Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Copyright

“You’re attracted to me. Aren’t you?”

Ross trailed his finger along her spine and Abigail’s body went rigid with tension. “I have more sense than to be attracted to you!”

“What has sense got to do with it?” An odd look flickered in the depths of his eyes.

“Everything,” she stated calmly. But her spine still tingled from his touch, and she realized with horror that Ross knew precisely what effect he had on her…

CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and went to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies in the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have two small daughters.

Beyond All Reason
Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

AS SOON as Abigail walked into her office, she knew that it was going to be a bad day.

She had had hardly any sleep at all the night before, had slept through her alarm clock and had had to rush about her small flat trying to dress and eat breakfast at the same time, and then, on top of all that, she had missed her bus to work and had had to engage in full-scale battle with three million other commuters on the Underground. Of course, she was late, and the note on her desk, with its bold, black writing telling her to ‘See Me’, didn’t fill her with a sense of eager anticipation. She looked at her boss’s door with a sigh, took a deep breath and knocked.

‘Yes!’

Abigail pushed open the door and stepped in.

Ross Anderson was sitting behind his desk. He looked up as she entered and stared at her, frowning.

‘Where have you been?’ he demanded. ‘I told you to come in at eight and it’s now——’ he looked at his watch as if he wanted to remind himself of the time which, she thought, was a joke because she could guarantee that he knew precisely how late she was, and simply wanted to ram the point home in that endearing way of his ‘—half-past nine.’ He sat back in his swivel chair and clasped his hands behind his head in an attitude of, Well, I’m waiting and be quick about it.

Abigail looked at him evenly. After one and a half years, Ross Anderson still had the power to make her feel uncomfortable. Those lean, dark, predatory good looks might charm the rest of the female sex into coy, blushing smiles and fluttering eyelashes, but she had always stoutly refused to let them do anything for her. She had had enough of good looks to last her a lifetime.

She answered him now in her usual calm, unhurried voice, ‘I’m sorry, I had a late night.’

‘You had a late night?’ He sounded incredulous, as if she had uttered some startling, incredible revelation of epic proportions. His black eyes skimmed over her with the insulting thoroughness which had not been on display for a very long time, not since she had informed him coldly that if he couldn’t respect her then he could look elsewhere for a personal assistant. She had just started working for him and had still been licking wounds and rebuilding defences, and had most certainly not been in the market for a flirtatious boss with more than his fair share of charm. In fact, if only he had known it, that glimpse of sexy charm so apparent when he had interviewed her had all but sent her skittering away in search of another job.

‘Doing what?’ he asked.

‘That’s none of your business. What did you want to see me about? I typed those letters you wanted and left them on your desk, and I’ve rearranged your meeting with Mr Grafton for next Wednesday.’

‘It damn well is my business,’ he retorted, ignoring most of what she had said, ‘when your late nights intrude on your working time.’

He stood up and walked around to the front of his desk, and then perched on the edge of it. Standing, he towered over her and she had to resist the temptation to walk right out of the room and back into the relative sanctuary of her own little office.

‘I don’t make a habit of arriving late,’ she defended.

‘Where were you last night?’

She lowered her eyes and said with reluctance, ‘I went out for dinner with a friend.’

‘Well, well, well. No need to act as though you’re confessing under torture. That only arouses curiosity. What friend?’

The amused curiosity in his voice made her head snap up in sudden irritation.

‘I don’t believe you know him, so there would be no point in telling you his name.’

‘Him? His name? A man?’ He smiled and that infuriated her even more.

As far as Ross Anderson was concerned, she was an open book. Unexciting Abigail Palmer with her shoulder-length brown hair, always neatly combed back, and her calm grey eyes. True he had once tried to use that easy charm of his on her, but she had firmly stamped on that, and he had shrugged with raised eyebrows. It wouldn’t have bothered him. Charm, as far as he was concerned, oiled the wheels of daily existence, but if she refused to play that game then she doubted that he really cared, just so long as she produced the level of dedication to her work that he wanted. Which was one hundred and ten per cent.

No doubt he had proceeded to assume that she was a quiet little mouse with an existence to match. How dared she have an outside life of which he was not aware? Least of all one that involved a man?

After a few weeks, when they had become used to one another, and ground rules had been tacitly accepted, she had caught him looking at her once or twice, a question in his eyes, trying to piece her together, just as he tried to piece everyone together, and she had always smilingly kept him at bay, and after a while, as they slipped into a comfortable working routine, he had given up.

She knew that he would not have been in the least puzzled if she had a vibrant social life, or if there were a string of ardent lovers waiting in the foyer for her when she was ready to leave. No, what puzzled him was her remoteness. She had discovered very quickly that remoteness was not a quality which was much in evidence in the women he dated. He was accustomed to beautiful, self-confident, outgoing types who laughed loudly, flirted like mad and generally made no effort to disguise what they wanted.

