The Blind-date Proposal

‘Kate, this is Finn McBride,’ said Gib. ‘We’ve been telling him all about you.’

Great, thought Kate. Now Finn would know just how sad her life was.

She stuck out her hand and Finn didn’t have much choice but to take it. ‘Kate Savage,’ she introduced herself in a brittle voice, trying not to notice the feel of his fingers closed around hers. In spite of his obvious reluctance, his clasp was firm and warm, much warmer than she had expected, and she snatched her hand away, oddly unsettled.

‘You’re being very formal, Kate,’ said Gib amused. ‘At least I don’t need to bother introducing you to Josh.’ He turned to Finn. ‘Josh practically lives with Kate.’

‘Oh?’ said Finn coldly.

‘Kate shares a house with a very good friend of mine,’ Josh explained, and the quick smile he gave Kate was sympathetic. He had obviously been told that he was there to make it less obvious that this was a blind date, although his presence wasn’t fooling Finn one little bit. ‘How are you, Kate? I haven’t seen you for a while.’

‘I’m fine.’ Apart from wanting to die of embarrassment, that was.

Phoebe handed Kate a glass of wine. ‘Finn’s just been telling us about his disastrous experiences with temps in his office,’ she said cheerfully. ‘We thought you could give him a few tips on how to handle them.’

Oh, yes, Gib and Phoebe had built her up into a topflight PA, hadn’t they? As if her humiliation wasn’t complete enough!

‘Really?’ Kate produced an acidic smile. ‘It does seem to be difficult getting good secretarial staff these days! What’s wrong with the temp you’ve got?’

‘She doesn’t seem to have any idea of time-keeping for a start,’ said Finn with a sardonic glance at the clock on the mantelpiece. No doubt he had been here on the stroke of eight, long before Phoebe and Gib would have been ready for him. ‘She’s completely unreliable.’

Unreliable, was she? Kate took a defiant gulp of her wine. ‘It doesn’t sound as if she has much motivation to work for you. Why would that be, do you think?’

Finn shrugged. ‘Sheer laziness?’ he suggested. ‘She seems to have a very vivid fantasy life too,’ he went on and Kate coloured in spite of herself, remembering how she was supposed to be sitting here being proposed to right now by a financial analyst called Will.

No doubt Gib and Phoebe had already filled him in on her disastrous relationship with Seb, and even if they hadn’t he would still know that story wasn’t true either. After all, if she had a financial analyst to go home to, she wouldn’t be the kind of sad person who needed to be set up on blind dates by friends.

Kate suppressed a sigh. Could things get any worse?

‘It can be just as bad on the other side of fence,’ Phoebe was saying loyally. ‘Tell them about your horrible boss, Kate. He sounds ghastly.’

Ah. They could get worse.

‘Oh?’ said Finn, thin-lipped. ‘Why’s that?’

Oh, well. In for a penny, in for a pound. She might as well take the opportunity to tell him what she thought, and it wasn’t as if he had spared her feelings!

‘He’s just generally rude and unpleasant,’ she told him. ‘He doesn’t seem to have even the most basic social skills. He can hardly be bothered to say “good morning” and as for “please” and “thank you”…well, I might as well ask him to talk Polish!’

A muscle had begun to beat in Finn’s jaw. ‘Perhaps he’s busy.’

‘Being busy isn’t an excuse for not having any manners,’ said Kate, meeting his gaze levelly.

‘He’s absolute death on personal calls in the office as well,’ Phoebe put in, apparently unaware of the antagonism simmering between Finn and Kate. ‘Kate’s always having to put down the phone in the middle of a conversation when his door opens, and we can be in the middle of a really good chat when she suddenly starts putting on an official voice and telling us she’ll get back to us on that as soon as possible. That’s our cue to call back later when he’s gone! It’s very frustrating.’

She turned politely to Finn. ‘You let people in your office use the phone, don’t you?’

‘I don’t encourage it, no,’ he said with a nasty look at Kate, who was almost beyond caring by now.

