by Jessica Hart
‘Are you sure you want the truth?’ Skye asked, eyeing him doubtfully. ‘You won’t like it.’
‘I don’t like anything about this situation!’
‘Well…’ Skye took a deep breath and began. ‘Fleming and his wife, Marjorie, had a party a few months ago and I met someone there…a man.’
Lorimer tapped his pen up and down impatiently. ‘I don’t want your life history, Skye. I just want to know why you’re here now.’
‘I’m telling you!’ Skye’s blue eyes were indignant. She picked up the threads of her story. ‘I met Charles at Fleming’s and I…well, I fell for him rather heavily. He was so different from anyone else I knew.’ She paused, fiddling with one of her rings, as she remembered the party and Charles, so cool and remote. ‘I saw him a few times after that, at dinner parties and things, but we never had a chance to…to get to know each other properly. Charles works for Fleming,’ she went on after a moment. ‘It turned out that he’d just heard that he was being sent up to the Edinburgh office, so naturally he didn’t want to get involved with anyone at that stage, knowing that he would be leaving soon.’
‘Go on,’ said Lorimer in a voice of grim long-suffering. ‘Do I gather that when he came up to Edinburgh you decided to come too?’
She nodded. ‘I was at a bit of a loose end then.’ No need to tell him that yet another firm had reluctantly decided that her warmth and friendliness simply weren’t worth the muddle she left in her wake. Her father’s disappointment had been the final impetus to her resolution to make a fresh start. ‘I happened to be talking to an old schoolfriend who lives here and she said she had a spare room in her flat. She suggested that I come up here, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity. I’m a great believer in fate,’ she added, trying to make Lorimer understand. ‘Charles was in Edinburgh, suddenly there was Vanessa offering me a room here, I didn’t have any ties in London…it just seemed meant.’
‘Did it indeed?’
Skye ignored the sardonic note in his voice. ‘Yes. You see, I thought that if I were up here at the same time as Charles he’d be less preoccupied than when he was in London and we’d have a better chance to get to know each other.’
She had also thought that all the glamorous women who always seemed to be hanging around Charles would be safely four hundred miles away in London, but she didn’t tell Lorimer that either.
‘So you followed him up here?’ Lorimer sounded as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. ‘Did this unfortunate man know he was being pursued so relentlessly?’
‘Of course not.’ Having got into the swing of her story, Skye was beginning to relax. She leant forward confidentially. ‘Men hate that, don’t they?’
‘I can’t imagine anything worse,’ said Lorimer distantly, eyeing her with appalled fascination.
‘Exactly! So I thought I’d have to make my presence here look natural, but I didn’t really want to get involved in a permanent job in case it didn’t work out with Charles. I decided I’d pretend I was up here doing a temporary job. I wasn’t actually going to do the job, you understand. I was just going to tell Charles that was what I was doing up here and then get a job as a waitress or something to earn some money.’
Lorimer was looking resigned. ‘It sounds a perverted sense of logic to me! Am I particularly stupid, or was there some reason you couldn’t simply tell him that you were working as a waitress?’
Skye hesitated. ‘Charles is very…serious, I suppose you’d call him.’ Vanessa called him a snob, but then Vanessa had never liked him. ‘He likes clever, professional girls. You know, the ones who wear smart suits and always know how to behave.’ She sighed. For a moment, she had forgotten whom she was talking to, and it was a few moments before her dreamy eyes focused suddenly on Lorimer’s. They held a very strange expression, exasperated and impatient, but there was a smile there too, and it was not an unkind one. If anything it was teasing, even tender, oddly disturbing, but the next instant it had vanished into a more familiar irony, jerking her back to the present.
‘Do I understand that you’re not exactly his type?’ Lorimer asked drily.
‘No,’ she admitted sadly. ‘Not exactly. I wanted to impress him, so I had to pretend to be doing something a little smarter than working in a restaurant. I looked in The Scotsman and saw your advertisement. It sounded ideal. Just three months, based here but some travelling around Scotland so I’d be able to say I was away when in fact I was at the restaurant.’
