The Boss and His Secretary

The word ‘job’ reminded her of her aunt’s temping agency. Taryn and her aunt got on extremely well, and her aunt Hilary, her father’s sister, ran Just Temps, not so very far from where she was.

On impulse Taryn took out her phone. ‘Are you busy?’ she asked. Her aunt had inherited the same workaholic streak that ran all the way through most of the Webster clan. Taryn herself had inherited it from her father.

Hilary Kiteley, as she now was, had been on her own since her husband had died some thirty years previously. Financially she’d had no need to work. But, because she had needed something challenging to fill her days, she had learned all she could about a business she had taken on and expanded, and which was now very well respected.

‘You’re not in your office?’ Hilary asked.

‘Can I come and see you?’

‘My door is always open to you, Taryn, you know that.’

Half an hour later Taryn was sitting in her aunt’s office, having explained that she had just walked out of a job which her aunt knew full well she had thoroughly enjoyed.

‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ she asked gently.

Taryn shook her head. ‘I—can’t,’ she replied, and loved her aunt the more that Hilary Kiteley did not pester to know—as Taryn knew her stepmother was going to—but smiled encouragingly.

‘Perhaps, when you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll go back?’ she offered.

‘I won’t,’ Taryn answered, and knew it for a fact. That kiss had changed everything. She loved him, and had been tempted. The risk of giving in was too great. He and Angie must sort out whatever crisis was going on in their marriage. They had to!

‘Well, you’re obviously very upset, whatever it was.’ And, with a far more logical head than Taryn felt she had at the moment, ‘Would you like me to find you something temporary while you sort out something more permanent?’ Hilary Kiteley enquired.

What she would do next had not occurred to Taryn. She would get another job; it was in her nature to work. But she wasn’t ready yet to be PA to someone other than Brian Mellor; she did not know when she would be.

‘I don’t know that I want to be a PA again,’ she confided.

‘You’d be good at anything you tackled.’

‘Oh, Auntie, you always were good for my self-esteem.’

‘With just cause! Remember that spell of waitressing you did for me when you were at college? They would have taken you on permanently, had you wished.’

As perhaps she had hoped, that comment drew forth a smile from her anguished niece. ‘Perhaps I’ll try waitressing again,’ she said with an attempt at lightness. And, realising she had taken up enough of her aunt’s time, ‘I’d better be making tracks for home.’

‘I hear Mrs Jennings left rather abruptly?’ Hilary commented, referring to their last speedily departed housekeeper.

‘You’ve been speaking to my father.’

‘You’re cook tonight, I take it?’

Taryn knew that she would be. Her stepmother was not much interested in food. And, even though she had at one time been their housekeeper, she was even less interested in matters domestic. If Taryn’s father was to eat—and his own culinary skills came in the ‘couldn’t boil an egg’ category—then it went without saying that his daughter had been elected.

‘We’ll get a replacement housekeeper soon,’ Taryn said hopefully, and was grateful that her aunt did not state her opinion that her stepmother would be wasting her time applying to Just Temps for someone to fill in meanwhile.

Instead she asked about the much discussed issue. ‘When are you going to leave home? You’ve been going to for years,’ she reminded her.

‘I know, and I really would like to move out. But every time I mention it something seems to go wrong at home.’

‘Like the time your stepmother had a fall the night before you were due to move out? Like the next time you came home to find her with a bandaged foot and barely able to hobble about? Not forgetting the time she thought she needed an operation—only then discovered the problem had miraculously cured itself?’

‘You’ve got a good memory.’

‘Eva Webster may be your stepmother, but I’ve known her for longer,’ Hilary stated, having known Eva Brown, as she had then been, for years.

She had known her long before Taryn’s mother, a gentle soul, had decided she could no longer put up with her husband’s long term neglect and, the day after Taryn’s fifteenth birthday, had explained to her daughter that she had fallen out of love with Horace Webster and in love with someone else. She had left, and Eva Brown, a widow in reduced circumstances, had moved in—as housekeeper. The day she had married Horace Webster, however, was the day she had determined that her housekeeping days were over.

‘That woman uses you like a skivvy,’ Hilary Kiteley went on. ‘And expects you to be grateful to be living under the same roof.’

Taryn, feeling a touch disloyal to Eva, even if her aunt was only telling the truth, did not answer. ‘How’s my favourite cousin?’ she asked. ‘Have you heard from Matt recently?’

‘He’s busy, but he manages to give me a call now and then.’

‘Give him my love the next time he rings,’ Taryn requested, and getting to her feet, ‘I’ve taken up enough of your time.’

‘Feeling better?’ her aunt asked, going to the door with her.

‘Much,’ Taryn replied, but more from politeness than truth.

‘Give it twenty-four hours and it will all seem so much better,’ Hilary assured her.

Taryn drove home, wishing she could think so, only to garage her car and enter the large but cheerless house, and be greeted by her stepmother’s demand of, ‘What’s going on?’

For a split moment Taryn wondered if her aunt had telephoned her stepmother, before instantly dismissing the notion. Aunt Hilary would not do that. ‘Going on?’ she queried, having arrived home at more or less a normal kind of time.

Somebody had been on the phone, she discovered, but not her aunt. ‘Brian Mellor has rung twice, wanting to speak to you. He’d tried your mobile—you’d got it switched off.’

‘So I had,’ Taryn replied, vaguely remembering she had switched it off after her call to her aunt. She made a mental note to keep it switched off. She did not wish to speak to Brian. What was there to say?

‘You’d better ring him. What does he want you for?’

‘No idea. Have you made a start on dinner?’

‘I had a migraine.’

Away from the subject she did not want to talk about, Taryn, after enquiring if her stepmother felt better, made her way to the kitchen.

Sleep did not come easily to her that night. She had loved that job, was comfortable with engineering and engineering terms, had computer and typing skills and, a quick learner, tackled anything that passed by her desk with enthusiasm. What sort of career did she have now?

Did she even want a career? She felt hurt, wounded, and had not replied to Brian’s phone calls. She relived again the way he had kissed her. As such matters went—and she knew that she was behind the times in that regard—she was not so very experienced. But she knew the difference between a kiss of friendship and even a shade or two warmer type of kiss—but those sorts of kisses had been a mile and a half away from the kind of kiss Brian had given her.

Not that it had been so much ‘given’. It had just sort of happened. She had been standing there, she had been empathetic, and then, wham, he was on his feet, kissing her—a kiss that had been all wanting. And she had panicked and had got out of there.

She’d been in the lift, having terminated her employment with Mellor Engineering without having to think about it, and…She suddenly remembered that man in the lift. Oh, heavens, had she been very rude to him?

Poor man…Oddly, she could see him quite clearly in her mind’s eye. Tall and, if not concerned exactly, there had been something in his grey eyes as he’d asked—she had to think for a few seconds—‘You seem upset?’ and, ‘Is it something I can help you with?’ And she had snootily and quite snappily retorted, ‘I very much doubt it.’ Which, in the circumstance of him only wanting to help, had not been at all gracious of her.

Taryn put the picture of the good-looking, quite obviously top executive from her mind. She didn’t know who he was, and if she ever did—which she wouldn’t, because she was never going to enter that building again—she was unsure that she would want to resurrect what had happened by apologising for her rudeness.