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He’d had beautiful assistants before—women who seemed to think that a lovely face and stunning body would catapult them from their assistant’s desk into the high-ranking security of the boss’s bed!
Not that Megan Phillips was ugly, he conceded wryly. In fact, she came nowhere near being ugly—she was just refreshingly and unthreateningly ordinary. She didn’t wear make-up and she didn’t wear short skirts, either. In fact, she never wore skirts at all—always trousers. Presumably to cover up her fat ankles. And that was just fine by him.
Because Dan McKnight had one prime rule in business.
That he never slept with anyone he worked with.
Megan was itching to tell him about the phone call, but equally determined to be professional, so she toiled away all afternoon and waited until it was almost going-home time before she brought the subject up. ‘Dan?’
‘What?’
‘Your girlfriend rang while you were out.’
He lifted his dark head and the grey eyes took on a wary expression. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ There was something about the tone of his voice which made her feel faintly uneasy. Megan blinked at him, waiting for some clarification—until she realised that she wasn’t going to get any.
‘Which girlfriend would that be?’ he queried unhelpfully.
‘You mean you’ve got more than one?’ She couldn’t keep the indignation out of her voice. Or the accusation.
There was a frosty shimmer of silence while Dan tussled with the idea of sending her packing right there and then, until common sense reasserted itself. And there were no absolutely no grounds for sacking your assistant just because she thought you had an overgrown libido! Maybe he should be flattered by it!
‘I have lots of friends of both sexes,’ came the silky correction. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Er, yes,’ stumbled Megan, feeling slightly foolish. ‘Of course I do.’
He continued to look at her questioningly. ‘So who was it?’
Horror dawned on her as she realised that she hadn’t even asked the woman’s name! ‘Er, I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’ he repeated ominously.
‘No.’
‘You didn’t think to take a name?’
‘Well, I—’
‘Aren’t you aware that taking incomplete messages is one of the most irritating traits known to mankind?’ he demanded heatedly. ‘It’s bad enough in a flatmate—but in an assistant it becomes more than merely irritating, it veers into the realms of sheer incompetence!’
Megan felt torn between protecting her job and protecting the woman on the telephone—even though the job was the best-paid she had ever had, and she didn’t know the woman from a bar of soap.
But…sisterhood, and all that.
Which was presumably why she found herself staring fearlessly into those grey eyes and saying, ‘She told me she’d written to you, but said that you hadn’t bothered to reply.’
He saw that her gaze was now burning into the top drawer of his desk where he’d stashed the stack of pastel-coloured envelopes in the hope that they might somehow go away if he ignored them for long enough.
‘Oh, did she?’ he asked, in a voice so soft that Megan failed to notice the dangerous undertone to it. ‘And what else did she say?’
‘That she would see you this weekend, and talk to you then.’
Dan let out a long, resigned sigh. ‘I see.’
Megan made one last attempt in the name of female solidarity. ‘She sounded very…upset, Dan.’
He correctly latched onto the disapproval in her voice. ‘And?’ he questioned silkily.
Megan blinked. He seemed to be asking her opinion, so why not give it? Wasn’t that what she was being paid to do? ‘I think you owe it to her to at least do her the courtesy of replying.’
Dan almost laughed aloud at what was, in fact, a beautifully worded insult. From his assistant, no less!
‘Oh, do you?’ he questioned, keeping his irritation at bay with difficulty. ‘And didn’t it occur to you that there might be a reason why I’ve let them all go unanswered?’
‘Some men play hard to get,’ suggested Megan boldly. ‘Treat them mean to keep them keen! Maybe you’re one of those men?’
‘I can see that I’ve already reached dizzy heights in your estimation of me,’ he said sarcastically.
‘It was only an option,’ Megan shrugged. ‘I don’t really know you very well.’
‘No, you don’t!’ he grated. ‘Because if you did you would know that my ego isn’t in any way fragile! And that I certainly don’t need to encourage the attention of lovelorn teenagers in order to get my kicks!’
‘Teenagers?’ asked Megan in a voice so shocked that Dan glared at her some more. ‘Lovelorn?’
‘Well, there’s no need to sound quite so outraged!’ he defended as he clipped the words out. ‘I’m thirty-three years old—not quite at the stage of queuing up for my pension book. Anyway, she’s nearly twenty.’
