‘I didn’t realise that I had asked for any important pieces of advice.’
‘I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t accepted a few favours along the way.’
Shannon looked at him suspiciously. ‘I can’t imagine you accepting favours from anyone,’ she muttered.
‘Hmm. For a confirmed non-drinker, I must say you’ve managed to finish that glass of port in record time. Can I pour you another?’ Kane shot her a grin that was wickedly amused. ‘Didn’t you drink at all when you lived in Ireland?’
‘Of course I did! I just didn’t…drink in the house.’
‘And what other little secrets have you been keeping from that delightful mother of yours?’
Shannon thought that she might hit him at any moment.
‘I mean, does she know about the wild and irresponsible life you’ve been leading down here?’
‘I haven’t been leading a wild and irresponsible life!’ She had nightmarish visions of her mother quizzing her on her after-work activities, making dubious leaps of the imagination and coming to the wrong conclusions. ‘And stop interfering,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘You’re right.’ He stood up and flexed his muscles. ‘I’m nothing but an interfering old busybody.’ His smile was a devastating mix of rueful apology and old-fashioned charm.
Did he expect her to buy that nonsense? she wondered. His words implied that he was nothing but a harmless senior citizen whose nosy interference she should indulge, if only to humour him. Ha! His self-effacing description couldn’t have been further from the truth, as they both very well knew.
‘True,’ Shannon said sweetly in agreement. ‘And I personally can’t think of anything worse than an interfering old busybody.’
Kane didn’t care for that. She could tell from his frowning expression, and her saccharine smile grew broader.
‘I suppose,’ she mused, ‘when a person gets old there’s very little left to amuse them but interfering in other people’s lives. They bustle about, poking and prying, and don’t even realise how irritating they are.’
‘You have a point,’ Kane conceded. But before she could rest on her temporary victory and enjoy the taste of it before it evaporated altogether, he added, sotto voce, ‘Next time I see Rose I must ask her whether she ever considered me an interfering old fool with nothing better to do.’ He laughed softly to himself, as if remembering a particularly pleasant thought. ‘Perhaps she might see it as her duty to try and patch up my poor, wounded ego.’
While Shannon was trying to find a suitably cutting retort to this, he sauntered towards the kitchen door and paused, to throw over his shoulder, ‘Oh, forgot to mention. I told your mum that you’d take a couple of days off work to move and show her around a bit. And before you thank me, there’s absolutely no need.’ Then he was gone before she could launch a few well-deserved verbal missiles in his direction.
‘I don’t know how you could let yourself be conned into believing Kane Lindley,’ Shannon grumbled to her mother two days later in the airport lounge, where they were waiting for Rose’s flight to be called. Trust him to finish her mother’s trip with flourish. First-class air fare back to Ireland. Excessive and flamboyant, she thought to herself, although when she’d tried to share this humble opinion with her mother, she’d immediately found herself in the dubious role of small-minded daughter suffering a bad attack of sour grapes just because she hadn’t got her own way.
‘Now, don’t be silly, Shannon. I wasn’t conned into anything. Kane has chosen to take you under his wing and I must say I have utmost trust in him.’
‘Why?’ Shannon cried. ‘Why?’
‘Because he’s a dying breed, my girl. A true gentleman.’
‘When it suits him.’
‘And Eleanor is a charming little girl. I can see how fond she is of you.’ Her mother smiled warmly at her daughter. ‘You always did have a gift with the little ones. It’ll do you the world of good, living there for a little while, give you time to eat properly, get your money together for somewhere better to live.’
‘Just so long as you don’t go into a state of shock when I tell you that I’m moving out,’ Shannon warned. ‘And you might as well know that I’ll never be able to rent anywhere like Kane’s house. I’ll still only be able to afford somewhere small.’
‘Small doesn’t have to be dangerous and dingy.’
