The Boss's Proposal

He didn’t give her time to answer his rhetorical question. “And I won’t be conveniently supporting my niece from a convenient distance. Close up and personal. That’s the role I intend to play.” His mouth was a grim line.

“I can survive happily without your money,” Vicky bit out sharply. “I’ve managed on my own for years and I can carry on managing.” She could feel tears pricking against her eyelids and she blinked them away.

Max trailed a finger along the shelf, in the manner of someone checking for dust. “So here’s our little problem. Out of the blue, I have a niece, someone who deserves to carry the family name. I don’t intend to run away from my responsibilities, such as they are, which means an investment of time as well as money, and please—” he held up one hand to cut off the heated protest forming on her lips “—spare me the aggrieved pride. As far as I can see it, everything has a solution and here’s mine. My niece inherits the family name and so, on an incidental basis, do you. I’m proposing to marry you.”

Getting down to business

in the boardroom…and the bedroom!

A secret romance, a forbidden affair,

a thrilling attraction…

What happens when two people work together and simply can’t help falling in love—no matter how hard they try to resist?

Find out in our new series of stories

set against working backgrounds.

This month in

The Boss’s Proposal by Cathy Williams

Since Vicky had started sleeping with her boss, Max Forbes, she was worried he would discover her secret. But when Max met the secret—her young daughter, Chloe—he realized immediately this was his late brother’s child, and insisted on marrying Vicky!

The Boss’s Proposal

Cathy Williams

MILLS & BOON

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

‘AH, YES, Miss Lockhart!’ The severely coiffeured and immaculately suited middle aged woman who’d emerged from behind the smoked glass doors leading into the impressive foyer of Paxus PLC favoured her with a beaming smile. ‘I’m Geraldine Hogg and I’m in charge of the typing pool.’ She grasped Vicky’s hand and shook it firmly. ‘I have your application form here, my dear—’ she waved the stapled papers at her ‘—and you’re in for something of a surprise.’

At which, Vicky’s heart sank. She didn’t like surprises, and she hadn’t spent half an hour battling with rush-hour traffic to find herself confronted with one. She’d applied for the post of typist at Paxus PLC because the pay offered was excellent and because working as a typist, whilst going nowhere career-wise, was just the sort of reliable job she needed while she got her house in order. Something undemanding which would give her the time she desperately needed to sort herself out.

‘Now, my dear, why don’t we go to my office and I’ll explain all to you?’ Geraldine Hogg had the sort of booming, hearty voice that Vicky associated with privately educated girls who had spent their school years getting their teeth into vigorous outdoor sports like hockey and netball. Her manner was brisk without being aggressive, and whatever so-called surprise lay ahead, Vicky felt that she would work well for the woman now ushering her through the smoked glass double doors and into a luxuriantly carpeted corridor flanked with offices.

‘I must say, you seem rather over-qualified for the job advertised,’ she said confidingly, and Vicky tried to suppress a sigh of disappointment.

‘I make a very hard worker, Miss Hogg,’ she ventured, half running to keep up with the enormous strides of the other woman.

She could feel her long, curly hair beginning to rebel against the clips she’d painstakingly used to restrain it and she nervously tried to shove it back into place with one hand, without missing a step. She needed this job and it wouldn’t do to create the wrong impression, even though it was virtually impossible to look mature and sophisticated when her red-gold hair was congenitally disobedient and her expression, however hard she tried to look stern, was constantly ambushed by her freckles.

‘Here we are!’ Geraldine Hogg stopped abruptly in front of one of the doors and Vicky only just missed careering into the back of her. ‘My typists are just through there.’ She waved one sweeping hand at the large, open-planned area opposite her office, and Vicky peered into the room, imagining what it would be like to work there.

Her last job in Australia had been a far cry from this. There, she had been one of the personal assistants to the director of a sprawling public company.

‘Come in, come in. Tea? Coffee?’ She indicated a chair facing her desk and waited until Vicky had sat down before summoning a young girl through to bring them something to drink. ‘I can recommend the coffee, my dear. None of this instant stuff.’

‘Yes, fine, I’d love a cup,’ Vicky said faintly. She felt as though she had been yanked along at dizzying speed so that she needed to recover her breath. ‘White, no sugar. Thank you very much.’

‘Now, I won’t keep you,’ Geraldine sat forward, both elbows on the desk and gave her an intent stare. ‘I’ll just tell you about the little surprise I have in store for you!’ She linked her fingers together and cocked her head to one side. ‘First of all, let me say that I was highly impressed with your CV.’ She glanced down at the highly impressive CV and flicked through it casually while Vicky’s head whirled with all the dreadful permutations of this so-called surprise in store for her. ‘Lots of qualifications!’ She rattled off a few of them, which only served to emphasise how ridiculously over-qualified Vicky was for the job in question. ‘You must have been quite an asset to the company you worked for!’

