A Business Engagement

by Jessica Steele

  Carter’s look was none the warmer, and she guessed he thought she had a fine nerve committing the company’s promise to a crook like Corbett. But, if he thought it, he didn’t say it. Instead he stated curtly, ‘I’ll take care of it.’

  And that was that. Her head ached. She didn’t want to go out that night—and she had not the foggiest notion of where she was going.

  When five o‘clock came, so did a telephone call that was to delay her from going home. It was from a man she had spoken to before, who had an urgent message for Joseph Fulford. ‘It’s in connection with something most confidential he’s working on. But it’s vital he has this information before the start of business tomorrow. Well before, if he’s to have any chance to sort through his strategy. I’d have rung earlier, but I’ve only just got the bare facts myself. Can you help?’

  ‘No problem,’ she assured him. She took down his message, made little sense of it, repeated it back for accuracy and, armed with her notes, she went along the corridor to Joseph’s office.

  Joseph Fulford was not there, but she hadn’t expected him to be. Why else would she take his messages? Disturbingly, though, neither was his PA. Clearly she’d better things to do of a Tuesday evening at ten past five than to hang about the Hamilton Holdings building.

  Now what? Ashlyn went back through to Joseph’s office again. Glancing at his desk, she saw his PA had tucked a note into his blotter where he would see it when he came in. It was a non-essential kind of note but pretty obviously he was expected back that evening.

  Ashlyn toyed with the idea of tucking her note into the same blotter. She dismissed it. If her information was vital and so confidential, she had better hand it to him personally. He’d probably look in in a minute.

  At five forty-five, Ashlyn was still thinking the same—though not with the same conviction. At ten to six, she tried to raise the switchboard. As she had thought, the switchboard operator had plugged in an outside line—and gone home. An outside line. Ashlyn smiled. Perhaps Joseph had decided not to return to the office and had gone home too. She would ring him. Problem solved.

  A few minutes of searching for his phone number soon showed she still had a problem. Two, in actual fact, if you counted that she had to get home herself and be ready to go out by eight o’clock.

  She left Joseph’s office and called at all the other offices on the top floor—bar one. Everybody else had gone, it seemed. She remembered the mound of paperwork she had seen on Carter Hamilton’s desk. She had been to his office once today and didn’t want to go in again. But since she understood he worked late each evening he was her only hope.

  He was still there. He looked up as she went in, his expression no warmer than it had been the last time she had seen him. ‘Do you have Joseph Fulford’s home telephone number?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘What do you need it for?’

  A yes or a no would have done! ‘I’ve a message for him,’ she replied shortly.

  ‘You take messages for him?’ He seemed surprised. Then he took a moment out to recall, ‘You lunched one of Henry Whitmore’s associates too.’ Bluntly he added, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing’s going on!’ she denied heatedly. Honestly—this man!

  He was waiting—wanting more. Which was why she decided he could take a running jump before she’d tell him more. Only, she still wanted Joseph Fulford’s home telephone number. It was an impasse and she knew it. And she had to be home and ready by eight.

  ‘If you must know, word has spread that while Lorna Stokes is off sick, your calls are switched to me when you’re out. I occasionally do the same thing for one or two of the other board members.’

  ‘The hell you do!’

  She wasn’t sure if he was admiring, annoyed—or what he was. ‘I’m hardly stretched,’ was the best defence she could come up with. ‘But anyway, I’ve taken this message for Joseph...’

  ‘He’s not coming back tonight.’

  She’d gathered that much herself! She tried hard to keep calm. ‘Well, anyway, it seems pretty vital that I contact him. Do you have his home phone number?’

  Carter stared at her levelly for long seconds, his good-looking face expressionless. Then, not looking in the least regretful, he replied suavely, ‘What a pity—I don’t. He’s just had his number changed and hasn’t thought to let me have it.’

  Blow that for a tale! Why she felt sure he was lying she couldn’t have said. ‘But this message is obviously important,’ she insisted, and, moving closer to his desk, she handed Carter the details of the call.

