haven’t complained about my coffee-making skills before.’
‘Too weak. Weak coffee is for weak men.’
This time her finely arched eyebrows flew up in an expression of amused disbelief.
‘Oh, really? I never realised that before.’
‘Didn’t think so. Aren’t you glad that you’re learning such amazing things every day, thanks to me?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ she murmured, looking down and sliding away from her desk. ‘I really don’t know how I survived in my last job before.’
She could almost hear him grinning as she swept out of the room and headed to Richard’s office.
Three days after she had started, his mother had telephoned her at the office to find out how she was enjoying working for her son.
‘It’s a unique experience,’ Tessa had confided truthfully. ‘I’ve never worked for anyone like your son before.’
‘I hope you’re managing to keep him in order,’ Mrs Diaz had said. ‘He can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated. Runs rings around people.’
‘Well, he doesn’t intimidate me,’ she had replied without pausing for breath.
Well, he did, though not in the way his mother had implied. She was confident in her abilities to do her job to the highest standard, thereby giving him no chance to slam into her for inefficiency, but on the personal level it was a different question altogether. He had a certain magnetism that made her quail inside and it was a source of abundant relief to her that she could school her expressions so that that particular weakness was never exposed.
He was waiting for her in his office when she returned ten minutes later with the file and a cup of coffee that was so strong that she could almost have stood the teaspoon upright in it.
He had pushed his chair back and pulled out the bottom drawer of the desk, which he was using as an impromptu footrest.
‘Pull up a chair,’ he said, ‘and close the door behind you.’
‘Close the door?’
‘That’s right. No need to repeat everything I say parrot-style.’
Tessa didn’t say anything. She shut his door, handed him the file and then sat down with her notepad on her lap and her hand poised to take down whatever he was about to dictate.
‘So,’ he began, ‘how are you enjoying it here?’
Tessa looked up at him in surprise. ‘Fine, thank you.’
‘Fine. Hmm.’ What he had intended to discuss, amongst other things, were the costings of extending IT operations somewhere in the Far East. She might not, he had realised, be the eye candy he had previously employed, but she hadn’t been kidding when she had told him that she was good at what she did. Not only were his thoughts channelled into expert documentation, but she could involve herself in more complex debates, which he had discovered was quite a useful talent.
Her persona, though, was a more difficult nut to crack. She greeted everything he said with the same unshakeable composure, which was beginning to prick his curiosity. His method of management was an open-door policy, whereby all his employees were free to voice whatever was on their minds, and they did. Moreover, he had become accustomed to a fast turnover of secretaries who wore their feelings on their sleeves. He liked the people who worked for him to be three-dimensional; he enjoyed the fact that he knew about their personal lives as well as their professional ones. It made for a tightly knit team of people who were secure enough in their abilities to take criticism and felt valued enough to dish it out should they see fit.
Tessa, thrown into this volatile, verbal bunch, was an enigma and it was beginning to bother him.
‘I’m concerned that you might be finding the pace of this industry a little too swift for you.’
‘Would you mind explaining that?’ She looked at him with unreadable brown eyes.
Curtis watched her, irritated by the fact that he couldn’t get underneath that smooth face of hers to the workings of her mind. He began to tap his propelling pencil softly on the protective leather mat in front of his computer.
‘I feel I’m keeping up with the pace of work here,’ she interjected, trying and failing to think back of any time over the past fortnight when she had been unable to cope with the lightning speed of his thoughts.
‘Oh, I don’t deny that.’
‘What, then?’
‘Being successful at a job is only partly to do with an ability to cope with the workload. Coping doesn’t necessarily equate to happiness and happiness goes hand in hand with motivation.’
‘There’s no need for you to be concerned with my happiness,’ Tessa told him. ‘If I was unhappy, I would quit.’
Having not meant to bring this topic up at all, Curtis now found himself uncomfortably aware that he wanted to prolong it until she said something personal rather than simply showing him the same face of complete composure that she had shown ever since she had first started.
‘Why? Have other people been complaining about me?’
‘Oh, no. On the contrary. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that it was high time I hired someone a little more down-to-earth than my usual brand of secretary.’
What woman in her right mind would like being described as down-to-earth? Tessa wondered. Especially when the description came from someone who looked the way this man did? Today, in deference to a board meeting that had been held with some particularly crusty clients, he had toned his dress code down a notch. Even so, the pink-and-white-striped shirt failed to give the impression of a conservative traditionalist, especially as it was twinned with an outrageously patterned, very slender tie, the likes of which she had personally never seen before, leading her to assume that it must be handmade.
‘But you don’t agree.’ The criticism, packaged up like a compliment, hurt more than she liked.
‘My theory is that for an employee to really enjoy his or her job, they’ve got to feel as though they fit in.’ He wondered why he was labouring this point and whether it was so important to get to the bottom of her when she was doing her job perfectly well. Better than well, in actual fact.
There was no answer to that. She spoke to everybody, sometimes she even went to lunch with a couple of them, although the workload was so intense that she was happy to eat a sandwich at her desk, a half-hour break before she carried on with what she was doing.
‘We’re like a family here,’ he broke into her thoughts, his voice piously ruminative, ‘and, call me old-fashioned, but I like to know what happens in my employees’ lives. It makes them feel wanted and it’s very important to me that they feel wanted.’ He looked at her from under his long, dark lashes and noticed the very slight shift in her position.
‘I don’t think anyone could call you old-fashioned,’ Tessa said, dodging the net he was trying to throw around her.
‘No? Why would that be, do you think?’
