Boardroom To Bedroom: His Darling Valentine / The Boss's Marriage Arrangement

CHAPTER TEN

THE BOSS’S MARRIAGE ARRANGEMENT

Penny Jordan

CHAPTER ONE

AS ALWAYS when she had to walk past her boss’s open office door, Harriet felt her body tense and she forced herself to look straight ahead and not into the room.

She should never have agreed to work for Matthew Cole, she admitted, reflecting darkly as she did so that if it hadn’t been for her best friend then she wouldn’t have done. That was the trouble with best friends; sometimes—too many times, in her experience—they tended to believe that they knew what was best! Her particular best friend certainly did, which was why he had coaxed, cajoled and generally used every trick in the book to get her to submit her CV for Matthew Cole’s personal appraisal.

Yes, that was right, her best friend was male! She and Ben had been friends since their junior school days, and that friendship had strengthened when they had both chosen to go to the same university.

Now, four years after they’d left university, their friendship was as strong as ever—which was why she had taken Ben’s advice and applied for the job at the firm of architects and design consultants, which he had insisted would be perfect for her.

And, to be fair to him, in all probability it would have been. If the job hadn’t come with strings. Strings that were firmly held in the uncompromising grip of the company’s owner, Matthew Cole. And strings which Matthew Cole had absolutely no compunction about pulling extremely hard when he felt like it. Take the way he had dictatorially announced that her desk was to be on the opposite side of the room from Ben’s, even though they were collaborating on the same office design project.

She should have listened to her own inner feelings right from the start, Harriet admitted, her green eyes shadowing as sunlight spilled through the window, burnishing her conker-coloured shoulder length hair. The thickness of her long black eyelashes gave her eyes a certain smouldering sensuality, which was echoed by the warm fullness of her mouth.

As she passed Mathew Cole’s office she let out a sigh of relief. She knew without looking in that he wasn’t there. For some reason she had developed a very sensitive early-warning system that told her very explicitly whenever Matt was about.

If she had had any sense she would have paid far more attention to that stab of shocked awareness and its ricocheting fall out when he had first interviewed her. She should have done, but when Ben had asked her jovially if she had been, as he put it, ‘knocked out by Matt’s sexiness, like every other woman who sets eyes on him,’ she had of course denied being so much as remotely aware of any such thing, never mind affected by it!

Ben had been hugely amused by her reaction, shaking his head and laughing as he told her how women normally reacted to his boss. And that had been her downfall. Because of course when she had been offered the job her own pride had not allowed her to refuse to accept it.

Despite the shock that Matthew Coles’s potent air of sexuality and masculine power had given her, she was totally immune to it—and to him, Harriet assured herself, with blatant disregard for the truth, as she walked into the open plan office she shared with Ben and other members of their team.

‘Nice weekend?’ Ben asked as she sat down.

‘Fine,’ Harriet assured him. ‘Everyone at home sends their love, and your mother has sent some of her damson jam for you.’

Ben groaned. ‘I’ve got a shelf full of the stuff already. You’d think that after twenty-six years she’d know I don’t like damson jam.’

‘Perhaps she’s trying to convert you. Which reminds me—she wants to know when she and your dad are going to get to meet Cindi!’ Harriet laughed, but her laughter died on her lips as she studied Ben’s haggard face.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, her concern intensifying as he shook his head. ‘Come on, Ben,’ she cajoled, ‘this is me—remember!’

She hadn’t forgotten, even if Ben had, how he had helped and comforted her through the break up of her own first big romance during their first year at university.

‘It’s Cindi,’ Ben admitted unhappily. ‘We had a bit of row over the weekend. And it isn’t the first one either. Harry, I just don’t understand her,’ he said vehemently as he swung around in his chair to look at her. ‘I mean, one minute she’s “let’s move in together and start planning a future” and then the next she’s saying, “I’m out with my friends and I don’t want to know you.” And all because…’

‘Because what?’ she pressed, but Ben shook his head. Harriet sighed. Cindi, the girl Ben was dating, had recently joined the company too, although since they were working on different projects, and she herself had been away on holiday, Harriet hadn’t had any opportunity to get to know her as yet. She knew that Cindi and Ben had been dating, and that they had fallen head over heels in love with one another.

‘Everyone has lovers’ tiffs, Ben.’ She tried to comfort him. ‘Perhaps give yourselves a chance to talk the problem through together…?’

‘This isn’t a tiff. She’s being totally unreasonable and she knows it. And as for talking it through—!’ His normally easygoing expression hardened. ‘No way I am going to be given ultimatums about the way I live my life!’

Harriet could see that he genuinely believed he had a grievance, but she still tried to lighten his mood by teasing, ‘What has she done? Told you all your old sports stuff has to go?’

When he didn’t respond she looked worriedly at him and said quietly, ‘Okay, so it’s something serious and I’m out of order trying to joke about it, but you can be a stubborn so-and-so at times, and if it’s a matter of giving a bit or losing someone special to you then—’

‘It isn’t as simple as that, Harry, and if she genuinely loved me she wouldn’t need to make such bloody ridiculous conditions because she’d know…’

‘She’d know what?’ Harriet demanded, mystified.

