Frozen Enchantment

by Jessica Steele

  Her eyes were innocent and large when, looking at her sharply, Cheyne Templeton replied curtly, 'I'm not married.'

  'Some female's had a lucky escape!' Jolene muttered to herself, only to discover from the narrowing of his eyes that the man she was going to have to work closely with for the next two and a half weeks had the acutest hearing.

  To her gratitude, she had little to do with him during the flight. And at the end of the flight, excitement had her in its grip again, and it did not matter to her so much as it had that it seemed he was going to watch every move she made. Because she was here on her first overseas assignment, and surely anyone aspiring to be a top-notch PA would have to be a real stick-in-the-mud not to get excited about that!

  She was still feeling excited when, having just been handed her passport by her employer, she stood before the uniformed young man at Passport Control and felt hard put to it not to beam a smile at him when he scrutinised her features for what seemed an age. Then, having returned her passport to Cheyne Templeton for hotel formalities, she was collecting her luggage from the conveyor belt prior to having it X-rayed out of the airport.

  She had a brief tussle with Keith when he insisted on carrying both her luggage and his own, and then the four of them were outside the airport and on the pavement. And her excitement took off again. For here she was in the USSR, where, besides Moscow and Leningrad, a place called Irkutsk would start to mean something.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BY SATURDAY evening a good deal of Jolene's excitement and enthusiasm had evaporated. So OK, she had expected to work hard, but there was work—and then there was work! While she admitted that Cheyne Templeton had not spared himself either, he had kept her nose glued to the grindstone near enough from the very first thing on Thursday morning.

  No, before that, she corrected herself. For they had arrived at their hotel in Gorky Street at a little after six oil the Wednesday evening, and while she had stepped forward to the receptionist, keen and eager to try out her Russian, she had discovered that the receptionist spoke better English than she herself spoke Russian.

  Their room keys, plus small paper slips which would permit them past the hotel's doorman each time they came in from the outside, were handed out, and they took the lift. Keith and Alec were on a different floor and they got out first, saying that they would see the others at dinner.

  Engrossed to see a female floor attendant seated behind a desk when she and Cheyne Templeton got out at their floor, Jolene was absorbing the atmosphere when he told her curtly, 'This is your room,' and as he moved away to his door along the corridor, 'We'll dine at eight. Don't be late!'

  'Wouldn't dream of it,' she replied guilessly, and went into her room to unpack a few of her belongings and to investigate the plumbing.

  Dinner was a three-course meal which began with fish and red cabbage, and was followed by what Keith decided 'had to be reindeer'. The meal ended with a piece of iced shortbread.

  'If that's it, I think I'll take me a look round Red Square,' commented Keith.

  'I've had sufficient,' Alec said, getting to his feet. 'I'll come with you,' he added.

  'Would you like to come with us, Jolene?' Keith, as she had hoped he would, asked her.

  Eager to take in all and everything, she was about to accept the offer with alacrity when Cheyne Templeton cut in. 'I'm afraid I need to brief Jolene on a few matters.'

  'Some other time, then,' smiled Alec, and while Jolene was getting over her surprise that for once, if not directly, her employer had used her first name, the two engineers went on their way. After that, there did not seem to be any time for her to do any sightseeing.

  Indeed, she mused, she might just as well have left her camera at home, for she had barely been outside the hotel for anything other than business. She had only just found time to visit the bank around the corner.

  'You won't need too many roubles,' Cheyne Templeton had told her when on Thursday morning she mentioned that she would really like to get some Russian currency before she went much further.

  'I won't?' she questioned.

  He shook his head. 'Foreign currency is welcomed here. It's quite legal, and easier, to spend sterling,' he added, but he accepted that she still wanted to change a traveller's cheque for some roubles and even told her where the bank was, then waited while she crunched her way across through the snow to find it.

