but is it all right for you to leave the front desk?’ Charlotte asked her uncertainly.
The girl smiled back at her.
‘Oh, yes, Mr Horwich said I was to show you where you’d be working when you arrived.
‘I’m Ginny, by the way,’ she introduced herself, stepping out from behind her desk.
‘That’s Mr Horwich’s room on the left,’ she told Charlotte, indicating one of the several closed doors off the corridor. ‘And this one is Mr Jefferson’s.’
Charlotte gave it a brief antagonistic glance. She had no doubt at all which of the partners had the most expensively equipped and luxurious office space.
‘And this is your office,’ Ginny told her, stopping so unexpectedly at a door immediately down the corridor from Daniel Jefferson’s that Charlotte almost bumped into her.
Her office. That puzzled her a little, since she had been expecting to be sharing an office with several other junior solicitors from the way the work had been described to her. It must just be Ginny’s way of describing things, she decided as Ginny opened the door for her, but as soon as she walked into the room she immediately recognised that it was equipped for only one person.
She hesitated uncertainly and looked at Ginny.
‘Are you sure…? I mean, I don’t think…I thought I’d be sharing an office with other people.’
‘Oh.’ Ginny looked confused. ‘Well, Mr Horwich said to show you in here. Oh, and he said to tell you that he wouldn’t be in this morning, but that Mr Jefferson would explain everything to you.’
Charlotte’s heart sank. She glanced round the surprisingly spacious and very comfortably furnished office with its window overlooking the town square, and suddenly her earlier anger deserted her, leaving her feeling frighteningly vulnerable and nervous.
‘I’d better get back to the main desk,’ Ginny told her. ‘Mitzi brings the coffee round at about tenthirty, but if you want a drink in the meantime there’s a machine in the staff-room. That’s up on the top floor. Mr Jefferson had it all kitted out so that we can eat our lunch there if we want. There’s a snooker table up there and a small kitchen.
‘Last year we made up two snooker teams. Men versus women, and the women won.’ She gave a small giggle, and then when Charlotte didn’t respond she flushed and said uncertainly, ‘Well, if you’re sure there’s nothing you need…’
Charlotte smiled automatically and shook her head, watching as the door closed behind her.
No, there was nothing she needed. If you discounted her own business, her own home, her self-respect, her pride, her future and her fiancé.
Idly she noticed the way she had put Bevan last. Had she always known that he would turn out to have feet of clay? That when it came to it he would not want to stand by her…that he had only wanted her while she was successful, while she enhanced his own image of himself? Had he ever loved her as he had claimed to do? And, even worse, had she really ever loved him—the way her father and her mother loved one another, for instance?
She moved over to the window and stood looking down into the square; a man was approaching the office door. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his thick dark brown hair glinting in the sunshine, and he moved energetically, lithely.
He was wearing an extremely conservative dark blue suit. She could see the crisp white edge of his cuff beneath the sleeve of his jacket. It was the kind of suit worn by a professional man. An accountant…a solicitor…Her heart gave a small fierce bound as he paused on the step and then looked up towards her window, almost as though he was aware of her scrutiny.
She recognised him immediately, of course, even though the only photographs she had seen of him had been grainy and flat. In the flesh she was much more physically aware of the strength of maleness, of his bone-structure, the strength and the power of him.
The suit he was wearing might be that of a traditional conservative man, but the body beneath it was unequivocally tough and male.
She took a hasty step back into the room, her face flushing as she pushed angry fingers into her hair, flipping it back off her face.
Her hair was the only thing she had refused to change when Bevan had insisted on helping her to update herself. It was straight and thick, with the glossy sheen of good health, its dark red colour completely natural, although people sometimes refused to believe it. She wore it in a shoulder-length bob, its silky richness in striking contrast to her pale skin and blue-green eyes.
Bevan had wanted her to have expensive courses of sunbed treatment to tan her skin, complaining that being so pale was unfashionable and unattractive, but she had always refused, pointing out to him the dangers that pale-skinned people like herself suffered from over-exposure to either natural or artificial tanning rays.
Perhaps she should have seen the warning signs then and recognised that Bevan wanted her for the image he believed she could project rather than for the person she actually was. She had certainly discovered very quickly that, once the image, the trappings of success, had gone, Bevan had gone as well.
All right, so maybe once she had recovered from the shock she had found that her pride was more hurt than her heart, but even so…It would be a long time before she trusted a member of the male sex romantically again.
What galled her the most was that Bevan had been the one to pursue her, showering her with flowers, flattering her with outrageous compliments. And at the same time trying to change her, she reminded herself wryly.
Her parents and her sister believed she was better off without him and she knew that they were right. Like the practice, her house, her expensive car, Bevan was a luxury she could no longer afford.
At least the only debt she had outstanding now was her bank overdraft. The only. Her mouth twisted a little, worry shadowing her face, her full lips tightening as she fought to control her feelings.
She had resisted fiercely at first when her parents had insisted on her living at home rent free; to have to return home to live in the first place at her age was galling, almost humiliating, despite the fact that she loved and got on well with her family, but, as they had gently pointed out, she had a large overdraft to repay and it was silly to have to spend money on rented accommodation while bank interest rates were so high.
Even the small second-hand car she was now using to travel the fifteen or so miles to this, her new job, had been provided by her father. Tears pricked her eyes briefly as she remembered how ashamed and miserable she had felt when he had given it to her. It wasn’t that she particularly regretted losing the bright red BMW sports model she had previously been driving. In point of fact she had come to find it too ostentatious and had felt acutely uncomfortable driving it. No, what hurt was knowing that she had failed; that she was as dependent on her parents as she had been as a student; perhaps even more so.
Not that either they or Sarah, her elder sister, had done anything to suggest that they felt anything but sympathy for her, but sometimes even sympathy was hard to bear.
She felt so guilty, she recognised, and so ashamed. She had allowed herself to be carried away by Bevan’s grand schemes without thinking them through properly. She had behaved foolishly and over-confidently and she had no one to blame for her present plight but herself.
But