Megan tried to sound worldly-wise. ‘And you’ve been having an affair with her, have you?’
Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t used to people he barely knew making negative character assessments about him that made him feel so uncharacteristically angry. But whatever it was—in that moment, Dan felt like striding across the office and shaking her!
‘Bloody hell!’ he swore. ‘You’re making me sound like Bluebeard! No, I have not been having an affair with her—cradle-snatching has never turned me on!’
‘Well, what is it, then?’ asked Megan in confusion. ‘What’s her name, and what’s it all about?’
Dan sighed. He kept his private life just that. Private. But if Katrina had started phoning and writing to him here, then inevitably his professional life would be involved. And compromised, too, if he wasn’t careful.
‘Her name is Katrina,’ he said. ‘And she thinks she’s in love with me.’
‘Why?’
In spite of everything, Dan laughed. He threw his dark head back and let rip with a throaty chuckle as her question brought him crashing down to earth. Because if his ego had been threatening to get out of hand that guileless one-word query had checked it! But then he saw the reproach which had clouded those huge hazel eyes of hers, and felt his temper flare. Again.
‘Why do you think?’ he demanded. ‘Because I had my wicked way with her when she was barely out of nappies?’
‘Dan!’
‘Well, that’s what the prissy look of concern on your face is implying, isn’t it, Megan?’
‘No!’
‘And you’ve obviously taken her side—’
‘I haven’t taken anyone’s side! I felt sorry for her, that was all.’
‘Even though,’ he continued furiously, his grey eyes growing thunder-dark, ‘even though you don’t know her and you barely know me? In fact, you don’t have a clue about the true situation!’
‘Maybe I don’t,’ she agreed. ‘But that’s easily remedied. Why don’t you tell me?’
Dan’s mouth flattened into a thin, hard line, and he stared at her with misgiving. He had been brought up to view the airing of emotions as a weakness—while to take a virtual stranger into his confidence would be interpreted as positively indulgent.
But he couldn’t just carry on ignoring a situation which was threatening to spiral out of control, could he? And Megan had no axe to grind. She didn’t know Katrina. She stood to gain nothing by giving him her opinion. Surely it would not be disloyal to confide in his assistant?
‘Maybe I should tell you,’ he said slowly.
But, even so, Megan was amazed when Dan sat back in his chair and studied her intently from between narrowed eyes, the way he sometimes studied a spreadsheet.
‘Okay.’ He nodded, and gave a smile which managed to be angry and thoughtful all at the same time. ‘I will. I’ll tell you the whole story about Katrina and then we’ll see where your sympathies lie, won’t we, Megan?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘PICTURE the scene,’ said Dan, and picked up the smooth round paperweight which lay on his desk. At its centre sat a small pink shell and usually he found it restful to look at. Not today, though. ‘Of a little girl growing up without any men around.’
Megan watched him run his long fingers over the cool, curved glass. What he was describing was the exact reverse of her own upbringing. There had been men galore around—or boys, to be exact—when she had slipped into the role of caring for her four younger brothers.
But she knew that having your mother die in childhood wasn’t typical. Thank God. She pushed away the poignant memories and looked into his cool grey eyes. ‘This is Katrina we’re talking about, I presume?’
‘That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘She and her mother used to live close to us. My mother is her godmother, and I’ve known Katrina for most of her life.’
‘Right,’ nodded Megan cautiously.
‘She is the daughter of an actress who happens to be very, very beautiful—’
Megan found herself wondering whether Katrina was as beautiful as her mother. But she didn’t ask.
‘And very self-obsessed,’ he continued, only now the edges of his voice were roughened with disapproval. ‘And, like many beautiful women, she regarded the arrival of a daughter as something of a catastrophe—’
‘Oh.’ Megan’s eyes widened. ‘Why?’
He seemed faintly taken aback by the genuine surprise in her question. Didn’t she realise how competitive women could be? He looked at her. No. Maybe she didn’t.
‘Because daughters have a habit of growing up!’ he answered. ‘They provide the physical evidence of how quickly the years are passing, don’t they? And there’s nothing an actress hates more than growing old. You can’t carry on pretending to be in your mid-thirties if you have daughter who is in her twenties!’
