her of being professionally incompetent in some way, and, even at the same time as she was fiercely grateful to Richard Horwich for giving her this job, she was almost resentful in some ways of what she suspected must have been a charitable impulse on his part.
With so many newly qualified solicitors looking for jobs, what had made him take on her, someone who had already shown how inefficient she was?
Her father had told her that she was too hard on herself; that she had simply, like others, ridden the crest of a financial wave which had retreated, leaving her high and dry. Maybe, but not everyone had been caught out by the roller-coaster of the sharp rise in the property market and its subsequent downturn.
Look at Daniel Jefferson, for instance. Her heart sank a little. She just hoped that she wouldn’t have to come into too much contact with him. It was perhaps illogical of her to feel so…so antagonistic towards him, so resentful almost, and it was also unlike her, but her normal good humour seemed to have become eroded over the last six months or so. She felt raw and vulnerable, unable to stop herself repeatedly going over and over what had happened, wishing she had seen what was coming and protected not just herself but those of her clients to whom she had given her services free of charge as well. Yes, it was a great pity she had not had the foresight that Daniel Jefferson seemed to exhibit to such spectacular effect. He obviously, unlike her, had an eye for a successful cause, she decided moodily.
Look at the way he had taken on the huge Vitalle conglomerate and achieved such a spectacular success…
She heard a door opening and the sound of someone moving about in the adjacent office, and quickly sat down at her own desk. Daniel Jefferson had obviously arrived to start on his day’s work.
What would it be today? she wondered bitterly. Some high-profile court case that would win him further acclaim; the preparation perhaps for a television interview? She had read in one of the papers how impressed the Press had been by the way he had handled his interviewers. Some people were like that, courting publicity, thriving on it. She remembered the small humiliating piece she had seen in the local paper describing the closing-down of her practice, pointing her out as one of the victims of the recession.
She had to put the past behind her, her father had told her gently, adding that there was no disgrace in having tried and failed; that he would rather she’d had the courage to do that and to admit her failure than had opted for the safety of a job in some large corporation.
But Charlotte couldn’t help remembering how proud her parents had been of her when she had first qualified. Somehow now she felt she had no right to their pride, and that she certainly had no right to the respect and trust of her colleagues.
While she was lost in these unhappy thoughts her office door opened. She tensed, blinking away the tears that had been threatening and struggling to stand up, cursing as she did so her straight, too short skirt.
‘Oh, Mr Horwich—’ she began, and then stopped, because it wasn’t Richard Horwich who was standing there, Richard Horwich whom she had naturally expected—forgetting Ginny’s words, in her state of confusion—to seek her out to tell her exactly what her duties were going to be. It was Daniel Jefferson.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’MSORRY,’ Charlotte began to apologise, cursing herself for not looking at him properly before addressing him by the wrong name.
‘That’s all right,’ Daniel Jefferson told her easily. He was smiling at her, she noticed, a nice warm smile which for some reason increased her resentment of him, and her discomfort with herself.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. I was delayed on the way this morning, but Ginny will have shown you where everything is. I’ve arranged with Margaret Lewis, who’s in charge of our trainee solicitors, to come down from upstairs at half-past ten to take you up to the nursery to introduce you to them.’
‘The nursery?’
He smiled again.
‘Sorry. That’s what we call the room where the young trainees we have here work. Partially because they are trainees and partially because they’re housed on the top floor in what were at one time, when this was a private house, the actual nurseries.’
He stopped speaking and looked assessingly at her. Charlotte was immediately self-consciously aware of the almost brash Londonness of her appearance, and only just managed to resist tugging at the hem of her skirt. Was it her imagination or did a small smile really curl the corners of his mouth as he glanced at her? She could feel her skin beginning to burn.
It was all very well for him, she decided bitterly, with his expensive hand-tailored suit; she doubted that he had ever been so hard up that he couldn’t afford to buy himself clothes, even chain-store clothes, never mind the kind of things he was wearing right now. Well, let him deride her if he liked; she didn’t care. Only she knew that she did. Just as she cared that he was the one who was standing here instructing her rather than Richard Horwich…just as she cared that she had apparently been isolated from the rest of the staff and put in an office adjacent to his own.
Why? Was it because despite the apparent warmth of that smile he had really not wanted her here on the staff? Had he perhaps even objected to his partner’s hiring someone like her…a failure…a person who had not made the same resounding success of her career that he had so patently made of his?
Had she been put here in this solitary office on his instructions so that he could monitor her work…so that he could keep a check on her, because he did not trust her professionally? She suspected that she had.
Her pride, already lacerated by what she had endured, stung bitterly under this fresh assault.
‘Do you think you’ll be comfortable in here?’ he asked her now. ‘I know you’re used to working on your own, so hopefully you won’t find the isolation too much of a bugbear. Of course, normally the communicating door will be open.’
He nodded to a door set into the wall, which Charlotte belatedly realised must connect his office with hers.
Her bitterness and her resentment nearly choked her as she listened to him. Did he really think he actually needed to watch her while she worked?
She could feel her fingers curling into her palms, her nails digging into her hands as she fought the temptation to tell him what he could do with his job. She must not, could not, give way to that temptation. She tried to concentrate on that awful burdensome overdraft, on the kindness and generosity of her parents. She was not in a position where she could afford to turn her back on a job…any job…no matter how much she might detest its provider.
Not that he had actually given her the job. She could just imagine it now, she decided bitterly. She could just visualise what must have happened when Richard Horwich had announced that he had offered the job to her.
Richard would have had to show him her CV, of course, and it was all there…she had held nothing back, feeling that it would be dishonest to do so.
During the interview Richard had questioned her very closely about the failure of her practice, and she had answered him frankly and honestly.
She could well imagine how angry a man like Daniel Jefferson must have been when he had learned she had been offered and had accepted the job.
He was speaking to her again and she forced herself to concentrate, her face an icy mask of remoteness