She knew that she was nothing like that and could never have been like that if she had taken a ten-year acting course in how to be a successful extrovert. Her personality had been too successfully moulded by her mother from an early age. How could you go through life, through all those formative years, having scorn poured on your efforts, without creating a wall of silent self-defence around yourself and a tendency to conceal what there was no need to reveal?

Experiences, especially of the bitter variety, left their acrid mark, and, where her background left off, her last disastrous brush with passion took up.

‘Well?’ he prompted. ‘You never told me that there was a man in your life.’

Abigail blinked. ‘No,’ she murmured, pretending to give the matter some thought. ‘You’re quite right, I didn’t.’

‘And you’re not about to.’

Not if I can help it, she thought.

‘I don’t see any point in bringing my personal life to work,’ she said by way of explanation.

‘I’ve noticed. Admirable, I’m sure, just so long as that personal life which you don’t bring to work doesn’t entail your getting here late.’

Abigail clenched her fists in impotent anger. Wasn’t this just like Ross Anderson? Normally she would have bitten her tongue and kept silent, but she was in no mood to be heroic this morning. There was a lot on her mind and all she really wanted was to submerge herself in her work and forget those niggling worries which, for the past three months, always seemed to be there in the background, somewhere, threatening to pounce.

‘I never complain about your personal life being brought into work,’ she muttered under her breath.

‘What?’ His voice was deadly calm and she flushed uneasily. She hadn’t expected him to hear that remark—she might have guessed that he had the ears of a hawk.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m awfully tired, and,’ she added for good measure, ‘I have a headache.’

He stood up and stared down at her and she looked back at him nervously.

‘Not too tired to function, I hope?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘You’re no good to me if you’re going to spend the day drooping around like some damned wilting flower.’ He strode over to his desk and began rummaging through the open files, and she watched him reluctantly. There was no doubt that he commanded attention. Under the tailored suit, his body was hard and very masculine. She had been to several client functions with him, and she had seen the way women were drawn to him, fascinated by his lazy charm and mesmeric sex appeal. He spun round and she raised her eyes to his, reaching out to take the stack of files.

‘I’ve attached some work in these which you’ll need to have typed by this afternoon,’ he said, flickering through each one while she watched with her mind miles away. ‘There are three reports which need some additional information slotting in. Hello!’ he bellowed. ‘Is there life here? Are you listening to a word I’m saying?’

Abigail jumped and looked up at him guiltily. ‘Of course I am.’

‘What the hell did you get up to last night with the man with no name, anyway?’ he asked and she didn’t say anything. ‘No need to answer that one,’ he murmured in a silky voice, ‘I get the picture.’

‘I’m sure you find it very amusing to speculate on my private life, Mr Anderson,’ she said coolly, taking the files from him because it gave her something to do with her hands, ‘but not all of us live in the fast lane like yourself.’

He laughed and folded his arms. ‘And what does that cryptic little remark mean?’ he drawled.

I won’t let him fluster me, she thought. She had learnt how to ride through his more provocative remarks with a sense of humour, without him seeing how addled they sometimes made her, and she looked up at him now, her face composed.

‘It means whatever you take it to mean, Mr Anderson,’ she said politely.

‘I take it to mean that you didn’t spend last night making passionate love with the man with no name.’

‘His name is Martin Redman!’ she snapped, immediately regretting her outburst because that only seemed to fuel his amusement. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get to my desk so that I can begin working on these files.’

‘Hurry off, then,’ he said, his mouth twitching at the corners, and much as she would have liked to flounce out of his office, she walked out in as calm and dignified a fashion as she could muster. Sometimes, she thought, sitting at her desk and switching on her computer terminal, sometimes I wish I could ram these files down his throat. That would go a long way to wiping the amused smile off his face!

Good old Fate. Trust it to have landed her this job eighteen months ago. At the time she had been working for a small firm of lawyers. Too small a firm, she later realised. She was the only secretary there, and her normal caution when it came to the opposite sex had gradually been eroded by the late nights she had found herself working. Ellis Fitzmerton had been one of her bosses, and she had gradually begun doing more and more work for him, knowing him in that casual but intimate way that was possible between two people who spent a great deal of working time together. There had been a drift towards take-away meals when overtime was necessary, often in an office empty but for the two of them. Legal talk had shifted to personal talk. The memory of it still made her flush. In retrospect, she couldn’t believe how stupid she had been. Ellis Fitzmerton was slick, good-looking, appealing. Little by little common sense had given way to an empathy she had never invited; and when, late one night, over a stack of files, of all stupid things, he had leant forward to kiss her, she had thrown caution to the winds and returned his passion. It had been an error of judgement which had lived to haunt her.

She shut the memory out and began typing the stack of letters, her fingers flying expertly over the keyboard, and she barely glanced up when the connecting door opened and he swept into the room, his black coat over one arm.

‘Feeling less tired now?’ he asked, propping himself with his hands on her desk, and she stopped what she was doing to look up at him. Up close, he was dauntingly handsome. His features were angular and the darkness of his hair and eyes gave a brooding impression that could be intimidating and vaguely cruel. She had trained herself never to respond to his unsettling good looks and she looked at him placidly.