‘No, I suppose you can’t,’ said Megan slowly. ‘I never thought of it like that.’ She looked at him, fascinated by what he was telling her. Dan McKnight, of all people, pouring his heart out—why, she hadn’t thought he had one! ‘So where do you fit into the picture?’
Dan had recently been asking himself the same question, searching back in his memory for something he might have said or done which could have been misinterpreted by a naive young girl.
He frowned. ‘Ever since Katrina was a little girl, she latched herself onto me and followed me around the place, whenever I was around. Which wasn’t often enough for her to see for herself that idols often have feet of clay,’ he added, with brutal honesty.
‘You mean you were her idol?’
He thought it might sound unacceptably arrogant if he corrected her sentence from past to present tense. ‘I guess I was.’ He also thought that Megan could have taken that note of astonishment out of her voice. ‘She used to trot round beside me, gazing up at me as though I could do no wrong.’ And he would be lying to himself if he denied that he had liked the young girl. And enjoyed her unconditional adoration. It had worked both ways—because Katrina had been like the little sister he’d never had.
And that was part of the problem. You could tell a sister to go away and she would probably listen to you.
‘So what did you do about it?’ she asked.
Dan sighed, accepting now that he might have adopted entirely the wrong strategy. He had thought that, by ignoring the young girl’s obsession with him, she would grow out of it, the way she’d grown out of having puppy fat. ‘Nothing,’ he admitted. ‘I just acted exactly the same as I always had towards her.’
‘And how was that?’
‘Big-brotherly, I suppose.’
‘So there was no attraction between you at all?’
Dan shook his dark head. ‘Not on my part, certainly! The age difference between us is too great for us to have anything in common—apart from geographical proximity, of course.’
Megan nodded, looking closely at the cool, clever face. ‘And what is the age difference, exactly?’
‘Thirteen years.’
She expelled a long breath. ‘It is a big gap, but it’s not unheard of,’ offered Megan, thinking of Hollywood stars and minor royals.
‘Neither is slave labour, but that doesn’t make it all right!’ Dan threw her an impatient look. ‘Think about it! When she was a chubby five-year-old, I was just setting off for university. So do you really think that we bonded? Maybe you imagine that every time I came home we sat down and discussed which brand of chocolate bar we liked best!’
Megan opened her mouth to say that she didn’t know why he seemed to be taking it out on her. But she shut it again. Dan McKnight was usually so elusive about his personal life. Getting information was often like prising a clam out of its shell. So if he was now choosing to open up to her, then she should be flattered as well as intrigued. ‘Of course I don’t think that,’ she said calmly.
Her composure seemed to take the heat out of some of his anger, and he put the paperweight down on top of a sheaf of papers. ‘Anyway,’ he shrugged. ‘By the time she’d reached fifteen, I was twenty-eight—’
‘And I suppose the age difference became far less significant as you both got older,’ suggested Megan reflectively.
Dan gave her another thoughtful look. ‘That’s certainly what Katrina thought.’
‘So did…?’ Megan chose her words carefully. ‘Did she just suddenly decide that she was in love with you—or did something happen?’
His eyelashes brushed together, obscuring and shadowing his eyes. ‘Like what?’
‘Well—’
‘You think I made a pass at her?’
‘No, of course I don’t.’ She tried to be diplomatic. ‘Well, not intentionally, maybe…’
Dan felt the ticking of a slow rage as he met the mild suggestion in her eyes. Until he realised that maybe he wasn’t as blameless as he’d imagined. It couldn’t have all come out of nothing, could it? So had he—maybe subliminally—been sending out the wrong sort of message to Katrina for years? He thought back and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I never did anything which could have been taken the wrong way.’
‘So can you remember exactly when it started to get more serious?’
He tried to pinpoint the moment when a schoolgirl crush had begun to escalate out of control. ‘I gave her a necklace on her eighteenth birthday,’ he realised. ‘It started soon afterwards.’
‘And how long ago was that?’
‘Almost two years.’
So Katrina was persistent. Two years of unrequited love was certainly dedication. ‘What kind of necklace?’ she asked.
‘Seed-pearls,’ he answered slowly, remembering that he’d bought them on his mother’s recommendation, and that they had cost rather more than he had intended to pay. He remembered the way Katrina had looked at him when he had handed the slim package over. The stunned expression followed by the shining gratitude in her eyes. The way she had flung her arms so tightly around his neck, until he had eventually had to disentangle them. ‘They were rather nice pearls, actually.’
