lowered his eyes now and, saying nothing, swivelled his computer so that it was facing her.
‘Recognise that man?’
Katy blanched. Her mouth fell open as she found herself staring at Duncan Powell, the guy she had fallen for three years previously. Floppy blond hair, blue eyes that crinkled when he grinned and boyish charm had combined to hook an innocent young girl barely out of her teens.
She had not expected this. Not in a million years. Confused, flustered and with a thousand alarm bells suddenly ringing in her head, Katy fixed bewildered green eyes on Lucas.
‘I don’t understand...’
‘I’m not asking you to understand. I’m asking you whether you know this man.’
‘Y-yes,’ she stammered. ‘I... Well, I knew him a few years ago...’
‘And it would seem that you bypassed certain security systems and discovered that he is, these days, employed by the Chinese company I am in the process of finalising a deal with. Correct? No, don’t bother answering that. I have a series of alerts on my computer and what I’m saying does not require verification.’
She felt dazed. Katy’s thoughts had zoomed back in time to her disastrous relationship with Duncan.
She’d met him shortly after she had returned home to her parents’ house in Yorkshire. Torn between staying where she was and facing the big, brave world of London, where the lights were bright and the job prospects were decidedly better, she had taken up a temporary post as an assistant teacher at one of the local schools to give herself some thinking time and to plan a strategy.
Duncan had worked at the bank on the high street, a stone’s throw from the primary school.
In fairness, it had not been love at first sight. She had always liked a quirky guy; Duncan had been just the opposite. A snappy dresser, he had homed in on her with the single-minded focus of a heat-seeking missile with a pre-set target. Before she’d even decided whether she liked him or not, they had had coffee, then a meal, and then they were going out.
He’d been persistent and funny, and she’d started rethinking her London agenda when the whole thing had fallen apart because she’d discovered that the man who had stolen her heart wasn’t the honest, sincere, single guy he had made himself out to be.
Nor had he even been a permanent resident in the little village where her parents lived. He’d been there on a one-year secondment, which was a minor detail he had cleverly kept under wraps. He had a wife and twin daughters keeping the fires warm in the house in Milton Keynes he shared with them.
She had been a diversion and, once she had discovered the truth about him, he had shrugged and held his hands up in rueful surrender and she had known, in a flash of pure gut instinct, that he had done that because she had refused to sleep with him. Duncan Powell had planned to have fun on his year out and, whilst he had been content to chase her for a few months, he hadn’t been prepared to take the chase to a church and up an aisle, because he had been a fully committed family man.
‘I don’t understand.’ Katy looked away from the reminder of her steep learning curve staring out at her from Lucas’s computer screen. ‘So Duncan works for their company. I honestly didn’t go hunting for that information.’ Although, she had done some basic background checks, just out of sheer curiosity, to see whether it was the same creep once she’d stumbled upon him. A couple of clicks of a button was all it had taken to confirm her suspicion.
Lucas leaned forward, his body language darkly, dangerously menacing. ‘That’s as may be,’ he told her, ‘but it does present certain problems.’
With cool, clear precision he presented those certain problems to her and she listened to him in ever-increasing alarm. A deal done in complete secrecy...a family company rooted in strong values of tradition...a variable stock market that hinged on nothing being leaked and the threat her connection to Duncan posed at a delicate time in the negotiations.
Katy was brilliant with computers, but the mysteries of high finance were lost on her. The race for money had never interested her. From an early age, her parents had impressed upon her the importance of recognising value in the things that money couldn’t buy. Her father was a parish priest and both her parents lived a life that was rooted in the fundamental importance of putting the needs of other people first. Katy didn’t care who earned what or how much money anyone had. She had been brought up with a different set of values. For better or for worse, she occasionally thought.
‘I don’t care about any of that,’ she said unevenly, when there was a brief lull in his cold tabulation of her transgressions. It seemed a good moment to set him straight because she was beginning to have a nasty feeling that he was circling her like a predator, preparing to attack.
Was he going to sack her? She would survive. The bottom line was that that was the very worst he could do. He wasn’t some kind of mediaeval war lord who could have her hung, drawn and quartered because she’d disobeyed him.
‘Whether you care about a deal that isn’t going to impact on you or not is immaterial. Either by design or incompetence, you’re now in possession of information that could unravel nearly a year and a half of intense negotiation.’
‘To start with, I’m obviously very sorry about what happened. It’s been a very complex job and, if I accidentally happened upon information I shouldn’t have, then I apologise. I didn’t mean to. In fact, I’m not at all interested in your deal, Mr Cipriani. You gave me a job to do and I was doing it to the best of my ability.’
‘Which clearly wasn’t up to the promised standard, because an error of the magnitude of the one you made is inexcusable.’
‘But that’s not fair!’
‘Remind me to give you a life lesson about what’s fair and what isn’t. I’m not interested in your excuses, Miss Brennan. I’m interested in working out a solution to bypass the headache you created.’
Katy’s mind had stung at his criticism of her ability. She was good at what she did. Brilliant, even. To have her competence called into question attacked the very heart of her.
‘If you look at the quality of what I’ve done, sir, you’ll find that I’ve done an excellent job. I realise that I may have stumbled upon information that should have not been available to me, but you have my word that anything I’ve uncovered stays right here with me.’
‘And I’m to believe you because...?’
‘Because I’m telling you the truth!’
‘I’m sorry to drag you into the world of reality, Miss Brennan, but taking things at face value, including other people’s sincerely meant promises, is something I don’t do.’ He leaned back into his chair and looked at her.
Without trying, Lucas was capable of exuding the sort of lethal cool that made grown men quake in their shoes. A chit of a girl who was destined for the scrapheap should have been a breeze but for some reason he was finding some of his formidable focus diluted by her arresting good looks.
He went for tall, career-driven brunettes who were rarely seen without their armour of high-end designer suits and killer heels. He enjoyed the back and forth of intellectual repartee and had oftentimes found himself embroiled in heated debates about work-related issues.
His