‘Much less, thank you. When shall I expect you back from your meeting with Mr Robinson?’ She briefly scanned her desk diary and informed him that he was seeing one of the marketing people later on in the afternoon.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, his black eyebrows curving upwards, ‘I won’t be running behind schedule, so you needn’t fear that you’ll be called upon to do any overtime tonight.’

She snapped shut the diary. ‘Oh good,’ she murmured, gathering together her sense of humour which had threatened to desert her earlier on, ‘I am so relieved to hear that. You know how eagerly I wait for five o’clock every evening, bag in hand, jacket on, feet poised to flee and join the general stampede of clock-watchers.’

‘Oh, all right. I take back that crack.’ He stood up. ‘Tell Janet to have all the sales figures ready this afternoon, I don’t intend to waste my time standing around while she rummages through her folder in a complete flap.’

‘I’ll tell her,’ Abigail said. Poor Janet. Ross Anderson had a knack for making people nervous, and Janet was no exception. The last time she had a meeting with him, she made the mistake of forgetting some of her brief and had had to endure his barely contained impatience while she attempted to sort through her things for the relevant information.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Ross had asked her afterwards, when Janet had finally left the office, with an expression of relief on her face, and Abigail had looked down at her notepad where she had been jotting down the relevant points of the meeting.

‘Nothing,’ she had said, which had made him scowl darkly at her.

‘She should have made sure that everything was prepared before she came in here.’

‘She’s human.’

‘I’m human,’ he had pointed out irritably, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I drift in and out of my meetings in a state of semi-chaos.’

Abigail had looked up at him wryly, and he had snapped, with a dark flush, that he was not obliged to justify his behaviour to her anyway.

He stood up now, glanced down at his watch and said that she could expect him some time after lunch.

As usual, after he left, the office seemed peculiarly empty and very restful. She worked steadily for the next two hours and then sat back with a little sigh of weariness.

She would have her lunch now, she decided, a yoghurt and some fruit, and she would try not to spend the next half-hour analysing her relationship with Martin. She enjoyed his company, he enjoyed hers and they felt comfortable with one another.

She peeled off the top of the carton and relaxed back in her chair, swivelling it around so that she was staring out of the window, although the view was hardly inspiring. Grey sky, grey tops of buildings, grey strip of road in between the buildings, and to the right an isolated, lonely green blob which constituted the nearest park. Sometimes she wished that she had never chosen London as a place to live, but it offered the best jobs and in a way she had become quite accustomed to its crowded streets and frenetic pace. Every time her mother travelled down from Shropshire to visit, she made a point of telling her daughter how silly it was to live in London when she was a country girl at heart, a description that always left Abigail feeling that by country girl she meant boring yokel. And that in itself was enough to guarantee that she stayed put, right where she was, in her tiny flat in North London.

She had just finished her yoghurt when the office door swung open and Abigail looked up to find herself staring into two very blue eyes.

‘May I help you?’ she asked, and for a while the other woman didn’t answer. She simply prowled around the office, the bright blue eyes scanning everything, until she found herself opposite Abigail’s desk.

‘You are Ross’s little secretary, I take it?’ Her voice was as cold as her eyes. ‘I’m Fiona St Paul. Perhaps Ross has mentioned me.’

‘No, I’m afraid he hasn’t.’

Since the other woman had no compunction about observing her, Abigail returned the scrutiny with one of her own. Fiona St Paul was very tall, very slender, with the smooth, sleek lines of a model. Her blonde hair was cropped short and her skin had the porcelain fairness that hinted of Scandinavian blood. Her voice, however, was very upper-crust English.

‘No,’ she said coolly, ‘I don’t suppose he would have. Not to you, anyway. Can you fetch him for me?’

‘Mr Anderson isn’t in at the moment, I’m afraid,’ Abigail said without too much regret.

‘Well, when will he be back?’ The scarlet lips were pursed with irritation.

‘Some time this afternoon.’

‘Some time? Some time? Could you be more specific than that?’

Abigail tried to smile politely and failed. ‘No,’ she said bluntly, ‘I cannot be more specific than that. Perhaps I could get him to call you when he returns.’

‘Yes, my dear, you most certainly could.’ She sat down on the chair opposite the desk and crossed her legs elegantly. She was wearing a pale blue silk suit and a thick, camel-coloured coat. ‘And could you call me a taxi? It’s absolutely tipping down outside and I can’t quite face standing out there trying to hail one.’ She inspected her nails, which were the same shade of scarlet as the lipstick.

This, Abigail felt very tempted to point out, is not part of my little secretarial duties, but she picked up the receiver and after a brief conversation managed to secure a taxi to arrive outside the building immediately.

‘Jolly good,’ Fiona said, standing up and brushing down her skirt. ‘And don’t forget to tell Ross that I dropped by and that I’ll see him tonight for the theatre.’ With that, she left the office, leaving behind her a waft of expensive perfume.