‘Well, then—that’s why!’ said Megan. ‘You sent out the wrong message.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘How?’
‘Women look at jewellery in a rather different way to men,’ she explained. ‘I mean—you probably thought that you were just helping commemorate a big birthday, with a pretty keepsake, from a friend—’
‘Precisely!’
‘Whereas women view certain pieces of jewellery as actually meaning something.’ She looked at him. Even she knew that—why, she still felt positively misty-eyed when she put her own string of pearls on—though that might be because they had belonged to her mother. ‘What made you buy them in the first place?’
Dan shifted in his seat, beginning to feel as though something had been going on that he hadn’t really been aware of. As though, in some very discreet way, he’d been cleverly manipulated. Why had he never seen the obvious link before? ‘My mother suggested it.’
‘Oh, I see.’ She looked at him with a question in her eyes. ‘Your mother obviously likes her.’
‘She approves of her, yes,’ answered Dan thoughtfully as he reflected on Megan’s words. ‘So Katrina thinks she’s in love with me because I bought her a piece of fairly expensive jewellery for her eighteenth birthday?’
Megan faced him. ‘You’re the only one who can answer that.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘You make her stop loving you.’
‘How?’ he demanded.
Megan was tempted to suggest that he spend longer in the girl’s company—that would be bound to make the dream evaporate in an instant!
‘What have you done so far?’ she questioned. ‘To put her off?’
‘Last time I saw her, I gently explained that the age difference between us is too great.’
Megan shook her head. ‘Oh, dear! Big mistake!’
He looked at her sharply. ‘Oh?’
‘Saying that makes it sound as though it’s only convention standing in your way! True love thwarted by an inflexible world! The Romeo and Juliet syndrome,’ she added helpfully. ‘What else have you done?’
‘I don’t take her phone calls any more—and I haven’t returned any of the more recent e-mails. Or answered any of the letters.’ He stared at the paperweight and when he looked up the grey eyes were troubled. ‘Because I can’t think what to say—and because the letters are becoming slightly more—’ he seemed to have difficulty choosing the right word ‘—graphic,’ he finished reluctantly.
‘Ignoring her will only make her more desperate,’ Megan mused aloud, deciding that there was absolutely no need for her to know just how graphic. ‘And she’ll be worried that she’ll lose your friendship altogether. No, ignoring her won’t help.’
‘Well, then, just what do you suggest I do?’ he demanded.
Megan stared at him, her lips twitching with the temptation to tell him that it wasn’t really her place to suggest anything at all.
But then she thought of Katrina’s crestfallen voice and tried putting herself in the girl’s shoes and felt an enormous wave of sympathy for her. Because hadn’t she read somewhere that obsessional love could gnaw away at you and dominate your whole life?
She frowned with concentration. ‘There is one way of getting her off your back.’ She saw him wince at the way she had phrased it. ‘But you might think it’s rather cruel.’
His eyes grew suspicious. ‘What did you have in mind?’
Megan smiled. Her brothers were the same. Couldn’t see a simple solution even if it was staring them in the face!
‘You just convince her that you’re in love with someone else. Simple.’
‘Oh, really?’ he queried softly. ‘And how do you propose I do that?’
‘She said something about seeing you this weekend—’
‘No. Let’s rephrase that. You make it sound like a date and it’s not. My brother is getting married in a few weeks’ time—and he and his fiancée are visiting my mother’s house this weekend. I planned to go along as well. And Katrina will be there, too.’
‘So you take somebody else with you.’ There was a marked lack of understanding in the cool grey eyes. ‘A girlfriend,’ she elaborated. ‘Show Katrina you’re all over somebody else! There’s no surer way for someone to get the message that you aren’t interested!’
‘But I’m not in love with anybody else.’
Megan sighed. Men could be so infuriatingly dense at times—even ones as startlingly bright as Dan McKnight! ‘You don’t have to be. You just have to pretend to be. Just find someone who’s willing to go along with it.’
Dan screwed his face up. ‘Like who, for example?’
‘Well, I don’t know! There must be hundreds of women who would be delighted to slip into the role of being Dan McKnight’s partner for the weekend!’