  No sooner was she back in the hotel, though, than the serious business they were there to do started. It began with a warm-up visit to a factory and from then on meeting after meeting where afterwards Cheyne Templeton gave her dictation after dictation—all to be typed back before her head hit the pillow at night. He worked fast and furiously, and Jolene could only be glad that everyone they had so far met spoke English, and seemed determined to practise it at every opportunity. If she began to wilt under the strain so that sometimes she found even her own shorthand indecipherable, then she would remember from having been there what the subject was all about.

  So far she had been able to fill in the few blanks accurately. She thought, too, that she was getting used to the pace at which Cheyne Templeton worked. Though if she could do no other than admire his hundred per cent dedication to the job in hand, not to mention that he never forgot a thing and seemed to have a photographic memory for detail, then she still thought he was something of a swine in his attitude towards her. Even when she barely had a minute to herself, it seemed to her that he was still watching her every move.

  She got ready for dinner that Saturday evening feeling sure that she would not be called upon to work flat out again tomorrow. Surely the chairman of Templeton's rested sometimes! Please let it be tomorrow, she offered up a prayer. She had not done a scrap of sightseeing as yet—surely Sunday was just the day to see Moscow?

  Because it was warm in the hotel, Jolene wore a two-piece suit of lightweight wool. She left her room with her thoughts on how she had come across a section of the hotel selling picture postcards and how she had sent her parents a card with a picture of the Moscow Metro showing its marbled halls. Her hopes were high as she secured the door of her room that maybe tomorrow she would have the chance of travelling on the Moscow Metro—when suddenly she espied Cheyne Templeton leaving his room some way up the corridor.

  Wishing she had timed it better, for she had no particular wish to see him before she had to, Jolene realised that it would be childish not to wait for him. The way one always had to wait for the lifts at mealtimes, it went without saying that she'd have to wait with him at the lifts anyway.

  'Have you finished that report I gave you after lunch?' he asked, his eyes flicking over her beautifully proportioned features and neat shape in her red two-piece, as he joined her and she fell into step with him.

  Biting down hard on the 'Give me a chance!' that sprang to her lips, Jolene halted by the lift and murmured politely, 'I thought—rather than keep everyone waiting for dinner—that I'd save some of that report in case I get bored for something to do later this evening.'

  'I've noticed about you, Miss Draper, a certain impudence you would do well to check,' Cheyne Templeton told her crisply.

  Immediately she made her face a blank. But as the lift arrived and she glanced at him before she got in, she could not help noticing that for all his crisp tone, and for all she was 'Miss Draper' this evening, there seemed to be a very definite upward quirk to the corner of his mouth. It was almost, she thought as the lift began to descend, as if he was having a hard time not to laugh. As if her politely spoken if sarcastically meant comment had amused him!

  Alec Edwards and Keith Shaw were already at the dinner table when they joined them. But as Jolene got busy with her egg, caviare and beetroot salad starter, she quickly learned that she would not have time to visit the Moscow Metro tomorrow. Not because she would be working, though, but because tomorrow they would be leaving Moscow.

  'We're leaving Moscow?' she exclaimed.

  'I thought you knew we had a meeting in Irkutsk on Mo
nday?' her employer replied.

  Yes, she did know, he had mentioned that meeting only that afternoon, but she had thought that Irkutsk must be a suburb of Moscow or something. Somewhere at any rate where they could get there and back quite easily by taxi.

  'I—hadn't realised that we'd have to change hotels, or to leave Moscow in order to be in time for the meeting,' she said, trying not to notice that Keith seemed to be trying not to laugh, while Alec was observing his caviare as if in some fascination. 'What time are we leaving here?' she questioned, perhaps with some vague notion of maybe still getting in a visit to the famed Metro.

  'Our plane takes off just after...'

  'Plane!' Jolene exclaimed. Somehow it had never crossed her mind that she would be taking to the skies again before her return trip back to England. 'We have to fly to get there?' she queried, thinking that if she had had five minutes to spare since she had learned that she would be visiting Irkutsk, she would somehow have mugged up where, in relation to Moscow, it was to be found.