  ‘There’s no mistaking that,’ he agreed, handing the piece of paper back. ‘He’ll have to have that information before morning.’ Ashlyn had no belief at all in the hint of a smile that crossed Carter’s expression as he volunteered, ‘I do have Joseph’s address, though.’ And, picking up his pen, he wrote it down and handed it to her, instructing, ‘You’d better drive over and deliver it in person.’

  Ashlyn looked at the address and saw that Joseph lived in an entirely opposite direction from where she lived. ‘But I don’t live anywhere near...’ she began to protest. Dammit, she was sure Carter knew Joseph’s phone number. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a date tonight!’ she further protested, hoping perhaps that Carter might be more reasonable.

  Fat chance! ‘It’s tough at the top!’ he drawled. Miserable toad! He looked quite cheered that she might have to break her date!

  ‘You don’t live anywhere near?’ she hinted—and saw him smile for the first time.

  It was a mistake to believe in that smile too, and Ashlyn could have hit him when, not sounding in the least unhappy about it, Carter informed her, ‘Would that I could go for you—but I’ve a heavy date myself tonight.’

  Ashlyn felt that peculiar sensation in the pit of her stomach again—and hated him some more. ‘I hope you enjoy it!’ she snapped, hoping nothing of the sort—she prayed his date gave him rabies.

  ‘Oh, I will,’ he assured her silkily.

  Ashlyn slammed out to go and phone Todd. Rat, rat, double-dyed rat!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BECAUSE it was now known that she was a board member, Ashlyn had no trouble the next morning when she visited each PA on the top floor and entered their director’s home address and phone number in her diary. In the event of anything similar to last night’s performance happening again, she had no intention of having to go to Carter Hamilton for that sort of detail.

  She was still cross with him, and still convinced he had been lying when he’d said he hadn’t got Joseph Fulford’s home number. He was just too efficient, just too—everything not to have it. Though why he had withheld that number from her she couldn’t decide. She whittled it down to two possibilities: either he was testing her to see if she had the company’s interests sufficiently at heart to let them take precedence over her private life, or he was just being bloody-minded and did not care that she’d had to break her date.

  Not that going out with Todd and the gang could in strict terms be called a date. But he wasn’t to know that. Pig!

  It was around ten o‘clock when the man at the top of her detestation parade strolled into her office. ‘Find Joseph all right?’ he enquired pleasantly.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ she answered prettily, and because she couldn’t resist it added, ‘And my date waited for me.’ She didn’t see why Carter Hamilton should have the sole prerogative of lying.

  ‘Don’t forget the board meeting next Tuesday!’ he answered crisply.

  Love you too, she silently fumed. And so the day progressed. And the next, and the next. And Ashlyn, her humour restored, drove home on Friday evening realising that she had been fully occupied these last three days. Her job seemed to have grown!

  It still slightly amazed her that, while knowing nothing at all about business, she could talk so confidently with highly influential people. But it appeared that she could, because one or two of them asked especially for her when they phoned.

  Top-floor executives seemed,
just lately, to be forever dropping by en route to their own offices. And yesterday Henry Whitmore had called on her lunchtime services to go with him to help him entertain a couple of associates.

  ‘You’ve got a Cheshire cat grin all over your face!’ her mother remarked when she went in. ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘You could say that!’ Ashlyn answered, smiling, and felt so good about being a part of the working scene, she stooped and gave her mother a kiss.

  ‘Don’t forget to tell your uncle Edward all about it at his retirement dinner tomorrow night!’ her mother called after her as Ashlyn headed for her room. Her parents were still suffering from this pride thing, then!

  Ashlyn loved her family, and enjoyed family gatherings. Her uncle Edward’s retirement dinner was no exception. The following evening she went with her parents to join her six cousins, their wives and older offspring to celebrate with her other uncles and aunts the eldest Ainsworth’s well-earned retirement.

  It was a happy party, but, as ever, one proud parent after the other seemed to be bursting to relate some clever, endearing or amusing anecdote regarding their progeny.