Her mother. Brainwashed. It was enough to make a girl ill. But Shannon had to admit, as the days rolled by, that Kane was true to his word. Carrie still collected Eleanor from school, and on the very first evening had asked Shannon to let her know what nights she planned to be away so that she could come over to babysit. There would be no question of her being trapped in a full-time nanny role.
Neither had she found herself obliged to politely accept lifts to work with Kane in the mornings. He left before seven, giving her an hour to get herself together before having to leave the house. And at the office he was utterly professional. However long the situation lasted, there would be no intrusion into her personal space.
Amidst the general upheaval, she had almost forgotten about the Christmas play until Eleanor reminded her one morning before she was about to leave for school.
‘I hope you haven’t forgotten about this afternoon’ were her opening words as she went into the office to find Kane sitting at her desk and riffling through her in tray.
‘Have you seen that Jones file? I’m sure I had it on my desk before I left work yesterday.’
‘Have you checked your briefcase?’
‘Good point.’ He abandoned the abortive search and focused on her. ‘What about this afternoon?’
‘Eleanor’s play?’
‘Damn. Damn, damn, damn.’
‘I’m afraid she’ll be terribly disappointed if you don’t turn up,’ Shannon told him quietly. ‘I specifically arranged no meetings for you this afternoon after one-thirty and that meeting shouldn’t overrun. I have to tell you that I’m really disappointed. I just can’t believe that you could have forgotten about it. She’s shown us her routine often enough, for Pete’s sake!’ As soon as the words were out she realised how cosily domesticated they made them both seem. Like a traditional couple playing at happy families instead of a boss and his secretary who had found herself in the unnatural situation of living under his roof.
To hide her burning cheeks, she began flapping around the coat rail, then spent a few seconds busying herself by dusting down her coat, as though it had somehow accumulated grit on the journey to work. When she turned to face him, she was less flushed.
‘Joke,’ Kane said, standing up and spinning her chair round to face her but keeping both his hands on the back of it.
‘What?’
‘Joke. Of course I remembered about the play. A few months ago I may have forgotten about it, but I’ve come a long way since those days of absentee father.’ He waited until she had primly positioned herself on the chair before swivelling it round to face him and leaning over her with his hands on either side of the chair. ‘Now I find our domestic little routines quite appealing, just as you seem to.’
Shannon was beginning to feel faint at his closeness. ‘We don’t have a domestic little routine,’ she denied, shakily, which made her sound as though she was guiltily denying some earth-shattering, self-evident truth.
‘Of course we do! You and Eleanor do homework and chat, and then you both prepare some food and I get home in time to catch up on the last half-hour of family chat…’
‘Family chat! Don’t be ridiculous!’
Kane raised his eyebrows expressively before pushing himself away. ‘We’ll leave at three. Will that give you enough time to change before we go to the school?’ Having wreaked havoc with her nervous system, he had now resumed his role of thoughtful employer and was looking at her with his head inclined to one side, patiently waiting for her to answer.
Shannon could barely stammer out an affirmative and even the demands of the job, which were usually constant enough to ta
ke her mind off everything but literally what was in front of her and needed attention, failed to deliver. Her mind refused to keep to the rails and insisted on breaking its restraints and merrily galloping down Avenue Wild Imagination.
The drive back to the house seemed unnatural at three in the afternoon, when they should both have been at work.
‘I feel like a truant,’ Kane said, reading her thoughts, and Shannon relaxed enough to smile.
‘So do I,’ she admitted.
‘Do you think we’ll get found out and the boss will have us for dinner?’
Shannon laughed at that. Wasn’t this what she found most disconcerting? His amazing ability to make her laugh when it was usually his fault that she was in a grumpy mood in the first place? However huge his personal assets were, literally and metaphorically, he still retained a sense of self-irony that could reach out and find the humour behind most things.
‘We might,’ she said, playing along with the game. ‘What do you think we should do if it happens?’
‘Throw ourselves at his mercy and beg for forgiveness?’
‘Or maybe pretend that our watches were both showing the wrong time and really we thought that it was five-thirty?’
