The Corporate Bridegroom

It was only after their father’s near fatal heart attack that she and her sisters had discovered the truth. That, far from being sedentary, their partners—the venture capitalist, the banker and the lawyer—were empire-building on their own account.

And now they wanted the Claibourne empire too.

This was the banker. A man who’d already demonstrated that he was cool to freezing point. And it was her task to convince him that she was an efficient businesswoman capable of running a major company. She hadn’t made a great start.

It was okay. It would be okay. He’d just caught her on a bad day. Tomorrow she’d be fine. She’d soon make up lost ground, demonstrate her worth. Heck, until she’d taken charge of public relations the store had been about as exciting as a dowager duchess. She’d turned it around. She could handle this.

Right now, though, she was approaching the worst moment in her life, and the last thing she needed was an encounter with Mr Frosty.

‘I’m really sorry about the coffee,’ she said, attempting to match him with a smile about as cool as it could get and still be a smile. ‘I would have apologised if you’d given me the chance.’ She waited for him to acknowledge that he should have done that. He didn’t. ‘Do please send me the cleaning bill for your trousers.’ Not a flicker of emotion crossed his cold features and she found herself saying, ‘Or you could slip out of them now and someone from Housekeeping will give them a sponge and press…’

She had been trying to help, but instead she had a mental flash of him pacing her office in boxer shorts and blushed. She never blushed. Only when she said something truly stupid. This was clearly a ‘truly stupid’ moment. She glanced at her watch.

‘I have to be somewhere else in about ten minutes, but you’re perfectly welcome to use my office while you wait,’ she added, just so that he understood she wasn’t going to stick around and keep him company. Trouserless.

Any other man of her acquaintance would, by now, be grinning like an idiot and praying that his luck was in. It wouldn’t be, but Niall Macaulay wasn’t to know that. It made no difference; he still gave her a look that would have chilled a volcano. No, she definitely couldn’t compete in the coolness stakes, but at least that was a discernible reaction.

Whether it was better or worse, she couldn’t say and she nervously fluffed her hair. It was a ‘girly’ gesture that men either loved or loathed—and one that she’d thought she’d got well under control. Clearly Mr Macaulay would loathe it. Which made it suddenly seem very attractive. She preferred any reaction, even a negative one, to nothing. So she did it again, this time loading the irritation factor by smiling at him. Not a cool smile this time, but one of those big, come-and-get-me smiles. The kind of smile that would have left the average man sitting up and begging like an eager puppy. Not Mr Macaulay. But then he wasn’t average. He was more of just about anything.

He was also ice, through and through.

‘Miss Claibourne, I’ve been asked by my cousin to spend some time shadowing you at work. Assuming, that is, you can spare valuable time from shopping to actually do any.’ She followed his gaze, which had come to rest on the pile of designer bags she’d deposited on the sofa.

‘Don’t knock shopping, Mr Macaulay. Our ancestors invented shopping for fun. It made them rich men and it’s the shopping habit that keeps the dividends rolling in.’

‘Not for long, surely,’ he replied, with a lift of one dark brow, ‘if the directors shop elsewhere.’

She picked up her desk diary and began to flip through it—anything but meet that chilly gaze. ‘You clearly have a lot to learn if you imagine couturier designers would sell anything but their prêt-à-porter lines through a department store. Even one as stylish as Claibourne & Faraday.’ She gave a little breath of quiet satisfaction. She felt so much better for that. Then she glanced sideways at him. ‘Shall we match diaries? If you can spare valuable time for such trivia?’ He didn’t look that excited by the prospect. His response was the merest shrug which could have meant anything, ‘It’s just that I can’t see you and your cousins being that keen to “play shop”,’ she pressed.

‘Play shop?’ he repeated. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you actually served behind the counter.’ It was her turn to keep silent while her brain spun wildly. India had warned her to just do her job, keep quiet and not make smart remarks. Unfortunately her mouth had a mind of its own. ‘Do you?’ he pressed.

‘Not now,’ she admitted. ‘But we’ve all done it in the past, when we were learning the business. Do any of you really know the first thing about running a department store? The retail industry isn’t for amateurs.’

‘Really?’ That at least appeared to amuse him. Or was that a suggestion that he considered her the amateur? If that were so, he did have a lot to learn.

‘Really. You might be the world’s greatest investment banker, but would you know how many pairs of silk knickers to order for the Christmas market?’

‘Would you?’ he asked.

Oh, yes. It had been a question in the trivia quiz on the store’s website, that she’d run in the dead month of February. Before she could have the satisfaction of telling him the number, he continued, ‘I’m certain you don’t get that closely involved in day-to-day matters. You have department heads and buyers whose job it is to make those decisions.’

Only partly true, as she was sure he knew. ‘The buck stops on the top floor, Mr Macaulay. I’m simply making the point that I’ve been down there on the shop floor. I’ve worked in every department. I’ve driven delivery vans—’

‘You’ve even been one of Santa’s little helpers, according to the Evening Post,’ he interrupted. ‘How much did you learn from that?’

