Chloe wanted chicken nuggets for her dinner. She had originally wanted a McDonald’s, but had graciously allowed herself to be persuaded into ordinary chicken nuggets at home on the understanding that pudding, in the form of ice cream and chocolate buttons, would be abundant.
Vicky raced around the kitchen while her daughter sat at the kitchen table and chatted about school, intermittently drawing a family portrait that bore no resemblance to their family, or any family for that matter, at least of the human variety.
She hadn’t bothered to get out of her working clothes and she felt disgruntled and sticky. Out of the corner of her eye she looked at her daughter, who was gravely intent on her task at hand, her dark hair swinging past her satin-smooth baby face, and felt a jolt of fear.
What was she doing? Even here, in her own house, she half felt as though she needed to look over her shoulder, just in case Max appeared unexpectedly, like a rabbit popping out of a hat. So what if the money was a godsend, so what if she actually was discovering that the job was as exciting as she’d thought it would be? She was still playing with fire and everyone knew what happened to foolish women who played with fire. They got burnt.
She gazed lovingly at Chloe and realised that the chicken nuggets were getting burnt.
The following morning, she made a decision. She would begin laying the groundwork for her eventual, inevitable and sooner-than-expected resignation.
She couldn’t bring herself to work less hard or to do any of her jobs carelessly and thereby ensure dismissal. It just wasn’t in her nature. Instead, she decided to go down the road of little hints.
He was in the office and waiting for her when she arrived with fifteen minutes to spare. He had fetched out a stack of files and, in a quarter of an hour, proceeded to fill her in on the people she would be meeting, the way their company operated and what part they played in the Forbes Corporation. In between, she made them both a cup of coffee while he perched indolently on her desk and rattled off information.
It felt comfortable. She dabbled around him, listening and taking in every word, carefully sticking a couple of pens into the briefcase which she had seen fit to buy shortly after starting the job and some paper, in case she wanted to take notes. Every so often she paused, asked a question, then proceeded with what she had been doing.
By a quarter to nine they were ready to leave, and she was fairly confident that she wouldn’t find herself too much out of her depth.
What she hadn’t been prepared for was how much she would enjoy the experience of being on the move with Max Forbes, meeting clients, playing a subdued but appreciated second fiddle to him. When his attention was focused elsewhere, as it was throughout the day, she could watch him with shameless interest and, with each passing minute, the respect which she’d felt for him from the very beginning became more grounded. She could now barely believe that he and Shaun had been related at all, never mind the intimate connection they had shared. Were it not for the physical resemblance, which was beginning to get a bit blurred in her mind as it was, she would have said that as two people the brothers could not have been further apart.
Lunch at a pub in the middle of the countryside, yet not incredibly far from the nearest town, was a one-hour affair which sped past. They discussed the clients they had seen, the ways in which they interacted with the property development side of the Forbes company. Max talked about New York, which was as personal as he got, and in turn Vicky chatted about living in Warwick as opposed to living on the other side of the world, without giving away too much information.
By the time they had finished with their last client at a little after three, it was pointless returning to the office.
‘My car’s still there,’ Vicky pointed out.
‘I’ll give you a lift home. You can always take a taxi in to work in the morning.’
‘No. That won’t do.’ She stared remotely out of the window, vaguely looking at the wide open spaces, dotted with the occasional house or barn conversion. They were still a little distance out of the city centre and unfortunately on the wrong side of Warwick as far as the office was concerned.
‘Why won’t it do?’ Max asked with a hint of impatience.
‘I like having my car,’ Vicky said stubbornly. ‘There’s no public transport to speak of from my house and I don’t like to think about what I’d do if something happened and I needed to get somewhere fast.’
‘Something like what?’ He seemed to know where he was going, and fortunately it was more or less in the direction of the office, so she was less jumpy than she might have been otherwise at the tenor of his question.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She shrugged and lazily slid her eyes across to him, mentally taking in the forcefulness of his profile, the harsh cut of his features, the dark, springy hair that seemed as defiant as hers when it came to being controlled. Even though his, unlike hers, was a less obvious colour. Chloe would have that very same thick, black hair, offset by those amazing grey eyes. She felt another twinge of uneasiness, which she stifled, at least momentarily.
‘I could fall over and break something…’
‘In that case, you wouldn’t be able to drive for help.’
‘Or I could burn myself badly with a saucepan of hot milk…’
‘Mm. Casualty, but still no car would be needed. You’d have to call for help.’
‘Okay. I could discover at eight in the evening that I’ve run out of instant coffee and I desperately need to go out and buy some more from the corner shop…’
‘So now you tell me that you’re addicted to coffee.’ There was sudden rich humour in his voice and it made her flush with excited pleasure and look quickly away from his curving mouth. ‘Mood swings, you know—bouts of sudden depression, quite unpredictable…’
‘Who? What?’
‘Coffee addicts…’ He chuckled and she automatically grinned in response.
‘Do you know,’ she murmured, ‘I’ve spent years wondering about those strange personality defects of mine? Thank you so much for sorting it out for me. Coffee addiction. Tomorrow I’m a changed person.’