‘Yes. With most of them looking to make the post permanent. I can’t take the risk,’ he said grimly.
His arrogance almost took her breath away. ‘I’m sure there must be a woman somewhere who could manage to resist your charm for forty-eight hours, Dan!’
He acknowledged her sarcasm with a slight quirk of his lips, and then his grey eyes began to gleam with the first inkling of a plan. Someone outside his circle. Someone who would be willing to play along with it for a couple of days and then forget it. Someone who didn’t tempt him. Someone who…
‘How about you?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Me?’ Megan stared at him. ‘Why me?’
He considered this. There was no point in beating about the bush. ‘Well, the main reason is because you don’t find me in any way attractive.’ His eyes bored into her. ‘Do you, Megan?’
Megan stared back at him. She knew that nine women out of ten would have fancied him. Maybe if she hadn’t worked for him she might have felt differently. As it was, she found it easier to imagine being kissed by a block of concrete than by Dan McKnight. She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t.’
Dan smiled. ‘Thank you for not bothering to spare my feelings,’ he murmured. ‘And, fortunately, the feeling is entirely mutual. You’re probably the last woman in the world I would choose to have a relationship with.’
Megan glared. Surely there were nicer ways he could have put it? ‘Thanks very much!’
He flicked her a look from between the dark curtain of his lashes. ‘So. Are you busy this weekend?’
Megan hesitated. There was a sort of unspoken rule that if you were a single woman and a man asked if you were busy you always said that, yes, you were. Very. From this, they would come to the conclusion that you had a wonderful, exciting life of your own and you weren’t just sitting around waiting for Mr Wonderful to come galloping into it on his white charger.
But Megan had always had a problem with telling lies. Even if they were only tiny ones.
‘Er, no. I’m not. I’m free, actually.’
‘So would you do it, Megan?’
‘Pretend to be your love-struck girlfriend, you mean?’
‘That’s right.’
Megan looked at him. At the cool grey eyes and the thick, dark hair. At the body which was surprisingly lean and muscular for a man who didn’t have a job which was fundamentally physical. ‘No,’ she said flatly.
Dan’s eyes widened. He wasn’t the kind of man who often had to ask a woman for a favour—those were usually offered freely enough. Neither was he used to being turned down quite so firmly or so emphatically as Megan Phillips had just done, and he suddenly found the novelty of being refused almost stimulating.
And certainly surprising.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘Because I’m your assistant—I can’t go along pretending to be your lover.’
‘I wasn’t actually expecting you to consummate our fictitious relationship.’ He bit back a smile. ‘That would be taking method acting a little too far!’
If Megan hadn’t grown up on a farm and been so matter-of-fact about the act of procreation, then she might well have been embarrassed by a remark she suspected had been made with just that aim in mind. As it was, she was able to return his mocking stare with an unruffled look of her own. ‘I hardly know anything about you.’
‘You seem to have extracted a lot more information than most people,’ he told her truthfully.
‘Not enough if we’re supposed to be in love.’
‘Ask me anything you want,’ he coaxed softly.
‘What would I have to do?’
‘Very little. Eat a few meals with me. Maybe play a little tennis. Laugh at my jokes. Withstand the third degree from my mother. Gaze adoringly into my eyes—’
‘I don’t know about the gazing adoringly into your eyes bit,’ she told him honestly. ‘I’m not that good an actress!’
He pursed his lips together, like someone who’d been amused by an unexpected source of entertainment. ‘Well, if the pleasure of my company doesn’t tempt you enough, here’s an added inducement.’ He paused for effect before saying softly, ‘What if I told you that a very famous actor was also going to be there this weekend?’
Slightly relieved that he hadn’t done anything so vulgar as offer her money, Megan willed herself not to look too interested. He probably meant somebody who’d been in a series of coffee advertisements. ‘Oh? And who’s that?’
Dan enjoyed the moment. ‘Jake Haddon.’
Megan’s face froze in disbelieving surprise. It was a full ten seconds before she could speak. ‘The Jake Haddon?’
‘Is there more than one?’
Megan swallowed, more confused than excited. Because not only had Jake Haddon just starred in the year’s biggest-grossing film—but the upper-class Englishman with a fine line in irony had been voted the sexiest star of the decade!