No wonder, Abigail thought, that he had had no hesitation in informing her that he would not be running late today. She gazed at the computer terminal and wondered at which stage this particular romance was. She had not heard mention of Fiona St Paul before but that didn’t mean that she hadn’t been on the scene for at least a couple of months. She certainly ran true to type as far as Ross’s women were concerned. Tall, elegant, self-assured. She switched on the computer terminal and thought of Martin.

‘Just your type,’ her mother had gushed when she had first met him four months ago.

‘Ordinary, you mean?’ she had asked drily, because her mother’s implied insults no longer drove her into paroxysms of self-conscious embarrassment the way they once had as a teenager.

‘Nice and stable,’ her mother had returned. ‘You don’t want to lose your head over a man you wouldn’t be able to keep. Remember that last fiasco of yours.’

It had been a mistake telling her mother about Ellis. She had immediately delivered a lecture on the impossibility of an ordinary girl handling someone like him. Never mind that she had never actually met Ellis Fitzmerton. That, according to her mother, had been a minor technical detail, and certainly not enough to stop her announcing her views on the subject.

Nice, stable Martin, Abigail thought now. She was very fond of him and when she had accepted his marriage proposal one week ago, she had done so safe in the knowledge that he would be a good husband, someone on whom she could rely. They had only been seeing each other for a matter of six months, but she knew that she felt relaxed and comfortable with him and that was what love was about, she was certain. He had been such a pleasant change from the suave, deceitful Ellis with his promises and declarations which had lasted all of six weeks, until the girlfriend she never knew he had returned from her glamour trip round the world, bronzed, beautiful and ready to resume where she had left off. Oh, the declarations had certainly gone by the board then, she thought bitterly. Love? Marriage? He had looked at her white face with wide-eyed incredulity. ‘You must have misread the signals, sweetie.’ He had shaken his head sadly, ruefully, pained at the thought that he might have given her the wrong ideas.

Martin was far too decent a human being ever to play games like that. She frowned and felt that little niggling worry which she immediately swept to the back of her mind.

It was after four when Ross swept back into the office. He paused by her desk and she reeled off his telephone messages, then she said, glancing down at the typed letters, ‘By the way, you had a visitor. A woman by the name of Fiona St Paul. She said that you’d know who she was.’

She thought of the other woman, that chic elegance wrapped up in expensive designer clothes, every nail manicured, every strand of hair firmly in place, and she felt an uncustomary jolt of jealousy. How ridiculous, she thought, with an uneasy inward laugh.

‘What did she want?’ Ross asked, slinging his coat over the spare chair and shrugging out of his jacket.

‘She expected to find you here,’ Abigail said. ‘She was disappointed that you weren’t in.’

‘Get her on the phone for me, would you?’ he said by way of response. ‘She works at Sotheby’s.’ He strode through to his office and Abigail looked at his retreating back with dislike. He rarely involved her in anything to do with his women. She knew of their existence because of the theatre tickets she booked for two, the intimate meals she reserved in expensive restaurants, the flowers she occasionally ordered, but beyond that they mostly remained a mystery. Several she had met in passing, and from them she had deduced that he was attracted to physical perfection. Now she got Fiona on the phone with a certain amount of unwarranted resentment and, as they connected, she heard his voice down the line, warm, full of sexy charm.

He certainly can turn it on, she thought, replacing the receiver softly. Even when he stormed through the office, subjecting her to his evil moods, she could tell that underneath that terseness lay the sort of lazy charm that most women would find hard to resist.

Ellis Fitzmerton might have been a bitter pill, but he had served his purpose. He had immunised her against folly, and that was why she had excelled in this job. Ross Anderson could not distract her.

Janet arrived for her meeting five minutes early, and spent the time chatting to Abigail while nervously contemplating the door.

‘He won’t eat you,’ Abigail said, following the line of her gaze.

‘No,’ Janet agreed, ‘but he still scares me half to death most of the time.’ And what could Abigail say to that when she fully understood the line of thought?

‘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?

‘An hour or so after you left,’ she said.

‘Very nice girls,’ he murmured, and she had the sneaking suspicion that he was leading up to something, though what, she couldn’t quite figure out. ‘Have you known them a long time?’

‘Years. I grew up with Alice, in fact. I’m an only child and she was like a sister to me.’

‘Down-to-earth, sensible girl,’ he mused, leaning back in the chair, his long, lithe body dwarfing it.

‘Yes, well, we all are,’ Abigail said tartly. ‘Reality isn’t something you can escape from when you have to strive for every little foothold you gain in life.’

‘That sounds like philosophising to me.’

‘I guess it does,’ she answered with a reluctant grin. ‘I didn’t lead a deprived existence, I always knew that there would be food on the table, but that luxuries were out of the question. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘have I answered all your questions? Do you feel that you now know me? Can we return to work?’

‘There is all that paperwork on the takeovers to work through, isn’t there?’ he agreed, raising his eyebrows, as if only now giving that any thought at all.

