Sleeping With The Boss

‘Stately home?’

‘I‘ll discuss it with you in my office.’ He stood up and raked his fingers through his hair. Alice looked at him and it flew through her mind—a thought so brief that it barely left an indentation—that she had yet to come across a man as compellingly attractive as Victor Temple. The angles of his face were hard, bordering on arrogant, but for all that there was a certain underlying sensuality about him. It was there in his mouth, in his dark-fringed eyes, in the supple grace of his body. He never worked out and probably wouldn’t recognise the inside of a gym if he saw it, but his body was sleek and well-toned. A lean, athletic body which was apparent beneath the cut of his suit.

Was that one of the reasons why they worked so well together? She could acknowledge, in a detached, clinical way, that he was almost frighteningly good-looking, but he did not appeal to her. Tall, dark-haired and handsome all added up to the sort of man she knew, instinctively, was best avoided. She had already made one mistake in that direction and it was a mistake she would never repeat.

In turn, she was quite simply not his type. He did not sport a line of ever-changing women. She had met them both, and they both slotted into the same category—sexy, blonde and, at least from the outside, highly undemanding on the intellectual front. They had both struck her as the sort of women who accessorised what they wore to match their lipstick and nail varnish, and in high winds would somehow still manage to hold onto an immaculate hairdo and impeccable make-up.

His last secretary, who had left six months before she had arrived, had been, according to some of the girls in the office, a fifty-something harridan with a penchant for tweed skirts, even in summer, and sensible shoes. Then had come a dizzying and unsatisfactory array of young girls, none of whom had stayed the pace.

Alice knew that what he appreciated in her were her mind and her lack of obvious sex appeal. It was either a flattering or alternatively depressing comment on her, depending from which side of the fence it was viewed. As for her, she welcomed it with relief.

When she went into his office, he was on the phone; he leaned back in his chair and motioned to her to sit down, watching her as she did so.

Alice was suddenly acutely conscious of her appearance. There had been nothing in the slightest way sexual about his look, but there had been a certain unexpected appreciation there—must a flicker, but enough to register in her subconscious. The applications of sun cream had done the trick, eventually. She had not developed a deep tan, but there was a pale bronze glow about her which was quite becoming.

She sat down now, smoothing her skirt with her fingers, and gazed straight ahead of her, out through the window to the oppressive blue-grey sky outside. Glow or not glow, she didn’t need a mirror to tell her what she lacked. Her straight dark hair, falling to her shoulders, was shiny enough and easy to look after, but, coupled with her fine-boned face, somehow managed to give her a background, girl-next-door look, and she lacked curves. She knew that and it didn’t bother her except, occasionally, when she happened to be in the company of someone blatantly sexy, at which times she would feel the smallest twinge of envy that there was an entire world of clinging, low-cut dresses that would for ever be out of her range.

‘Hello?’ She heard the deep timbre of his voice and refocused her attention back to the present.

‘Sorry. I was miles away.’

‘And not a particularly pleasant place, judging from the expression.’

Alice blushed and looked down at the notepad on her lap. Sometimes it was easy to forget just how shrewd Victor Temple could be when it came to reading other people’s minds. His own, he kept suitably under lock and key.

‘Just thinking what needs doing when I get back home,’ she improvised, and he raised his eyebrows with a certain amount of sarcastic amusement

‘Well, so sorry to drag you back to mundane office matters.’ He sat back with his arms folded and subjected her to a leisurely stare. ‘I can’t imagine your flat being anything other than scrupulously tidy,’ he drawled, which brought more colour to her cheeks and she returned his look with a Sash of sudden anger.

‘It’s a mess,’ she said flatly, defying him to contradict her. ‘Books everywhere, clothes everywhere, dishes not washed.’ She stared down to conceal the rebellious glint in her eyes. Did he think that she was prim and proper and precise? Did he think that, because she was efficient at work and well organised, she was exactly the same out of work? For all he knows, she thought, I could lead a scorching and raunchy life the minute I leave this office block.

‘I’m impressed,’ he told her, amused at her tone of voice. ‘Vanessa not pulling her weight?’

‘Post-holiday clutter,’ Alice said, stifling an inclination to scowl. ‘We’ve hardly had time to unpack our cases.’

‘Why don’t you get a cleaner?’

‘Because it’s an unnecessary luxury.’

‘Don’t I pay you enough?’

‘More than enough,’ she said, restlessly wondering where this conversation was leading. She glanced at him from under her lashes, trying to determine his mood. ‘I happen to rather enjoy cleaning,’ she murmured finally. ‘I find it relaxing.’

‘You’re the first woman I’ve ever heard say that.’

