Law Of Attraction

Her father had told her that she was too hard on herself; that she had simply, like others, ridden the crest of a financial wave which had retreated, leaving her high and dry. Maybe, but not everyone had been caught out by the roller-coaster of the sharp rise in the property market and its subsequent downturn.

Look at Daniel Jefferson, for instance. Her heart sank a little. She just hoped that she wouldn’t have to come into too much contact with him. It was perhaps illogical of her to feel so…so antagonistic towards him, so resentful almost, and it was also unlike her, but her normal good humour seemed to have become eroded over the last six months or so. She felt raw and vulnerable, unable to stop herself repeatedly going over and over what had happened, wishing she had seen what was coming and protected not just herself but those of her clients to whom she had given her services free of charge as well. Yes, it was a great pity she had not had the foresight that Daniel Jefferson seemed to exhibit to such spectacular effect. He obviously, unlike her, had an eye for a successful cause, she decided moodily.

Look at the way he had taken on the huge Vitalle conglomerate and achieved such a spectacular success…

She heard a door opening and the sound of someone moving about in the adjacent office, and quickly sat down at her own desk. Daniel Jefferson had obviously arrived to start on his day’s work.

What would it be today? she wondered bitterly. Some high-profile court case that would win him further acclaim; the preparation perhaps for a television interview? She had read in one of the papers how impressed the Press had been by the way he had handled his interviewers. Some people were like that, courting publicity, thriving on it. She remembered the small humiliating piece she had seen in the local paper describing the closing-down of her practice, pointing her out as one of the victims of the recession.

She had to put the past behind her, her father had told her gently, adding that there was no disgrace in having tried and failed; that he would rather she’d had the courage to do that and to admit her failure than had opted for the safety of a job in some large corporation.

But Charlotte couldn’t help remembering how proud her parents had been of her when she had first qualified. Somehow now she felt she had no right to their pride, and that she certainly had no right to the respect and trust of her colleagues.

While she was lost in these unhappy thoughts her office door opened. She tensed, blinking away the tears that had been threatening and struggling to stand up, cursing as she did so her straight, too short skirt.

‘Oh, Mr Horwich—’ she began, and then stopped, because it wasn’t Richard Horwich who was standing there, Richard Horwich whom she had naturally expected—forgetting Ginny’s words, in her state of confusion—to seek her out to tell her exactly what her duties were going to be. It was Daniel Jefferson.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I’MSORRY,’ Charlotte began to apologise, cursing herself for not looking at him properly before addressing him by the wrong name.

‘That’s all right,’ Daniel Jefferson told her easily. He was smiling at her, she noticed, a nice warm smile which for some reason increased her resentment of him, and her discomfort with herself.

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. I was delayed on the way this morning, but Ginny will have shown you where everything is. I’ve arranged with Margaret Lewis, who’s in charge of our trainee solicitors, to come down from upstairs at half-past ten to take you up to the nursery to introduce you to them.’

‘The nursery?’

He smiled again.

‘Sorry. That’s what we call the room where the young trainees we have here work. Partially because they are trainees and partially because they’re housed on the top floor in what were at one time, when this was a private house, the actual nurseries.’

He stopped speaking and looked assessingly at her. Charlotte was immediately self-consciously aware of the almost brash Londonness of her appearance, and only just managed to resist tugging at the hem of her skirt. Was it her imagination or did a small smile really curl the corners of his mouth as he glanced at her? She could feel her skin beginning to burn.

It was all very well for him, she decided bitterly, with his expensive hand-tailored suit; she doubted that he had ever been so hard up that he couldn’t afford to buy himself clothes, even chain-store clothes, never mind the kind of things he was wearing right now. Well, let him deride her if he liked; she didn’t care. Only she knew that she did. Just as she cared that he was the one who was standing here instructing her rather than Richard Horwich…just as she cared that she had apparently been isolated from the rest of the staff and put in an office adjacent to his own.

Why? Was it because despite the apparent warmth of that smile he had really not wanted her here on the staff? Had he perhaps even objected to his partner’s hiring someone like her…a failure…a person who had not made the same resounding success of her career that he had so patently made of his?

Had she been put here in this solitary office on his instructions so that he could monitor her work…so that he could keep a check on her, because he did not trust her professionally? She suspected that she had.

Her pride, already lacerated by what she had endured, stung bitterly under this fresh assault.

‘Do you think you’ll be comfortable in here?’ he asked her now. ‘I know you’re used to working on your own, so hopefully you won’t find the isolation too much of a bugbear. Of course, normally the communicating door will be open.’

He nodded to a door set into the wall, which Charlotte belatedly realised must connect his office with hers.

Her bitterness and her resentment nearly choked her as she listened to him. Did he really think he actually needed to watch her while she worked?

