Best of Virgins Bundle

by Cathy Williams

  ‘House? What house?’ Katy wondered whether she had missed some vital connecting link somewhere in what he had said.

  ‘What house do you think?’ Bruno’s tone was exaggeratedly patient, the tone of someone who had to slow down the natural pace of his mind to accommodate the sluggishness of someone else’s. Hers. He fixed his fabulous dark eyes on her startled face and watched as comprehension gathered pace.

  ‘You’re going to work from Joseph’s house?’ Katy squeaked. Her stomach seemed to be doing a frantic tap-dance inside her. Thank God she was sitting down or else she might have keeled over at the horrifying prospect now unfolding before her eyes.

  ‘Correct. Now drink up, we can’t spend all day here discussing this.’

  Her eyes were as wide as saucers as she looked at him. Yes, of course she had anticipated that he would be around for a couple of days, a week at the most, and she had already decided that if that was the case, then she could quite easily avoid him. It was a big house. With a bit of forward planning she need never run into him, and on the few occasions when avoidance was out of the question she would just take a deep breath and cope with the temporary discomfort.

  But an indefinite stay?

  ‘Furthermore—’ Bruno flicked his wrist so that he could glance at his watch ‘—you’ll be working for me. It’s not ideal. I would have preferred someone with a bit more experience in dealing with the business world, but you’re available and you’ll have to do. I can’t very well ask my own secretary to uproot herself and move up here to accommodate me. Not when she has a husband and two children to consider.’ The implication being that, were it not for those emotional anchors, he would have had no hesitation at all in uprooting her.

  ‘There’s really no need to look so stricken, Katy. I don’t bite.’ He stood up and she realised that, as far as he was concerned, the conversation was over. Not that it had even been a conversation. He had informed her of what he intended to do and her duty was to keep quiet and oblige.

  And as she tripped along behind him, watching blankly as he charmed the nurses on duty and headed down the corridor for Joseph’s room, all she could think of was the nightmare prospect of what he had just proposed.

  She would have to have it out with him, she thought feverishly. In an ideal world, she would not have had to communicate with him at all, but she would just have to bite the bullet and confront him with the impossibility of his suggestion. Not that it had been couched as such.

  She found that her pleasure at seeing Joseph was considerably dimmed by the metaphorical cleaver she now felt to be hanging over her neck.

  It hardly helped that after a few minutes during which she held Joseph’s hand while Bruno toyed with something approaching a bedside manner, the subject of her new role was foisted onto her clearly still weak employer.

  ‘I really don’t think that this is the time…’ Katy initiated a hesitant protest and Bruno quelled her with a glance.

  ‘I am simply reassuring my godfather that he can count on my being around for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘You mustn’t interrupt your work schedule,’ Joseph predictably objected, then, to her dismay, he continued wanly, ‘though, of course, it would be very nice for me to know that you’ll be at the house, looking after it, so to speak, and looking after my dear Katy as well…’

  Katy tried not to splutter at this.

  ‘I do not need looking after, Joseph,’ she managed to say with a lot of commendable self-control and keeping her eyes very pointedly averted from Bruno’s intense, unsettling gaze. ‘I’m nearly twenty-four! I think it’s fair to say that I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself, and of making sure that the house doesn’t fall down around my ears! Besides,’ she said encouragingly, giving his hand a little squeeze, ‘you’ll be home sooner than you think.’

  ‘Is that what the doctor says?’

  ‘Well, no, not exactly, but then we haven’t actually spoken to any doctors as yet—’

  ‘Typically there’s never a doctor around when you need one,’ Bruno interrupted, scowling darkly. ‘Apparently he won’t be surfacing for another hour and I’ve given the nurse strict instructions that he’s to see me before he begins his rounds.’

  Joseph met Katy’s eyes in a moment of mutual understanding. She wondered whether it had even occurred to Bruno that a busy doctor might not appreciate being summoned by a relative of one of his patients, and then decided that it probably hadn’t. Bruno simply assumed that his wishes would be obeyed, supposedly for no other reason than the fact that he had been the one to issue them.