‘I’d like to think so.’ Vicky attempted a confident smile but was quietly glad for the interruption of the young girl bringing two cups of coffee.

‘Why did you decide to leave Australia?’ Sharp blue eyes scrutinised Vicky’s face, but before Vicky could answer Geraldine held up one hand and said, ‘No! No point answering that! I’ll just fill you in on your position here. First of all, we feel that you would be wasted working as a typist…’

‘Ah.’ She could feel the sting of disappointed tears prick the back of her eyes. Since leaving Australia four months previously, Vicky had worked in various temporary jobs, none of which had been satisfactory, and the two permanent posts she’d applied for had both turned her down for the very reason Geraldine Hogg appeared to be giving her now. Unless she secured a proper job she would find herself running into financial problems, and she couldn’t afford to start dipping into her meagre savings. Not in her situation.

‘But, fortunately,’ Geraldine swept on in a satisfied voice, ‘we have something far better to interview you for, my dear, so there’s no need for you to look quite so dejected. The head of our organisation will be spending a great deal more time in this particular subsidiary and he needs a secretary. Admittedly, you’re a bit young for the post, but your qualifications provide a good argument for putting you forward for the job, which, incidentally, will pay double the one you were to be interviewed for!’

‘Working for the head of the organisation?’ From past experience Vicky knew that nothing came without a catch, and this opportunity sounded just a little too good to be true.

‘I’ll take you up to see him now, and while I don’t, obviously, guarantee that the job is yours, your past experience will certainly stand in your favour.’

It occurred to Vicky that none of this was happening. It was all some bizarre dream which would end the minute she opened her eyes. In fact, applying to the company had had a dream-like feel about it from the start. She had seen the advertisement in the newspaper and the name of the company had triggered a memory somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind. Shaun, in one of his eternal, self-glorifying rambles, had mentioned it as one of the myriad companies his family owned and the name had stuck because it had been the name of the road on which she had lived with her aunt in Sydney. Just answering the advert had taken will-power, because Shaun was possibly the one person in the world whose memory made her recoil in revulsion. But answer it she had, partly through curiosity to see proof of the great Forbes Dynasty and partly because the pay offered had been too good to refuse.

Now, she curiously looked around her as she was shown up to the third floor. The décor was muted and luxuriant. The central areas were open plan but fringed with small, private offices, sheltered from prying eyes by the same smoked glass as in the foyer. The company—which, she recalled from the newspaper advert, had not been going for very long—had obviously chosen the nursery supplying its plants with some care, because in between the usual lush green artificial trees that most successful companies sported were expensive orchids and roses which couldn’t be very easy to maintain.

‘Hope you don’t mind the walk up,’ Geraldine was saying briskly at her side. ‘I can’t abide elevators. Much prefer a spot of good old-fashioned exercise. World would be a better place if people just got off their arses, pardon my French, and used their legs a bit more!’

Vicky, busy looking around her, puffed and panted an agreement. Somehow she found it difficult to associate Shaun with clean, efficient, seemingly well-run surroundings like these. She could feel her mind going down familiar paths and focused her attention on Geraldine and what she was saying, which appeared to be a congratulatory monologue on the massive and successful Forbes Holdings, of which Paxus PLC was a small but blossoming satellite. She wondered whether any mention would be made of Shaun, or even the brother, the one who lived in New York, but there was no mention of either in between the steady stream of growth, profit and share price chat.

‘’Course, I’ve worked for the family for twenty years now. Wanted a career teaching sport, but I did the back in, my dear, and ended up going along the secretarial road. Not that I’ve regretted a minute of working here,’ she confided, and just when Vicky imagined that the bracing talk might become less factual and more personal, Geraldine paused in front of a door and knocked authoritatively.

‘Yes!’

Mysteriously, Vicky saw that the plain, down-to-earth face had turned pink and, when Geraldine pushed open the door and poked her head in, her voice was almost kittenish.

‘Miss Lockhart here for you, sir.’

‘Who?’

‘Miss Lockhart.’

‘Now?’

Vicky gazed, embarrassed, at the unappealing abstract painting on the wall opposite. Was this ‘surprise’ job offer also a surprise to the man in question, or were heads of organisations exempt from good manners?

‘I did inform you a week ago…’ Geraldine said, lapsing into her more autocratic voice.

‘Show her in, Gerry, show her in.’ At which, Geraldine pushed open the door wider and stepped back to allow Vicky through.

The man was sitting behind a huge desk, lounging in a black leather swivel chair which he had pushed away from the desk so that he could cross his legs in comfort.

