The Boss's Proposal (6 page)

‘I realise that,' Vicky said, briefly looking at him and then resuming her perusal of the file in front of her.
‘Whenever I need you to help, I shall ask. I think finding my way around the business and
what you do here
is going to take the longest. I'll read up all the company literature, but Mrs Hogg—'

‘Ms Hogg.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘
Ms
Hogg. Geraldine prefers good, healthy outdoor pursuits with her formidable sister to the company of men any day of the week.' He grinned and she reluctantly grinned back.

‘Well, as I was saying…' What
had
she been saying? ‘
Ms
Hogg didn't get much of a chance to fill me in on this particular branch of your company. She mentioned that it's a fairly new concern—'

‘But growing at an almost unprecedented rate,' he carried on for her, ‘hence my involvement. Virtually all of our customers are new to us and have to be treated with kid gloves, aside from one or two whose mother company is based in London and whose subsidiaries coincidentally operate in this general area. I'm pretty busy for the rest of the day, but I can always pop over to your house some time after wor—'

‘No!' Vicky heard the panic in her voice with alarm. The important thing was to lull any suspicions he might have of her to sleep, not stoke them into a frenzy by overreacting to obvious situations. ‘I mean, I have very…very definite views on business and pleasure.'

‘Does that mean that you shed your working personality the minute you walk out of the office building?' He stared at her narrowly, head cocked insolently to one side, as though conjuring up a mental picture. ‘Intriguing. As the office doors swing shut behind you, do you wrench the clips out of your hair and hitch up your neat, little tailored skirt?'

‘Of course I don't,' Vicky said coolly. ‘I just think that it's important to separate leisure time from work time, or else the two begin flowing into one another and somewhere down the road you realise that there's no part of your life that isn't free from work.'
Neat, little tailored skirt?
How could four small words be invested with such a derogatory meaning? He made her sound like an old age pensioner and, without thinking, she let her fingers flutter to the top button of her shirt, firmly done up, protecting her from unwanted attention. She had never been like this. There had been a time, not
that
long ago, when she'd used to wear short skirts and pretty, attractive tops, but that had been before she had learnt that prudery was the only defence against Shaun's lecherous hands. The sight of her primly buttoned up had sometimes been enough to deter him from invading her body and she had grown accustomed to the way of dressing until now, she realised with a start, most of her clothes conformed to the prissy, unadventurous image she had meticulously cultivated over time.

‘But is it such a good idea to compartmentalise your life? Don't you find that a little unhealthy?' He'd pushed his chair a little way away from hers to enable him to scrutinise her face, which was now going a deep shade of pink. It occurred to her that they had successfully managed to veer away from the point of their conversation, which was namely to brief her on office business, and she struggled to find a way of bringing it back to the matter in hand. While she was busy grappling with the problem, he filled the brief silence with his sudden interest in her private life.

‘Reminds me of a split personality,' he said thoughtfully, and she felt her hackles rise at the insinuation.

‘I assure you I'm
perfectly normal
,' Vicky informed him
in a voice that suggested closure of the topic. She meaningfully peered at the file in front of her, even fetching out a piece of paper to stare at it with frowning concentration, though her eyes weren't registering much of what was written there.

‘I never implied that you weren't!' he protested in an offended voice. ‘I just think that it's perfectly natural for work to spill over sometimes into leisure.'

‘Well, perhaps you're right,' Vicky said with a shrug. ‘Are you contactable when you're in London or would you rather problems waited until you returned here?'

‘You can e-mail me any time, or telephone, of course, although I'm not often in the office.' He allowed an acceptable period of silence to stretch between them, then he said in a considering tone, ‘Do you know, it's been my experience that women who are fanatically guarded about their private life usually have something to hide…?'

He had unknowingly hit jackpot. He could sense it in the stillness of her body, which only lasted a matter of seconds but was enough to tell an entire story of its own.