Perhaps you mix with the wrong sort, she felt like telling him. Not that he would have appreciated women who wanted to tidy his house for him. She thought that he would probably run a mile if he were ever to be confronted with a domestic type. Domesticity was not a characteristic he would find especially appealing in a member of the opposite sex. He didn’t want cosy nights in watching television, he didn’t want home-cooked meals, he didn’t want the little lady ever to wear an apron and attempt to tidy him up into a candidate for marriage.

‘You were telling me that you have a new client on board?’

‘I have a file here somewhere.’ He pulled open the drawer of his desk and rummaged briefly inside, frowning. ‘Now where did I put the damned thing? I was sure I stuck it in my drawer.’

‘Perhaps Rebecca filed it away,’ Alice said helpfully.

‘Why would she do that?’ Victor asked irritably.

‘Because she might consider it one of her duties? Filing tends to come into the job specification for a secretary. Even for those who don’t complete their secretarial courses.’

He slammed shut the drawer of his desk and favoured her with a narrowed look. ‘Sarcasm, Alice?’ He raised his eyebrows expressively. ‘Since when?’

Alice didn’t say anything. Normally, she bit back any retorts she might have fermenting in her head. Normally, she maintained an even, placid demeanour. She did her job and very rarely allowed herself the luxury of personal input. But two weeks in the sun had stirred something inside her. There had been a lot of young couples there, blissfully wrapped up in one another, oblivious to the outside world. The hotel specialised in honeymoon holidays, and from that point of view had not been chosen with a great deal of foresight, because for the first time Alice had been conscious of her own relentlessly single state. True, Vanessa was single as well, but her life was brimming over with men. She emanated a certain vivacious attractiveness that drew them in droves.

Her own situation was, she acknowledged realistically, slightly different. No men beating a path to her door, although she had a few male friends who occasionally asked her out to dinner, or the theatre, and it was only now, strangely, that she felt the lack of them. Perhaps, she thought, because she had crossed the thirty threshold. Time suddenly seemed to be moving faster. The gentle breeze that had flicked over the pages of the calendar was gathering momentum, flicking those pages faster and faster.

She smiled at Victor, meeting his speculative look with studied incomprehension, and decided that any restlessness was best left at home, or at least locked away in a compartment in her head that was inaccessible to anyone apart from herself.

‘What did you and that flatmate of yours get up to on holiday?’ he asked curiously, and Alice could have kicked herself. Victor Temple enjoyed getting his teeth into a challenge. For the past year and a half, she had shown him one face, and although at the beginning he had asked polite questions about her outside life he had quickly realised that answers would not be forthcoming, and he had soon lost interest.

Now, stupidly, she had afforded him a glimpse of someone else behind the efficient smile.

‘Oh, the usual things,’ Alice said vaguely.

‘Really? Like what?’

‘You said it yourself: we swanned around the pool and turned to leather.’ Most of the couples, she thought, had looked young enough to be her children. Or perhaps she just felt old enough to be their mother. A sudden, sour taste of dissatisfaction rose to her throat and subsided again. Whatever was the matter with her? she wondered irritably. She had never been prone to self-pity, and she hoped that she wasn’t about to become a victim of it now.

‘You couldn’t have spent a fortnight doing just that.’

‘We went to the beach a few times as well.’ She would have liked to somehow draw the subject back to the stately home, and the portfolio of other clients awaiting attention, but she knew that to have done that would only have succeeded in sharpening his curiosity still further. In a minute, he would become bored trying to extract information from her and he would give up.

‘Good bathing?’

‘Cold.’

‘And what about in the evenings? What do young single girls get up to when they go abroad on holiday?’ He grinned, amused at her discomfort, which annoyed her even more.

‘I would have thought that you knew the answer to that one,’ Alice said evenly. ‘After all, we do enough advertisements on the subject.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He sat back and gazed at her thoughtfully. ‘Nightclubs, bars.’ He paused. ‘Sex.’ He allowed the word to drop between them, like forbidden fruit, and she went bright red.

‘I’m not that young,’ was all she could think of saying by way of reply.

‘You mean that you’re too old for nightclubs? Bars? Or sex? Or all three?’

She snapped shut her notepad and glared at him openly. ‘What I do on holiday is none of your concern, Mr Temple. If you’re really that interested in finding out what the young single female gets up to on holiday, then I suggest you go along yourself and find out firsthand. I’m sure that you’d find no end of women willing to show you.’ She heard herself with dismay and confusion, alarmed that he had managed to provoke her into a response that was extraordinarily out of keeping with her normally unobtrusive work persona.

‘Well, well, well.’ He linked his fingers together and inspected her. A long, deliberate and leisurely inspection that was as unwelcome as it was disconcerting. She could feel her nails biting into the notepad and for the life of her she couldn’t think of a way of wriggling out of her embarrassment.

‘Quite a show of temper,’ he said, in the voice of a scientist who suddenly discovered that his experimental mouse had unexpected talents.