She was obviously never going to be able to use the office phone again—not that Kate could imagine going into work again after this. On the scale of embarrassment, being blatantly fixed up with your boss must rank pretty high, she thought. It was certainly one of the most excruciating situations Kate had ever found herself in and, let’s face it, she had plenty to compare it to. Sometimes she seemed to spend her life lurching from one mortifying episode to another.

‘Access to phones and email for personal business is good for staff morale,’ she pointed out. ‘If you treated your staff like human beings who have a life outside work, I think you’d see productivity shoot up.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with our productivity,’ snapped Finn, and this time his irritability did catch the others’ attention. They looked at him a little curiously and he controlled his temper with an effort.

‘There’s a difference between dealing with a crisis, in which case of course staff can use the phones, and spending hours gossiping on my time,’ he said in a more reasonable voice.

‘Doesn’t your temp get the job done?’ Kate asked sweetly.

‘In a fashion,’ he admitted grudgingly.

‘Perhaps you should go and work for Finn,’ said Gib in such a blatant attempt to push them together that he might as well have shown them to the spare room and tucked them in to bed together. ‘You might get on better with him than with the boss you’ve got at the moment.’

‘Now, there’s an idea!’ said Kate as if much struck by the thought. ‘Have you got any jobs going at the moment?’

‘It’s very possible that there might be a vacancy for a temp in my office coming up,’ Finn said with something of a snap, ‘but that wouldn’t interest you, of course, you being such a high-flyer! Gib and Phoebe here were telling me that you practically run the company where you are at the moment. I’m not sure I could offer you anything that challenging.’

A hint of colour touched Kate’s cheekbones at his sarcasm. ‘No, well, I’m thinking of changing career anyway,’ she told him loftily.

‘Really?’ the other three all said together.

‘Yes,’ she said, thinking that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, come to that. It didn’t look as if she had much future in the secretarial world, anyway. ‘I’m sick of being treated like a lower life form, so I’ve been thinking that I might…what’s the word?…downscale.’

‘Downscale?’ Josh echoed doubtfully, clearly wondering how it was possible for her to downscale from her current position. Being a temp was hardly the giddy heights of a career, was it?

‘Or do I mean diversify?’ said Kate. ‘Do something different anyway. Think out of the box. Use my talents.’

‘What exactly are your talents?’ Finn asked, the sardonic lift of his brows belying the apparent interest in his voice.

Yes, what were her talents? Kate’s normally fertile imagination went inconveniently blank at the very moment she needed it most.

‘She’s a great cook,’ Phoebe prompted, evidently still under the impression that Kate might make a suitable wife for Finn.

For some reason it was only at this point that Kate made the connection and remembered that his presence here meant that Finn was a widower. She had been so shocked to see him that she hadn’t thought beyond the awkwardness and antagonism, and now she felt suddenly contrite. That beautiful, glowing girl in that photo on his desk was dead. No wonder he seemed so grim.

Kate was conscious of a twinge of guilt about all the times she had thought Finn abrupt and rude, but then, how was she to know that his brusqueness hid a broken heart?

The others were still madly promoting her. ‘Kate’s a communicator,’ she heard Gib say. It was the kind of thing that made you realise just how long he’d spent in the States. ‘She’s got wonderful people skills.’

‘Not just people,’ said Josh dryly. ‘She’s pretty good when it comes to animals too. Remember that dog in the pub, Phoebe?’

‘God, yes.’ Phoebe gave an exaggerated shudder, and Josh grinned.

‘I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes thinking about it,’ he told Finn. ‘Kate confronted a skinhead with huge hands and no neck. He was covered in tattoos and snarling and swearing at his dog. Kate told him he wasn’t fit to own an animal and took the dog away from him while the rest of us were dancing around in the background being mealy-mouthed and saying I’m not sure this is a good idea, Kate, why don’t you let the RSPCA deal with it? Meanwhile Kate was about half the size of this guy, and giving him a piece of her mind, and the rest of the pub was squaring up for a good fight.’

There was a flicker of interest in Finn’s eyes. ‘What happened to the dog?’

‘Oh, Kate got it,’ said Josh. ‘We knew she would. It was a savage Alsatian cross, and I wouldn’t have wanted to go near it myself, but Kate had it eating out of her hand in no time.’ He turned to Kate. ‘What did happen to that dog?’