but she couldn’t quite equate Jacques Querruel with peace and quiet. She kept her voice from betraying anything of what she was thinking as she said, ‘You spend a lot of time there?’
‘Not as much as I would like,’ he said a touch ruefully. ‘Part of this is my own fault, of course. I do not find it easy to delegate, Miss Stanton.’
Now, that she could believe without any trouble at all! Her face must have spoken for itself because he smiled drily. ‘I think we will change the subject.’
During the rest of the twenty-minute ride to her bedsit Holly was on tenterhooks. Not that Jacques was anything but coolly polite and amusing, and seemingly at ease. He sat one leg crossed casually over the other, his whole body suggesting a relaxed composure that Holly envied with all her heart. He didn’t seem to be aware of the atmosphere within the car, which was strange, she thought, when she wouldn’t have been surprised if the air had started to crackle with electricity. But then she obviously registered on him with as much force as a bowl of cold rice pudding.
The street in which her bedsit was located was not the best in the world, and as they drew up outside the terraced three-storey house that was identical to a hundred others she saw Mrs Gibson’s cats had been having a field-day with the dustbins again and most of their contents were scattered all over the minute paved front garden and the pavement.
Holly liked Mrs Gibson, who occupied the basement bedsit and had bright orange hair despite being eighty years old if a day, and she didn’t even mind the three cats, who had a disconcerting habit of vomiting up their trophies from the dustbins at the most inopportune moments, but she could have done without them today. Of course, they had gathered en masse on the crumbling steps to the front door. It was that sort of day.
The big ginger tom had just begun to lead the way in a Mexican wave of retching as Holly leapt out of the taxi, and she positioned herself straight in front of the car window as she said briskly, ‘You really needn’t send the taxi back, Mr. Querruel. I can ring for one myself once I’m ready.’
‘I wouldn’t hear of it.’ He had leant forward slightly as he spoke, his attention directed somewhere behind Holly’s left shoulder, and now he said a little bemusedly, ‘There is an elderly lady with a tea cosy on her head waving to you.’
It figured. Holly glanced behind her, waving back to Mrs Gibson before she said, ‘That’s Mrs Gibson. She is a friend of mine,’ her tone defiant. ‘I’ll see you in a little while, then.’
‘I will look forward to it.’ The answer was polite but distracted. One of the cats had just gone for a gold medal in the realm of projectile vomiting, breaking all previous records, and Mrs Gibson was doing a kind of soft-shoe shuffle as she tried to prevent all three felines diving into the hall. Jacques looked fascinated.
As the taxi drew away Holly turned round, her tone resigned as she said, ‘I’ll get a bucket of water and some disinfectant and clear all this up, Mrs Gibson.’
‘Would you, Holly? There’s a dear. Mr Bateman, the silly old fool, has gone and put kippers in the dustbins again. I told him Tigger would have the lids off before you could blink, but would he listen? The man’s an idiot.’
‘Mrs Gibson, why are you wearing a tea cosy on your head?’ Holly asked matter-of-factly.
‘Am I, dear? Well, there’s a thing!’ Mrs Gibson blinked at her as she removed the offending article from her sparse bright hair and then giggled like a schoolgirl. ‘I’ve been wondering where this was for a few days. I must have put it on the coat stand instead of my woolly hat when I washed them both. I wonder what I’ve done with the hat, because it isn’t on the teapot.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Holly said, smiling into the pert little face which was as wrinkled and lined as a pink prune. ‘It’ll turn up.’
By the time Holly had cleared up after the cats and weighed down the dustbins with two bricks apiece, kept specially for the purpose but rarely used by anyone but herself, she’d lost ten minutes of valuable time.
She dashed up to her bedsit on the first floor, stripping off her clothes and flinging on her robe before hurtling along to the bathroom at the end of her landing. A quick two-minute shower in cold water—the water heater was playing up again—ensured a bracing if teeth-chattering pick-me-up, and then she was back to the bedsit, pulling off her shower cap and standing in front of her wardrobe as she surveyed her sum total of clothes.
She had one or two really nice things, she thought despairingly, but were they suitable for somewhere like Lemaires? She doubted it, but nevertheless the black and blue ruched and printed bandeau dress and vertiginous high heels she had bought to celebrate securing the job at Querruel International would have to do. If nothing else the shoes would give her an extra few inches, which wouldn’t go amiss considering Jacques Querruel had seemed to tower over her in the lift, and her black wrap—the bargain of the year twelve months before, when she’d spied the beautiful Versace wrap in a charity shop for a fraction of its original price—would dress up the whole outfit.
She peeped out of the window before she went to work with her make-up and the taxi was already back and waiting. No time to put her hair up, then. She contented herself with eyeshadow and mascara, along with a careful application of her lipstick pencil, finishing her toilette with a dab of perfume on her wrists. Silver studs in her ears and a silver bangle on one wrist and she was ready. She stood in front of the mirror, breathing deeply in and out for a moment or two. She had never felt so scared in all her life.
‘Look at it this way,’ she said to the wide-eyed, dark-haired girl staring back at her from out of the mirror. ‘You have got nothing to lose and everything to gain from hearing what he has to say. You’d already decided you wouldn’t be able to stay at Querruel International, not working for Margaret anyway. He might, he just might make you an offer you can’t refuse.’
No, she hadn’t phrased that quite right, Holly thought agitatedly as the mental image of a tall, dark and extremely handsome Frenchman sent the juices flowing. What she’d meant was, she might find she didn’t have to start the dismal rounds of searching out the right kind of job again.
She would hear him out, weigh up the pros and cons of what he said and then make an informed decision. Simple. No big deal, not really, not unless she made it one. OK, so he was taking her to dinner, but he’d been pretty nonchalant about it. He clearly hadn’t been over-bothered one way or the other. And that was fine. Great. Perfect. The last thing she needed was for him to get any sort of ideas.
She gathered up her small black purse and the wrap, and squared her slim shoulders as though she was going into battle instead of to dinner. But that was what it felt like…
Jacques saw her the moment she walked through the doors of Lemaires; he had been watching the entrance intently ever since he had sat down at the secluded little table for two. He rose immediately and raised his hand, and as the waiter guided her over to him he said quietly, ‘Thank you, Claude. And perhaps you would bring one of your delicious champagne cocktails for Miss Stanton?’
Once she was seated, Holly said a little breathlessly, ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long, Mr Querruel.’
‘Not at all,’ Jacques said pleasantly. He had settled back in his seat once she was comfortable, his eyes unreadable and his big body relaxed.
Holly envied him. She felt as taut as piano wire. Whether her tenseness communicated itself to him she didn’t know, but he took the wind out of her sails completely in the next moment when he leant forward and said
