Secretary On Demand

The hurt foot had been a good idea. It released Sandy’s barely contained lust for drama and she instantly shot into wounded mode, removing one shoe and tenderly touching her ankle as though it might explode at any minute if too much pressure was applied.

Shannon took the opportunity to scuttle through the kitchen, pausing to glance at the orders stacked on the counter, then hustled outside into the restaurant.

Yes, so what if she was sad? A sad twenty-five-year-old girl who had fled Ireland in a welter of misery and had grasped at the giggling normality of fantasising about a mysterious customer who had fired her imagination. Didn’t her imagination deserve to be fired after what she had been through? It was all a silly game but silly games had been just what her depressed soul had needed.

She walked briskly over to his table and appeared to be startled at finding him there.

If she had been Sandy, she would have been far more elaborate when it came to playing startled. Instead, she smiled with consummate politeness and said, ‘Oh! What a pleasant surprise to see you here at lunchtime, sir! Shall I take your order or are you waiting for someone?’

‘Oh! And what a pleasant surprise, seeing you at lunchtime, and, yes, you may take my order for a drink but I am waiting for someone.’

He had a deep, slow voice that had a disturbing tendency to curl around her nervous system, which was what it was doing now. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her with amusement.

‘I thought your little blonde friend was serving me.’

‘Oh, Sandy’s hurt her ankle. She’s sitting for a few minutes.’

‘In that case, I’ll have a bottle of the Sancerre. Could you make sure that there’s ice in my glass? I like my white wine very cold.’

‘Of course, sir. Will that be all?’

‘Now, there’s a leading question,’ he murmured, and Shannon’s colour rose. Was he flirting? No. Impossible. The man might be terrifyingly good-looking but he was also highly conventional. Didn’t he wear impeccably tailored suits and read the Financial Times every morning?

She cleared her throat and met his dark eyes steadily. ‘Perhaps I could bring you a little appetiser to sample while you wait for your friend? One of our chefs has prepared some delicious crab and prawn pastries.’

‘Tempting.’

‘Or you could wait until your partner arrives.’

‘My partner?’ he drawled with lazy amusement. ‘In what context would you be using the word “partner”?’

Shannon looked at him in confusion. She’d assumed that his lunch date was with a woman. Maybe even his wife, although he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Or maybe, she thought sheepishly, she had just been fishing for information.

‘You blush very easily. Has anyone ever told you that? And when you blush, you look even more like a schoolgirl, especially with those braids on either side. What sort of partner do you think I’m meeting for lunch? A female partner, perhaps?’

‘I’m very sorry, sir. I just assumed…perhaps your wife…or maybe a female friend…’

‘I don’t have a wife, actually, and a female friend…’ He let his voice linger on the description for a few seconds while he continued to watch her gravely. ‘What an extraordinarily quaint way of putting it. Alas, though, no female friend on the scene either.’

Her surprise must have registered on her face because he laughed softly and raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes, I’m one of those sad old men who is still waiting for the right woman to come along and make an honest man of him.’ Disconcertingly, the mildness in his voice seemed to encourage a response to this, but for the life of her Shannon couldn’t think of a thing to say. She got the distinct impression, in fact, that the man was trying to tease her.

‘I’m sure that’s not the case,’ she replied tartly, shoving the order pad into the pocket of her apron and doing something pointless with the cutlery on the table because she was rather enjoying the feeling of being watched by those incredible eyes.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘If that will be all, sir, I’ll just go and fetch your wine.’

‘You mean you’re leaving me in the middle of my unanswered question?’

‘I’m very busy at the moment, sir.’ She drew herself up to her full height of five feet three and looked down at the darkly amused face. ‘I’ll return with your drinks order…’

‘And some of the delicious crab and prawn pastries…’

‘What? Oh, yes. Right.’

It was the strangest conversation she’d had with him since he’d appeared through the door months earlier and she found that she was shaking when she returned to the kitchens. Let that be a lesson to her not to indulge her curiosity! She’d been bitten by the speculation bug and he’d returned the favour with panache, deliberately playing verbal games with an air of complete fake gallantry. She would be better off getting back to the work she was paid to do.

‘Your foot’s completely better,’ she informed Sandy, when she managed to eventually corner her, ‘and table four wants a bottle of Sancerre. A bucket of ice on the table as well.’

‘Oh, dear. I take it your curiosity has been satisfied?’

‘The man,’ Shannon said loftily, ‘is not quite the paragon of politeness we thought he was.’

Sandy’s eyes gleamed with sudden alertness. ‘Ooh… Tell me more… Was he rude?’

‘No.’ Shannon sat down and rustled lots of paper into a stack then she pushed a button on her computer so that the screen lit up. How was she supposed to get any work done when her desk was stuck here off the end of the kitchens without even a partition to separate one from the other? It was noisy and disorienting and she felt giddy.

‘Oh. Did he make a pass at you, then?’

Shannon’s eyes shot to her friend’s with horror. ‘He most certainly did not!’ she denied vehemently.

‘Then what did the man do?’

‘He…he… Nothing really, I suppose,’ she said lamely. ‘But you can carry on serving him, and you’d better hurry with his wine before he marches in here to find out what’s going on. Oh, and he wants some of those crabby pastry things as well.’

She would take no further interest in him, or his lunch companion for that matter.

So when, ten minutes later, Alfredo announced to her that she would have to help out with the serving, she point-blank refused. Albeit in a pleading tone of voice and sheltering behind the excuse of having to catch up on her paperwork.

‘Are you disobeying me, missy?’ Alfredo’s jowls wobbled and he folded his arms expressively. He had an array of menacing gestures which routinely failed to work because his jolly approach to life was always too near the surface. He was a sucker for giving leftovers to their little coterie of down-and-outs who stopped by every night at closing time and sometimes he would force them to comment on some of his concoctions. How could anyone resist Alfredo?

Which was why Shannon ended up sticking on the apron again with a little sigh of frustration. As luck would have it, table four needed their order. She decided that it would be good practice at smiling brightly and acting like a sophisticated Londoner who could handle most things without batting an eyelid, which was the image she was steadily trying to create. On no account would she allow the man, still nameless, to think that he had thrown her into a tizzy with his word games.

She approached his table with the plates, studiously avoiding eye contact, and gently deposited the halibut in front of him. Then she decided to further test her savoir-faire by asking him whether his wine was all right.

‘Enough ice, sir?’

‘A bucket is more than enough,’ he agreed in a murmur. ‘And the little crab pastries were truly exquisite. My compliments to the chef.’

‘I’ll pass on the message,’ Shannon said, rather proud at her self-containment.

‘Very obliging of you.’ He looked at his food and she had a sneaking suspicion that there was something resembling a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth.

She turned to his companion and the practised smile froze. She could feel the colour drain away from her face.

‘You!’ she whispered, clutching the plate of food. ‘What are you doing here!’ Her fragile mastery over her emotions crumbled spectacularly away in the face of Eric Gallway, who was sitting back in his chair, looking at her with smiling, polite blankness. He was as blond-haired and blue-eyed as she remembered, with the plastic good looks of someone who had spent a lifetime cultivating their outward image to the detriment of everything else. He’d captured her with his looks and then used every ounce of smooth charm at his disposal to try and get her into bed with him. Goodness knew, he might have succeeded as well in the end if she hadn’t found out about his wife and his children and the whole life he had conveniently concealed while promising her happy-ever-afters and wedded bliss. Only then had he turned vicious and the mask had slipped away to reveal a small man with a nasty, cruel mind.

‘Excuse me, do I know you, miss?’