She could feel her fingers curling into her palms, her nails digging into her hands as she fought the temptation to tell him what he could do with his job. She must not, could not, give way to that temptation. She tried to concentrate on that awful burdensome overdraft, on the kindness and generosity of her parents. She was not in a position where she could afford to turn her back on a job…any job…no matter how much she might detest its provider.

Not that he had actually given her the job. She could just imagine it now, she decided bitterly. She could just visualise what must have happened when Richard Horwich had announced that he had offered the job to her.

Richard would have had to show him her CV, of course, and it was all there…she had held nothing back, feeling that it would be dishonest to do so.

During the interview Richard had questioned her very closely about the failure of her practice, and she had answered him frankly and honestly.

She could well imagine how angry a man like Daniel Jefferson must have been when he had learned she had been offered and had accepted the job.

He was speaking to her again and she forced herself to concentrate, her face an icy mask of remoteness as she listened to him.

‘I’ve prepared a list of the cases I most urgently need your help with. I thought it might help if you spend a few days familiarising yourself with the files. They cover quite a wide spread of things.

‘I don’t know whether or not Richard explained it to you, but this was originally a small country practice. No one here has ever specialised in one particular field. We prefer to deal with whatever comes our way—rather like GPs. It’s my belief anyway that a good spread of work makes for a far more interesting work-load, and where we feel that something is beyond our scope we either refer the client on, or, if we feel we can do so, we take it on with the proviso that the client can seek other advice if he or she feels that we aren’t doing a good job for them. It may be old-fashioned but it suits us, and I’ve found I’m not too keen on specialising in one particular field.’

Charlotte could feel her face burning. Did he have to remind her of her own folly in concentrating on all that conveyancing? She wanted to tell him that she had had no alternative; that she had simply not had the time to expand her field of operations…not with the property market so active and then with all the work she had taken on without any payment because she had felt the cause to be worthwhile.

Bevan had been furious with her about that. They had argued about it constantly, but she had pointed out to him that it was her time and that she had the right to give it freely if she wished. And even if she had not made any money she had had the gratification of knowing that she had been able to help people who otherwise would have had no chance at all of getting justice. Going to law was an expensive business, and not everyone was eligible for legal aid.

‘This is a new departure for me,’ Daniel Jefferson was saying. ‘I’ve never worked in such close collaboration with anyone else before, apart from when I was newly qualified, when I worked for my father. He’s retired now, of course.

‘However, I have to admit with the work-load I have at the moment I do need a qualified assistant.’

An assistant! She had been employed as Daniel Jefferson’s assistant. Charlotte bit the inside of her mouth to prevent the sharp protest she could feel bubbling in her throat erupting vocally. Nothing had been said to her about working exclusively for Daniel Jefferson when she was offered the job. On the contrary, she had assumed that she would be one of a team of junior qualified solicitors working for the practice in much the same way as qualified solicitors worked for the legal departments of large companies. They would, she had imagined, do all the dirty work while Daniel Jefferson creamed off the glory.

To discover that she was going to be working exclusively for him and under his direct control had come as a very unpleasant shock.

The temptation to challenge him to reveal the truth instead of cloaking it with pseudo-flattery, and to admit that, far from believing she could be of any real help to him, his real purpose in having her installed here in the office next to his own was because he simply did not trust her almost overwhelmed her.

It galled her more than she could bear to admit to realise what had happened. If only she could afford to give in to the demands of her pride, to tell him that she had changed her mind and that she no longer wanted his job and to walk out of here with her head held high.

But she couldn’t. She had no option but to grit her teeth and give him a frosty little smile.

She was, after all, a mere employee…and he was the mighty Daniel Jefferson, and if he dictated that she was to spend her working life making coffee and posting letters there was damn all she could do about it.

All at once the misery and the frustration of the last few humiliating months boiled up inside her in a fierce surge of emotion directed at the man standing opposite her.

It was all right for him. He, no doubt, had never put a foot wrong, never made a mistake, and he had certainly never suffered the humiliation of losing almost everything…career…home…lover…

Not that she and Bevan had actually been lovers in the physical sense, oddly enough. After his passionate and fervent pursuit of her he had become so engrossed in reorganising her career and her image that somehow there had never seemed to be any time for them to actually become lovers. Whenever they went out, it had always been with a crowd of Bevan’s friends, high-profile men and women from the same world he himself inhabited, who talked coolly of burn-out and ‘yuppie flu’ and who seemed to take the view that finding time to develop personal relationships was somehow something that did not fit into their plans for their lives.

Charlotte had gone along with it because…because Bevan had swept her off her feet, she admitted miserably.

She heard Daniel Jefferson asking if there was anything she needed.

If there was anything she needed…Yes, she needed her self-respect back, she thought bitterly. She needed to salve her pride, to feel that people believed in her, that they trusted her professional ability. She needed all those things and more, but she was not going to get them from this man.

She gave him another cold, tight smile.

‘No, there’s nothing I need,’ she told him carefully. She fully understood what he had said to her. If he would give her the list of files he wanted her to study…