the time being. Sir Charles, it seemed, needed her to act as his hostess, and he had informed her that it would do her no harm to learn how to run the London house, and Branthwaite, his home in Berkshire. Briony had been frankly unenthusiastic at the prospect. For one thing, she could imagine the reaction from Mrs Lambert, their briskly efficient housekeeper, if she attempted to interfere in the clockwork running of either establishment. For another, she had always planned on having a career of some sort, and she told her father so.
Sir Charles had raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve no objection to you finding yourself a job of sorts in time, Briony,’ he said. ‘But I do hope you’re not intending to turn yourself into one of these strident females, always demanding equal opportunities, and other nonsense. Besides, I did think you might wish to give me some of your time now that your full-time education has been completed. I’ve been very lonely since your mother died, and I was looking forward to your companionship.’
Which was emotional blackmail at the very least, Briony thought gloomily as she murmured reluctant acquiescence. She was neither blind nor stupid, and she was quite aware that her father had consoled himself during the latter years of his widowhood with a succession of attractive ladies, many of whom had been only too willing to act as his hostess. She wondered rather acidly whether the subtle pressures on her father to remarry had proved rather overwhelming of late, and if that was why she was being dragged kicking and screaming into the picture.
But she consoled herself with the thought that the next year or so could be fun. There would be dinners and receptions, and even trips abroad, and a greater contrast to the boarding school life of past years could scarcely be envisaged. Her father had been too busy controlling the publishing empire of which he was chairman to have paid her a great deal of attention up to now.
The dinner which had preceded the awards party had been rather a disappointment to her. She had been introduced to a number of young executives, who had paid her flattering attention, but she was realistic to know that this was what she could expect as the chairman’s daughter, even if she’d had two heads. She was not unaware of her own attractions—her slender figure, the sheen of her coppery hair, and the charm of her wide-set grey-green eyes with their heavy fringing of lashes—and was becoming used to the glances which tended to follow her these days. But at the same time she knew there had to be a happy medium between the overt flattery of the younger men at U.P.G. and the almost paternal deference of the older ones. She guessed that her father’s reputation of being a hard man to cross was responsible for the respectful distance which seemed to be maintained from them for most of the evening.
When the actual moment for the awards came, Briony quite enjoyed handing over the small silver replicas of quill pens, and the accompanying cheques, and uttering a few shy words of congratulation to writers, photographers and artists who had been merely names to her up to now.
She was just beginning to shed some of her inhibitions and enjoy being the centre of the stage, when she became aware of a man watching her across the room. For a moment their eyes met and locked, and Briony was teased by an odd sense of familiarity. But she knew he was not one of those she had met at the dinner.
And in the same moment she realised that the expression in the aquamarine-pale eyes, looking her over from head to foot, was neither paternal nor deferential. It was coolly challenging, even faintly amused, and it told Briony quite clearly and unequivocally that wherever the sex war was waged, this man would expect to emerge as a victor. Nor did she have to wonder how anyone of her age and inexperience, only recently released from the shelter of school, could have known this. It was pure instinct, and she recognised it as such.
But all the same, she turned away hurriedly, aware that embarrassment mingled with indignation was heightening the colour in her face, and was annoyed to find that her mind still retained an image of him, tall and lean, his tawny hair bleached into blond streaks, and his eyes startlingly pale against the deep tan of his face.
All she had to do, of course, was wait until her father, deep in conversation with Hal Mackenzie, the editor of the Courier, the group’s leading and influential daily paper, was free, and then ask the man’s name. But she was reluctant to do this, for reasons she only dimly perceived herself. Something told her that if her father wished her to know this man, then he would have arranged for there to be an introduction earlier in the evening.
In the event, she did not have to wait to be told who he was. When the time came for the prestigious ‘Journalist of the Year’ award to be made, and the name Logan Adair was called, he walked forward. As she picked up the award, Briony discovered crossly that the palms of her hands were damp, but she managed to present a calm exterior as Logan Adair shook hands, first with her father, who was murmuring a few conventional phrases of congratulation, and then turned to her.
She said politely, ‘Well done, Mr Adair,’ in a small, cool voice, and held out his award and envelope. Everyone else had taken their award, thanked her, shaken hands and walked away, usually back to the bar with ill-concealed relief. But not Logan Adair.
He said with elaborate courtesy, ‘On the contrary, thank you, my dear Miss Trevor,’ and his hand reached out to clasp not her fingers as she expected, but her wrist, pulling her forward towards him slightly off balance, so that she looked up in quick alarm and saw the amused glint in his eyes before he deliberately lowered his mouth to hers. The pressure was quick and light, and casual in the extreme, so there was no reason on earth why Briony should jerk back as if she had been branded, only to find the little incident had been witnessed in the loudest silence she had ever heard.
Logan Adair said smilingly, ‘A pleasure to have met you, Miss Trevor,’ and turned away.
Briony’s cheeks were stained with bright colour and her fragile poise was shaken to its core. The chatter round the room had broken out again, but too loudly, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Sir Charles, frowning thunderously, wheel on Hal Mackenzie. She wished with all her heart, in spite of her embarrassment, that her father would treat it as the joke it had undoubtedly been, or else forget it altogether, but she knew this could never happen.
Sir Charles was well known for his ambivalent attitude to the empire he controlled, she thought unhappily. He was proud of his newspapers and magazines and the influence they wielded, yet he had little time for the rank and file journalists and photographers who provided the words and pictures for his millions of readers to pore over. United Publishing had had its fair share of industrial troubles in the past, and Briony was aware that many people in the organisation believed that their chairman’s intransigent attitude towards his workforce was at least partly to blame.
‘What Charles would really like to see would be complete automation in the industry, complete with robots to press the right buttons,’ an old friend had remarked recently at a private dinner party, and though Briony had joined in the laughter which followed, the comment had troubled her slightly. It occurred to her that a newspaper’s quality was largely dictated by the people who wrote for it. People like Logan Adair, whose byline appeared above hard-hitting eye-witness reports from the trouble spots of the globe.
Briony had seen his name often in the Courier, and had looked out for his stories, relishing his laconic style and the dry humour with which he often laced the bitter truth he had to tell. She knew from comments she had heard that he was regarded as one of the feathers in the Courier’s cap, and that there were plenty of rival newspapers who would have paid over the odds to obtain his services, but she was also aware that her father did not share these sentiments.
She heard Hal Mackenzie say placatingly, ‘Sir Charles, isn’t this all rather a storm in a tea-cup?’ and walked away hastily. The presentations were over, fortunately, and someone had opened the french doors at the end of the room which led out on to the rooftop terrace. She was glad to be able to escape there, and glad too to find herself alone. If indeed she was alone. She’d only