At the time, her plan had seemed perfect. Things had only begun to go wrong when she had met Charles again.
‘So it was just my bad luck that you picked on my advertisement?’ Lorimer asked with a sigh.
‘Well, yes,’ said Skye apologetically. ‘I never thought I’d actually have to have anything to do with you. Everything was going so well. I managed to just “bump into” Charles and pretended to be terribly surprised to see him, and when he asked me what I was doing here I had my story all ready. I told him that I was working here, never dreaming that Kingan Associates would mean anything to him, but then he said he would probably see me at work, because he was involved in some deal with you. So then, of course, I had to get the job!’
Lorimer looked across at Skye without speaking. In honour of the new job, she had put on her least outrageous outfit, a short woollen dress in a vibrant cerise colour that clung to her slender figure and emphasised her long legs, but had been unable to resist jazzing up what she considered to be an unaccustomedly sober image by adding one of her collection of fun necklaces. This one was a string of exotic wooden fruits, all brightly painted. Wooden pineapples swung from her ears. She had finally succeeded in pushing the wild blonde curls away from her face and her blue eyes looked guilelessly back at him, certain that he would see the reasonableness of her argument.
‘I don’t suppose it occurred to you that there were alternatives?’ he said after a moment. Skye had the impression that he had had to count to ten before he could allow himself to speak. ‘You couldn’t have told him you were still waiting to hear about the job? Or that you were still considering another offer? In fact, anything other than gaily claiming that you were already established as my PA?’
‘I didn’t think of it,’ said Skye frankly. ‘Anyway, the more I thought about it, the better idea it seemed. I can do just as good a job as anyone else, I just need the chance to prove it. If Charles came here, I’d have a good excuse to see him, and he’d be impressed to see me working as your PA. It would be a new image for me, you see: discreet, professional, sophisticated.’
Lorimer looked at the pineapples and winced visibly. ‘If I thought there were any chance at all of you being any of those things, I wouldn’t object to having you as my PA,’ he said. ‘As it is, I’ve never heard such a load of ridiculous nonsense in all my life!’
‘You said you wanted the truth,’ Skye reminded him a little sulkily. ‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘Oh, I believe you all right! No one could make up an absurd story like that!’ With a sigh, Lorimer put his head in his hands. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’
Skye looked innocent. ‘Perhaps you were very naughty once when you were a little boy?’ she suggested helpfully, and then wished she hadn’t when Lorimer lifted his head and glared at her. It was strange how eyes so blue and dark could look so icy, she thought irrelevantly.
‘It isn’t funny,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘I’m trying to run a company here. I wanted a quiet, sensible assistant who would help me get the new project off the ground, and what do I get? A flippant featherbrain who’s as quiet as a Caribbean carnival and about as sensible! You may find it an amusing situation, but I’m afraid I don’t. If this Charles of yours knows as much about you as I do, I don’t blame him for not wanting anything to do with you. I never thought I’d feel any sympathy for Charles Ferrars, but it seems I was wrong… I presume we are talking about Charles Ferrars?’
She nodded and his eyes hardened. ‘I’ve met him.
Fleming’s anxious for him to get involved on this deal, so it’s possible he may be coming in, but if you want him to see you as discreet, Skye, you’d better learn to be discreet. You’ll be dealing with confidential matters that are none of Charles Ferrars’ damned business, and if I hear you talking to him about any of it, in or out of office time, you’ll be out with a well-deserved boot up your backside. Is that clear?’
Skye sat up straighter. ‘You mean you’ll still let me work for you?’
‘It looks as if we’re stuck with each other,’ said Lorimer, resigned. ‘I don’t want to risk offending Fleming Carmichael, and you don’t want your precious Charles to know that you’re here under entirely false pretences, so now that we both know where we are we’d better make the best of it. I would, however, like to know exactly who, or what, I’m going to be dealing with for the next three months!’ Retrieving her c.v. from a pile of papers on his desk, he tossed it contemptuously across to her. ‘Would it be fair for me to assume that this is a tissue of lies from start to finish?’
