ten minutes passed, by which time Yancie had gone from feeling completely at ease to feeling just a shade uncomfortable. Okay, so he was a busy man, but…Be patient, he’s paying you, and you need this job. Hang it all, she loved her job. It wasn’t taxing on the brain—but who needed taxing? The freedom the job allowed was limitless. Indeed, it didn’t seem like a job of work at all.
Even so, having cautioned herself to be patient, when another few minutes of her having absolutely nothing to do went by, Yancie was considering telling Veronica Taylor to ring down to the garage and let her know when the old man surfaced. Then Yancie heard sounds on the other side of the door she’d assumed connected the two offices—and that reassured her that the old boy hadn’t expired while she waited.
She pinned a ‘Yes, sir’ look on her face—it cost nothing—and the door opened. So too did her mouth. More—her jaw dropped. Oh, no! It couldn’t be! She didn’t believe it! She just didn’t believe it.
Horrified, Yancie saw at once that ‘old’ Mr Thomson Wakefield, for this surely must be he, was not old at all! He was tall, dark-haired, had hard grey eyes—and was somewhere in his mid-thirties. She had thought she had never clapped eyes on him before—but she had! Even minus his Aston Martin—she recognised him.
Oh, mother! Yancie stared, wanting to die, at the grim, unsmiling countenance of the man standing there coldly surveying her—a man who clearly had no intention of making things easy for her. She tried hard to sort her brain patterns out, to think up some kind of defence. But what defence was there?
So much for her hiding the firm’s logo on her shirt yesterday—a fact he hadn’t missed, she was suddenly positive. This man—this man, who’d made it to the top of his tree—was, she all at once knew, a man from which little escaped. What he didn’t know, she just knew, he troubled to find out.
This man knew, as he’d known yesterday, exactly what her brooch had concealed. Though he hadn’t needed to see the Addison Kirk logo; he’d probably recognised the car she had been driving. In all probability he had only very recently—perhaps even the day before—been a passenger in it!
‘Mr Wakefield?’ she enquired, hoping there was some wonderful mistake and that this man—this man who yesterday, by his swift and skilful reactions, had managed to avoid what would have been an almighty collision—and earned a load of lip from her for his trouble—was not, by some miracle, the head of the Addison Kirk Group.
He didn’t bother to confirm but, ignoring her completely, instructed his PA, ‘Hold my calls for five minutes, please.’ She had called him a grumpy old devil—it was going to take that long?
He held his office door open for her to go through. Yancie stood up, uncertain whether or not to walk to the other door, and keep on walking. ‘I’ll attend to you later’, this man had yesterday threatened—he must have pegged her as employed by the company before he’d even said it. ‘Later’, Yancie knew, had just arrived—but she wasn’t the sort to run away.
CHAPTER TWO
YANCIE crossed into Thomson Wakefield’s office. It was large and, as well as having the usual office furnishings, also housed a comfortable-looking sofa, and a couple of easy chairs grouped around a low coffee table.
She had thought his dismissal of her from the company he headed would take seconds; she would have preferred it. But, no. Not the most talkative of men she had ever known, he pointed to a chair on the other side of his large desk.
She took the seat and while he sat facing her so she began to gather her scattered wits. Without question she was to be well and truly carpeted—she guessed few had called the head man a grumpy old devil—apart from all the rest that had gone with it—and got away with it. It surprised her that he hadn’t just instructed Kevin Veasey to sack her and be done with it.
That he hadn’t instructed Kevin gave her a ray of hope. She hung onto it. She loved her job. ‘I suppose you aren’t very interested in an apology,’ she opened politely when Thomson Wakefield, saying not one word, continued to study her as if she were some strange object on the end of a pin.
‘Are you sorry?’ he asked crisply.
Yesterday—forget it. Today—abjectly. To keep this job, she could be grovellingly sorry. Well, perhaps that was going a bit far—but she was prepared to go as far as pride would allow.
‘I don’t normally behave like that,’ she said prettily.
‘You mean you don’t normally very nearly cause a disaster, then refuse to accept blame?’
Yancie knew there and then that this man gave no quarter. A hint of a smile would do wonders for that unsmiling, sombre, see-nothing-to-laugh-at, though in actual fact quite good-looking face.
‘I was in the wrong—on both counts.’ She did a swift about-turn from her attitude of yesterday.
‘Your driving was appalling!’ Thomson Wakefield agreed stonily.
‘Not all the time!’ she dared to argue, saw that hadn’t gone down well, and added swiftly, ‘Up until that point, when I suddenly realised I was driving on an empty fuel tank, my driving was first-class.’ She’d be modest tomorrow—today her job was on the line—not to say by a gossamer thread.
He nodded as if conceding her point. ‘I’d been tracking you for some miles,’ he openly let her know.
That jolted her. Oh, why hadn’t somebody told her that the boss man had an Aston Martin? It might have clicked when she’d first become aware of the car yesterday, might have given her a chance to think she should take some kind of action. Well, possibly not. ‘You pegged me as one of yours miles before our—er—introduction?’ she enquired.
Thomson Wakefield studied her for some seconds without speaking, his glance taking in her almost white ash-blonde hair, her bluest of blue eyes, her dainty features and perfect skin.
‘You’re different from the rest of our drivers, I’ll give you that,’ he pronounced curtly, leaving her to guess whether he meant that she had started to ask questions in what was his interview, or if he meant her feminine features.
She opted for the latter. ‘I’m the only female driver this particular part of the group has,’ she commented. ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed as light dawned. ‘But you already knew that.’
‘It took but a few moments for my PA to discover which female driver in our livery was on that stretch of the motorway yesterday,’ he conceded coolly.
Uh-oh. If he knew that much, it was pretty certain he also knew that she shouldn’t have been anywhere near that section of the motorway yesterday! Yancie sensed even more trouble. Although, fingers crossed, he still hadn’t said those diabolical words she didn’t want to hear—You’re out. Though it could be, of course, that, after giving her a tongue-lashing—let him try—he had plans for Kevin Veasey to tell her she had washed her last car at Addison Kirk. Somebody had almost certainly instructed Kevin not to let her take any of the vehicles out that day; of that Yancie all at once realised she could be certain. Silence, just then, however, seemed the better part of discretion.
‘So,’ Thomson Wakefield went on, ‘perhaps, Miss Dawkins, you would care to tell me your version of the events yesterday. The events that led up to you almost demolishing not one motor vehicle, but two—leaving aside the perilous way you very nearly dispatched the two