This time he laughed, a deep-throated, appreciative laugh, and she felt another quick stab of pleasure.
‘Okay,’ he conceded, ‘we’ll head back to the office, but why don’t we play truant and have a bit of time out rather than go back to work?’
‘Play truant? A bit of time out?’ She wasn’t looking at him but she was smiling, weirdly relaxed and happy, despite all those misgivings which kept popping up with nagging regularity. In a little while, she would erect her defences once more. But, for the minute, sitting alongside him in his powerful car, after an unexpectedly enjoyable day, she felt too lazy to get worked up. ‘Surely,’ she continued, ‘those are not the words of an empire builder? If they are, then I reckon I could go out and build one or two empires myself.’ Cold winter sunshine glinted across the countryside, giving everything a hard edge.
‘Everyone needs a bit of truancy now and again, especially when in the right company,’ he murmured, more to himself than to her, so that she had to strain to hear him, and even then she couldn’t be sure that she had heard correctly. ‘I have an idea.’
‘What?’ She turned to look at him.
‘I live a matter of minutes away from the office. We could go there, and before you start protesting, I’m merely suggesting it because I’ve had quite a bit of building work done on my place and, if you decide to stay with the firm, you’d be entitled to reduced costs. You could get an idea of the standard of work the company is capable of.’
‘I haven’t decided whether I’m staying or not,’ Vicky said feebly, uncomfortably aware that she was raising the point because she knew she had to and not because she wanted to.
‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked sharply, and Vicky felt the cut of his eyes flick over to her.
She squirmed a bit in the seat and cleared her throat. ‘Well, I am on probation…’ she began, sliding away from the argument
looming ahead on the horizon. ‘You might very well find that I’m not suitable for the job and…and…well, I want to give it a bit of time before I make my mind up as well,’ she trailed on evasively.
‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘Are there problems that you haven’t told me about? Some aspect of the work proving too difficult?’
‘No! I was just speaking…hypothetically.’ She cleared her throat again in an attempt to establish control over her unconvincing arguments.
While they had been talking and her attention had been distracted, he’d driven quickly and expertly back to his house and, before she could protest, he was pulling up the drive and killing the engine.
His house was in one of the many rural retreats that nestled alongside the city centre, within twenty minutes’ driving distance, yet with a remote feel that came from being surrounded by open land. The front garden was set back from the road and hidden behind a luxuriant hedge that had been trimmed with awe-inspiring precision.
‘I…I d-didn’t realise you were bringing me to your house,’ Vicky stammered, stepping out of the car and glancing at her watch.
‘Oh. I thought I mentioned it.’ He was unlocking the front door, his back to her, and she frowned at him, wondering why she felt as though she had been skilfully manoeuvred. He pushed open the door and stood aside to let her pass. Hesitantly, she brushed past him, feeling the hairs on her arm stand on end at the slight contact, then she was inside a compact hallway, with rich wooden flooring. The banister curved upwards to rooms that were left to her imagination but, as far as she could see, the ones on the ground floor had been decorated with flair and taste.
‘Not my own,’ he confessed, following her appreciative gaze around her. ‘Two ladies armed with some of the weightiest books I have ever seen managed to persuade me that all of this—’ he spread his arm in a sweeping gesture to encompass the house ‘—was precisely what I wanted.’
‘And was it?’ She stepped a little more confidently into the hall, and continued to survey the clever subdued oatmeal colours that lent startling emphasis to the paintings hanging on the walls and the depth of the maple flooring. Through some of the half-opened doors, which promised a house bigger and more complex than it appeared from the outside, she could see that the pale canvas theme continued throughout, with splashes of deep green or vibrant terracotta bringing bursts of intermittent colour.
‘Well, I like it, so it would appear so.’ He laughed under his breath and she smiled in response.
‘I must say, I have absolutely no eye for interior design either,’ she admitted, ‘so two ladies with large books would do quite nicely for me as well.’
‘It could be arranged,’ he murmured, heading off out of the hall and expecting her to follow. Which she did.
She found herself in a kitchen which was expensively furnished with all the latest gadgets in evidence. None of them looked as though they had been touched. Only the semi-blackened kettle on the Aga hinted that someone actually used the kitchen, and the kitchen table, she was pleased to see, seemed to have an air of history about it.
‘I take it you don’t cook,’ she said. ‘Everything looks brand-new.’
‘Everything is brand-new. The decorators only cleared off about a week ago. Coffee?’
She was so accustomed to making coffee for him at work that the sudden role reversal, and the even more disturbing hint of intimacy in the situation, made her flush.
‘Perhaps a quick cup.’ Before any silence could develop between them, she began speaking rapidly, almost eating up her words, asking him about the building work that had been done, how long it had taken, whether he was pleased with the house, if there was anything else that required doing. She would have happily rattled on about the condition of her split ends if it had succeeded in masking her awareness of where she was. In Max Forbes’s house. Alone. No computer, fax machine or ringing telephone to assert the appropriate differences between them.
