Beyond All Reason

She knew that she was nothing like that and could never have been like that if she had taken a ten-year acting course in how to be a successful extrovert. Her personality had been too successfully moulded by her mother from an early age. How could you go through life, through all those formative years, having scorn poured on your efforts, without creating a wall of silent self-defence around yourself and a tendency to conceal what there was no need to reveal?

Experiences, especially of the bitter variety, left their acrid mark, and, where her background left off, her last disastrous brush with passion took up.

‘Well?’ he prompted. ‘You never told me that there was a man in your life.’

Abigail blinked. ‘No,’ she murmured, pretending to give the matter some thought. ‘You’re quite right, I didn’t.’

‘And you’re not about to.’

Not if I can help it, she thought.

‘I don’t see any point in bringing my personal life to work,’ she said by way of explanation.

‘I’ve noticed. Admirable, I’m sure, just so long as that personal life which you don’t bring to work doesn’t entail your getting here late.’

Abigail clenched her fists in impotent anger. Wasn’t this just like Ross Anderson? Normally she would have bitten her tongue and kept silent, but she was in no mood to be heroic this morning. There was a lot on her mind and all she really wanted was to submerge herself in her work and forget those niggling worries which, for the past three months, always seemed to be there in the background, somewhere, threatening to pounce.

‘I never complain about your personal life being brought into work,’ she muttered under her breath.

‘What?’ His voice was deadly calm and she flushed uneasily. She hadn’t expected him to hear that remark—she might have guessed that he had the ears of a hawk.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m awfully tired, and,’ she added for good measure, ‘I have a headache.’

He stood up and stared down at her and she looked back at him nervously.

‘Not too tired to function, I hope?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘You’re no good to me if you’re going to spend the day drooping around like some damned wilting flower.’ He strode over to his desk and began rummaging through the open files, and she watched him reluctantly. There was no doubt that he commanded attention. Under the tailored suit, his body was hard and very masculine. She had been to several client functions with him, and she had seen the way women were drawn to him, fascinated by his lazy charm and mesmeric sex appeal. He spun round and she raised her eyes to his, reaching out to take the stack of files.

‘I’ve attached some work in these which you’ll need to have typed by this afternoon,’ he said, flickering through each one while she watched with her mind miles away. ‘There are three reports which need some additional information slotting in. Hello!’ he bellowed. ‘Is there life here? Are you listening to a word I’m saying?’

Abigail jumped and looked up at him guiltily. ‘Of course I am.’

‘What the hell did you get up to last night with the man with no name, anyway?’ he asked and she didn’t say anything. ‘No need to answer that one,’ he murmured in a silky voice, ‘I get the picture.’

‘I’m sure you find it very amusing to speculate on my private life, Mr Anderson,’ she said coolly, taking the files from him because it gave her something to do with her hands, ‘but not all of us live in the fast lane like yourself.’

He laughed and folded his arms. ‘And what does that cryptic little remark mean?’ he drawled.

I won’t let him fluster me, she thought. She had learnt how to ride through his more provocative remarks with a sense of humour, without him seeing how addled they sometimes made her, and she looked up at him now, her face composed.

‘It means whatever you take it to mean, Mr Anderson,’ she said politely.

‘I take it to mean that you didn’t spend last night making passionate love with the man with no name.’

‘His name is Martin Redman!’ she snapped, immediately regretting her outburst because that only seemed to fuel his amusement. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get to my desk so that I can begin working on these files.’

‘Hurry off, then,’ he said, his mouth twitching at the corners, and much as she would have liked to flounce out of his office, she walked out in as calm and dignified a fashion as she could muster. Sometimes, she thought, sitting at her desk and switching on her computer terminal, sometimes I wish I could ram these files down his throat. That would go a long way to wiping the amused smile off his face!

Good old Fate. Trust it to have landed her this job eighteen months ago. At the time she had been working for a small firm of lawyers. Too small a firm, she later realised. She was the only secretary there, and her normal caution when it came to the opposite sex had gradually been eroded by the late nights she had found herself working. Ellis Fitzmerton had been one of her bosses, and she had gradually begun doing more and more work for him, knowing him in that casual but intimate way that was possible between two people who spent a great deal of working time together. There had been a drift towards take-away meals when overtime was necessary, often in an office empty but for the two of them. Legal talk had shifted to personal talk. The memory of it still made her flush. In retrospect, she couldn’t believe how stupid she had been. Ellis Fitzmerton was slick, good-looking, appealing. Little by little common sense had given way to an empathy she had never invited; and when, late one night, over a stack of files, of all stupid things, he had leant forward to kiss her, she had thrown caution to the winds and returned his passion. It had been an error of judgement which had lived to haunt her.