‘Yes, there is!’ She didn’t want to sound eager, but on the other hand she had no desire to continue their fraught conversation. In fact, she would have happily taken on a charging bull with her notepad if it would have provided the necessary distraction from Ross’s intimate probing.

‘And you’re right, there’s a pile of paperwork waiting on my desk to be sifted. Usual stuff. Letters from clients, contracts that need signing, statements to look at. Routine things, but they do take up one’s time.’

‘Yes, they do!’ she agreed lustily.

‘But it can all wait, I think. At least until we have another cup of coffee.’ He held out his cup with barely concealed amusement and she threw him a furious look.

Playing games. That was what it was all about, she thought, rapidly refilling his cup and handing it back to him. Games that had been initiated from curiosity. She hated games. She had always been a serious girl, with her feet firmly planted on the ground, and her head where it should be, not spinning somewhere in the clouds.

The only man who had ever played games with her had been Ellis, with his smooth patter. Had his games been initiated through curiosity as well? Or boredom? Or maybe they had been the effect of their enforced late nights alone in an empty office? Whatever, they had taught her a bitter lesson, and she felt a sweeping resentment that Ross was toying with her as well.

Martin was not a game-player. He took life seriously as well. She had a fleeting mental image of him. Pleasant-looking, with neatly combed brown hair and blue eyes. A thoroughly nice chap, as her friend Alice had whispered to her at some point during the engagement party.

She wondered, in a flash of sudden insight, whether she hadn’t allowed herself to enter into a relationship with him because he was just so different from Ellis, because he was sincere at a time when sincerity was the one thing she desperately needed.

She had met him at a dinner party, where they had automatically paired off, being both single, and it had just developed from there. No heady passion, no thunder and lightning, just a quiet, unfussy friendship between two people who shared similar interests. But would she have responded to him if that disastrous romance only months previously had not left such a sour taste in her mouth?

The thought confused her.

‘The food was very good,’ he mused, holding her gaze until the unsteadiness that she had been feeling since they had entered the boardroom threatened to take over completely. ‘I never knew that you were such a good cook.’

Abigail sighed in resignation. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

They both knew what she meant. He had broken through the carefully controlled barrier that had always separated her private life from her working life by turning up at that engagement party, and he wasn’t about to desist until his perverse curiosity about her was satisfied.

‘I’m not a bad cook,’ she said. ‘Why are you suddenly so interested?’

‘What makes you think that I haven’t been interested in you from the start?’

It was a curious way to answer her question and for a minute it threw her into speechless silence. Her mind flew back over the past eighteen months, and snippets of conversation between them resurfaced from the depths of her subconscious, like little eels wriggling free from the rocks under which they had been firmly buried.

She remembered times when he had asked her about herself, about what she did in the evenings, what movies she liked, whether she ever went to the theatre. And she could remember her responses with equal clarity. The uninformative, abrupt answers, the firm closing of any door between them that he might have been trying to open.

The rational side of her knew that it was stupid to let what had happened between her and Ellis affect the way she looked at the rest of the male sex, she knew that the constant erosive effects of her mother were a legacy she should leave behind. But she couldn’t help herself. Ross Anderson, she had known from the very start, was precisely the sort of man she should steer clear of, and she had made sure that she listened to her head and obeyed its instructions.

He continued to stare at her in that unsettling way of his, until she said nervously, with a little laugh, ‘Of course I did far too much food! There was an awful lot left over. I shall be eating cold chicken and beef in various guises until doomsday.’

‘Sounds a dismal prospect,’ he murmured softly, tracing the rim of the cup with one long finger.

‘Do you do a lot of cooking?’ she asked awkwardly, wondering when the inquisition would come to an end.

‘Not if I can help it, no. In fact, I spend most of my eating time in various establishments. It suits me.’

‘Sounds an unhealthy habit,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘You’re probably lacking all the essential minerals and vitamins your body needs to grow.’ It had been a nervous quip, but once she had said it she groaned inwardly at her clumsiness. What on earth had taken possession of her? Where was all the cool self-control that had been in evidence ever since she had started working for him?

‘Do you think so?’ he asked seriously enough, although there was something wickedly amused in his voice.

She kept her eyes firmly averted from his body.

‘My mother was a great believer in eating up all one’s greens,’ she said by way of reply. ‘I guess her constant reminders about carrots and eyesight and broccoli and strong bones must have stuck.’ She tried a cheerful laugh. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t afford to eat out every night of the week even if I wanted to.’

‘An unhealthy habit,’ he agreed, ‘as you said.’ He looked down and idly rotated the coffee-cup in his hand. ‘Your boyfriend didn’t strike me as someone who craves expensive meals either.’ He hardly looked as though her response to that observation was of paramount importance. His voice was casual, off-hand, speculative. Still, she felt her body stiffen. Wasn’t it inevitable that he would drag poor Martin into the conversation? She frowned and wondered why she was now mentally referring to him as Poor Martin. Silly.

‘In fact,’ Ross was saying in the voice of someone who had rummaged through his mental database and unearthed some mildly interesting memory, ‘I was subjected to quite a lecture on the shameful, profligate ways of the rich.’