Skye retrieved the c.v. and smoothed it over her knee. ‘My name and address are right,’ she began cautiously, reading down the list of personal details. ‘And I really am twenty-three and single.’
‘Good of you to be so candid,’ he said with more than a touch of acid. ‘Does this catalogue of true facts about Skye Henderson extend any further, or was four lines about as much as you could manage?’
She considered the list again. ‘I was born in London…that’s right too.’
‘Hardly a recommendation, even if it is true,’ said Lorimer. ‘However, let’s stick with your antecedents. Am I right in thinking that your mother is not in fact Scottish, as you claimed?’
‘No…but she did go through a stage of being very keen on Scotland,’ Skye offered helpfully. ‘She goes through fads. At the moment, she’s being very “green”, but I don’t suppose it’ll last. Anyway, I think she was reading about Bonnie Prince Charlie just before I was born and got a bit carried away with the romance of it all. She’s as English as you can get, but apparently she went around in a tartan skirt for a while and carried on as if my father were personally responsible for Culloden. I suspect he let her call me Skye just to shut her up for a while!’ She laughed merrily, but Lorimer was not amused.
‘Very funny,’ he said coldly. ‘That sort of flippant attitude is typical of the English, of course. They treat Scotland as if it’s some kind of joke.’ His tone was so bitter that Skye had the impression that his dislike of the English went back way beyond his disastrous involvement with the London finance company, and she looked at him curiously, wondering about his past and what had made him the man he was now.
Wisely deciding not to make matters any worse than they were already, she sat up straighter in her chair and tried to look like the kind of girl who didn’t even know the meaning of the word ‘joke’, but her face simply wasn’t designed to do anything other than smile.
Watching her unsuccessful attempts to appear suitably earnest, Lorimer’s forbidding expression eased. He frowned harder and tried to look severe, but there was an unwilling but unmistakable gleam of humour in his eyes. He nodded at the c.v. in her lap. ‘I gathered from what Fleming said that you’ve taken a… how shall I put it?…a somewhat creative approach as far as work experience is concerned?’
‘I just promoted myself a bit,’ said Skye, glancing guiltily at the list of high-powered jobs she had claimed for herself. Perhaps she had been rather ambitious.
‘So you have worked for an advertising agency, but not as the managing director’s PA?’
‘I was a temp there for a couple of weeks.’
‘A couple of weeks?’ Lorimer pressed his fingers to his temples and breathed deeply. ‘You don’t lack nerve, I’ll give you that! I suppose I should be grateful that you’ve worked as a secretary at all. At least it means you can type…or does it?’
‘Of course I can!’
‘At seventy words a minute?’
‘Well, perhaps not quite that fast…’
‘I didn’t think it would be. How many words a minute should I deduct to give me a fair idea of what you can actually do? Twenty? Twenty-five?’
‘Forty?’ Skye hazarded a guess.
Lorimer kept his temper with a palpable effort. ‘Forty?’ he repeated, his voice carefully expressionless. ‘Let me get this right. You can manage a bit of laborious typing, but I might as well learn to write all my letters out by hand rather than expect you to take down any shorthand?’
‘I think it might be better,’ said Skye, relieved.
‘Is there anything you can do?’
‘I can answer the phone,’ she said brightly, but Lorimer only lifted a sardonic eyebrow.
‘I hope you’re not expecting a round of applause?’
‘And I make a very good cup of coffee.’
‘I’m sure that’ll be a great help, but I’m more than capable of pouring my own coffee!’
Skye thought. ‘Well…I can do the filing and the photocopying and make travel arrangements…and I could organise your social life.’ She looked at him hopefully. She had always thought she would make rather a good social secretary, but somehow Lorimer didn’t look the type to go in for long lunches or taking guests to the theatre. His idea of entertainment was probably a round of golf, she realised. Not much scope for her there.