  Her father’s opportunity came during the main course, and Ashlyn was stunned, not to say mortified, to hear him proudly boast, apropos of almost totally nothing, ‘Of course Ashlyn is invited to other board members’ homes now.’

  All eyes turned to her and she felt absolutely unable to humiliate her father by stating that she had merely been delivering a message to one of them. She had no option but to look modestly down at her plate as if fascinated by the King Edward potato thereon.

  ‘You’re doing well, I hear, Ashlyn,’ Teddy, another of her super cousins, commented lightly.

  ‘Not bad,’ she answered—and discovered that reply was not good enough for her mother.

  ‘Not bad!’ she exclaimed. ‘You should have seen her face when she came home yesterday. She’s taken to her business career as if born to it.’

  ‘Being an executive director can’t be easy,’ her uncle Richard opined, and Ashlyn, dying a thousand deaths, was grateful when her cousin Duncan, who was sitting next to her, gave her elbow a nudge.

  ‘Go with the flow, coz,’ he muttered, as if aware of her high embarrassment. ‘My folks are only waiting for yours to shut up so they can get started on telling one and all of my masterly intellect.’

  Ashlyn was cheered, and he was right. She guessed that all families were like that as Duncan’s praises were sung. Perhaps her parents weren’t any more proud than the rest of the family. Though when she recalled that it was because of her parents’ pride that she was doing her ‘executive director’s’ job in the first place she doubted that.

  Geoff Rogers’ PA, who’d had a dreadful and prolonged bout of flu, returned to work on Monday, but Ashlyn discovered that she was still fielding calls for Geoff.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he enquired, always the flirt although, having discovered Ashlyn wasn’t playing, he had toned it down a little. ‘It will give Elsa a little time to catch up.’

  ‘I don’t mind at all,’ Ashlyn replied, ever aware that, even if this job had grown to be full-time, it would come to an end when Lorna Stokes returned.

  Ashlyn saw nothing of Carter that day, and went home that night looking forward to the board meeting the next day. Oh, not because she would see him there. Perish the thought! It was just that she had found the last meeting more interesting than the previous one. And, now that she knew a little more—true, not a great deal more—it should be most interesting listening as matters slipped into context.

  Ashlyn drove to Hamilton Holdings on Tuesday hardly able to believe how much she had changed in the space of less than three months. To begin with she had been terrified at the prospect of attending a board meeting. Yet here she was today, actually looking forward to it!

  Carter was not at the meeting. ‘Good morning, everyone.’ Joseph Fulford took the chair and opened the meeting with Carter’s apologies for not being there. He was, it seemed, away on other business.

  And the meeting was deadly dull. Ashlyn wondered why she had ever looked forward to it. She knew the names of everyone there now, and several of them had greeted her in the ante-room, Henry Whitmore in particular breaking off from what he was saying to call, ‘Don’t run away afterwards, Ashlyn. I need your help.’

  She kept herself awake throughout the meeting by wondering what he wanted her help with. But, much though she liked Joseph, he had a sleep-inducing voice. Carter, now, he... Grief, she was actually comparing the man favourably with someone! ‘Out, damned spot!’ In this case, a Gloucester Old Spot, a breed of pig she must have heard about from somewhere or other.

  ‘Coming to lunch with us, Ashlyn?’ Geoff Rogers came over the moment the meeting was over.

  She was about to accept when Henry Whitmore came over. ‘My need is greater than yours,’ he said as he edged Geoff out of the way. ‘Ashlyn and I have been invited to lunch with some people we met last week.’

  ‘They’ve invited me?’ Ashlyn asked in surprise.

  ‘They insist that you come along,’ Henry informed her.

  Ashlyn started to feel better. Henry might be gallantly stretching the truth a little, but it did her heart good that she had been included at all. It made her feel a true part of the team.

  She had another pleasant surprise on Thursday afternoon when her office door opened and a man of about thirty came in. He was dark-haired, olive-skinned—and was dramatically distraught.