Abigail didn’t say anything but she gave an inward groan of despair. As soon as Ross had walked through the front door, capturing everyone’s immediate attention, Martin had seen it his duty to jostle for attention, and his method had been to talk much louder than he usually did and to hold forth on subjects with perverse dogmatism. It had been a side to him which she hadn’t seen before, but then again, she had never seen him in competition, however needless, with a man like Ross.

She had missed his lecture on the rich. She had, she thought, probably been clearing away the dishes and taking refuge in the kitchen. She could imagine it all too well, though. In fact, after all the guests had left, he had said to her in a disapproving voice, ‘Overpowering man, your boss. I can’t imagine working for someone like that, but then I guess he’s got what it takes to run a company like his.’ He had made that sound like a distasteful threat but she had been too exhausted by then to pay a great deal of attention to what he was saying.

Martin had a managerial job in a computer company, and he was quite happy with that. His ambitions did not soar to dizzy heights and he was fond of telling her that his parents were perfectly content with their lives, and they never had a great deal of money to throw around. His father was a retired schoolteacher and his mother helped out on a part-time basis at a local flower shop.

‘There’s more to life than money,’ she heard herself say stoutly. ‘Anyway——’ she glanced away from that hard-boned, intimidating face ‘—Martin’s not usually so…so…’ She searched around for the right phrase and finally said, ‘Outspoken. He’s a warm, generous person.’ Her voice had risen slightly and the sudden lift of Ross’s dark brows made her glare at him with irritation.

‘I’m sure he is,’ he replied as though her warm outburst had surprised him. ‘After all, you’re marrying the man.’

‘And what exactly is that supposed to mean?’ She stood up, flustered, not giving him time to respond. ‘I really think we ought to be getting back to the office,’ she said.

‘And since when do the secretaries dictate the orders?’ Ross enquired, with an edge of flint in his voice.

‘I apologise,’ she said calmly, breathing deeply to clear her head and restore her balance, ‘but I refuse to be subjected further to this dissection of my private life.’

He looked as though he was about to debate that point, but in the end he shrugged his broad shoulders and stood up, reaching out to hand her her notepad.

‘You’ll be needing this,’ he murmured with amusement, and their eyes met. To hide behind again, he might just as well have said, and she took it without rising to the bait.

Why did he have this effect on her? she wondered desperately. Why did he have this tight, strangling effect on her? Martin never did. They spent their time chatting, going for walks, and she never felt as if the world was closing in on her.

She put it down to dislike, and yet there were times when they worked so well together that she felt almost a mental bond with him. It was aggravating. Of course, she should never have accepted this job in the first place. She should have gone to work for some safe, fatherly figure with a receding hairline and a comfortable paunch. Someone whose presence didn’t threaten her. She would have too, if the job description and the pay package hadn’t been so irresistible.

They walked back to the office in silence. She could feel his presence alongside her, dark, oppressive, alarming.

‘Rebecca was quite taken with that boss of yours,’ Martin had said the night before. ‘Began giggling and batting her eyelashes the minute he came through that door with that I’m-better-than-everyone-else air about him.’ His voice had been laden with derision. ‘Still, he’s the sort of chap women fancy, I suppose. Bit too aggressive by half for you, though, I should think,’ he had added, looking at her for confirmation, and she had agreed fervently, although her wayward mind had conjured up an image of Ross naked, in bed, his muscled body relaxed, his mouth curved into that cynical, charming smile, and she had forced the image away with angry recoil.

Now that wayward mind of hers was threatening to invade her calm again, and she resolutely thrust it back.

Ross went straight through to his office, expecting her to follow, which she did, breathing a sigh of relief as he returned his attention to work.

He ploughed through documents on his desk, leaning forward to explain to her what he wanted done, listing meetings that he wanted set up within the next fortnight. She kept her head bent, taking notes, nodding, watching the strong forearms, the dark hair curling over the gold metal band of his watch with stubborn fascination.

‘These columns need updating,’ he told her, his eyes flicking over the paper. ‘The correct figures are attached at the back. You’ll have to go through them and replace whatever needs replacing.’

She craned forward to see what he was talking about and he said impatiently, ‘Come around the desk. You’ll twist your neck in that position.’

‘Yes, of course, Mr Anderson,’ she said neutrally, moving around to stand behind him.

He had rolled the sleeves of his shirt to the elbows and she stole a surreptitious glance at his powerful forearms. She wished that she hadn’t because immediately a disjointed thought rushed into her head: what had he and Fiona done last night? She imagined him caressing the tall, elegant blonde with those strong hands, and crossly shoved the unpleasant image to the back of her mind.

‘Look,’ he said, jabbing his finger at a row of black figures, ‘here. These are last month’s sales figures, which need replacing, but I want you to keep these graphs handy.’ He sifted through to the graphs and she leant forward slightly to follow what he was saying, frowning and trying to puzzle out how she could update sixteen pages of information without having to redo the whole thing from top to bottom.