‘Ah, we’ll be all right.’ He gave her a sidelong, teasing look. ‘After all, our boss is known to be the fairest, most generous man in London. A paragon amongst the male sex, in fact.’
‘Funny. I thought you might reach that conclusion.’ She laughed again, and the remainder of the trip back to the house passed by in pleasant silence, broken only by quiet, easygoing conversation that skirted from topic to topic, never resting long enough on any one for it to meander down dangerous byways.
And it was oddly gratifying to dress for a school event. She had been to her brothers’ and sisters’ various school plays and awards evenings and sports days but she had never attended a school event in the capacity of adult spectator. She wore a green and black checked skirt and a bottle green jumper and her high boots, all fairly new acquisitions since she’d started working for Kane and seen her pay packet considerably increased. She brushed her hair until it shone and then swept it away from her face, pinning it back on either side with two tortoiseshell clips, and was inordinately pleased when Kane told her that she looked absolutely perfect.
And the play was perfect as well. Eleanor remembered all her lines, not that there were that many to remember, and the animals and trees all behaved themselves.
Afterwards, over a fast-food dinner, Shannon recounted her various experiences of school plays and all the disasters that had befallen the various members of her family. When she talked about her past, she could feel it come alive, could feel her excitement as a child as she’d dressed in Nativity costume for a ten-second starring role in the class play. Her eyes sparkled and once or twice, when she looked at Kane, it was to find him staring at her, seemingly enthralled at her recounting of old times. He even joined in with the reminiscences and gave amusing thumbnail sketches of things that had happened to him as a boy.
Eleanor looked gratified but astounded to hear that he’d had a boyhood. Like all children, she probably assumed that her father had mysteriously emerged, fully grown and mature, from his mother’s womb.
So it seemed natural, when they had got back to the house and Eleanor was settled and asleep, to continue the trip down memory lane. And it seemed natural to mention Kane’s wife over a cup of frothy coffee. Shannon almost expected him to refuse to answer, but he did, startling her with the length and breadth of his explanation. They met and it had been, he told Shannon, an instant attraction.
‘But really,’ he said, caressing his coffee-cup thoughtfully, ‘when I look back, I wonder whether our mutual infatuation would have matured into something stronger. I don’t normally, I assure you, bore people with details of my private life but…’ their eyes met and tangled and Shannon’s pulse accelerated ‘…what can I say? We rushed headlong into a relationship and within a year Annette was pregnant. In retrospect, I wonder whether we really ever knew one another that well.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Shannon asked.
Kane looked at her broodingly. In the muted light, his face was all angles. The shadows lent him a remoteness that was at odds with his frank discussion of his dead wife. ‘She was distraught at being pregnant. It wasn’t planned and towards the end I could tell that she was terrified that her party days might be over. She was also upset at how her body changed. I always assumed that women found pregnancy enjoyable.’ He focused his attention on her, as though indicating that she might be able to provide an answer to this, and Shannon shrugged.
‘Not all do. I would, though.’ She smiled mistily. ‘I can’t imagine how wonderful it must be to have a baby growing inside you, feeling it, waiting for it to make its appearance…’
‘I thought that might have been your way of looking at things.’ There was a lingering silence during which she became aware of the breeze rustling against the window-panes, blowing through the leaves on the trees.
‘There’s something girlish yet womanly about you.’
‘Girlish yet womanly…? What does that mean?’ She laughed to dismiss the thick atmosphere between them but found that she couldn’t tear her eyes away from his and the laughter died in her throat.
‘I guess another way of putting it is…sexy.’
Sexy, sexy.
Sex.
With the man sitting just next to her at the kitchen table.
Shannon licked her lips and Kane watched the unconscious gesture of nervousness, which made her even more nervous. Nervous but excited. Unspeakably excited, in fact.