  ‘Mamma mia!’ he exclaimed, on seeing her. ‘I am just on my way back to Italy and thought I must find a moment to go and see Ashlyn of the beautiful voice—and here you are—enchanting!’

  Ashlyn left her chair to go and shake hands with him. ‘How nice to meet you, Vezio,’ she greeted him, for he could be no other than Vezio Morini.

  ‘Ah, you are so beautiful—and you know who I am!’

  He was, to say the least, a little over the top, in her opinion. But she could not help but like him. ‘Of course,’ she smiled, and, falling naturally into her hostess mode, asked, ‘Have you time for tea or coffee before your flight?’

  ‘I should have called on you first and let my other business wait,’ he mourned. Somehow, while making him a cup of tea, and for all he spoke excellent English, they fell to speaking Italian.

  And then it was time for him to rush off. ‘Have a good flight,’ she bade him.

  Vezio took both her hands in his and, despite the fact that he barely knew her, he kissed both her cheeks. ‘Next time I am in London, I will call on you first,’ he stated. ‘Arrivederci, my beautiful Ashlyn.’

  She collapsed onto her seat when he had gone. Vezio Morini had charm by the cartload. Yet, for no reason she could think of, a man came to mind whose charm was conspicuous by its absence when he was talking to her. She guessed Vezio had been to see him. Carter must have told him where to find her.

  Geoff Rogers, late in and in a rush the next morning, stopped by her office on the way to his own. ‘I’m lunching with some people today—it could be heavy going. Be an angel and come with me.’

  Was she the boardroom’s PR liaison officer and message-taker-in-chief or wasn’t she? ‘If you think I’ll be any help,’ she agreed.

  ‘Oh, you will be,’ he beamed. ‘I don’t know what it is, or how you do it, Ashlyn, but people relax around you.’

  ‘I’ve already agreed to come,’ she teased.

  ‘No soft soap, honest!’ he assured her, consulted his watch and rushed off.

  Lunch was a pleasant affair, and Ashlyn didn’t know what Geoff had worried about. True, there was more talk about business than when she had lunched with Carter, or Henry Whitmore for that matter. The conversation brought forth moments when she judged it best not to try to contribute. But there were other times when a word here and there seemed to be the nudge needed to keep things flowing.

  And if the length of time they’d taken over lunch had made the occasion fruitful, then the fact that it had gone fou
r by the time she returned to her office also seemed to hint that it had not been unsuccessful.

  Ashlyn returned to her office, switched on the coffee-maker and made a mental note to tell Mrs North not to cook her an evening meal in future. These business lunches were starting to become regular. However, she reminded herself, this would not go on for very much longer. Lorna Stokes was now out of hospital. Soon Carter would tell her that her job was over.

  That thought saddened her. She didn’t want to leave. It had been a big adjustment leaving home daily to do her nine-to-five stint, but she had adapted far more easily than she would have believed. And, for all she could not have said what exactly it was that she did, and she felt that she could hardly call it hard work, she did not want it to end.

  Just then, her door opened. Looking so tight-lipped that she would not have been surprised if he had told her this was her last day with Hamilton Holdings, Carter came in.

  Her heart started to pound, pound so much that she realised she must want to stay on at the company more than she had realised.

  ‘Kind of you to come back!’ Carter grunted by way of openers. How to win friends and influence people!

  ‘I’ve been out to lunch!’ she flared. She might want to hold onto her job for as long as she could, but she didn’t have to sit meekly and take everything he threw. ‘It was business!’

  ‘Business?’ he echoed, his eyes on her alert. ‘Business for this company?’

  ‘As it happens, yes. Geoff Rogers and—’

  ‘You’ve been out to lunch, all this while, with Rogers?’

  ‘And enjoyed it very much!’ she retorted defiantly. ‘And before you start,’ she charged on, never having forgotten he had warned her against involving the Hamilton name in some sex-scandal that very first day she had met him, ‘Geoff Rogers is harmless.’ When he looked likely to interrupt, she added, ‘We didn’t lunch cosily on our own, if that’s what you’re thinking, but with a Mr Foster and a Mr Ison.’