She peered forward, her eyes intent, and the silky cowlnecked shirt gaped to expose a tantalising glimpse of pale breasts restrained by the small cups of her lacy bra. She didn’t notice. Her mind was busy trying to work out the complexities of the job in front of her. It was only when she glanced away from the report that her eyes fell on what Ross had already observed, judging from the expression on his face.

He had turned the swivel chair so that he was directly facing her and there was a lazy grin on his lips. She straightened quickly and looked at him, forcing herself to meet his gleaming dark eyes.

He clasped his fingers together, challenging her to say something, which she didn’t. His eyes drifted from hers and did a leisurely sweep of her body, resting briefly on her breasts, which hung heavy and aching under the stare. Her nipples pressed against the lacy material and she had to force herself not to surrender to the terrible, crazy thought of what it would feel like to have Ross touch them, with more than just his eyes.

What the hell was happening to her? Not even Ellis had ever awakened this depth of arousal in her. True, her body had willingly responded to his when he had made that first pass in the semi-darkness of his office, and true, over the ensuing weeks she had enjoyed their stolen caresses, the husky timbre of his voice as he had explored her body with his hands, sometimes at the most inappropriate moments, but what she felt now was so intense that she almost caught her breath.

She had thought that her fling with Ellis had been an aberration, a temporary insanity. Certainly one of the nice things about Martin was that he hadn’t pushed her into sex. They were both content to kiss, but he had not frantically tried to get her into bed, and that had been a relief. Desire was no basis for a long-term relationship. She had found that out the hard way.

‘I think I’ve got that,’ she said coolly, moving back around to her chair and not looking at him.

He was still smiling in a way that made her want to hit him, and eventually she said crisply, ‘And by the way, I still have that Haynes report to do. I had to phone around several people to get the information you wanted and some of them weren’t in when I called. I should have it ready and on your desk by this afternoon.’

‘Very enterprising,’ he said silkily. ‘What would I do without you?’

‘Find someone else, I expect,’ Abigail returned neutrally.

‘Easier said than done. But stupid speculating over a problem that doesn’t exist, isn’t it?’

She didn’t say anything. She was remembering Martin’s desire to start a family and the adjunct that when they did so she would leave work. At the time—and it had only been mentioned once—she had given it little thought, not wanting to immerse herself in details such as those when they weren’t even married yet.

‘Or does it?’ he asked softly, reading her expression, and she went red. When she wasn’t careful, when she wasn’t guarding her expression, this man could see right through her, to what she was thinking. A dangerous skill. ‘Married women usually lose interest in their jobs,’ he murmured, picking up his fountain pen and thoughtfully twirling it with his long fingers. ‘Their honeymoon seems to scramble their brains and they come back with their heads still in the clouds and their minds on children and nappies. You seem to have your head screwed on all right at the moment, despite the tired eyes and the late arrival yesterday, but——’ he looked at her ‘-—your lover strikes me as the sort of man who can’t wait to get the little woman behind the kitchen sink. Am I right?’

CHAPTER THREE

ABIGAIL’S hand was still poised over her notepad. It was beginning to ache, and she lowered it.

The hard cold sunshine streamed in through the large glass panes and threw Ross’s face into disturbing shadow so that she found it difficult to read his expression. Was he merely expressing curiosity or was he really worried that she was about to stack her papers neatly together on her desk and take her leave?

‘I don’t know what gives you that idea,’ she stammered, and he stopped twirling the fountain pen in his fingers, putting it on the desk so that he could lean back in his chair, looking at her through his lashes.

‘Isn’t he?’ he asked by way of response, and she felt like a butterfly pinned against the wall.

‘These letters,’ she suggested coaxingly, in an attempt to change the conversation, and his lips twisted into a crooked smile,

‘Won’t work, Abby,’ he said softly, and she felt herself begin to bristle from head to toe. She didn’t have to sit here and be cross-examined! Explaining her personal life to him wasn’t part of her secretarial duties. She hadn’t asked him to turn up on her doorstep the evening before, but he had anyway, and now he was acting as though the brief visit entitled him to make sweeping statements on her relationship with Martin. It was ludicrous!

‘I understand that you might be worried about my leaving this job when I get married——’ she began, and be cut in in a voice that took her by surprise,

‘When? Has a date been set?’

‘No, but engagements normally lead to weddings, don’t they?’ she said in a dulcet voice.

His jaw hardened, and he stood up, walking to the window to stare down. She could see the reflection of his face on the glass, the stiff line of his back. She saw it all with a sense of dismayed fascination.

‘Of course he’s not suited to you at all,’ he informed her, not turning around, and she stood up, the notepad dropping to the ground. Her hands were trembling and she couldn’t believe her ears.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard me.’ He swung around to face her and his black, brilliant eyes swept over her from head to toe. ‘If you marry that boy you’ll be making the biggest mistake in your life.’

‘He is not a boy!’ was all she could find to say to that, which sounded utterly inadequate.

‘He’s way too pale, insignificant for you. You’d be bored to death within a year.’

