would be left to his Personnel department but the impulse had felt right.
On the spur of the moment, he telephoned the company where she had last worked and spoke for five minutes to the boss, who gave her a glowing reference.
So, he had had an interminable string of relatively competent secretaries. They had all looked good, and why shouldn’t he have gone for that? Some of them could even have been brought up to the standard he wanted had they not ended up becoming inconvenient. Lingering looks, offers to work as much overtime as he wanted, skirts that seemed to get shorter and tops more plunging as the days went on... All in all, pretty annoying in the end.
He wondered how this new one was dealing with the latest woman to have been dispatched from his life and he half-smiled when he imagined her tight disapproval.
Georgia had been exciting at the beginning. She had been enthusiastic and innovative in bed and, more importantly, had seemed to really take on board the ground rules for any relationship with him—namely, forget about looking for long-term commitment. So why had he got bored with her? She had certainly been eager to please and what man didn’t want a woman willing to bend over backwards for him? He wondered whether there were just too many women willing to bend over backwards for him: gorgeous, sexy, voluptuous women whose vocabulary largely centred on the word ‘yes’. In his high-octane, high-pressured life, the word ‘yes’ had always been a soothing counterpoint. Although of late...
He scrolled through the report in front of him and acknowledged another successful takeover that would allow him to expand certain aspects of one of his technology companies into Europe. In a rare moment of introspection, he grimly congratulated himself on the distance he had travelled from the foster-home kid with zero prospects to a man who ruled the world. He was sure he had felt more pleasure in the past when he had occasionally contemplated his achievements.
He had started on the trading floor, a sixteen-year-old gofer with an uncanny ability to read markets and predict trends. His first real kick had come when he had realised that the guys with the cut-glass accents and the country estates had begun to take him seriously when he spoke. They had started seeking him out and, with the instincts born of someone from the wrong side of the tracks who was hungry and ambitious, he had learnt how to ruthlessly use and eventually channel his talents. He had learnt when to share information and when to withhold it. He had learnt that money was power and power brought immunity from ever having to do what anyone else told him to do.
He became the man who gave the orders and he liked it that way. Thirty-two years old and he was untouchable.
The firm knock on the door snapped him out of his thoughts and he sat back in his chair and summoned her in.
This, Alice was thinking as she walked into his office, was why she could never like this guy. He had dialled a number and then left her to it and, from what she had gleaned during that conversation with Georgia of the husky voice, he was just the sort of inveterate playboy she despised.
But the job was going to be hers and she wasn’t going to let this type of challenge kill her chances. He seemed to have accepted her request for her weekends to remain sacrosanct and had hired her without the usual bank of interviews. She got the feeling that this was a departure for him. So she could bend a little in this area...
Her face, however, was rigid with disapproval as she sat in the chair indicated.
‘I assume,’ she began stiffly, ‘that you would want to see me to find out how my conversation went with your...girlfriend...’
‘Ex—ex-girlfriend. Hence the point of the conversation. So that she could be left in no doubt as to where matters stood.’ The waves of disapproval emanating from her were palpable. She looked as though she’d swallowed a lime and was painfully having to digest it. ‘I spoke to your ex-boss. Sounds like a nice man. I’m thinking you were never required to step up to the plate and have any awkward conversations with his ex-lovers...’
Was he being deliberately provocative? The lazy intensity of his gaze and the suggestion of a smile on his lips sent the blood rushing to her head and she tightened her jacket around her and sat up a little straighter. Her crossed legs felt as stiff as planks of wood, yet there was a curling sensation low down in her pelvis that she chose to ignore. Top of her mind right now was counting the ways she disliked her new boss. Good-looking he might be...staggeringly good-looking...but she decided on the spot that his personality left her cold.
In a way, it would make for an excellent working relationship. She had already gleaned from her phone call with the unfortunate Georgia that the problem with his past few secretaries, apparently, had been with them all developing inappropriate crushes on him.
‘I can’t believe he’s got one of his secretaries to do the dirty work for him!’ Georgia had wailed down the line. ‘Well, if you’re like the other one...’ she had sobbed, ‘Showing off your boobs and thinking you can snap him up, then you’re making a mistake! He’s never going to go there! He doesn’t like to mix work and play. He told me! So you can forget it!’
Georgia had lasted a mere two months, one week and three days. Was that the average duration of his relationships with women—a handful of months before he got bored and moved on to the next toy?
Thoughts that were usually deeply buried rose swiftly to the surface and she thought about her father—the years spent watching from the sidelines as he’d failed to return home, failed to pretend that he hadn’t been playing away, failed to pay lip service to a marriage he’d wanted to ditch but couldn’t afford to. She killed that pernicious, toxic trip down memory lane and dragged her wayward mind back to the present.
‘Tom was and is a very happily married man,’ Alice intoned. ‘So, no, there were no awkward phone calls to women.’ And you should make your own phone calls, she wanted to snap.
‘I gather from your expression that I’m not winning a popularity contest at this moment in time?’ Did he care one way or another? No. But if they were going to work together then there was no point in pretending to be a saint. Soon enough she would come into contact with the women who entered and left his life, barely producing a ripple. She would have to get used to fending off the occasional uncomfortable phone call and, if her moral high ground didn’t allow for that, then he needed to know right now.
‘She was very upset,’ Alice informed him, trying hard to avoid the trap of sounding judgemental, because what he got up to in his private life was none of her business. If he didn’t care who he shared it with, then that was up to him.
And yet, she couldn’t help feeling that there were sides to him that he shared with no one, and she couldn’t quite work out what gave her that impression—something veiled in his eyes that belied the image of a man who laid all his cards on the table. He didn’t give a damn whether she knew about his women or not but, yes, he did give a damn about other things, things she suspected he kept to himself.
Of course, it was fanciful thinking, because it didn’t take a genius to work out that a man who had reached the meteoric heights that he had would not be the open, transparent type. He would be the type who revealed only what he wanted to and only when it served his purposes.
‘I have no idea why,’ Gabriel said wryly. ‘I’d already informed her that I was pulling the plug on our relationship. Unfortunately, I think Georgia found it harder than she thought to accept the breakup.’
‘Do you usually farm difficult conversations out to your secretaries?’
The edge of criticism in her voice should have got on his nerves but Gabriel found that