Under the rapid pounding of her heart, Vicky was dimly aware of the door gently being shut behind her, and then she was left, stranded, in the middle of the large office, like a fish that had suddenly found itself floundering in the middle of a desert. Her breathing was laboured and she hardly dared move a muscle, because if she did she suspected that her shaky legs would collapse completely.

All she could see was the nightmare in front of her. The dark hair, the strong angular face, those peculiar grey eyes.

‘Are you all right, Miss Lockhart?’ The question was posed in an impatient voice from which could be dredged not even passing concern. ‘You look as though you’re about to faint and I really haven’t got the time to deal with a fainting secretary.’

‘I’m fine. Thank you.’ Fine, she thought, considering the shock that had rocked her to the foundations. She was still standing, wasn’t she? If that wasn’t fine, what was?

‘Then sit down.’ He nodded curtly at the chair facing him. ‘I’m afraid it slipped my mind that you were supposed to be coming today… Your application form’s somewhere here…bear with me for a moment…’

‘That’s fine!’ Suddenly Vicky found her voice. ‘In fact, there’s no need to waste your time interviewing me. I don’t think I would be suitable at all for this job.’

She just wanted to get out of the office and out of the building as fast as her legs could take her. Her skin was on fire and her temples were beginning to pound.

He didn’t immediately answer. Instead, he paused in his search for the elusive CV and the pale grey eyes became suddenly watchful as they scanned her flushed face.

‘Oh, really?’ he said slowly. ‘And why do you think that would be?’ He stood up. A towering, well-built man, he strolled to the bay window behind his chair, from where he perched against the ledge, all the better to watch her.

Between the host of emotions and thoughts besieging her, Vicky tried to locate a functioning part of her brain which might come up with a good excuse for showing up at this company for a job, only to spuriously announce that she had to leave immediately. Nothing was forthcoming.

‘You know, you do look a little nervous.’ He brushed his chin reflectively with one finger while continuing to scrutinise her face with the lazy intensity of a predator eyeing up potential prey. ‘Not one of these highly strung, neurotic types, are you?’

‘Yes,’ Vicky agreed, ready to clutch any lifeline offered that might get her out of the place, ‘highly strung and very neurotic. No use to a man like you.’

‘A man like me? And what kind of man might that be?’

Vicky dropped her eyes rather than reveal the answer to that particular question. The strength of the response she would give him might just blow him off his feet.

‘Sit down, why don’t you? You’re beginning to interest me, Miss Lockhart.’ He waited until she had made her way to the chair and flopped down, then allowed a few more seconds to pass, during which he looked at her as though trying to unravel the workings of her mind.

‘Now, tell me why I’m beginning to feel that there’s something going on here that I know nothing about.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I’ll let that pass.’ He flashed her smile that indicated that the subject had been dropped but by no means abandoned.

He has a God complex, the bastard. He’s always felt that he could run my life, along with everyone else’s. She could hear Shaun’s voice, high and resentful as it always had been whenever he spoke about his brother. Vicky’s tightly controlled mind slowly began to unravel as her eyes locked with Max Hedley Forbes. Because that was his name. She’d heard it often enough from Shaun’s lips. A litany of bitterness and antagonism towards a brother whose mission in life, she’d been told often enough, had been to undermine as many people as he could in the minimum amount of time. He’d been a monster of selfishness, Shaun had said to her, a man who only knew how to take, a man who rode roughshod over the rest of the human race and most of all over his one and only brother, whose name he’d discredited so thoroughly that even his father had chosen to turn his back on his son.

It had never occurred to her when she applied for this job that fate would be waiting for her just around the corner. Max Forbes lived in New York and had done for years. She’d never thought that she would end up finding him in an office building in Warwick, of all places. The past squeezed her soul and she briefly closed her eyes, giving in to the vertigo threatening to overwhelm her.

Shaun might have turned out to be a nightmare, but nightmares were not born, they were made. The world and the people in it had shaped him, and the man coolly inspecting her now had been pivotal in the shaping of his brother. However awful Shaun had been, wasn’t this man opposite her worse?

‘So,’ the dark, velvety voice drawled, dragging her away from her painful trip down memory lane and back to the present, ‘you claim to be neurotic and highly strung, yet—’ he reached forward to a stack of papers on the desk and extracted one, from which he read ‘—you still managed to sustain a reasonably high-powered job in Australia from which you left with glowing recommendations. Odd, wouldn’t you agree? Or perhaps your neuroses were under control at that point in time?’

Vicky refrained from comment and instead contented herself with staring out of the window, which offered a view of sky and red-brick buildings.

‘Has Geraldine given you any indication as to why this post has become available?’ He moved around the desk and perched on it, so that he was directly facing Vicky, looking down at her.