‘I have nothing to hide,' she informed him icily, ‘and at the risk of sounding impertinent on my first day here, I should just like to say that I resent your prying into my private life…'

‘I didn't realise that I was
prying
into your private life, I
thought
that I was making a general statement…' Her tone of voice didn't appear to have put him off his stride and she saw, with dismay, the gleam lurking seductively in his eyes. ‘Of course—' he dropped his eyes and inspected his nails briefly ‘—you're entitled to your privacy, and if you have something that you're ashamed of…'

‘I am
not
ashamed of
anything
!'

‘Okay! Okay!' It was the oldest trick in the book and she knew it. He was making a show of backing away from
confrontation while simultaneously appearing doubtful of her protestations of innocence.

‘What could I have to be ashamed of?' she couldn't help demanding indignantly, and this was met by a theatrical shrug of his broad shoulders.

‘Nothing.'

Vicky made the inarticulate sound of someone whose feathers have been severely ruffled.

‘Unless,' he said as an afterthought, ‘it's something to do with a man.' He flicked a quick look at her to see how this one registered but her normal serenity was well and truly back in place. ‘You know, you're entitled to have whatever relationships you want, be they with married men…'

Vicky, recognising that he was fishing for information, maintained her studious silence, chewing her lip as she peered down at sheaths of paper in a business like manner.

This
was what she had feared most, this willingness on his part to cheerfully overstep the mark. He had no respect for anyone's limits. If he got it into his head that jumping over them was what he wanted to do, then jump over them he would, and with a grin on his face.

‘Or even married women…' He didn't seriously believe that that was a possibility but he decided to voice his thoughts anyway, if only to keep this enticing conversation on the go. As expected, she shot him a dry look and didn't bother to say anything.

‘Or perhaps it's a toy boy? These things
do
happen…'

‘I'm not old enough for a toy boy,' Vicky pointed out with a sigh of resignation. ‘No married men,
or women, for that matter
, no toy boy, no geriatric in his seventies, no
skeletons
, in fact…' She sounded pleasingly truthful and couldn't resist a smug smile in his direction.

‘Everyone has a skeleton or two,' he said quickly, and she raised her eyebrows at him.

He wasn't going to get anywhere with this one. She was now looking at him with crisp efficiency, raring to get going with whatever folder she'd been fingering for the past fifteen minutes. He admitted defeat, and for the next two hours they worked alongside one another. Instead of wasting time going through files individually, he dictated letters, briefly giving her a lowdown on each account as he covered them.

She picked things up fast. He'd spent so many months battling with various levels of incompetence that it was sheer bliss to work with someone who was capable of following his pace. Her questions were clipped and relevant, she grasped what she needed to do without requiring a lengthy process of repetition, and by the time Maria on Switchboard began putting through his calls once again he felt confident enough to leave her on her own to get on with things.

Through the office partition, he could see a sliver of her at her desk, one hand holding a pen, which she lightly tapped as she inspected whatever she had just typed onto the computer. She had shoved her hair into a bun, and ever so often she would absent-mindedly reposition her rebellious curls.

Max rolled his chair a few vital inches to the left, without altering the tenor of his conversation on the telephone, and guiltily watched her as she worked. It made him feel a bit like a lecher so, after a few minutes, he rolled himself back in front of his desk and made an effort to swivel towards the window behind him so that he no longer felt like a voyeur.

He only realised how keyed-up he was to her presence
when she politely peeped into his office forty minutes later with a question.

‘I've been going through the filing cabinets,' she began, and he indicated the chair for her to sit.

‘And…?'

‘It appears that two files have been made of this account, and filed under separate names.' Vicky handed him the files, which boasted two different sets of handwriting. ‘Problem is that the information in both doesn't correspond, even though it's all to do with the same thing. It looks as though one of your secretaries dealt with something three months ago and then misfiled the folder. When the problem recurred, her replacement started a new file and basically told the client the complete opposite of what had been said to him previously.' She stood up and leaned forward, flicking open both the files and then carefully indicating what she meant. One long strand of wayward hair escaped and skirted her neck, coiling in a perfect red-gold corkscrew curl.