  It would be a salutary lesson to him if he found himself at the bottom of the pecking order when Joseph’s consultant arrived. Katy found herself drifting off into a pleasant day-dream in which Bruno was forced to wait at the end of a long queue shuffling along a corridor while, at the head of the line, a consultant as domineering as Bruno took his time while Bruno frantically tried to commandeer his attention from the back. She made the puppet figure in her head jump up and down in frustrated indignation and discovered she was smiling when Bruno’s voice brought her plunging back to reality.

  ‘Are you with us?’ he asked, short-circuiting all politeness as usual, and Katy sat up a little straighter.

  ‘I was just thinking…’

  ‘Well, we’d better be heading off. Joseph needs his rest…’ They both looked at the old man, whose eyes had drooped.

  ‘He looks so frail,’ Katy whispered in sudden anguish. She turned impulsively to Bruno only to collide with cold black eyes.

  ‘What would you expect?’ He stood up and strode over to the door where he waited restlessly for her. ‘He has had a heart attack,’ he continued harshly. ‘Did you imagine you would find him performing cartwheels?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘And I don’t think it’s very helpful,’ Bruno continued, preceding her to the door and then allowing her to brush past him into the corridor, ‘for you to let him see that there’s any doubt that he’ll have a full recovery and be back to his usual self.’

  ‘I didn’t!’ Katy protested in a dismayed whisper. ‘I mean, he couldn’t hear what I said and…and he wasn’t looking at me. In fact, he had nodded off! Of course, I wouldn’t want him to imagine that…that well…’

  ‘Where is this doctor?’ Bruno was scanning the corridor, as out of place as a fish in a tree. Katy could see the scurrying nurses glancing at him with interest as he frowningly surveyed the scene.

  ‘I don’t think it’s been an hour yet,’ Katy said dubiously. ‘Maybe we should just sit and wait.’

  Bruno looked at her as though the concept of sitting and waiting for anything or anyone was a foreign concept that he could not compute.

  ‘Standing here isn’t going to make the consultant appear any quicker,’ she pointed out tentatively. ‘And we’re getting in the way.’

  Before he had time to come back at her with one of his biting responses, Katy walked off towards one of the nurses at the desk and politely asked whether they could be notified of the consultant’s arrival when he appeared so that they could have a quick word.

  ‘His godson is very worried,’ she murmured in a low voice, while Bruno breathed down her neck in a very off-putting manner.

  ‘His godson is understandably anxious to have a few answers,’ Bruno interjected with a show of perfect politeness, and Katy wondered how he managed to sound so threatening when he was delivering, for him, quite an inoffensive remark. She had no need to look at him. She could imagine the unsmiling expression on his face all too clearly. The nurse must have picked up the same signals as well because the bland, bordering on bossy expression he’d worn had been replaced by a nervous nodding of the head.

  ‘If I kept people sitting and waiting all day long,’ was the first thing he muttered as soon as they had sat on the functional chairs further along the corridor, ‘I would no longer be in business.’

  Katy discreetly held her tongue as there was no point in antagonis
ing him when she still had to raise the sensitive subject still making her ill.

  ‘And just let me do the talking when this consultant makes his appearance,’ he grated. ‘Tiptoeing around the man isn’t going to get the answers that I need!’

  Katy sneaked a sidelong glance at him and knew, with blinding certainty, that Bruno was worried, desperately worried, and the only way he could deal with it was to become even more aggressive and forceful than he normally was. Her heart went out to him and on impulse she placed her small hand on his wrist, only to find him stare at it with such concentrated distaste that she immediately removed it.

  ‘Oh, spare me the compassion, Katy.’

  ‘Do you ever let that guard down, Bruno?’ she heard herself asking and immediately realised that she had overstepped the boundary. Personal questions like that were not encouraged by a man like him. Even Joseph shied away from indulging his curiosity about his godson’s life, only letting slip now and again to her questions that clearly nagged away at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ she apologised immediately. ‘None of my business. We’re both worried.’

