the gate before taxiing to the runway. There was a long pause as they waited for clearance and, glancing across to ensure that she was keeping up with him, he noticed that the knuckles of the hand gripping her pencil were bone-white.
She was nervous? This girl who, without a second thought, leapt to the aid of total strangers in distress?
As he hesitated, she glanced up at him. It wasn’t only her knuckles that were white, he realised, and as the engine noise grew and the plane began to speed down the runway he stepped up the speed at which he was dictating in an effort to distract her.
It might have worked, too, but when a day started out badly, it invariably kept going that way, and as they lifted off something crashed loose in the galley behind them. A woman in the aisle seat opposite them gave a startled scream and Talie jumped so violently that she would undoubtedly have left her seat if she hadn’t been strapped in. As it was, her notebook and pencil took off on a flight of their own, and the pins which had been struggling manfully with gravity to hold up her hair gave up the effort and the cottage loaf exploded.
‘Are we going to die?’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ he said, reaching out and taking her hand. ‘But not today.’
He really was a bastard, Talie decided, as her heart rate slowly returned to normal. How could she ever have imagined for one minute that he was friendly? Charming? Totally scrummy, actually.
She had practically haunted the lifts of the Radcliffe Tower in her lunchtimes, hoping to run into him again. Knowing that she was being stupid. Just how stupid she couldn’t possibly have imagined.
Okay. She’d give him the killer good looks—even if he was using those slate eyes to freeze her to her seat—and she was right about his hands. They were strong and capable and very good for holding on to when you thought your last moment had come.
Admittedly he’d lost the smooth, boyish look of the average pop idol, and settled into that look men achieved around their mid to late thirties and hung on to until the muscles started to sag a little around the jaw, when they were so old that it didn’t matter. When he smiled he didn’t look anywhere near old enough to be the ill-tempered tycoon described by her colleagues.
Unable to rescue her notebook until the seat-belt sign went off, Talie remained absolutely still, trying to ignore the warmth of his palm pressed against hers, the way his long fingers curled reassuringly around her hand. Instead she closed her eyes and re-ran their encounter in the lift, trying to work out how she could have got it so wrong.
He’d seemed friendly enough, but then she hadn’t given him much of a chance to be anything else, prattling on about being late. He probably wouldn’t have spoken to her at all under normal circumstances. Most of his staff probably wouldn’t have dared say anything beyond good morning.
None of them would have yelled at him to hold the lift. They’d rather have been late.
And he wasn’t being funny when he said she could talk her way out of anything, she realised belatedly. He was being sarcastic.
The seat-belt sign pinged off, but before she could move, reclaim her notepad, he had released her hand and picked it up for her.
‘Have you stopped shaking sufficiently to carry on?’ he asked, handing it to her. ‘Or do you require a medicinal brandy?’
‘If I had a medicinal brandy that would be the end of my working day,’ she said. ‘Not the beginning of it.’
She looked around for her pencil, but it had rolled away under a seat somewhere, and since she wasn’t about to crawl around on her hands and knees looking for it she took a new one from her bag. Then, suspecting that she might need more than one, she swiftly anchored her hair back into place and stuck some spares into the resulting bird’s nest, so that she wouldn’t have to cut him off in full flow.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ she said. Then, when he didn’t immediately begin, she glanced up at him and realised that he was staring at her hair. For just a moment she thought he was going to make some seriously cutting remark.
Maybe she was mistaken. Or maybe he’d wisely thought better of it. Because after a moment he sat back, closed his eyes and continued pouring his thoughts out at a rate that kept her fully occupied for some time.
Her attention briefly wandered when an infant whose mother was deeply engrossed in the film she was watching caught her eye and with a giggle tossed a drinking cup in her direction, hoping for a playmate.
Any other time she’d have been there…
The cup rolled away down the aisle and the child started to cry. Talie found it really, really hard to stay put when every instinct was urging her to leap up and retrieve it. Instead she took a deep breath and, as she turned the page, hit the buzzer to attract the attention of the stewardess.
‘Good decision,’ Jude said.
She’d written it down before she realised that it was a comment rather than dictation. Clearly his eyes weren’t as firmly closed as she’d imagined.
The flight passed without further incident. She typed up the notes Jude had dictated until the laptop battery beeped a warning that it was about to go flat. But if she thought all she had to do was hit ‘save’and then relax for the rest of the flight, she was mistaken.
Jude stopped working on some figures, took a special adapter from his own laptop bag and leaned across her to plug it into the power outlet of the aircraft—obviously concerned that she’d do fatal damage to the aircraft electronics if he left her to do it herself.
He might be an unmitigated bastard as a boss, but he did have gorgeous hair, she thought with an envious sigh as she got an unexpected close-up. Dark as bitter chocolate, perfectly cut so that every silky strand knew its place. Even the lick that momentarily slid across his forehead needed no encouragement to return to order.
She tucked a stray curl behind her ear and comforted herself with the thought that good hair wasn’t everything.
Kindness was much more important.
He refused all offers of tea, coffee, even lunch when it arrived, and, taking only water, kept working. She had no idea if he expected her to follow his example, but enough was enough. He might be able to function on fresh air, but she needed a substantial amount of calories if she was going to keep up this level of output. She made a mental note to stock up on an emergency supply of chocolate at the first confectionery outlet she passed.
After the stewardess had removed her tray, he began again. This time dictating notes for an after-dinner speech he was going to make to some business group, stopping just before her right hand began to scream for mercy.
She began to wonder if Heather’s daughter had really gone into early labour. She might just have decided that she could do with a break, and could always say it had been a false alarm…
Mentally slapping herself for having such evil thoughts, she applied herself to the keyboard, and was taken by surprise when the Captain announced that they would shortly be arriving at JFK.
‘I don’t believe it! A yellow cab!’
Jude glanced across the road to where a constant stream of cabs was picking up new arrivals. ‘No, you’re right. It’s yellow.’ Then, spotting his driver climbing out of a waiting limo, he said,
