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‘At least,’ Ross said to her one hour later, after Janet had left his office and was safely on her way back to peace on the sixth floor, with her own easy-going marketing boss, ‘she came prepared this time.’ He was getting ready to go, slipping on his jacket, looking at her absentmindedly as he did so.
‘You terrify her,’ Abigail said bluntly, and he stopped what he was doing and looked at her, surprised.
‘Do I? Why?’
‘Why do you think? You’re unpredictable.’
His black brows met in a frown. ‘I’m not sure I like that description of myself.’ He sat on the edge of her desk and began rolling down his sleeves, buttoning them at the wrists. ‘I don’t terrify you,’ he observed.
‘I’m accustomed to you, perhaps.’
This was beginning to veer off their normal routine conversation and she felt suddenly awkward.
‘You’ve grown accustomed to my face?’ he murmured, sensing her mood with amusement. ‘Something like that?’
‘Something like that, I suppose,’ she replied, not looking at him, walking across to collect her coat from the stand in the corner of the room. She turned to find him staring at her, his dark eyes unreadable.
‘I suppose I’ve grown quite accustomed to yours as well,’ he murmured, making no move to leave so that she was forced to stand by him, hovering, her hands stuck into the pockets of her coat. ‘But that doesn’t mean that I know you any the better.’
She didn’t care for the way his eyes were boring into her and she certainly didn’t know what sort of response to make to that, so she remained where she was, silent.
When the silence eventually became unbearable, she said, in a burst of discomfort, ‘What play are you going to see tonight?’
‘Changing the subject?’ Ross asked, eyeing her. ‘Why are you so cagey about your personal life?’
‘I’m not cagey about my personal life,’ she said, horrified to find that her mouth was dry and her brain felt as though it was seizing up. She was used to dealing with him when he was in a filthy temper, so why was she feeling like this when he was being nice? Because, a little voice told her, nice is dangerous when it comes to a man like Ross Anderson.
‘No? Then how is it that you never let on that you were seeing a man? Not even in passing?’
‘Because…’ she stammered, going red.
‘Because it’s none of my business?’ He stood up and slipped on his jacket.
‘I never really gave it much thought,’ she said with an attempt to be casual. ‘Gosh, is that the time? I must get going.’
‘Dinner date?’
‘Something like that,’ she said and he bit out angrily,
‘There you go. Dodging a simple question, acting as though the minute you say anything revealing about yourself you’ll find yourself in the firing line.’
She shot him a placating smile which was supposed to remind him that she was, after all, just his personal assistant, and he gave her a long, sardonic stare. ‘Careful you don’t fall, Abby,’ he murmured, and she looked at him, bewildered. ‘You’re backtracking so quickly that you might just lose your balance.’
He moved towards the door and held it open to her.
‘Musical,’ he said succinctly into her ear. ‘A much safer topic, isn’t it? Fiona and I are going to see a musical in the West End and then we shall probably have dinner somewhere.’ He pressed the button on the lift and turned his attention back to her. ‘What about you? Where is your boyfriend taking you to dinner?’
Was it her imagination or was there laughter in his voice every time he mentioned Martin?
‘Actually,’ she offered with reluctance, ‘we’re having dinner at my place tonight.’ She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and then said, because he would find out sooner or later anyway, ‘It’s something of an engagement party, as a matter of fact. Just relatives and a few friends.’
Ross stared at her as though she had suddenly sprouted three heads and announced that she was from another planet.
‘Well,’ she said defensively, ‘I would have told you! It’s not some great secret. I just never thought that you’d be interested.’
The lift arrived and she stepped in with a feeling of relief. She had her head averted, but she was acutely aware that he was still staring at her. What right did he have to make her feel guilty simply because she happened to be a very private person, who preferred keeping things to herself? Nonetheless, she felt a slow flush creeping up her cheeks.
‘So you’re getting engaged to this Martin person,’ he mused. ‘You don’t seem to be overjoyed and excited at the prospect.’
The lift doors opened on to the ground floor and she stepped out. With some surprise she realised that she was perspiring slightly.