For a minute she thought that Ben wasn’t going to answer, and then, as though he couldn’t help himself, he burst out furiously, ‘She’d know that you’re the closest thing I’ve got to a sister, as well as my best friend, and that no way do you feel any differently about me than I do about you. Hell, just because she’s never had any close friends of the opposite sex doesn’t mean that— And as for saying that you might secretly be in love with me—well, that’s just plain ridiculous!’

It took Harriet several seconds to assimilate what Ben was telling her, but once she had, she protested immediately, ‘She can’t possibly think that! You must have misunderstood.’

‘I wish!’ Ben responded darkly.

‘Look, Ben, let me have a word with her,’ Harriet offered.

‘No. No! It’s no use. She won’t believe you, Harry. And that’s what’s really getting to me. I’ve given her my word that I’ve been totally up front with her about us, but apparently my word isn’t good enough.’ His voice hardened. ‘What she wants—what she says her friends have told her she should demand—is for me to prove to her that there’s nothing going on between you and me by cutting you out of my life completely. She says if I loved her then I’d agree. She says she will not accept me having another woman in my life who means more to me than she does. And she says that if I don’t accept her terms then it means that you do mean more! I’ve tried to make her understand— to see…to admit that she’s being sexist and stupid, and that if she loved me she would accept my word that she’s got it all wrong. After all, I know you a damn sight better than she does. You aren’t secretly in love with me, are you?’

Harriet burst out laughing. ‘No, I am not!’ she assured him truthfully.

From where she stood it was easy for her to see how and why the argument had escalated out of control, even if she did feel affronted by Cindi’s assumption that she was the sort of person who would try to break up someone else’s romance. Take two people who had fallen passionately in love but who did not know one another all that well, add a generous helping of female jealousy, a pinch of insecurity and a good measure of male pride, and what you had were all the ingredients for a very destructive explosion.

Right now Ben might have an angrily stubborn look in his eyes, but Harriet could see the pain he was trying to hide. Automatically she leaned forward and took hold of his hand, giving it a comforting squeeze.

On his way past the large room which housed his creative design team, Matt Cole came to an abrupt halt as he surveyed the intimacy of the way Harriet was leaning towards Ben and reaching for his hand, her eyes liquid with tender emotion.

Matt was thirty-six years old, the head of his own highly innovative and profitable company, and supposed to be possessed of a sharply astute brain—so why the hell had he not recognised what was happening to him the minute he had set eyes on Harriet and taken immediate and evasive action then?

Because he had believed then, in his arrogance, that he had more than enough power and control over his emotions to keep them in check, that was why. He had felt the immediate fierce surge of emotional and physical reaction to her and dismissed its importance, shrugging it and his own feelings aside, telling himself that it hardly mattered that he happened to find her attractive since he had a rule that he never mixed business with pleasure. And, since he had never previously had any problems in sticking to that rule, he hadn’t thought it would pose any problems now.

But he had misjudged the strength of his own feelings. Big time. Very big time.

He was the only child of older parents. His mother had died shortly after his birth, while his father had died when he was in his first year at university, and so all along Matt had focused on his work as a means of providing him with the only kind of security he had told himself he needed.

Marriage and children were on his agenda—eventually. But falling passionately, mindlessly and helplessly in love, and having his whole world turned upside down were not!

But that was exactly what had happened. And, what was more, with every day that passed it was growing harder and harder for him to deal with his feelings.

He had tried to distance himself from Harriet, to cut himself off from what he felt by putting up a façade of cold indifference, but he might as well have tried to breathe without oxygen he acknowledged grimly.

Every day, several times a day, he found himself making some kind of excuse to be in the vicinity of her desk. Every day he watched with a jealousy that made him appalled at himself as she lavished on Ben the attention he longed to have her lavish on him!

He had tried everything, from telling himself he was behaving unprofessionally to telling himself he was behaving ridiculously, but nothing made the slightest difference to what he felt. What he felt right now was that he wanted to stride over to Harriet and take her in his arms and kiss her—if not senseless then at least into a state where she wanted him to the same extent that he wanted her, and to hell with the consequences! But even stronger than his desire to make love to her was his desire to shield and to protect her. To shield her from some of her colleagues’ contemptuous and critical comments about her and to protect her from the consequences of her own behaviour.

It made no difference how often he told himself that as one of his employees she had no more right to his protection than any of the others, or that he had no right to want to protect her. He loved her, and he couldn’t bear to hear what was being said about her. He found it hard to stand to one side and allow the inevitable to happen. Because everyone, it seemed, believed that sooner or later someone, if not Ben himself, was going to tell her to stop making a fool of herself by displaying so plainly her feelings for a man who obviously did not return them.

If an adult human being had to suffer unrequited love, then better by far that they suffer it in secret— as he was doing.

But what right did he have to interfere? Either as her employer or as the man who loved her?

Morally perhaps none! But emotionally… Matt exhaled sharply.