‘Not in any great detail, no,’ Vicky told him, ‘but honestly, there’s no point launching into any explanations. The fact of the matter is…’ What was the fact of the matter? ‘The fact of the matter is that I had really set my heart on working in a typing pool…’

His lips twitched, but when he answered his voice was serious and considering.

‘Of course. I quite understand that you might not want to compromise your undoubted talents by getting a good job with career prospects…’

Vicky shot him a brief look from under thick, dark lashes, momentarily disconcerted by the suggestion of humour beneath the sarcasm. ‘I have an awful lot on my plate just now,’ she said vaguely. ‘I wouldn’t want to take on anything demanding because I don’t think that I would be able to do it justice.’

‘What?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What have you got on your plate?’ His eyes scanned her CV then focused on her.

‘Well,’ Vicky stuttered, taken aback by the directness of the question, ‘I’ve only recently returned from Australia and I have a lot of things to do concerning…my house and generally settling in…’ This explanation skirted so broadly around the truth that she could feel the colour rise to her cheeks.

‘Why did you decide to go to Australia?’

‘My mother…passed away…I felt that the change would do me good…and I just happened to stay a great deal longer than I had anticipated. I landed a job in a very good company quite early on and I was promoted in the first six months. I…it was easier than coming back to England and dealing with…’

‘Your loss?’

Vicky stiffened at the perceptiveness behind the question. She’d once considered Shaun to be a perceptive, sensitive person. Perhaps illusions along those lines ran in the Forbes family.

‘I would appreciate it if we could terminate this interview now.’ She began getting to her feet, smoothing down the dark grey skirt, nervously brushing non-existent flecks of dust from it rather than face those amazing, unsettling grey eyes. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve wasted your time. I realise that you’re a very busy man, and time is money. Had I been aware of the situation, I would have telephoned to cancel the appointment. As I said, I’m not interested in a job that’s going to monopolise my free time.’

‘Your references,’ he said coolly, ignoring her pointed attempt to leave his office, ‘from the Houghton Corporation are glowing…’ He looked at her carefully while she remained in dithering uncertainty on her feet, unable to turn her back and walk out of the office but reluctant to sit back down and allow him to think that the job in question was open for debate. ‘Very impressive, and all the more so because I know James Houghton very well.’

‘You know him?’ Several potential catastrophes presented themselves to her when she heard this and she weakly sat back down. It wouldn’t do for Max Forbes to contact her old boss in Australia. There were too many secrets hidden away there, secrets she had no intention of disclosing.

‘We went to school together a million years ago.’ He pushed himself up from the desk and began prowling around the room, one minute within her line of vision, the next a disembodied voice somewhere behind her. If his tactic was to unsettle her, then he was going about it the right way. ‘He’s a good businessman. A recommendation from him counts for a hell of a lot.’ He paused and the silence from behind her made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. ‘Where in Australia did you live?’

‘In the city. My aunt has a house there.’ There was an element of danger in this line of questioning but Vicky had no idea how to retrieve the situation.

‘Did much socialising?’

‘With whom?’ she asked cautiously. It would help, she thought, if he would return within her line of vision so that she could see the expression on his face—but then, on reflection, perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing that she couldn’t. After all, he would be able to see hers, and she had a great deal more to hide than he would ever have imagined in a million years.

‘People from your work.’ She could sense him as he walked slowly round to the side of her. His presence made her feel clammy and claustrophobic. Out of the corner of her eye, she could make him out as he lounged against the wall, hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, head tilted slightly to one side as though carefully weighing up what she was saying. Weighing it up and, she thought with a flash of sudden foreboding, storing up every word to be used at a later date in evidence against her.

Not that there would be a later date, she reminded herself. Powerful though he was, he couldn’t compel her to work for his company. He might grill her now because she had been stupid enough to make him think that there was more to her than met the eye, but very shortly she would be gone and he would be nothing more than a freakish reminder of how eerie coincidence could be. The thought of imminent escape steadied her nerves and she even managed to force a smile to her face.

‘Off and on. I had a lot of friends in Sydney. The Australians are a very friendly lot.’ She risked a sideways glance at him.

‘So I’ve been told. My brother certainly thought so.’

‘You had a brother out there?’ A slow crawl of treacherous colour stole across her face and she could feel a fine perspiration begin to film above her lip.

‘Shaun Forbes.’ He allowed the name to register. ‘My twin.’

He had never told her. She’d known Shaun for nearly a year and a half and he’d never once mentioned that the brother whose name he reviled was his identical twin. She imagined now that it must have been deeply galling to have so spectacularly failed to live up to a brother who had emerged from the womb at the same time as he had and had been given exactly the same upbringing and privileges, yet had succeeded.