‘Of course I am,’ she said more hotly than his remark warranted. ‘I’m very excited about the whole thing.’
‘What’s he like?’
They were walking across the huge reception hall now, but not fast enough as far as she was concerned. Ross Anderson, she knew from experience, was the persistent sort. She had seen it in everything he did. He grappled with problems until they were sorted out to his satisfaction, and he could be ruthlessly single-minded in pursuing his targets. It was one of the reasons why his company, in times of recession, had continued to do well, to expand. Publishing was a volatile beast at the best of times. She knew, as everyone in the company did, that he had inherited an ailing firm from his father, and had then proceeded to drag it kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, until it was now one of the largest in the country, with branches operating throughout Europe. Quite simply, Ross Anderson had taken the company by the throat and had brought it to heel.
He hadn’t achieved that by being a sensitive flower. She eyed the approaching glass doors with zeal.
She had managed to ignore his question and was about to launch herself through the revolving doors, to freedom, when she felt the warm pressure of his hand on her elbow, and she sprang back, alarmed.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, and he said very softly into her ear,
‘From your reaction, not what you think.’
‘Very funny,’ she muttered between her teeth.
‘I was simply going to ask you whether you had time for a quick drink. To celebrate your engagement.’
‘No.’ She tired to water down the abruptness of her answer with a smile. ‘I really must get home so that I can prepare some food for tonight.’
‘How many people have you invited?’ he asked blandly, his hand still disconcertingly on her elbow.
‘Not many. I would have asked you along,’ she explained, ‘but…’
‘But you’re a firm believer in not mixing business with pleasure. I know. I got the message three days after you joined the company.’
She looked at him, startled.
‘Surprised I remember?’ he asked, and she shrugged.
‘Not when I think about it. You have the memory of an elephant. Sometimes I think you must have the entire collection of the Encyclopedia Britannica up there, roving about in your head.’
‘Shall I take it as a compliment?’
‘If you like.’ Her voice was casual, distracted even though her heart was doing some pretty odd things inside her and she couldn’t for the life of her imagine what had prompted that observation.
‘You know, sometimes I think I almost prefer Mrs Fulbright, your predecessor, whose lifelong ambition was to reveal the maximum about herself in the minimum amount of time.’
That hurt. ‘You could always ask me to resign,’ she said, her grey eyes angry.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ he snapped impatiently, ‘I’m not asking you to do anything of the sort. I’m merely trying to make a point.’
‘I can’t help the way that I am, Mr Anderson,’ Abigail said inaudibly, ‘I…’
‘Yes?’ Their eyes met and the breath caught in her throat.
‘Nothing. Look, I really must be dashing off.’ She took a step backwards, knowing from his grim expression that the subconscious retreat had registered with him. ‘Do have a nice time at the play tonight,’ she said, while he continued to stare at her tersely. ‘I shall be in bright and early in the morning.’ She was running out of friendly parting words and it suddenly occurred to her that she was under no obligation to make excuses for her personality. She was his employee, and one who did a damn good job. She was conscientious, hardworking and trustworthy and that was all that mattered, wasn’t it?
She turned away abruptly and walked through the revolving doors, and the sudden cold winter air outside was like a balm.
As luck would have it, she had missed her bus again, but this time she hardly noticed the press of bodies on the Underground. Her mind was too busy sorting through the extraordinary atmosphere that had sprung up between herself and Ross. She had never felt so uncomfortable with him before. True, from time to time in the past she had caught him looking at her, but this was the first time that she had felt so entirely the target of his overwhelming personality, and it had alarmed her.
It wouldn’t do to forget Ellis and the way he had ignored her the minute his girlfriend had reappeared on the scene. She had so nearly given in to him, slept with him, she had been so caught up in the frenzy of never before experienced desire.
She thought of Ross, and for a moment the image that sprang back at her of his implacable, hard good looks was so sexual that she sucked in her breath with shock. Had she actually wondered what it would be like to have those strong hands on her body? No, she told herself uneasily. He had just managed to creep under her skin a little with his damn inquisition, but that was all.
