a full-time course which involved taking further exams for her chosen career. So that by the time Carleton Northcott decided to retire and move to his second home in the Windward Islands, and suggested that if Astra didn’t want to go to Barbados with him she could move into his London apartment and keep an eye on the place for him, Astra thought it the best idea she’d heard in a long while. Her mother must have thought so too, for this time she raised no objection.
All of which had worked out for the best, Astra reflected as she washed her used dishes at the kitchen sink. Over the last few years, what with being so busy with her job, and Imogen having a full social calendar, Astra rarely saw her mother. Though, dutifully, she would telephone and occasionally her mother—usually when she was having some kind of disaster with her current male, and both her sisters were engaged elsewhere—would pay her a visit.
Which, Astra thought, dragging her mind back to the present, her briefcase as yet still unopened in her study, wasn’t getting the work done. She dried her hands, and ten minutes later she was totally absorbed in her work.
Strangely, though, after all the multitude of thoughts that had gone through her head that evening, when later she turned off her computer and went to bed it wasn’t of her family that she thought. For quite some while she lay sleepless, her mind not on any member of her family, but on the tough-sounding board member of Blyth Whitaker International, a man she had yet to meet.
Next day, Astra arrived at the Blyth Whitaker building in good time. Incongruously, when she would have said she knew her business inside out, she suddenly started to feel a little nervous. What nonsense! she scoffed, but couldn’t deny that she was glad the mirror in the lift she had been directed to showed her looking cool and immaculate in her black suit and white silk shirt.
Briefcase in hand and in her smart plain black, two-and-a-half-inch-heeled shoes, Astra stepped out of the lift determined to keep looking outwardly composed. On the face of it, there was no reason why she should lose the tiniest bit of composure—even if it was Mr Sayre Baxendale himself that she was there to see.
Even if it seemed too incredible to be true that Sayre Baxendale had asked for her personally, she was good at her job. Why did she feel the need to keep reminding herself of that? Good grief—she couldn’t remember the last time, or any time for that matter, when she’d had the jitters about meeting a client. For heaven’s sake, he was expecting her; she wouldn’t have got past Reception had that not been so.
Astra found the door she was looking for, and, since she was expected, tapped on it only lightly, and went in. A tall black-haired man was at another door with a woman in her late twenties who was on her way out so that Astra caught only a glimpse of her. The woman seemed vaguely familiar. But Astra met so many people in her job that it didn’t surprise her that the woman, his PA, most probably, could be someone she had already met.
However, she was here to see Sayre Baxendale, who had closed the door after the woman and was coming back into his office. ‘Astra Northcott, Yarroll Finance,’ she introduced herself. She was softly spoken, her voice unaccented, with a hint of friendliness—otherwise her appearance and everything else about her was totally businesslike.
She extended her right hand—he ignored it. ‘Take a seat,’ he instructed shortly.
Astra didn’t know what it was about this man; he was good-looking certainly, was broad-shouldered, without fat, had dark eyes, and she could well imagine that sensational-looking females would come chasing after him rather than him having to exert himself. But she felt more niggled by him than anything else. No one had ever declined to shake hands with her before.
Astra was aware that his dark glance was giving her a thorough going over, as if to note every detail—her figure, her thick red hair, worn as she usually wore it in a sophisticated chignon, her green eyes, her pale skin. She felt herself dissected—and put back together again—and that too annoyed her.
Which left her, since she instantly did not care at all for this man with whom she was here to do business, to draw on every scrap of her professionalism. She went calmly over to the chair he had indicated—it was opposite to the one he took—his large, uncluttered desk in between them.
‘I am unsure which kind of personal package you may be interested in, Mr Baxendale,’ she remarked pleasantly, placing her briefcase on his desk. ‘If you’d care to give me a few details of what you have in mind,’ she went on, her long, slender fingers already at the fasteners on her briefcase, ‘I’ll…’
‘I’m not remotely interested in any personal package you have to offer.’ He cut her off before she could finish, and Astra, her fingers falling away from her briefcase, just sat and stared at him, stunned.
He’d somehow made that sound as if she wanted him to be personally interested in her! Fat chance! She started to recover from her incredulity, and almost told him that it sounded to her as if his sensational females should be less forthcoming than they were if he thought she was remotely interested in him either—personally. But she was here on business, or thought she was, and to have him, Sayre Baxendale, as one of her clients would be a prize indeed.
So she remained calm, remained even a hint friendly, as she enquired, ‘You are Sayre Baxendale? I am speaking with the same man who contacted Yarroll Finance yesterday and suggested I come to see you today?’
‘I asked you to come and see me today,’ he replied bluntly, no suggestion about it.
Somehow Astra managed to keep a pleasant look on her face. ‘I must have got it wrong,’ she murmured apologetically. ‘You’re more interested in some commercial…’ She broke off; she saw he was looking at her sceptically. And anyhow she didn’t ‘do’ commercial. Her intelligence going into overdrive, she had a positive notion that if his Finance section couldn’t come up with everything he wanted on the commercial side, then heads in that section would roll thick and fast. ‘You’re neither interested in a personal package nor anything commercial, are you, Mr Baxendale?’ she enquired as calmly as she could.
He studied her, his dark eyes fixing at last on her cool green ones. ‘No,’ he answered shortly.
Instinctively, Astra wanted to get up and walk out of there. But she was here representing her firm and, anyhow, she was more professional than that. ‘May I ask, then, why you have asked to see me today?’ she enquired—and very nearly dropped when he told her.
However, he did not tell her straight away, but first, to her surprise, referred her to someone she had completed a deal with several months before. ‘Does the name Ronald Cummings mean anything to you?’ he asked.
It was a name she was unlikely to forget! She’d had a client named Ronald Cummings. That was to say she had dealt with—long and tediously—Ronald Cummings, a fifty-year-old who’d changed his mind constantly in the months prior to him finally settling on the investment she had arranged for him.
‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss anyone who may or may not be a client,’ she kept her professional hat firmly in place to reply.
Sayre Baxendale was unimpressed. ‘Ronald Cummings has no such ethics when it comes to discussing you!’ he informed her shortly.
‘You know Mr Cummings?’ Astra enquired, more to give herself a moment to sort out in her head what the dickens was going on here than anything else.
‘His daughter happens to be my PA,’ Sayre Baxendale answered crisply.
‘His daughter?’ The woman she had caught a glimpse of just now? Astra speedily thought back to three or four months