  'Since our meeting is most definitely arranged for this coming Monday, to go by plane seems the only way to travel if we're to keep our appointment,' Cheyne Templeton said drily, and while by that time Jolene was starting to get the general idea that Irkutsk was quite some way away, his voice had taken on a pleasant note as he let fall, 'I'm reliably informed that even by plane it will take us all of seven hours to get there.'

  'Seven hours!' she exclaimed, aware that one could almost go from England to America in the same amount of time. 'Where the dickens are we going?' she just had to question.

  Her jaw nearly hit the table when, blandly, Cheyne Templeton told her, 'Siberia—didn't you know?'

  'Siberia!' she croaked. And, as she got herself together, 'You're—joking?' she suggested, mindful that Keith and Alec were smirking their silly heads off.

  'You'll learn, Jolene,' the man to whom she was earlier 'Miss Draper' began 'that I never joke about business.'

  She was still trying to surface from hearing that tomorrow she would be flying to Siberia when Keith remarked, 'Don't say you didn't bring your thermals!'

  'I did, actually,' she told him coolly, and tucked into her meal, grateful that simply because she had always thought of Russia as a cold place, she had thought to pack some woollen undergarments.

  They left Moscow from a different airport from the one they had arrived at, and by courtesy of Aeroflot. The plane they boarded was a TY154, and had very few seats vacant, Jolene noted. They took off just after midday to the accompaniment of pop music, and the music was still coming through the speakers well after they were airborne. She forgot about the pop music, though, when a stewardess diverted her attention by bringing round small terracotta-coloured bowls of mineral water. Wanting to cram every experience she could into this working expedition, Jolene drank her water and, looking at the man in the seat next to her, she saw that Cheyne Templeton too had quenched his thirst.

  Some time later lunch was served, and three hours after they had taken off from Moscow they landed in Omsk, to disembark while the aircraft was refuelled.

  As they walked from the plane to the transit lounge, though, Jolene was all at once very much aware of her employer; of his height and the air of authority which he just exuded.

  'Coffee?' he queried generally when, having climbed the steps to the transit area, the two engineers had found a table.

  Wondering why on earth she should suddenly have felt so aware of Cheyne Templeton, Jolene took the opportunity of his going to order coffee to give herself a mental shake. For goodness' sake, what in creation was the matter with her?

  'I wonder what the time is?' Alec pondered aloud, and gave Jolene something else to think about.

  'It's just gone half past three,' she consulted her watch to tell him.

  'That's what my watch says too,' Alec smiled. 'But since there are about ten time zones in the USSR, I reckon we must have crossed a couple of them already.'

  'Oh,' she murmured, only then starting to get to grips with how vast the USSR really was.

  They remained in Omsk for about an hour, and whatever the time in Omsk then was, and her watch still said half past four Moscow time, dusk was falling when everybody made a move to return to the plane.

  Jolene found that she was again walking side by side with her employer when, negotiating the icy steps of the transit building prior to going to the aircraft, she suddenly felt his hand firm on her elbow. For no reason her heart leapt a beat and then steadied when at the bottom of the steps he let go his hold on her. With no need then to keep her eyes on her feet and where she was putting them, she raised her head and, all at once, as she looked at the skyline, she was held spellbound by the most magnificent sunset.

  With the sun a big round beautiful ball in the sky, she was so enraptured that she just had to share it. 'Look...' she began, as with her eyes alive in her face she turned to Cheyne Templeton. But suddenly, as she looked up into his dark grey eyes, she forgot completely what she had been going to say. For as he looked solemnly down into her upturned face, she was all at once breathless— and she had the craziest notion that so too was he.

  That crazy notion did not last above a second, for to prove that he was not in the slightest breathless he was curtly telling her, 'You'd be better employed in looking where you're going, Miss Draper.'

  So what if there was some hard-packed snow about? she thought belligerently, and to show him that she was as firm-footed as he no matter where she looked, she swiftly put some space between them.

