The Boss's Proposal (15 page)

‘There's nothing else,' Vicky said, standing up. ‘If you feel that you can't work with me now, then I'll understand.' She brushed a few non-existent specks of dust off her jeans and then edged behind her chair, gripping the back of it with her hands. Why did he think that she was still hiding something? Could he read what was going on in her mind from the expression on her face? Did he have X-ray eyes? She felt as though her nervous system had been put through a shredder.

‘And there's another thing,' he said pensively, stroking his chin with one long finger and making no attempt to budge.

‘What? What's another thing?' She could barely conceal the jumpiness in her voice, even though she knew that the more jumpy she sounded, the more penetrating would be his scrutiny of what she had told him.

‘The myriad times you mention that you
might just leave the company
. Why do you do that, I wonder?'

Vicky, for her part, wondered desperately why he didn't leave her house. All that musing and speculation was making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

‘Are you one of these women who needs constant reassurances?'

‘
One of these women who needs constant reassurances?
Oh, please!'

‘Then why are you always threatening to walk out? There's no need to feel insecure. You've told me your dark little secret—' he allowed a few nasty seconds to elapse, just to remind her that he was quite aware of the holes in her storyline ‘—and I don't think your status will affect your job.' He stood up and she very nearly groaned with relief. ‘So I expect to see you in the morning,' he added, walking towards the sitting room door and resting his hand lightly on the door handle, ‘and you needn't worry,' he said seriously, ‘that I'll make any unreasonable demands on you. I'm not an ogre. I do appreciate that working women with children cannot be as accommodating as single, child-free women. But—' his eyes narrowed on her ‘—I would have appreciated the truth from the beginning, and what I
don't
expect is to discover that any more lies have been told. Got it? You're in a job that sometimes requires the utmost confidentiality. A loose-tongued liar is the last person I need working for me.'

‘I'm not a loose-tongued liar! I made
one
mistake, told
one
lie, for which I apologise. I don't make a habit of running around lying to anyone and everyone. But if you feel that way, then I'm more than happy to quit!' She looked at him with mutinous determination and he appeared to think the matter over.

‘One chance, Vicky, because you're so damn good at what you do. But that's it.'

Vicky murmured something fairly inaudible. She had just lived through the most harrowing couple of hours since she had returned to England. Her vocal cords were apparently giving up through sheer stress.

He abandoned his condemnation of her and assumed a lighter tone. ‘I can understand why the thought of renovations to this house hold so much appeal. I expect you've been thinking along the lines of playrooms and places to store toys?'

He fully opened the door, and Vicky saw Chloe before Max, who was still looking at her. She was standing at the bottom of the staircase, nicely caught in a pool of light, her dark hair tousled from sleeping, her right hand clutching the moth-eaten teddy that had been her faithful companion since birth.

Max, following the startled widening of her eyes, turned around, and whatever he had been saying died on his lips.

‘You promised to bring me up a milk shake, Mum,' Chloe said. ‘I'm thirsty.'

T
HERE
was a sense of doomed inevitability about the whole thing. In the space of a second or two, Vicky accepted that fate had just been playing games with her ever since she had accepted the job, waiting for this very moment to evolve so that she could have the last laugh.

She watched the scenario unfolding in front of her and realised that there was nothing more that she could do.

Chloe, who had barely noticed the presence of another adult in the room, now became aware of Max standing to one side, stepping out of the shadows, and her eyes opened wide in shock and puzzlement.

‘Shaun?' she whispered uncertainly. She scuttled over to Vicky, her eyes fixed on Max, and clutched the proffered hand. Vicky reached down and swept her daughter into her arms, wrapping her protectively into her, with one hand cupping the back of Chloe's dark head. She knew that her hands were trembling. ‘Mummy, what's Shaun doing here?'

‘It's not Shaun,' Vicky whispered, aware that Max's eyes were boring into her, demanding answers. ‘How about that milk shake?'

‘She called me
Shaun
.' Max regained his power of speech, but before he could launch into a series of questions Vicky looked at him sharply and held up one finger for him to keep quiet, then she walked away towards the kitchen, still hanging on to Chloe, although she was now aware that her daughter's head had popped up and was
doubtless surveying the unnerving vision in front of her with childish curiosity and apprehension.

Disconcertingly, Max had followed in her wake. Vicky had a vision of them both avidly looking at one another, and the weight of all the explanations lurking in the not-too-distant future made her feel sick and weary. She switched on the kitchen light and, still not looking at Max, she sat Chloe on the kitchen counter and proceeded to pour milk into a glass, add some chocolate powder and stir, really as though everything was fine and her life hadn't been suddenly turned on its head. It was the calm before the storm. She felt like breaking into hysterical laughter and had to fight the urge, because calm was what was needed. A calm hand, a steady head and a cool determination.