The train disgorged her at her stop and she walked the remainder of the distance back to her flat, feeling calmer as she began to look at things in perspective. He had unnerved her. She was not accustomed to being unnerved. After eighteen years of living with her mother, she had learnt how to maintain a steady, unshakeable front, and the fact that that front had been rattled, for once, had taken her aback.
It would never have happened, she decided, letting herself into her flat and immediately heading for the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee, if she wasn’t already in a fragile frame of mind. She had spent most of the night awake, thinking about Martin’s proposal, about the engagement party which would formally seal it, wondering whether she had done the right thing. She had convinced herself that her head was right when it said yes, and if her heart was being a bit belligerent, then that would settle in time. It just so happened that Ross had decided to cross-examine her when she was mentally not up to it.
She looked at her watch, gulped down the remainder of the coffee, and then spent that next hour putting the finishing touches to the food which she had prepared over the weekend and stored in the freezer.
She found herself hurriedly taking a shower, then changing into a slim-fitting silk dress in blues and purples, which she had bought months ago but had never got around to wearing because whenever she tried it on all she could see was the revealing depth of the neckline, and that immediately made her wonder what on earth had possessed her to buy it in the first place.
After thirty minutes of rapid dressing, she stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom and looked at her reflection with a critical eye.
Not bad, she decided. No abundance of voluptuous curves, but a neat figure nevertheless. She had applied some blusher to her cheeks, so her skin did not look as pale as it was wont to do, and her eye-shadow made the most of her eyes, which she personally considered to be her best feature.
When the doorbell rang, she drew in her breath, crossed her fingers that her mother wouldn’t do anything to antagonise Martin’s parents and that the handful of friends they had invited would get along, and went to answer the door.
CHAPTER TWO
‘ALL right. Out with it. What’s eating you?’
‘Nothing’s eating me.’ Abigail stared down at her notepad and thought that something was eating her all right, and whatever it was it was making a great meal of it ever since the evening before when Ross and Fiona, unexpected, uninvited and unwanted, had shown up at what was supposed to be a small, intimate celebration party.
Everything had been going just fine until they turned up. There had been no embarrassing pauses in the conversation, no snide remarks from anyone, lots of congratulations, lots of food, and her mother had been on best behaviour, even if Martin’s parents, a rather timid couple, had seemed occasionally overwhelmed by her presence. That had been expected. Her mother had a tendency to be overwhelming at the best of times.
‘Then why,’ Ross continued with a hint of impatience, ‘have you been sitting there for the past half-hour looking as though the world’s caved in? Have you been listening to a word I’ve been dictating?’
‘Of course I have.’ She held up her notepad which was full of scribbled writing and tried not to fling it at him.
‘It’s because I turned up at that engagement party of yours last night, isn’t it?’
‘Why did you?’ Their eyes met but she didn’t look away. Why bother to pretend that she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about?
He shrugged and looked at her. ‘Curiosity, I guess. If you hadn’t been so secretive about the whole thing, I probably wouldn’t have.’
Curiosity. She digested the word with something approaching dislike.
His sudden appearance in her flat had elicited varying reactions from the assembled guests. Martin’s parents, with a certain amount of obtuse naivete, had assumed that he had been invited, in the capacity of Abigail’s boss. They had even made an effort to involve Fiona in conversation, seemingly not noticing the languid boredom on her face or the way her eyes skimmed derisively over the décor. Her own mother had viewed him with rather more suspicion, and Abigail had seen the twitching antennae with a sinking heart. More lectures to come on good-looking men and how they should be avoided at all costs; remember Ellis Fitzmerton. We don’t want you making a fool of yourself over another boss, do we?
And of course Martin, who had never met Ross before, as if sensing unfair competition, had adopted an air of macho aggressiveness which had not sat well on his shoulders. Poor Martin. That, in some respects, had been the worst thing about Ross’s unexpected arrival. He had stridden into the small sitting-room, with his bottles of expensive champagne, tall, commanding, sexy, and instantly everyone had seemed very dull in comparison. Including Martin.