  She waited for him to fill the brief pause, which he didn’t, and Katy released a little sigh. She thought that he had relegated her remark to oblivion and was surprised when he said in a low, musing voice, ‘Joseph has never been ill. Not with anything serious anyway. It’s odd but you never imagine that the people you care about are ever vulnerable; you foolishly imagine that they’re going to somehow live for ever.’

  Katy discovered that she was sitting on the edge of her chair and holding her breath. She felt a flood of sympathy at his unexpected admission but knew better than to express it. His moment of weakness would pass and then he would look back and resent her for having witnessed it in the first place.

  ‘I wondered,’ she volunteered hesitantly, ‘if we could discuss this work thing, Bruno…’

  Bruno inclined his body slightly so that he was looking at her, eyes narrowed. It took all the will-power at her disposal not to look away and thereby earn his irritation. Hadn’t he already snapped at her that he found it impossible to conduct a conversation with someone who couldn’t meet his eyes? How was he supposed to know that one glance in her direction was sufficient to reduce her to a state of panic?

  ‘What’s there to talk about?’ he asked in a reasonable voice.

  ‘I…I really haven’t got the right qualifications to work for you,’ Katy stuttered. ‘I mean, I’ve never worked as a professional secretary or anything…’

  He frowned. ‘You’re helping Joseph with his memoirs, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes, but…’

  ‘And correct me if I’m wrong, but that must involve at least some of the usual things, such as an ability to type.’

  ‘Well, yes, I know how to type, but—’

  ‘I thought you’d taken a course—’

  ‘A very short course,’ Katy swiftly pointed out. ‘I mean, I was a nanny for four years and when the Harrisons found that they would be moving abroad they helped me out by sending me on a three-month sort of crash course so that I could help Joseph out with odd bits of typing.’ She licked her lips nervously and discovered that, far from wanting to look away, she was mesmerised by her close-up view of his lean, strong face and the way the weak sunlight filtering through the windows highlighted the blackness of his hair.

  ‘Why did they do that?’ he asked, frowning.

  ‘Oh, they liked me. I still keep in touch with them, you know.’

  ‘And as a token of their affection, they decided to send you on a secretarial course? You’re losing me here, Katy.’

  ‘Well, I mentioned that I wanted to break away from nannying. Not,’ she stressed, ‘that I didn’t enjoy every minute of it. I did! I was looking after two lovely children and really I couldn’t have wished for a better start to life in London. The Harrisons were the perfect employers. I mean, so is Joseph, to be honest. I’ve been very lucky…’

  ‘Katy—’ he shook his head in fascinated bemusement ‘—where is this going? I didn’t ask for a potted history of your working life. I simply wanted to know why you were objecting to working for me.’

  ‘Right. Yes, well, what I was saying was that working on Joseph’s memoirs isn’t like being a real secretary.’ In a minute he would say that she was losing him again. She could see it in his expression. He wanted her to get to the point and not be sidetracked by a long ramble. ‘I do a little bit of typing, but not a huge amount. Mostly I take some dictation, very, very slowly, and then when Joseph goes off to have his nap I type it up. Very, very slowly.’ She felt obliged to get the picture straight. ‘He doesn’t work at breakneck speed, Bruno.’

  Bruno smiled with genuine amusement at that and she found that she was even more mesmerised by that smile.

  ‘I won’t be able to keep up with you,’ Katy said bluntly. ‘And I don’t expect that you have a lot of patience for mistakes. I make a lot of mistakes. I spend ages correcting them.’ In case he wasn’t getting the very pointed message, she decided to leave him in no doubt of her unsuitability. ‘In fact it usually takes me as long to correct my mistakes as it does to type the thing up in the first place. I’m not clever with computers and Joseph doesn’t mind one bit because he’s absolutely hopeless with them as well.’

  ‘You should have a bit more confidence in yourself,’ Bruno informed her bracingly. ‘And familiarity with computers is just a question of practice.’

