at the offices that commanded one of New York’s prime locations in the heart of the financial sector.

  She had been to his office several times before—little visits with Samantha—so she was recognised at the vast reception desk and waved across to the bank of elevators, one of which would take her to the top floor of the thirty-four-storeyed building.

  His offices were the working equivalent of his apartment. Luxurious, plush, silent, industrious. His own office, perched at the end of the thickly carpeted corridor, was as big as some people’s flats, with one section partitioned for his personal assistant and another, larger one, comprising a comfortable sitting area with leather chairs and plants and little tables. She knew that there was even a bathroom adjoining his office, for those times when he came in very early or was obliged to leave very late.

  It struck her forcibly that the size and the opulence of it was a glaring reminder of just one of the many differences between them.

  Thinking like that made her feel even more nervous, and she tried to project a composed demeanour as she stopped to chat to his secretary.

  He wouldn’t be aware that she was even there, and Tess was tempted to give him just a little bit longer to enjoy his carefree life before she blew it to smithereens. Matt, buzzed eventually by his secretary, felt a kick of satisfaction knowing that Tess was waiting to see him. She had been on his mind even more, having seen her at that party. He didn’t know what she wanted, but when he thought that she might actually be reconsidering her options he felt like a predator in full and final control of its elusive prey. Maybe she had gone to the party to meet a man, but he had thought about that and eventually dismissed the notion. It really didn’t tally with what he had come to know about her. At any rate, he liked to think that seeing him had made her realise what she really missed. She would only be around for a few more days, but he was more than willing to reluctantly set aside his pride and take her back to his bed. In fact—and he barely acknowledged this—it was a shame that she had made the fatal mistake of trying to tie him down, because who knew what might have been the next natural step for them…? He might just have offered her the very thing she had so obviously craved.

  He didn’t immediately look up when she quietly entered, although his senses went on sudden red alert. When she cleared her throat he finally raised his eyes, and then sat back in his chair without saying a word.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you…’ she began, painfully aware of his lack of welcome. He might just as well have set a timer on his desk and told her that she had one minute to state her case.

  ‘You’re lucky to find me here,’ Matt told her politely. ‘I have a meeting in a matter of minutes, so whatever you’ve come to say, you need to say it quickly.’

  Faced with such bluntness, Tess dithered in an agony of uncertainty. She had vaguely rehearsed what she might say, but now she was looking at him every single thought vanished from her head. She felt possessed of roughly the same amount of confidence as a rabbit staring at two headlights bearing down on it at great speed.

  ‘Well?’ Matt said impatiently. ‘What is it? I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘Even if you had, I still don’t think I’d find this easy to say,’ Tess told him shakily.

  Something in the tone of her voice infused him with ominous foreboding. He went completely still and waited.

  ‘You’re going to be mad, but…I’m pregnant…’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MATT froze. He wondered if he had misheard her, but then immediately revised that notion as he looked at her face. She was white as a sheet and leaning forward in the chair, body as rigid as a piece of wood. Mad? She thought that he might be mad? That seemed to be the understatement of the century.

  ‘You can’t be,’ he asserted bluntly, and Tess flinched.

  ‘You mean you don’t want me to be—but I am. I did a test this morning. In fact, I did more than one test.’

  His usually sharp brain seemed to have shut down. Nothing had prepared him for this.

  ‘You were protected,’ he told her flatly.

  With an abrupt movement that took her by surprise, he propelled himself out of his chair and walked towards the window. For once, his natural grace had deserted him.

  ‘If this is some kind of ruse to get money out of me, then you can forget it!’ He leant against the window and then restlessly began to prowl the office. He couldn’t keep still. Running through his head was the thought that this just couldn’t be happening.

  ‘Why would I be using a ruse to get money out of you?’

  ‘You can’t accept that we’re finished. You want to walk away with more than just a few memories. You know how much I’m worth!’

  ‘I don’t know how you can say that!’ Tess exclaimed, dismayed. ‘Since when do you know me to ever think about money? And I wouldn’t make something like this up!’

  No, she wouldn’t. Painful sincerity was etched on her face. Whether he liked it or not, she wasn’t lying. She was carrying his baby, and that was a fact with which he would have to deal whether he liked it or not. While he tried to scramble for some other explanation, he was already accepting the truth that had been forced upon him.

  But beyond that there were still a lot of questions to be answered, a lot of perfectly reasonable suspicions to be dispelled—if, indeed, they could be. Surfacing through the fog of his confused thoughts, a line of pure logic crystallised, and in the face of that every natural instinct he possessed took second place.

  She had bewitched him, made him behave in all sorts of ways that had been alien to him. Yes, he had had a good time with her. She had known how to make him laugh and she had relaxed him in a way no other woman had. But in the bigger picture how much did that really coun
t for?

  He had known her for a couple of months! And lo and behold, having assured him that she was fully protected, here she was—pregnant and knowing full well that her future would now be a gold-plated one. Did that make sense? Wasn’t there something strangely suspicious about the circumstances?

  Matt slammed the door shut on any shady areas in this scenario. He was conditioned to be suspicious. It was his protection. He wasn’t about to abandon it now, even if he could see the glisten of tears in her eyes. He reached for the box of tissues he kept in his drawer and handed them to her, but there was a cold cast to his features that sent a chill to her heart.

  ‘So. Explain.’

  ‘That first time…’

  Matt cast his mind back with a frown. ‘If I recall, you assured me that—’

  ‘Yes, I know what I said!’ Tess interrupted fiercely. ‘Okay. I lied.’ Her eyes skittered helplessly from his dark, incredulous face.

  She was aware of him picking up his phone, talking in low tones to his secretary, knew that he was telling her that he didn’t wish to be disturbed. While he spoke, she did her best to get her tangled thoughts in order.

  ‘That didn’t come out right,’ she said, as soon as he was off the line. Nervously, she plucked a tissue from the box on her lap and began shredding it with shaking fingers. ‘It wasn’t so much a lie as…I economised a bit with the truth. When you asked me whether I was taking any contraception, I was so…so turned on that I didn’t want us to stop…’

  Without warning Matt’s mind did an abrupt detour and swerved off back to that night when they had made love for the first time. He had never been so turned on in his life before. Even thinking about it now…But, no, there was no way that he was going to let his body dictate his handling of this situation. He didn’t care how turned on she had been. She had deliberately lied—taken a chance with life-altering consequences attached.

  ‘So you decided to let me go ahead. You risked a pregnancy for a moment of passion. You threw away your virginity and played fast and loose with both our lives because you just couldn’t help yourself…’