to late mornings, and trying to put it through its paces at seven-thirty had been torturous.
She looked at him, keeping her temper in check, but he wasn’t looking at her at all.
‘I see you managed to finish all the typing that was on your desk. What time did you leave last night?’
Francesca sat down at her desk. She had dressed in slightly more conservative clothes today—navy blue dress, straight and fairly shapeless and far less obviously designer.
‘Around six,’ she murmured vaguely, and his eyes slid across to her with irony.
‘There’s no need to become a workhorse,’ he said mildly, reaching down two volumes from the shelf of books and putting them on the desk next to her. ‘I want hard work out of you; I don’t want a nervous breakdown.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ she asked, eyeing the books.
‘What it’s supposed to mean is that I don’t want you working over-long hours and then complaining of exhaustion by the end of the week.’
‘I’m not a complaining sort, Mr Kemp,’ she answered, truthfully enough, and he shrugged, not really interested in what she was or wasn’t, she supposed, just so long as it didn’t intrude on work.
It was a novel situation. She had always been accustomed to provoking a reaction in men. She had the extraordinary looks of a blonde with contrasting dark eyes and eyebrows. She looked at him from under her thick lashes and saw that as far as her looks were concerned she might well be as alluring to him as the umbrella stand in the corner of the office.
‘I want you to get a start on these two books,’ he said, pushing his hands into his pockets. ‘They’ll give you some background information on what the company does. Before that you’d better come into my office and we’ll go through my work diary for the next six months.’
She followed him into the office and obediently compared her thick diary with his, slotting in meetings and conferences which had obviously been arranged since the departure of his last unsuccessful temp.
When he had finished he sat back in his chair and looked at her steadily.
What was it, she wondered, about this man’s eyes? They were quite cool, quite calculating, but somewhere in the wintry depths there was also something else—something offputtingly sexual.
‘I never got around to asking you whether you have any questions about the company,’ he said, ‘or, for that matter, about your role in it. Have you?’
‘What did your last secretary do?’ Francesca asked ‘I mean, the one who left three years ago. What duties did she have?’
He looked at her with a trace of irony on his mouth. ‘Do you intend to fill her shoes?’ he asked. ‘No one else has managed that.’
‘I’m willing to give it a try,’ she said evenly. ‘I know you don’t think very much of me—’
‘Oh, but I think your secretarial skills are surprisingly as good as your father described.’ His voice was cool and his choice of words blunt enough to leave her in no doubt as to where the remainder of his thoughts lay.
Francesca kept her temper. She was normally an even-tempered person, but then, admittedly, no one had ever been quite so abrupt to her before. She had only been in the job one day but already she was beginning to realise exactly how cushioned her life had been. When she walked into the building she was surrounded by people purposefully going somewhere, hurrying to jobs because, no doubt, they needed the pay-packet that came with employment.
‘Irene,’ he said into the silence, ‘was my right-hand man. She not only typed, she also knew the workings of this company almost as well as I do. When I asked for information on a client she could provide it almost without needing to go to a file for reference.’
‘Sounds a paragon,’ Francesca said wryly.
‘I think it’s called devotion. The assortment of secretaries I’ve had since then have been in the job simply for the money.’
‘Which,’ she pointed out, ‘is one thing, at least, you can’t accuse me of.’
‘No,’ he returned without emphasis, ‘but your lack of need to earn a living does mean that it’s fairly immaterial what you bring to this job, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘You’re not prepared to give me a fighting chance, are you?’ she asked, and he shrugged, neither confirming or denying that. He simply continued to look at her steadily, shrewdly, with cool judgement in his pale eyes.
‘How did you start all this?’ she asked, changing the subject because she didn’t want to let him get under her skin. Again.
‘With a loan from the bank,’ he replied drily, as if it had been a particularly stupid question because the answer was so self-evident.
‘And after the loan from the bank came what?’
‘A small outlet in the Midlands. Our products were good, though, and we moved in at a fortuitous point in the market. Any more questions?’
He waited politely and she clamped her teeth together. It wasn’t difficult to tell that he found her a bore. She stood up, shaking her head, and when she looked back towards him as she left his office his attention was already elsewhere, his face frowning as he skimmed through something on the computer on his desk.
She quietly closed the door behind her, feeling for almost the first time in her life that she had been politely rebuffed.
When you thought about it, she decided, it was funny—funny to have the shoe on the other foot, not to be the focus of admiring attention. Except that she didn’t much feel like laughing, even though she knew that her reactions were childish and that she would have to stop acting like a damned spoiled brat who sulked when she was not in the limelight. She had never before considered herself a spoiled brat and it was silly acting like one, she told herself, just because Oliver Kemp, a man whom she didn’t like anyway, found her uninteresting.
At ten-thirty the outer door opened and one of the managers strolled in. He was in his mid-thirties, fair-haired, and the minute he saw her his eyebrows flew up.
‘Well,’ he drawled, darting a quick eye at the connecting door and then obviously deciding that the coast was clear, ‘where have you been hiding yourself, my lovely?’
Francesca stopped what she was doing and said calmly, ‘You must be Mr Robinson. Mr Kemp is expecting you. I’ll just buzz and tell him that you’ve arrived.’
‘Brad. And no need just yet. I’m five minutes early anyway.’ He eyed the door again and adjusted his flamboyantly coloured tie.
Francesca watched him in silence as he perched familiarly on the edge of her desk and leant towards her. She knew this type, this make and model.
‘When did the wind blow you in?’ he asked.
Probably married, she thought, but still felt as though he was entitled by divine right to do just whatsoever he pleased. Probably, she decided, he felt as though it was his duty to spread himself around the female population, or at least around those remotely presentable.
‘I’ve