‘Come on.’ He stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets and Abigail said, bewildered,
‘Come on? Where? What are you doing?’
He had walked over to where she was sitting opposite him and proceeded to frogmarch her to the door, while she made ineffectual protesting noises.
‘I’m taking you to the boardroom,’ he said, pulling open the outer door and unceremoniously escorting her out. ‘Life’s just too damned offputting with you in this kind of mood. Whatever little resentments you’re nursing, you’ll bloody well tell me about them over a cup of coffee.’
‘No!’ She tried to pull away, not liking the way his fingers burnt her skin. ‘What about work? This is silly!’
He ignored the protests and continued to pull her along the corridor.
‘Work can wait.’
They reached the boardroom and he pushed her in, slamming the door behind them.
‘Now,’ he said tightly, turning to face her with his arms folded, ‘get it off your chest.’
He stood with his back to the door, staring at her, his black eyes glittering, and she gave him a weak smile.
‘It won’t work,’ he informed her in a curt voice, and when she looked at him with a question in her eyes he continued tersely, ‘that smile of yours. It won’t work.’
‘What smile of mine?’ She smiled.
‘That one. The placating one that you produce every time you’re in an uncomfortable spot. The one that precedes a change in conversation.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she muttered, looking away, and he said, moving towards her with his arms still folded,
‘Oh yes, you do. You’re fine just so long as work is involved but the minute I make any personal remark to you, however damned inoffensive, you throw me one of those smiles, edge away and take refuge behind the word processor, or the telephone, or that notepad of yours.’ He whipped the notepad out of her fingers and she instantly felt bereft without it.
‘Now sit down!’ he barked, making her jump, and she sat down, following him warily with her eyes as he walked across to the coffee-machine and began fiddling with it. After a few minutes, and cursing under his breath, he shot her a black look and said with disgust, ‘The damn thing’s broken.’
‘It was working yesterday,’ Abigail offered, and he scowled. ‘Are you sure you know how to work it?’
‘Of course I know how to work it,’ he told her impatiently. ‘It doesn’t take a degree in metaphysics to work a blasted coffee-machine, does it?’
She got up and went across to the non-functioning coffee-machine, pressed a few buttons, and was rewarded by the familiar gurgling noises.
He looked at her with a disgruntled frown, as if she had been personally responsible for its previous lack of co-operation with him, and said under his breath, ‘Pointlessly fiddly gadget. I suppose manufacturers think it’s clever to make something simple as complicated as they can.’
‘I suppose they do,’ she agreed easily, feeling much more relaxed.
‘And that’s another thing!’ he roared at her. ‘Another trait of yours! Agreeing with everything I say if you think it’s going to get me off your back!’
Abigail started to smile soothingly, and stopped in time. She made their cups of coffee and retreated back to the sanctuary of her chair. For a minute there, standing so close to him, she had felt her heart beating fast and her pulses racing, as if she had just finished running a marathon.
He sat down next to her and crossed his legs, his eyes speculative, trying to read inside her mind, to unearth what thoughts were flitting through her head. It filled her with a trace of alarm, because there were times when he had shown a distinct talent for doing just that, and it had always unnerved her.
‘Why were you so put out last night? When you opened the front door and saw us standing there, your face was like a thundercloud.’
‘I don’t happen to like my private life intruded into on the grounds of curiosity!’ she snapped. She had wondered why he had marched her along to the boardroom for coffee and a so-called chat when both could have been accomplished back in his office, but now she knew. He had brought her here to disorient her, to talk to her out of familiar surroundings, where he would have the clear advantage. In this silent, large boardroom, with its stark gleaming table and its array of chairs standing to attention around it, there was no easy flight behind familiar objects. And no distracting telephone calls which might have given her the opportunity to leave his office quietly when he was too busy talking to intervene. Here, there were just the two of them and her thumping heart.
‘All right then, forget curiosity. I’ve known you for eighteen months. I came to extend my congratulations to you formally.’
