href="#uf3782b53-2aca-528f-8df0-60d46c0a8e83">CHAPTER SIX
IT STARTED with a letter.
Megan weighed it in her hand and studied it. A love letter, she thought.
The envelope was pink and had the fat, pampered feel of something which had been taken care of—and the handwriting was careful—using proper ink from a proper pen.
She turned the envelope over and smiled. How absolutely wonderful—to think that her coolly demanding boss was the recipient of yet another of these extravagant envelopes!
Who’d have thought it? Mr Cool getting love letters! Why, it almost made him seem human!
Except that Mr Cool hadn’t been living up to his name just lately. He had been edgy. Irritable. Uptight.
She just didn’t know why.
Megan had been working for Dan McKnight at Softshare for nearly three months now—and she still kept having to pinch herself. The offices were buzzy, the staff were young and it was almost obscenely well paid.
No, jobs in the computer industry of this calibre didn’t exactly grow on trees and Megan counted her blessings each and every day. And okay—maybe some women did look down their nose when you told them you were a personal assistant—especially to a man—but that was their problem, not hers!
Softshare was American-owned and cutting edge, its aim unashamed domination of the software market. A forward-thinking, right-on company—where the workforce was ninety per cent men to ten per cent women.
Which in theory should have been a single girl’s dream. The only trouble was that most of the men looked pretty much the same. And the way they looked was nothing to get excited about.
Only one stood apart from the rest of the herd—and that was Dan McKnight. Because Megan’s boss was the man who not only didn’t fit the technological stereotype—he had taken the mould and broken it into a thousand pieces!
As an industry famous for its lack of pretension and rules, the computer world attracted its fair share of nerds and boffins. But Dan was different. The nerds favoured pony-tails but Dan visited a barber shop regularly, and somehow he timed it so that his hair was never too long and never too short.
Most people in the building wore jeans and T-shirts and sometimes even kicked their shoes off when they were sitting at their desk. But not Dan. With his unruffled hair and perfect grey suits, Dan always looked as cool and as uncreased as if he had just stepped from the pages of a brand-new magazine.
Such a pity she didn’t find him attractive!
Megan turned the letter over in her hand and frowned as the door of the office was flung open and in walked Dan McKnight himself. She sat up immediately, the way she used to do at school when the headmaster came into the classroom unannounced.
And, when she came to think of it, wasn’t there something about him which reminded her of a head teacher? A kind of steely determination which meant that he usually got what he wanted without appearing to want it at all!
He was exceptionally tall—with both the height and the body to make the most of a suit. He always wore suits—cool grey suits which matched his eyes and contrasted with that neatly cut dark hair.
Only his mouth seemed at odds with the quietly controlled character of the man. It was too lush, too Latin—and far too sensual to belong to Dan McKnight, Megan had decided!
‘So what’s he like?’
Megan’s housemate was always asking her this particular question and Megan always had difficulty answering it. Because Dan had such a cool, analytical way of looking at people that it was hard to know what actually made him tick—though it certainly wasn’t for want of trying!
She knew that he was single and lived in an exclusive London suburb and had one of the keenest minds in the computer industry. But that was about all she’d gathered, other than his glaringly obvious attributes of being too rich and too smart and too handsome. And much too bad-tempered.
‘Good morning Dan,’ she said politely.
Dan had been deep in thought and her words shattered his concentration. He screwed his eyes up at her as if trying to remember who she was, then gave a small smile of satisfaction as he shut the office door behind him.
His new assistant seemed to be shaping up just fine, he thought. Hard-working. Enthusiastic. She was easy on the eye, too—though maybe not in the conventional sense. His eyes narrowed and he allowed a reluctant smile to cross his lips. She obviously had no vanities.
Today was a perfect example. That plain pair of beige trousers and an indeterminate-looking cream sweater did nothing for her rather sallow complexion, he decided. Dan liked his assistants to be ultra-efficient—and Megan was efficient, no question about that. He just didn’t like them to look too decorative—and so Megan fitted the bill perfectly.
Some of the other directors at Softshare had made the mistake of hiring secretaries who looked like out-of-work actresses. And Dan had watched with a kind of wry amusement as those same directors had struggled to keep their minds on the job instead of on a magnificent pair of legs!
‘Good morning, Megan,’ he said as he put his briefcase down.
‘How was the play last night?’ she queried.
Dan knitted his brows together. Had he told her he was going to the theatre? ‘It was…competent.’
‘I’m sure the playwright would be flattered to hear such a glowing description,’ observed Megan, with a sunny smile. ‘I saw it myself last week—and I thought it was terrific!’
‘Really? What a remarkable coincidence.’ He gave her a chilly look which matched his uninterested tone and stifled a sigh. If there was one thing he could fault Megan Phillips on, it was her irrepressible need to chatter. She talked about anything and everything. All the time. She wanted his views on music and newspapers and the state of the economy.
And sometimes—to his horror—he actually found himself discussing these things with her!
Dan
