The Girl He'd Overlooked (9 page)

At any rate she had no choice, did she? He was laid up, unable to move. She
had
to physically help him! If she could open up and be friends with him once more, it would just prove that she had got over him! More or less! Those niggly, confused, tumultuous, excited feelings she was having would therefore be nothing to worry about!

The list was ready when she returned. On it he had written, ‘laptop, charger, clothes’.

‘But before you disappear,’ he said, making it sound as though she were Scott of the Antarctic, ‘I’m feeling a little peckish…’

She was still feeling strangely upbeat when, forty-five minutes later, she headed off to his house. The estate was so vast that no other dwelling could be glimpsed from any window in the house. In summer, the trees shielded the view of the house but those trees now were bare and
heavy with snow and it was a battle against the wind and the snow to make it to the front door. She had been to the house before but never to his bedroom, which she managed to locate by a process of elimination. The top of the house was comprised of a suite of rooms, and was virtually closed off, used only for guests. Of the other bedrooms, only one, apart from Daisy’s, resembled a room that was occupied.

Deep burgundy floor-length drapes were pulled open so that she could see, outside, the steady swirl of the never-ending snow. Most of the pale carpet was covered by a sprawling Persian rug and a massive four-poster bed dominated much of the room. It was neatly made up but, when she leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, she could picture James lying on it, wickedly, sensationally sexy, with dark satin sheets lightly covering his bronzed muscular body. Then she pictured him on that sofa, with the duvet over him as she perched on the edge and chatted to him, so close that their bodies had been practically touching. She blinked guiltily and the image was gone.

Locating a handful of clothes took no time at all but it felt uncomfortable gathering them up, jumpers, trousers, tee shirts and underwear. Designer items neatly laundered and tossed into the drawer indiscriminately. She had grabbed two plastic bags before leaving the cottage and she stuffed all the items inside and then hunted down his laptop computer and charger, both of which were in the kitchen where he had left them before his heroic mission to fell the tree.

She had left him lying on the sofa and he was still there when she finally returned, although he had decided that he couldn’t remain prone for ever.

‘I can manage to move a bit when the painkillers kick in,’ he announced, liking the way the wet made the waves
in her long hair turn into curls. Her dark hair was dramatic against the paleness of her skin and he didn’t think he had ever noticed before how long her lashes were or how satiny smooth her complexion.

‘But I don’t think it’s going to do any good if I try and work sitting up on the sofa,’ he pushed himself up, flexed his muscles and grimaced when his back made itself felt. ‘I should be upright. You’d probably know that if you’d done that first-aid course you never got around to doing.’

‘So what are you suggesting?’ Jennifer asked drily.

‘Well… I can use that chair over there but you might have to bring me some sort of desk. We can position it by the bay window.’

‘What sort of desk did you have in mind, sir?’

‘Would it be asking too much for you to get the one I use at the house? It’s roughly eight by four.’ He grinned and felt a kick when she grinned back at him and shook her head with an elaborate sigh.

‘I suppose I could bring down my dressing table. It’s small and light and it’ll have to do.’ She glanced down at the clothes she had brought over in the plastic bag. ‘Can you manage to change yourself?’

‘Only after I’ve had a shower, but I figure I can just about make it up the stairs myself. If you could lend me a towel…’

She did and while he showered—she could hear the water and could picture him standing under it—she cleared the little dressing table and manoeuvred it down the stairs where she set up a miniature work station for him. An office away from his office with a view of the snowy landscape.

The cottage was small and, having avoided him the night before, leaving him to watch television on his own, she resigned herself to the fact that she wasn’t similarly
going to be able to avoid him during daylight hours. She could work in the kitchen and she would, but even stretching her legs would entail walking into the sitting room.

Far from feeling discomforted by the prospect of that, as she had the evening before, she felt as if something had changed between them. Despite her best efforts, she had stopped fighting herself and relaxed.

He had forgone the hassle of shaving and he emerged half an hour later with wet hair and just enough of a stubble so that he looked even darker and sexier. Reluctantly she was forced to admit that neither Patric nor Gerard, the erstwhile lawyer with whom she had tried to forge a relationship, were a patch on James when it came to sheer animal sex appeal.

He took himself off to the sitting room with a pot of coffee and Jennifer tried to concentrate on catching up with her emails in the kitchen. It was almost impossible. Eventually, she began reading some of her father’s recipe books, amused when she noticed a number of pages creased, dishes he had either tried or else had put on a list to try at some stage.

In the midst of trying to decide whether she should just abandon all hope of concentrating on work and start cooking something a little more ambitious for their dinner, she was interrupted by the sound of a book hitting the ground with force and she yelped and jumped to her feet.

James was standing by the window with his hand pressed against the base of his back and scowling. He turned as she entered and greeted her with, ‘Why do people resist doing something when they must know that it’s for their own good!’

Jennifer looked down at the heavy book that had hit the floor. It was her father’s gardening tome.

‘Apologies. I had to throw something.’

‘Do you throw something every time you get frustrated?’ she asked, moving to collect the book and replace it on the little coffee table.

‘My favoured way of releasing stress is to go to the gym and punch-bag it out of my system. Unfortunately that’s impossible at the moment.’ He felt a lot less stressed now that she was in the room. ‘What are you doing in the kitchen? Are you working?’

‘I’m reading a recipe book and wondering whether I should chance cooking something a little more ambitious a bit later. Shall I get you something to eat? Drink?’

‘No, but you can sit and talk to me.’ He gave up the chair in favour of the sofa and lay down with a sigh of intense relief.

‘Your secretary must have a nightmarish time working for you,’ Jennifer commented, moving to the comfy chair by the fire and tucking her legs under her.