‘Okay, honey,' she whispered unsteadily to her daughter, whose attention she now had to fight to retrieve. ‘You can have your milk shake in bed and Mummy will explain everything to you in the morning.'

‘Has Shaun come back from Heaven to visit us?'

‘No, darling. Of course not. This man here just
looks
like him, that's all.'
Heaven? Shaun Forbes?
She walked past Max and proceeded up the stairs with her daughter. ‘There's no need to follow us,' she addressed the figure behind her in a cold voice. ‘I
will
come back down.'

‘You'd better.'

Don't you dare threaten me
, she wanted to say, but fear made her keep quiet, relieved at least that he'd turned and was heading back down.

‘But who
is
he?' Chloe asked unsteadily, as she was deposited onto the bed and handed her glass of milk shake. ‘Why does he look like Shaun?' She drank a mouthful of milk shake and watched her mother over the rim of the glass. Vicky tried to imagine what must be going through
her daughter's head. Surprise, bewilderment, all muddled up because she was still sleepy. Certainly no excitement. Her father had made no effort to try and cultivate a relationship with her and, consequently, Chloe had seen him as virtually a stranger, one who brought her the occasional present, depending on his mood and whether any money happened to be available at the time. From the very beginning he'd insisted on being called Shaun by her which, as it turned out, couldn't have been better, because
daddy
implied an affectionate intimacy which was patently lacking in their relationship. Later on, indifference had given way to a certain amount of wariness, because she'd been able to see the effect he had on her mother, even though Vicky had done her utmost to protect her daughter from her father's nastier sides.

‘They're related,' Vicky said, smoothing the dark hair with her hand. She kept her voice as low, as soporific and as expressionless as possible, and she kept up the stroking until Chloe's eyes began to flicker shut, then she carefully removed the glass of milk shake and placed it very quietly on the bedside table. ‘I'll talk to you about it in the morning.' Right now,
morning
seemed a long way away. In fact most things, including normality, seemed a long way away, with Max Forbes prowling around downstairs, waiting for her to reappear so that he could start firing questions at her. The questions, she thought sickly, making a hushed departure from her daughter's room and gently closing the door behind her, weren't as terrifying as the prospect of what would come swiftly in their wake. Therein lay a whole murky morass of possible avenues, none of which she cared to contemplate.

At the top of the stairs she paused, took a deep breath and then headed down the stairs and into the sitting room, where Max was waiting for her, as she knew he would be,
lounging by the window with his hands stuck into his pockets. He waited in perfect silence as she sidled across to the nearest chair and sat down. Waited and watched until she could feel her body perspiring and her nerves stretching tighter and tighter, pulling her to breaking point.

He was waiting for her to start babbling, she thought. He probably figured that she would babble herself right into a corner, from which he could then proceed to bar her exit and do precisely as he pleased.

She cracked, though managed to hang on to a fairly steady voice. ‘I suppose you want an explanation of what just went on.' When he didn't say anything, she carried on with rising anger, ‘Well, standing there in silence isn't going to get either of us anywhere!'

Instead of responding with a verbal outburst, he strode towards the door and closed it, then he strolled towards her, so that she was reluctantly forced to stare up at him. She winced when her eyes met his. Judging from the expression on his face, whatever deductions he had reached showed that he was halfway there to providing his own correct explanation.

‘The door's shut,' he said silkily, ‘and you can consider yourself trapped here until you tell me what's going on. And don't even think about skirting over the details. I want you to start at the beginning, leaving nothing out, and then—' he moved across to the sofa, sat down, crossed one ankle over his thigh and looked at her ‘—I shall decide what to do with you.'

‘
What to do with me?
You can't do anything with me!' She sounded a lot braver than she felt and her fingers were twining together nervously.

‘Of course I can.' He shot her a patient, rueful look that didn't disguise the cold, hard, reptilian determination in his eyes. ‘But we won't go into any of that just yet.'

Vicky felt a quiver of dread race along her spine. She cleared her throat, but when she opened her mouth to speak she could barely enunciate what she wanted to say.

‘Start at the beginning,' he told her in the same kind voice that was designed to turn her into a nervous wreck. ‘Which—' he leaned forward and surveyed her musingly, his head tilted to one side ‘—I take it involved my brother, Shaun? That was the name your daughter uttered, wasn't it?
Shaun?
With that look of stunned recognition in her eyes?' The veneer of kindness was disappearing, as she had known it would sooner or later. ‘
Not
,' he added softly, ‘that I wouldn't have guessed her identity. She could be my brother's clone. Same hair, same colouring, same eyes… Little secrets
do
have a way of slipping out sooner or later, don't they?' He bared his teeth in a smile while she continued to look at him with mesmerised apprehension. ‘Or perhaps,' he continued languidly, ‘slipping out is a bit of a misnomer…because that would imply a mistake, wouldn't it? When there must be a name for the deliberate exposure of a so-called secret…wouldn't you say? What word would I be searching for here, do you think?' He stood up and strolled towards the window, idly flicking back the curtain and peering outside for a few seconds before reverting back to his inspection of her face. His movements were lazy and unhurried. Here was a man, she thought, with all the time in the world to pin her to the wall and crucify her. She swallowed hard.

