discreet tap on the door heralded the arrival of the PA.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he apologised to his boss. ‘Sir Malcolm will be arriving shortly. The ‘copter pilot has just radioed in to say they’ll be landing on time.’
‘Yes, thank you, Chris.’
As Gideon Reynolds started to stand up, Courage did the same. Her interview was obviously at an end, and no doubt all those unexpected and unwelcome questions about her grandmother had simply been a means of idling away a few spare minutes of time before his visitor arrived. Well, she hoped it had amused him to see how the other half lived, Courage decided angrily.
No doubt the ten thousand pounds that was so unobtainable to her that it might as well have been ten million was something he probably spent in a weekend, entertaining a girlfriend. More, she decided sourly, since he was obviously such an expert on Chanel couture clothes. But not such an expert that he had recognised that hers was a copy.
‘Tell me, Miss Bingham,’ she heard him asking unexpectedly, ‘what would you do if you were anticipating the arrival of a VIP and you learned from the helicopter pilot that not only was he late picking up his passenger but that the reason he was late was because the machine was being serviced when he arrived to fly it? Your VIP guest, by the way, is a rather irascible person, who has only agreed to attend the meeting you have arranged on the understanding that he will not be kept waiting.’
‘Initially I would recall the helicopter—no appointment, no meeting, no matter how essential, is so important that someone’s life should be put at risk, and if the machine was still in the process of being serviced there would be no guarantee that it would not develop some sort of problem. I would then contact the passenger, apologise for the delay and assure him that he would be picked up within fifteen minutes.’
She saw the way his eyebrows rose and added, with more self-assurance than she actually felt, ‘If he was being collected from a helicopter pad then it would have to be within range of a national helicopter service. I would obtain a substitute machine and pilot from my own contacts—if I regularly used helicopter transport I would, of course, already know of a reliable back-up service. I would make sure I was on hand the moment the VIP arrived, with both an apology and an explanation, and I would follow this up later, having first of all made sure that he was still able to leave at the originally stated time.’
‘And the original cause of the delay, the mistimed service, how would you deal with that?’
‘That would depend on whether or not I was responsible for its mistiming…’
‘And if you were?’
‘I wouldn’t be,’ Courage told him crisply. ‘Because I would have already made sure that the machine was ready for the pilot to collect at the stated time—and if it wasn’t I would have had a substitute serviced machine there for him.’
‘Very efficient.’
‘I try to be…’
He was already walking over to the door and Courage followed him, coming to an abrupt halt as, unexpectedly, he turned round.
There was less than a metre between them…
She had already seen that he was tall—at least six feet four since she had had to look up at him—and that the physique beneath his subtly tailored jacket possessed the kind of powerful muscle-structure that no desk-bound man could ever possibly have. This man worked out in a gym and he played sport—to win, Courage suspected, and roughly.
Through the polar whiteness of his cotton shirt she could actually see the dark shadow of his body hair. A small shudder ran through her, heat zigzagging through her body like lightning, searing along her cheekbones. She could feel her face burning with mortification as he looked at her.
There had been a time in her life when the sight of a bare male chest covered in body hair had been enough to make her want to curl up and die with embarrassed, shocked awareness of such sexuality—and her own reaction to it. But that had been a long time ago and she had got over it… Just as she had got over…other things.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘N-n-n-nothing,’ Courage lied. ‘I—’
‘Don’t you want to know whether or not you have got the job?’
He was playing with her, taunting her. Angry sparks flashed in Courage’s eyes.
‘You said yourself that I was over-qualified for it.’
‘Which means that I’d be a fool not to snap you up, doesn’t it? When can you start?’
As she fought to control the jumble of confused thoughts and emotions stampeding wildly through her, Courage was still aware of her apparent new employer’s watchful scrutiny of her. It was as though he was looking for some kind of specific reaction, the angle of his head, his jawline as he studied her… The angle of his head?
She frowned, desperately trying to catch hold of the tail-end of the vague wisp of dark memory which still eluded her. It was no use, it was gone. But she had the job, and that was what she ought to be concentrating on right now, not some uncomfortable feeling that there was something somehow familiar to her about her new boss.
Familiar but not familiar-pleasant, or even familiar-indifferent, she acknowledged half an hour later as she drove home in her grandmother’s ancient Morris. No, the kind of familiarity which had stirred so elusively through her was the kind that carried with it un-comfortable feelings of fear and anxiety.
Frowning, Courage changed gear for a sharp bend. There was no point in worrying about it. Wherever it was she had seen him before it would come back to her sooner or later. And, after all, she didn’t have to like the man; she simply had to work for him.
Ideally, he might not be her choice of employer, but that was hardly important; what was important was being able to be close to her grandmother. She was only sixty-seven—not old at all, really—and if Courage could just persuade her to take things more easily until she could have the operation…
The salary Gideon Reynolds had offered her had been astonishingly generous, far more than she had been earning—when he had mentioned the figure he would be paying her her mouth had dropped slightly.
‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her. ‘Isn’t it as much as you already earn?’
‘It’s more,’ Courage had told him honestly—and had caught the quickly suppressed flicker of surprise in his own eyes. ‘It seems a lot to pay someone for the amount of work involved.’
‘A good workman is always worthy of his hire,’ Gideon had responded smoothly. ‘And I promise you won’t find that the job is any sinecure.’
‘I shouldn’t want to,’ Courage had countered promptly.
What was it about the man that made her feel as though he was constantly challenging her, constantly probing…? Constantly testing her, almost…
As she turned off the main road and into the lane which led to her grandmother’s cottage her frown deepened. Why had Gideon Reynolds been so surprised by her honesty? Surely he wouldn’t have employed her if he had felt that he couldn’t trust her?
Stop