Then he leant across the few inches separating them and she closed her eyes as his cool lips touched hers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THIS was what Shannon had been waiting for. The realisation hit her like a bombshell the minute Kane kissed her. It was a slow, lingering kiss. He was tasting her, exploring her mouth with his tongue as his hand reached behind her head, pulling her to him, and Shannon allowed herself to be directed. She was barely aware of the smooth wooden table between them as she leant towards him and into him, drowning in the depths of his mouth. When he finally drew back, she found that she was trembling.
How could he stop? She opened her eyes and saw that he was looking at her.
‘What? What? What’s the matter?’ She leaned across and closed her eyes, but he placed one finger very gently on her mouth and her eyes flicked open again.
‘We need to talk about this.’
Talk? How could he be contemplating discussion at a time like this?
‘Why?’ she cried. ‘Why do we have to talk about it?’
He sat back in the chair and folded his hands behind his head.
‘Look, if you don’t want to…if you… I don’t turn you on, so what’s the point…?’ Shannon could feel herself on the brink of tears, but she wouldn’t give in. It was obvious. One moment of impulse was now being considered in the harsh glare of reality and found wanting. If he really wanted her, like she really wanted him, he wouldn’t have been able to pull back, never mind sit there looking at her through shuttered eyes and telling her that they needed to talk.
She stood up and he said quietly, ‘Sit back down, Shannon.’
‘And what if I don’t?’ she flung at him, gripping the edges of the table so fiercely that her knuckles were white. ‘What are you going to do? Stop me? So that you can tell me that we need to talk? Drag me back to the kitchen table, kicking and screaming?’
‘That,’ he said, ‘is precisely what I would do.’
By way of reply, she pushed herself back from the table and stalked across the kitchen, her eyes glazed and aching from the effort of not bursting into tears from sheer humiliation. How ironic to think that Eric Gallway, the man she had once idiotically considered the love of her life, had never been able to stir a response like this in her. His seduction had been intense, brief and polished, and his techniques for trying to get her into
bed had been much on the same level.
But the stronger he’d tried to fan her flames, the more she’d pulled back, believing that years of indoctrination had given her principles which she couldn’t overcome. She had really believed that she couldn’t commit to sex before marriage.
If he could see her now! Not a principle in sight. All her principles had vanished over the face of the horizon and she knew, with mounting dismay, that they had vanished because what she felt for Kane Lindley was nothing like what she had felt for Eric Gallway. What she felt was true and strong and right because she was in love with Kane.
The realisation brought a choked lump to her throat. Her eyes were stinging.
She felt his steel-like grip on her wrist before she even realised that he had covered the distance between them.
Shannon stood frozen to the spot, aware of the futility of any physical battle between them. ‘Go on, then! Talk! If you want to talk, talk! Get it off your chest.’
‘Not here.’
‘Why? What difference does it make?’
‘In the sitting room.’ He didn’t give her time to answer. Instead, he pulled her along while she ineffectively tried to wriggle out of his vice-like grip.
The sitting room was in darkness but instead of switching on the overhead lights he flicked on a lamp with one hand while the other remained firmly super-glued to her wrist. Then he pulled her along to the sofa and only released her when he was sitting right next to her, close enough for any idea of a quick sprint to the door to be out of the question. Not, she thought, that it mattered. The short distance between the kitchen and the sitting room had been enough for her to consider her options. They were basically limited to two. Attempt a pointless flight from the situation from which she would emerge with her dignity even less intact than it was now, if that was possible, or brazen out her mortifying rejection with as much cold self-possession as she could muster.
‘Why don’t we just forget what’s just happened?’ Shannon suggested, staring at the fireplace. She could feel the pulse in her neck beating and she drew in a long, steadying breath. Rallying her defences would be so much easier if she could just ignore the man sitting next to her. He wasn’t in her line of vision, but unfortunately she was still intensely aware of his eyes on her. She was also, unfortunately, all too aware of what he was seeing. A woman with heightened colour, her breathing shallow and gasping, hands clammy and shaking. Hardly a vision of cold self-possession, she thought bitterly. More like a vision of total collapse.
Secretary on Demand Page 12