  ‘I have lots of confidence in myself,’ Katy denied as she saw the lifebelt of her professed incompetence slipping out of her grasp. ‘Just not when it comes to technology. You could hire a temp from one of the agencies in town. There are loads of them floating around! Someone with that business experience you mentioned earlier!’

  ‘But then, what would you do all day long?’ Bruno looked at her narrowly. ‘You are being paid, after all, and with Joseph in hospital there would be nothing for you to do, would there? Instead of jumping to the conclusion that you would never be able to work for me, you should think of it as a challenge to fill in the long hours in an empty house.’

  A challenge? Shouldn’t a challenge be something that someone looked forward to? Who ever looked at something they were horrified at doing and saw it as a challenge? Did this man inhabit the same planet as the rest of the human race?

  Before she could contemplate what he had said and return with something adequate, however, the consultant arrived and the next half an hour was spent with her listening while Bruno took over the reins of the conversation. He asked questions she would never have thought of with a bluntness that she was personally mortified by but which the consultant seemed to appreciate, judging from the hearty, informative depths of his replies.

  The upshot was that there was absolutely no reason why Joseph shouldn’t make a full recovery. He should even be encouraged to do a bit of light exercise, and he would be back at the house within a couple of weeks or so. As a mark of how much Bruno had impressed him, he even scribbled his home number on a piece of paper and told them both that they could reach him any time if they had any more questions or were worried about anything.

  ‘Exercise,’ Bruno murmured, half to himself as they headed out of the hospital towards the car. ‘Joseph’s only form of exercise is light walks in the garden, am I right?’

  ‘He’s no spring chicken, Bruno,’ Katy said, and then, unable to resist a little dig, she added straight-faced, ‘What would you expect him to do? Cartwheels round the flower beds?’

  She was startled and irrationally pleased by the sudden burst of laughter that greeted this piece of tart sarcasm and it was only when they were in the car proceeding carefully out of the city and back towards the house that Katy remembered the unfinished conversation about work. Or, rather, unfinished from her point of view. Bruno had obviously decided that the subject matter was closed and was now thoughtfully ruminating on the challenges posed by the consultant in connection with the light exercise from which his godfather mi
ght benefit.

  Katy took a deep breath and then burst out, ‘But how can you run—is it an empire that you run?—from a house? I mean, don’t you need to be there, on standby, just in case…’ her voice trailed off as she tried to envisage the dynamics of big business ‘…just in case something happens?’

  ‘Something like what?’ Bruno asked curiously.

  ‘I don’t know exactly…’ Katy said vaguely, frowning. ‘Some catastrophe or something.’

  ‘You mean like the building falling down?’

  Katy read the amusement in his voice as a subversive attack on her obvious ignorance of corporate finance and the money-making business in which she had never had much interest.

  ‘I mean,’ she stressed bravely, ‘don’t you need to actually be in an office in your building so that if people have problems they can have…well, access to you? Face to face?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Bruno drawled smoothly. ‘Technology these days is actually quite sophisticated…’

  ‘It’s not my fault I’ve never been computer literate,’ Katy muttered in defence. ‘Of course, we did have IT lessons at school but I was never really interested. I’ve always thought that computers were so impersonal.’ She peered thoughtfully out of the window straight ahead as she edged the car through the city traffic at a snail’s pace, and considered her school life. Oh, she had been very happy there, but not in her most optimistic moments would she ever have described herself as one of those thrusting high achievers who seemed destined for the top careers. She had tried very hard to master the world of computer technology but she had never risen above pedestrian and it had never bothered her.

  She couldn’t see how she was going to get out of working for Bruno, especially when he had covered the underhand route of reminding her that she was being paid and would, presumably, be on call to him if his godfather wasn’t physically around. But when she pictured herself speeding around with whirlwind efficiency, answering phones and rushing at his breakneck pace, her mind seemed to shut down and a sickish feeling began to rise up in the pit of her stomach. Maybe if she didn’t feel so awkward and foolish in his company, she might have managed to pull off a passable show of competence, but the reality was that she would stumble over everything and end up enraging him.