To her further unease, he began loosening his tie, tugging at it with one hand while he poured hot water into two mugs with the other. Her eyes clamped onto his long fingers as they pulled at the tie and she had to blink a few times to clear her head. He was saying something about walls that had needed breaking down and the chaos of the dust everywhere, despite all the precautions and plastic sheets that the builders had used. He had finished making the coffee, had removed his tie altogether and tossed it carelessly over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and now faced her across the central isle counter.
‘So that would be something you’d have to get used to.’
‘Used to? Sorry. I wasn’t listening.’ She went red and Max did his best to hang on to his temper. Having coerced the woman over his doorstep, using tactics which he had never had to deploy before, he was infuriated to discover that her reaction spoke of the wariness of someone suddenly caught in a trap. She hadn’t wanted to come, she didn’t care for the fact that she had now found herself here and her forced good manners were threatening to bring out the worst in him.
‘I said,’ he repeated very slowly, ‘that saying goodbye to your privacy would be something you would have to get used to.’
‘Saying goodbye to my privacy? What are you talking about?’ She slammed the mug onto the counter surface with shaking hands and some spilt over the sides and slopped onto the counter. ‘I may be your secretary, for the time being, but that doesn’t mean that I have to relinquish my privacy! If those are the kind of demands you’ve made on the women who have worked for you in the past, then I’m not surprised they left after a few hours!’
‘What are you talking about?’
In the sudden silence, Vicky realised that he wasn’t so much angry at her outburst as perplexed by it. Ah, she thought with a sinking feeling as she realised that whatever his original remark had been she had failed to hear it, absorbed as she had been in her own thoughts.
‘What were you talking about?’ she hedged. She took a long sip of her coffee and eyed him over the rim of the mug.
‘If you would make more of an effort to listen to what I’m saying, then you wouldn’t fly off the handle because you’ve caught the tail end and stupidly jumped to the wrong conclusions.’
Vicky bristled at his tone but, since he had a point, she thought it tactful to maintain a discreet silence on the subject.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said stiffly. ‘My mind was miles away.’
‘Where? Miles away where?’
He could feel himself itching to launch into an argument, anything to prise something more out of her than secretarial courtesy. True, she lapsed into strong emotion now and again, but then only for the briefest lengths of time and her retreat into that shuttered tower of hers was swift and complete whenever that happened. There was something wary and secretive about her, and his yearning to crack her open like a fruit was beginning to get a little out of control. His sleeping patterns had altered. Often, he would get up for no particular reason at some ungodly hour and even if he did his damnedest to concentrate his whirring mind on business or work or even, God help him, other women, his thoughts would return tirelessly to the small, pale-faced witch facing him now with her cup of coffee, eyes slightly narrowed, like a wild animal that has learnt to be cautious with strangers.
Even more frustrating was the fact that his once ceaseless social life had whittled down to business meetings, client dinners and the occasional meal on his own at the local Italian. The thought of another woman, another of his simple, easy-to-please-just-add-two-tablespoons-of-compliments-and-some-expensive-meals-out women, made him go glassy-eyed with boredom.
He blamed her.
‘I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular,’ Vicky said noncommittally, drinking the remainder of her coffee quickly.
Max forced himself to smile, or was it grimace? He couldn’t be sure. At any rate, whatever expression emerged felt unnatural.
‘The only thing, I’ve noticed, that gives a woman that abstracted look is the thought of a man.’ Fishi
ng. Again. And not very subtly either, he thought. Some of his remarks made him cringe. Where the hell had all his debonair self-assurance gone? He could see her looking at him with a withering expression and his mouth tightened.
‘Not all women, actually,’ Vicky told him politely. She shoved the empty mug a few inches into the centre of the counter, a little prelude to her request to be driven to the office so that she could collect her car. ‘Some of us do sometimes find our tiny minds cluttered up with something other than thoughts of a man.’
Okay, he thought, I deserved that, but did she have to look quite so…self-righteous? His mind leap frogged into an altogether different tableau, one where self-righteousness played no part, one that involved more emotion than she probably knew how to handle. In fact, a variation on one of the many tableaux that had recently been complicating his previously unfettered life.
‘Touché,’ he said, flushing darkly. ‘Well, I can see that you’re ready to go. By the way, that rumour about a supermarket being built near your house—it was just a rumour after all. They’ve bought a site on the other side of town instead.’
‘That’s a relief—’
‘And, in case you’re interested,’ Max continued, ‘I was talking about the building work you might want to have done on your house at some point. If you’re even considering the possibility, I’d suggest you get in touch with Mandy and let her know. Organising all the various people can be a nightmare, even though they all answer to this company.’ Who on earth did she think she was kidding? No matter how much she tried to hide it, there was a man somewhere in her life. What he couldn’t understand was why she felt compelled to conceal the fact. The mere thought of a man touching that body he constantly fantasised about made him want to grind his teeth.
‘You’re moving too fast!’ she said lightly, walking ahead of him to the front door. She looked over her shoulder and smiled. ‘And, from your point of view, I haven’t been with the company for two minutes! Shouldn’t I have to work a lot longer before I can qualify for any discounted building work from the company?’
The Boss's Proposal Page 7