  Jolene spent the time until she boarded the aircraft in being certain that her imagination had been playing her tricks and that she had not felt in any way breathless either. All such thinking went out of her head, however, when as she made her way down the aisle to the seat she had previously occupied, she saw that it was now occupied by Keith. She smiled at him as she went past him. If he wanted the window seat, he could have it. He could have Cheyne Templeton to go with it, too, she thought a shade mutinously and, seeing that Alec was seated not too far away, she went and sat next to him.

  She knew that Cheyne knew where she was sitting when, as he came down the plane to his seat, his eyes registered where she was. Just counting his sheep, she thought sourly, but could not help but wonder, when she cared not a button, why she should suddenly feel so belligerent about him.

  'Hope you don't mind changing seats with Keith,' Alec said, giving her a fatherly smile. 'Only Mr Templeton wanted to go into some complicated engineering problem with him and, as you know, he never likes to waste a minute.'

  Jolene gave him some 'didn't mind a bit' answer, but she did not feel very talkative, and spent the next half-hour realising that Keith had not taken her seat in the aircraft because he wanted a window seat, but because Cheyne Templeton had ordered him to sit there.

  She had by then discovered that her employer was something of an engineer himself, so it was quite feasible that he wanted to spend the next three hours discussing some engineering problems with Keith. But she doubted it. As well as discovering that the head of Templeton's was a qualified engineer, she had also discovered that he worked on the principle of never leaving until tomorrow what he could do today. That being so, she was very near a hundred per cent certain that if he wanted an engineering discussion with Keith he would have conducted it in the first three hours of their flight, and would not have so much as considered leaving it until the second half of their flight.

  Not that it bothered her in the slightest that he clearly did not want her sitting next to him. For goodness' sake—as she fleetingly recalled Tony Welsh's way of going on—far from being piqued, it was a welcome relief to have a boss who was not trying to get as close as he could to her the whole time!

  She was lifted out of her sole topic of thought when the stewardesses again brought little dishes of water around. 'Spahsseebah,' Jolene thanked her, and heard Alec trying out his Russian too.

  But when they had downed the mineral water, it was as though A
lec had primed his vocal cords, for he was in a talkative mood from then on, telling her about his wife, and his wife's job at the local health centre, and about his children, now fully grown. 'It's funny,' he said, 'but every time I go away on this sort of trip, I spend weeks looking forward to it, and then, no sooner am I away from home than all I can think about is getting back to it again. Crackers, isn't it?' he ended.

  'It's not crackers at all,' Jolene told him warmly. 'It just means that your home and family mean a lot to you. Which,' she smiled, 'is how it should be.'

  They chatted on after that until there was a sort of tea break where they were served a cake, a small tub of jam, and a packet of coffee powder. Not quite sure what she was supposed to do with the jam, Jolene watched to see what the Russian travellers did with it. Though when she saw that they ate the jam with a spoon, and ate the cake afterwards, she decided that she preferred her jam spread over her cake. She had just demolished it when cups of hot water came round.

  She added the coffee powder to it, as did Alec, and, his vocal cords primed once more, when he learned that she had quite a big garden to look after they had a lengthy discussion on gardening.

  The plane had started to descend at Irkutsk when he said, 'Oh, by the way, I discovered that Irkutsk is five hours ahead of Moscow. Which means that we are now eight hours in front of the UK. Which also means,' he added, pushing back his cuff prior to adjusting his watch, 'that the time is now a quarter past midnight, Irkutsk time.'

  Jolene had altered her watch too, and she stayed close to Alec as they landed and boarded one of the two small airport coaches that came out to the tarmac to ferry passengers to the airport building. She stayed near to the fatherly man again when half an hour later they collected their luggage.

  It took the taxi about fifteen minutes to convey them to their hotel, but no sooner had the documentation side of things been dealt with and room keys handed out than Keith was making noises, since he had missed his dinner, about finding something to eat.