‘What are you talking about?' she mumbled.

‘Tut, tut, tut. Please. No games.' Another threatening baring of the teeth, then he sat back down. ‘Just the truth. When did you decide to hunt me down so that you could—hey, presto—turn over your trump card and take me for every penny I've got?'

‘Hunt you down?' Vicky shook her head in utter confusion. ‘Fleece you?
What
are you talking about?'

‘Stop it! Now!' He sat forward and punched one clenched fist into the palm of his hand with such force that she jumped. ‘What happened? Did you meet my brother out in Australia and decide that he was a good match? A good match, that is, until you discovered that his outgoings usually exceeded his incomings by several thousands per month? Or maybe even when you found that out you still decided that there was enough there to make it worthwhile, but only a child could have got the commitment… Is that when you decided to become pregnant? Backfired, though, didn't it…because he didn't marry you, did he?'

‘You've got this all wrong.' Her mind tried to grapple with all the misconceptions being hurled at her but it was lagging behind. As fast as he tossed one accusation at her, and before she'd had time to deal with it, he was moving on to something else, some other nightmarish misunderstanding. From one correct assumption, he'd woven his own theories, and was now in the process of shooting her down with them.

‘No,' she began a little more forcefully, ‘that's not what happened at all…'

‘I gather. But things must really have looked grim when Shaun died. No wedlock, no cash… What was there for a poor girl to do but hot-foot it over here to England and check out what further sources of finance were available?'

‘Look, this has gone far enough!' She stood up, trembling, but her legs were unsteady and she slumped back onto the chair.

‘I don't think so. Actually, I don't think we've even begun as yet.' There was grim resolution stamped on his face. Not in a million years would anyone have ever guessed that the man sitting opposite her possessed any
thing resembling a sense of humour. That he had made her giggle, made her blush, had touched her and turned her body to fire. Now the opposite was happening. With every word, her body was turning to ice.

‘You played it cool, though. I have to admit it. My hat's off to you, and I'm as sceptical as they go when it comes to a gold-digger.'

‘I am not a
gold
-digger!' She spat the words out. With anger and frustration she watched his dark eyebrows raise in incredulous disbelief.

‘No? So are you telling me that it was sheer coincidence that you managed to wangle a job working for your ex-lover's brother?'

‘I didn't
wangle
a job,' Vicky muttered miserably. ‘I just—'

‘Just what? Happened to be walking past a company that carried the Forbes name? And decided to apply for a job? Without it ever occurring to you that the similarity of the names might indicate something?'

‘You don't understand. I saw the name and yes, I was curious…'

‘And a little curiosity got your brain churning, didn't it? You must have thought you'd hit jackpot when you saw me! Now all you had to do was reel me in, slowly but surely, and you took your time. No rushing in and producing the child like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat…'

‘
Chloe. The child's
name is
Chloe
.' His phraseology sparked off a memory that bit into her like acid. Shaun had called his daughter
the child
. It had enraged her then, and just hearing the same, dehumanising words come from his brother's mouth enraged her now. ‘And, for your information,' she said vehemently, standing up and discovering that her wobbly legs could actually support her now,
‘the thought of getting money from your brother or any other member of his wretched family was the last thing on my mind!' She walked over to where he was sitting and loomed over him like an angry, red-haired, avenging angel.

‘And you expect me to believe that?' His lips twisted into a sneer of disbelief and, without pausing to think, she raised her hand and slapped him hard on the face, hard enough for his head to swing back and for her hand to feel as though every bone in it had been broken. The display of violence surprised her as much as it surprised him but, before she could step back, his hand had shot out, grasping hers by the wrist and yanking her forward so that she had to catch herself from toppling on top of him.

‘You knew exactly what you were doing. Why don't you admit it? Why else did you accept the job offer unless to ingratiate yourself with me, until an opportune moment came for you to reveal your little secret? Damn you!' His grey eyes were blazingly furious and Vicky shrank back with a small cry of dismay and fright. For the first time it really hit home that his armoury of weapons, should he choose to deploy them, was extensive.

As if reading her mind, he gave her hand another fierce jerk and then said in a dangerously soft voice, ‘Well, my dear, I'm a completely different kettle of fish to my brother. When you decided to play with me, you decided to play with fire—and fire burns. Do you understand what I could do to you? I could drag you through the courts and demand partial custody of the…of my…my brother's child. In fact, I could probably swing to take her away from you. After all, money talks, and she would be in line for a very large fortune.'

Vicky felt the colour drain from her face. ‘You c-couldn't,' she stammered. ‘You wouldn't…'