Lorimer was unimpressed by her array of talents. ‘If you type as slowly as it sounds, I’ll be here all night waiting to sign my letters and I won’t have time for a social life,’ he pointed out caustically. ‘Well, we seem to have established that your c.v. isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, so I might as well have it back.’ He held out his hand and Skye gave it back to him rather shamefacedly. ‘I was going to tear it up, but it’s such a creative document that I think I’ll keep it to remind me just how far some girls will go to get their man! I’m surprised you didn’t list Charles Ferrars as one of your interests instead of…what was it now?…oh, yes, travel, theatre and, yes, golf!’
‘I would like to play,’ said Skye bravely, meeting his derisive look.
‘But you’ve never been near a golf course in your life?’
‘Well… no.’
‘That was obvious,’ said Lorimer. ‘Even if it hadn’t been plain as a pikestaff that you were making everything up as you went along, I’d have known you were bluffing as soon as you told me your handicap was two.’
‘But I deliberately chose a low handicap so that you wouldn’t suspect!’
Lorimer sighed. ‘Ladies’ handicaps begin at thirty-six, Skye. The better you are, the lower your handicap. If you play off two, you’re an extremely good player. If you’d claimed a handicap in the thirties, I might just have believed that you’d recognise a golf ball if it fell on your head.’
‘Well, what a stupid system!’ said Skye, disgusted, and then giggled as she realised what a fool she had made of herself. ‘It’s just as well you didn’t offer me a game!’
‘I’m glad you find it so amusing.’ said Lorimer dourly. ‘We won’t be able to make a scratch player out of you, but you’re going to have to learn something about golf if you’re not going to make me look utterly ridiculous.’
‘Couldn’t I pretend to have broken my arm or something?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said irritably. ‘You can’t spend three months in plaster for no reason. Besides, you need to sound as if you know what you’re talking about on the phone. I’ll have to show you the basics when we go down to Galloway. It’s quiet down there and no one will see us.’
Skye perked up at the prospect of a trip out of the office. ‘When are we going to Galloway?’
‘That depends on your friend Fleming Carmichael. Probably within the next two or three weeks, but there’s a lot to be done before then.’
Infinitely relieved that the worst of Lorimer’s anger seemed to have dissipated into resignation, Skye spread her hands and beamed at him. ‘Well? Where shall I start?’
Lorimer looked her over with a jaundiced eye. ‘You can start by tidying yourself up. You look a complete mess.’ He picked up his pen and reached for one of the files arranged in neat piles on his desk. ‘I had planned to do some dictation, but it looks as if I’m going to have to write it all out by hand now. You can familiarise yourself with your office next door while I’m doing that, but make the most of it. After that, you’re going to work!’
CHAPTER THREE
SKYE soon learnt that Lorimer Kingan was not a man of idle threats. She had never worked so hard in her life. Her previous employers had never expected very much of her, but Lorimer kept her busy all week, making her type and retype letters until they were perfect. Everything had to be immaculate, so that Skye, whose usual approach to work was slapdash in the extreme, found her desk piling high with plans to be photocopied and circulated, reports to be typed, letters to be filed and queries to be answered. It didn’t take long to realise that if she didn’t check absolutely everything it would just end up back on her desk with a sarcastic note scrawled across it and she would have to start all over again.
Nobody had ever made Skye work before, and by the end of every day she was so tired that she could hardly drag herself up the stairs to Vanessa’s flat.
‘You’re just not used to doing a proper day’s work,’ said Vanessa unsympathetically. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
‘That’s what Lorimer said,’ Skye grumbled that weekend. ‘I thought at first that he was just trying to bully me into leaving of my own accord, but when I asked the others in the office they said he was like that all the time! They’re all scared stiff of him. Can you believe it, Van? They never talk to each other! You walk into a room and there’s dead silence. They’ve all got their heads down and they’re working!’
Vanessa laughed at Skye’s scandalised expression. ‘People do, you know! How are they coping with you? You must be a bit of a shock to the system there. You never stop talking.’