She marvelled at how easy it was to slide back into this easy companionship and how much she was appreciating it, having feared it to be lost and gone for good. She tried not to think that it was no good for her and then decided that she was just, finally, dealing with things in an adult fashion. Not hiding, not fighting, just accepting and moving on. What could be dangerous or unhealthy about that? Besides, she enjoyed looking at him, even though she hated admitting that weakness to herself. She liked seeing him rake his fingers through his hair as he was doing now. It was a gesture that had followed him all through his teenage years.

‘My secretary loves working for me,’ he denied. ‘She can’t wait to start work in the mornings.’

Jennifer imagined someone young, pretty and adoring, following him with her eyes and working overtime just to remain in his company, and suddenly was sick with jealousy.
‘She’s in her sixties, a grandmother, with a retired husband who gets under her feet. Working for me is like having a permanent holiday.’

The relief that flooded her set up a series of alarm bells in her head and she resolutely ignored them. So that crush she had had might not have been quite as dead and buried as she had hoped, but she could deal with that!

He was grinning at her and she smiled back and said something about his ego, but teasingly, blushing when he continued to look at her with those fabulous deep blue eyes.

‘So tell me why you threw the book,’ she said, still feeling a little hot and bothered by his lingering stare. She knew that it wasn’t good to feed an addiction, however much you thought you were in control, but she found she just couldn’t stand up and walk back to the kitchen and carry on reading recipe books.

‘A couple of months ago, we finalised a deal with a publishing company. On the whole a lucrative buyout with a lot of potential to go somewhere, but one of the subsidiary companies is having a problem toeing the line.’

Jennifer leaned forward, intrigued. She remembered reading about that buyout on the Internet. ‘What do you mean
toeing the line
?’

‘They need to amalgamate. They have a niche market but it makes no money. The employees could be absorbed into the mainstream publishing company and get on board with ebooks but they’re making all sorts of uncooperative noises and refusing to sign on the dotted line without a fight. Of course, they could be made to toe the line but I’d rather not take on board disgruntled employees.’

Jennifer had worked with a couple of small publishing houses in Paris, one of which specialised in maps, the other in rare limited edition books. She had been fascinated to
find how differently they were run from their mainstream brothers and how different the employees were. They were individually involved in their companies in a way ordinary employees tended not to be. Both had successfully broken away from the umbrella of the mother company and both were doing all right but hardly brilliantly. Without any security blanket, it was tough going.

She peppered him with questions about the legal standing of the company he was involved with, quite forgetting her boredom in the kitchen when she had been unable to concentrate on work.

Digging into her experiences with similar companies, she expanded on all the problems they had faced when they had successfully completed management buyouts.

‘You want to work with them,’ she said earnestly. ‘You can exploit a different market. It doesn’t all have to be about ebooks and online reads. I personally think it’s worth having that niche market operating without interference because it really lends integrity to the bigger picture.’

James, who had had no real idea of what Jennifer did in Paris, had only known that whatever she did, she did extremely well, was impressed by the depth of her knowledge and the incisiveness of her ideas. She also knew all the legal ins and outs should this small arm of his publishing firm decide to break away. He found himself listening to her with interest and when, pink cheeked, she finally rounded up her rousing argument for not trying to force them to fit into a prescribed mould, he nodded slowly and frowned.

‘Very good,’ he said slowly, and she flushed with pleasure. ‘So you think I should stop trying to close this minor arm of the business and let the employees do their own thing?’

‘Not
do their own thing
,’ Jennifer said, ‘but with someone
good in charge, you might be pleasantly surprised to find that there’s room in this computerised world of ours to accommodate things that don’t want to or can’t be computerised. There are still people out there with a love of old things and we should encourage that.’

‘And what would you say if I told you that I have just the person for that job in mind?’

‘Have you? I guess I always thought that the people who work for you were bright young things who wouldn’t want to get tied up with something they might see as old-fashioned.’

‘Oh, some of the bright young things could be easily persuaded into tying themselves into something old-fashioned if the pay was right. Money is always the most effective arm twister.’

‘Ye-es…’ She dragged out that single syllable as she thought about what he said. ‘But you also need someone who’s really interested in what they’re doing and not doing it just because the pay cheque at the end of the month is fat.’

‘The person I have in mind is bright, passionate and would do a damn good job.’

‘That’s brilliant. Well… enough of me spouting my opinions. Do you feel a little less frustrated now or am I going to hear that gardening book hit the ground again? Not that I mind, but maybe you could give me a little advance warning so that I don’t jump out of my skin when I happen to be holding a knife about to chop something up for our dinner!’ She began standing up and he waved her back down.

‘I like you spouting your opinions,’ he said, which made her flush with pleasure again. ‘The girl I knew just used to hang onto mine.’

And the guy I knew and with whom I was so infatuated never encouraged me to have my own…

The shift in their relationship now stared her in the face. Two adults finding ground that was equal, so different from what they once had, so different and
so much more rewarding.

From nowhere floated those little words he had said when she had still been fighting him, still trying to prove to him how little he meant to her…

You’re a sexy woman.
Her heart skipped a beat and her skin began to tingle. He might respect her opinions, she thought, but that didn’t mean that he had suddenly stopped seeing her as the girl next door. This time, when she tried to dredge up the hurt she felt she had suffered at his hands all those years ago, it eluded her. It was in the process of being replaced by something else. For the very first time, she thought back to that night and tried to see herself through his eyes. Young, naive, infatuated, gullible. What a poor proposition. She shook her head, clearing it of the muddle of thoughts now released to show themselves.

‘I know. How boring for you.’

‘Boring… never…’

‘Who,’ she said hurriedly, because that thoughtful look in his eyes was doing all sorts of weird things to her, ‘do you have in mind for this job, then? And do you think he’ll like being taken away from what he’s doing to head up something that might not be a profitable concern?’