She shut the memory out and began typing the stack of letters, her fingers flying expertly over the keyboard, and she barely glanced up when the connecting door opened and he swept into the room, his black coat over one arm.

‘Feeling less tired now?’ he asked, propping himself with his hands on her desk, and she stopped what she was doing to look up at him. Up close, he was dauntingly handsome. His features were angular and the darkness of his hair and eyes gave a brooding impression that could be intimidating and vaguely cruel. She had trained herself never to respond to his unsettling good looks and she looked at him placidly.

‘Much less, thank you. When shall I expect you back from your meeting with Mr Robinson?’ She briefly scanned her desk diary and informed him that he was seeing one of the marketing people later on in the afternoon.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, his black eyebrows curving upwards, ‘I won’t be running behind schedule, so you needn’t fear that you’ll be called upon to do any overtime tonight.’

She snapped shut the diary. ‘Oh good,’ she murmured, gathering together her sense of humour which had threatened to desert her earlier on, ‘I am so relieved to hear that. You know how eagerly I wait for five o’clock every evening, bag in hand, jacket on, feet poised to flee and join the general stampede of clock-watchers.’

‘Oh, all right. I take back that crack.’ He stood up. ‘Tell Janet to have all the sales figures ready this afternoon, I don’t intend to waste my time standing around while she rummages through her folder in a complete flap.’

‘I’ll tell her,’ Abigail said. Poor Janet. Ross Anderson had a knack for making people nervous, and Janet was no exception. The last time she had a meeting with him, she made the mistake of forgetting some of her brief and had had to endure his barely contained impatience while she attempted to sort through her things for the relevant information.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Ross had asked her afterwards, when Janet had finally left the office, with an expression of relief on her face, and Abigail had looked down at her notepad where she had been jotting down the relevant points of the meeting.

‘Nothing,’ she had said, which had made him scowl darkly at her.

‘She should have made sure that everything was prepared before she came in here.’

‘She’s human.’

‘I’m human,’ he had pointed out irritably, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I drift in and out of my meetings in a state of semi-chaos.’

Abigail had looked up at him wryly, and he had snapped, with a dark flush, that he was not obliged to justify his behaviour to her anyway.

He stood up now, glanced down at his watch and said that she could expect him some time after lunch.

As usual, after he left, the office seemed peculiarly empty and very restful. She worked steadily for the next two hours and then sat back with a little sigh of weariness.

She would have her lunch now, she decided, a yoghurt and some fruit, and she would try not to spend the next half-hour analysing her relationship with Martin. She enjoyed his company, he enjoyed hers and they felt comfortable with one another.

She peeled off the top of the carton and relaxed back in her chair, swivelling it around so that she was staring out of the window, although the view was hardly inspiring. Grey sky, grey tops of buildings, grey strip of road in between the buildings, and to the right an isolated, lonely green blob which constituted the nearest park. Sometimes she wished that she had never chosen London as a place to live, but it offered the best jobs and in a way she had become quite accustomed to its crowded streets and frenetic pace. Every time her mother travelled down from Shropshire to visit, she made a point of telling her daughter how silly it was to live in London when she was a country girl at heart, a description that always left Abigail feeling that by country girl she meant boring yokel. And that in itself was enough to guarantee that she stayed put, right where she was, in her tiny flat in North London.

She had just finished her yoghurt when the office door swung open and Abigail looked up to find herself staring into two very blue eyes.

‘May I help you?’ she asked, and for a while the other woman didn’t answer. She simply prowled around the office, the bright blue eyes scanning everything, until she found herself opposite Abigail’s desk.

‘You are Ross’s little secretary, I take it?’ Her voice was as cold as her eyes. ‘I’m Fiona St Paul. Perhaps Ross has mentioned me.’

‘No, I’m afraid he hasn’t.’

Since the other woman had no compunction about observing her, Abigail returned the scrutiny with one of her own. Fiona St Paul was very tall, very slender, with the smooth, sleek lines of a model. Her blonde hair was cropped short and her skin had the porcelain fairness that hinted of Scandinavian blood. Her voice, however, was very upper-crust English.

‘No,’ she said coolly, ‘I don’t suppose he would have. Not to you, anyway. Can you fetch him for me?’

‘Mr Anderson isn’t in at the moment, I’m afraid,’ Abigail said without too much regret.

‘Well, when will he be back?’ The scarlet lips were pursed with irritation.