She didn’t believe a word of that and her look said as much.
‘Dammit, Abby!’ he bit out impatiently. ‘You made it patently clear from the start that you weren’t interested in a boss who was going to…to…’
‘Flirt with me?’ she offered with irony, and he glared at her.
‘If you want to put it that way.’
‘I’m not interested in that,’ she said, hearing the bitterness creep into her voice and wiping it out before he could start making deductions.
‘And I’ve tiptoed around you for long enough. Why did it make you so uncomfortable having me around?’
She flushed and looked away. Why had it? she wondered uneasily. He was just her boss, she thought. They worked well together and that was that.
‘Your girlfriend was bored stiff,’ she said, deflecting the unwelcome thought. ‘She perched on the edge of her chair, looking as though she might catch something infectious at any moment. How do you think it feels to have that at your engagement party?’
She glanced down at her finger, now sporting a discreet engagement ring, and felt a strange quiver of unreality. Suddenly things seemed to have happened very quickly, almost behind her back, when she hadn’t been looking.
‘Fiona can be tactless at times,’ he admitted, ‘but you still haven’t answered my question.’
‘I didn’t like the thought of your barging in, if you must know, looking at us as if we were strange oddities.’
‘What the hell do you think I am?’ he said, his face hardening. ‘Did you imagine that I came to sneer?’
She didn’t answer and that seemed to make him angrier.
‘I suppose not,’ she conceded reluctantly, not daring to meet his eyes, ‘but I’m just your secretary, after all. We don’t exactly move in the same circles, do we?’
Watch out, Abby, a little voice warned her, you’re beginning to sound bitter again.
She couldn’t help it though, the shadow of Ellis Fitzmerton made that impossible. After he had broken off with her, he had explained in a phoney, gentle voice that had nothing to do with sympathy and everything to do with reminding her of her position, that she must have been suffering from delusions if she thought that they could have made anything out of their brief, albeit pleasant, relationship. And when she had seen his girlfriend, she had understood why. They may have drifted into something because of circumstance, but there was a dividing line between them that was insurmountable. He had reinforced the refrain that had played in her ears ever since she had been a young child. Them and us and ne’er the twain shall meet. Beauty, her mother had once told her, can jump all barriers, but you might as well be honest and face facts, you’re no great beauty.
Ross gave her a long, intense stare, then said suddenly, ‘Who was he?’
‘Who?’ Abigail stammered, going bright red, and clutching the seat of the chair to stop her hands from trembling.
‘The man who filled your head with rubbish like that?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said sharply. ‘And I don’t have to stay here a minute longer and listen to this!’
‘Was it your mother, then?’
‘What makes you say that?’ At this point, every nerve in her body was jangling. This was the first time, she realised with panic, that he had ever managed to get any conversation between them on to an intimate footing and hold it there.
‘She struck me,’ he murmured thoughtfully, in a deceptively mild voice, ‘as the sort of woman who doesn’t mind thrusting her opinions on to other people, including her own daughter. That can be a disaster when it happens to a child, or an adolescent.’
He gave her a sidelong glance from under his lashes.
‘She can be a bit domineering, I suppose,’ Abigail admitted, only realising afterwards that she had fallen for a trap. He had given her a choice of talking either about a man or her mother, and she had chosen her mother when in fact, if she had been thinking straight, she would have seen that she was under no obligation to discuss either.
‘This is stupid,’ she said, fidgeting but not actually summoning up the courage to get up, ‘sitting here, wasting time talking about nothing, when there’s a pile of work back in the office waiting to get done.’
‘We’re not talking about nothing. Unless that’s how you would describe your life.’
‘And stop putting words into my mouth!’
Their eyes clashed and she felt a strange, giddy sensation overwhelm her.
‘How long did your friends stay?’ he asked, veering off at another tangent. He sipped his coffee and regarded her over the rim of the cup. Compelling. That more or less described him. His looks, his mind, everything about him compelled. Why else would she be sitting here being persuaded, against her will, to talk about herself?