‘Never to do it again,’ she offered, with a genuine smile—one she hoped he might accept as a peace-offering. Then maybe they could stop sparring and start over. As equals.

‘You didn’t know about the agreement, did you?’ he responded, bypassing the peace-offering and going straight for the jugular. ‘That you’d have to surrender the store when your father retired?’

She was a fraction too long in telling him that he was wrong. While she was still reaching for words that wouldn’t make a liar of her, he said, ‘I thought not. Your father should have been honest with you all from the outset. It would have been a lot kinder.’

That would have been a first, Romana thought. If ever a man had lived with his head in the sand… ‘We have no intention of meddling with the details, you know. We’ll employ the best management team available to run the store—’

‘We’re the best management team available,’ she retorted. Probably. She had no point of comparison. But they were family. No matter how much a high-flying executive was paid, he would never care in quite the same way. ‘Leave it to us and we’ll continue to deliver the profits you’ve enjoyed for years without ever having to lift a finger.’

‘And without having any say in what happens. Profits haven’t budged in three years. The store is stagnating. It’s time for a change,’ he announced.

Oh, knickers! The banker had done his homework. She’d bet he could tell to a penny how much they’d made in the last fiscal year. Last week, in all probability.

‘The retail market has been difficult all round,’ she said. She’d already said way too much. India was right. She should have kept her head down and her mouth shut.

‘I know.’ He sounded almost sympathetic. Romana wasn’t fooled for a minute. ‘But Claibourne & Farraday appears to have become entranced with its own image as the most luxurious store in London.’

‘Well, it is,’ she declared. ‘It may not be the largest, but it has a style of its own. And it’s definitely the most comfortable store in town.’

‘Comfortable? As in old-fashioned, boring and lacking in new ideas?’

Romana almost winced at this telling description. ‘And you have them?’ she demanded. They might have sat around bemoaning their father’s refusal to modernise, get away from the mahogany and red-carpet nineteenth-century decor. Let in some light. She wasn’t about to tell Niall Macaulay that. ‘You have brilliant new ideas?’ she asked. It was far too late to keep her head down.

‘Of course we have plans.’ Niall Macaulay said this as if anything else was unthinkable. All buttoned-up in his dark suit, with not a scintilla of passion behind his stone-grey banker’s eyes, what did he think he could bring to the greatest department store in London?

‘I didn’t say plans, I said ideas. Plans are something altogether different. You might be planning to sell out to one of the chains,’ she said. ‘None of the hassle, just loads of money to play with at your bank. And if you were holding the golden share, we wouldn’t be able to do a thing to stop—’

‘Romana…’ A disembodied voice from the intercom stopped her in full flow. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but if you don’t leave right now—’

Niall Macaulay glanced at his watch. ‘Five minutes to the second,’ he said.

Five minutes too long, she thought. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Macaulay, fascinating as this exchange of views has been, I do have to be somewhere else right now. On Claibourne & Farraday business. I’ll have to leave you to compare diaries with my secretary. Just let her know when you can spare some time for the store and I’ll include you in my plans.’ Without waiting to listen to his views on that suggestion, she grabbed her bags and, not bothering to wait for the lift, headed for the stairs.

Spare some time? Niall wasn’t about to let a chit of a girl get away with a put-down like that. She was the one not giving full value and he was about to prove it. Collecting his overcoat and umbrella, he followed her.

‘Miss Claibourne?’

The uniformed commissionaire at the main entrance had summoned a taxi and was holding the door. She stepped in. She was in a hurry and didn’t need another dose of Niall Macaulay. ‘That didn’t take long,’ she said. Not nearly long enough. He’d obviously followed her straight down the stairs. Then, because politeness appeared to demand it, she said, ‘Can I drop you somewhere, Mr Macaulay?’

‘No.’ Her relief was short-lived as he climbed in beside her. ‘I’m going wherever you’re going, Miss Claibourne. When I said I was going to spend some time shadowing you, I wasn’t referring to some stage-managed occasion, set up for the purpose. I meant now.’

‘Now?’ she repeated stupidly. ‘You mean now, this minute?’ She laughed—an unconvincing ha-ha-ha sort of laugh—hoping that he was joking. He didn’t join in. Her mistake; the man didn’t joke. ‘Forgive me. I understood you had a bank to run. I assumed you were a busy man, that you’d want to pick and choose.’ She hoped she looked sincere when she said, ‘You might prefer not to get involved in everything I do,’ because she really meant it. She didn’t want to be involved in everything she did.

‘I’m here. You’re here. Let’s not make a performance over this. Let’s just get on with it.’

He thought she was trying to hide something, and it was very tempting to say yes and let him see for himself, but really it wouldn’t be a good start. ‘Trust me, you really don’t want to shadow me today.’

‘Trust me when I say that I really do, Miss Claibourne. If I don’t stay with you all the time, how will I ever learn?’

And she’d thought the taxi driver had been sarcastic.

‘You don’t understand. I’m not—’