‘I don’t believe that I’m hearing this! I don’t think I asked for your opinion!’

‘No, but you should be grateful for it. I’m saving you a lifetime of regret.’

He sat back down in the black chair, for all the world as though nothing had happened, as though he hadn’t just behaved in the most arrogant, high-handed manner conceivable. She looked at him furiously.

‘Oh, sit down,’ he told her impatiently, and she made a choking sound. ‘We have work to do, have you forgotten?’

‘How dare you tell me how to run my life?’ she bit out, sitting down with her hands pressed into her lap. ‘What gives you the right?’

‘I’m not telling you how to run your life,’ he grated, ‘I’m merely offering you advice.’

‘When I want advice, I’ll ask for it. Thank you!’

He shrugged in a gesture of dismissal, as though ready to move on to something else now that he had voiced his uninvited opinions, and she picked up the notepad from the floor, very tempted to hurl it at him.

‘Right,’ be said, staring down at the papers in front of him, and before she could utter another syllable he began dictating, his voice hard and rapid, the words flowing easily as he flicked through the stack of paperwork.

‘You don’t even know him,’ Abigail said through gritted teeth, when there was a pause before he moved on to the next document, and he said easily, expecting her to return to the subject,

‘I know enough. Don’t tell me that you’d be content to play the suburban housewife with a weekly allowance and a handful of screaming children.’

‘Lots of women do.’

‘But not you. You have an inner fire, Abigail. It’s there lurking-just beneath the calm surface.’

‘Thank you, Dr Anderson, for that valuable piece of insight. When can I expect your bill?’

He laughed. ‘Point proved. I don’t see that acid sense of humour going down at all well with the boyfriend.’

‘His name is Martin. And you’re never wrong, are you?’

‘I try not to make a habit of it.’ He began on the second letter and she stared down at the notepad, copying quickly as he spoke while her mind furiously tried to grapple with what he had just told her. Of course he didn’t know Martin, didn’t even know her, come to that, so as an onlooker he was highly unqualified to make sweeping generalisations about either of them. She knew that she should simply disregard every word he had just said, but anger tugged away at her, and as soon as he had stopped dictating she took up where she had left off.

‘Martin and I are very fond of each other,’ she said defensively, and he threw her an amused, mocking look.

‘I’m very fond of my cleaner, but I wouldn’t propose marrying her. So——’ he looked at her with gleaming eyes ‘—very fond of each other, are you?’

‘Yes, we are! I know that might not seem like a great deal to you, I know that that must seem the most boring thing on earth, but marriage is all about being fond of your partner.’

‘Oh, is it?’ He appeared to give this some thought, then he shook his head and drawled, ‘And I always thought a hint of excitement was a good thing.’

She knew what he was up to, of course. He was trying to provoke a reaction in her, trying to antagonise her into saying something which would compromise herself. She knew his tactics. She had sat in enough high-level meetings with him and had seen that particular ploy in action. He would needle in that cool, cynical way of his until he got the reaction he wanted, then he would pounce. She stared with intense fascination at the little scribblings on her notepad and didn’t reply.

‘I’ve jotted some notes in the margins of this report you did a couple days ago,’ he said, reaching across to slide it towards her, and she took it, still in silence.

‘Martin can be very exciting,’ she crossly heard herself say, ‘not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Of course,’ he murmured soothingly, and she wanted to hit him.

‘He’s a very warm, caring human being!’ she expanded in a high, indignant voice, her face hot.

‘I’m sure.’ The black eyes held hers for a moment, then he lowered them but not before she saw the amused glitter in them. Ha, ha, she thought, hilarious. What a riot, affording me the wisdom of his great mind.

‘Is that all?’ she asked stiffly. ‘May I leave now?’

He ignored her. ‘He told me that he’s looking forward to getting married, to settling down. He hopes to make it to accounts manager within the next two years. This was after he had delivered his informative lecture on the disgrace of being ambitious or having money.’

‘You brought out the worst in him. Anyway, what’s wrong with being an accounts manager? The world is full of very fulfilled accounts managers. You make it sound like a sin.’ Worse, she thought, he made it sound boring, which no doubt was exactly what he had intended.

‘A little dull, perhaps,’ he mused, and she scowled. ‘But to each their own, I suppose.’ He stood up and looked at his watch, then began rolling down his shirt-sleeves, tugging his tie into position. ‘I’ll be with Jim Henderson until lunchtime. Expect me back around two.’

He slipped on his jacket and she walked towards the door, her body rigid, as if she had just undergone an ordeal by fire. She should never have risen to his bait, of course. A bit late in the day to realise that now, but she would know better next time, if there was a next time. She moved towards the door, frowning, but before she could leave he had moved alongside her. She felt his proximity with a jolt of alarm. Silly. She started to brush past him through the doorway, but he barred her retreat with his arm and she was forced to look up at him.

As her eyes met his, her mouth went dry and she felt giddy.

‘You know,’ he said thoughtfully, his voice husky, ‘in that dress you wore, you looked…sexy.’

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