‘Leave it with me. I'll deal with it.'

‘I don't mind…' She glanced and met his eyes, then quickly lowered hers. ‘Sorry. Overstepping my brief. I suppose I was so accustomed to dealing with these types of customer problems at my last job in Australia that I could find it easy to slip back into my old ways.' She reminded herself that that would be impossible, since her time allotment for this particular job was a matter of weeks rather than years. Any slipping she would be doing would be out of the office door and into the nearest employment agency.

‘I have an idea,' he said slowly, pushing himself back from his desk and tilting a bit on the chair. ‘Why don't we pay a few visits to some of the more critical clients? If you meet them, then you can put a face to the voice at the end of the telephone and so can they. Have a look at
my diary and fill me in on what I'm up to on…let's see…next Tuesday. We can spend a couple of hours with each and have a break for lunch at one of the better country pubs around here.'

Vicky began calculating in her head whether Brenda, her childminder, would be able to cover for her next Tuesday. Chloe would have to miss her after-school swimming lesson, but that was fine. She hated them anyway. If they managed to clear everything up no later than six in the evening, then there should be no problem at all.

She looked at him to find him staring at her with hooded interest.

‘I'll get your diary,' she said hurriedly, fleeing the office before he could begin quizzing her on further evidence of her mysterious secret life. As she fished for the diary from the drawer of her desk, she wondered whether she shouldn't just head him off by fabricating something that might satisfy his masculine curiosity. It would have to be something worth secreting away, yet nowhere near the truth. Perhaps, she thought, she could invent a double life as a stripper. That would shut him up, she was sure.

As she headed back into the office, her mouth was curved into a small smile at her ludicrous but amusing secret plan.

‘Share the joke?'

She raised her eyes to his but she didn't see him. What she saw, in fact, was a stage in a darkened room on which she wove with sensuous, semi-naked abandon, watched hungrily by the man sitting opposite her at the desk. Her mind was filled suddenly and sickening with an erotic image that was strong enough to blow her off her feet. She very quickly sat down, just in case, and delved blindly into the black diary on her lap, furiously flicking through the
pages until her trembling fingers lighted onto the correct one.

She mumbled something about there being no joke to share, making sure that she kept her eyes firmly averted from his face, and then said crisply, ‘Tuesday looks fine. If you tell me what clients you'd like to visit, then I can try and arrange them.' She was still speaking to the diary. In a minute, when her head had completely cleared of its treacherous suggestion, she would resume normal behaviour patterns.

‘If we meet the first, Prior and Truman, at nine, then we can probably fit Robins in before lunch. Make sure that you leave a two-hour window for lunch, say between one and three, then a couple more and we can call it a day.'

‘And which client would you like to take to lunch?' Her heart rate was getting back to its normal speed, thankfully, and she risked a look at him.

‘None. I think you and I could benefit from a bit of uninterrupted time together.' He let the words sink in, then added, ‘To go through any little work problems you might have encountered that you need to ask me about.' He wasn't
smiling
, she noticed, when he said this, but there was the
feeling
of a smile tugging at his mouth and she shot him a quenchingly professional look, just in case there was anything there that needed snuffing out.

Shaun had made her wise to the manipulations of the flirt. He himself had used more obvious tactics. He had often spread himself across her desk, before she'd insisted that he no longer come into her workplace, making sure that she'd had nowhere else to look but at some part of his reclining body; then, later, the big gestures of extravagant flowers and expensive dinners in the places where to be seen was to step up two notches on your street cred rating. The showy manoeuvres had lasted the length of
time it had taken to get her into bed, then gradually they had dwindled, until the day had arrived when the flowers and expensive dinners became things of the past. She would always, at the back of her mind, equate pregnancy with misery, because it was then that the seriously destructive verbal abuse had really begun, the taunts that would reduce her to uncontrollable weeping, the slamming of doors and jeering that had made her want to disappear from the face of the earth.