The Reluctant Surrender

Whilst he was speaking he was studying the occupants of the room, his gaze cold and analytical, giving nothing away—until he saw and recognised Giselle. On her he allowed his gaze to rest just that little bit longer, so that she would be aware of his recognition of her and be forced to recognise the mistake she had made when she had stolen his parking spot.

Giselle felt the anger in his gaze scorching her conscience, but years of forcing herself never to appear outwardly vulnerable had her lifting her head and meeting his gaze head-on.

She was daring to challenge him? Saul was a recognisably formidable man, whom no one defied—especially not someone who was in the wrong, and especially not when that someone was financially dependent on him, as this woman most decidedly was. He was used to women attempting to bring themselves to his attention because they desired him and his wealth, not so that they could challenge him.

Twice now she had angered him, which meant that she now had two debts to repay—and he would see that she settled up, Saul decided as the senior partner began to introduce his junior architects to him. Why, why, of all the men parking their cars in London had she had to steal the parking spot of this man? Giselle agonised inwardly. There was no point in telling herself that her behaviour had been out of character and born of desperation—that would not mean anything to the man slowly making his way towards her.

One by one he spoke to all the juniors, asking them which part of the plan they had worked on. Bill, of course, immediately went into his ‘I’m a team player and I get everyone onside with me’ routine, whilst at the same time managing to send a look in her direction which said that she was not part of that team. Little did Bill know that he had no need to try to make their new client have doubts about her. She’d already done a wonderful job of that herself.

Her stomach tense with apprehension, Giselle waited, and waited, knowing that retribution was going to fall, and knowing too that he was enjoying drawing out her torment.

And then he was standing in front of her, the powerful magnetic quality of his personality causing her to take a step back from him

‘And you, Ms…?’

‘Giselle,’ Giselle answered. ‘Giselle Freeman.’

‘And your contribution to the plans was…?’

‘Cold storage, wasn’t it?’ someone laughed, but Giselle ignored them.

‘I worked on the air conditioning, with an ecological brief to be incorporated,’ she said stiffly.

‘A brief which I think I am correct in saying is currently running over-budget?’ Saul pointed out as he allowed his gaze to slide slowly and thoroughly over her.

He’d picked up on the look Bill had given her and had guessed that she was as unpopular with them as she’d made herself with him. That would mean that she was not an effective team player, and that would hinder work on any project in which she participated. He was surprised that the practice kept her on.

Giselle’s heart pounded with fear. She’d been transferred to work on the air conditioning because it had run over-budget and because she was known to be good at working within budget—but she could hardly say so when not even Mr Shepherd had come to her defence.

Saul Parenti was playing with her, she knew. He was going to ask for her to be removed from the project, she could tell, and then she would probably be sacked. A cold sweat began to break out on her skin, and her stomach was churning with nausea. She couldn’t lose her job. She mustn’t. And beneath her fear was an angry contempt for this man who was using his power to torment her that she dared not let him see.

‘I am not happy with the car parking arrangements for the complex,’ Saul continued, turning back to the senior partner and breaking the tense silence that had gripped the room. ‘Perhaps Giselle should work on those, whilst someone with more experience takes over from her with the air conditioning.’

Giselle could feel her face burning. He had both insulted her professional ability and scored a point over her for her morning run-in with him. He had humiliated her publicly, she admitted helplessly, as the senior partner hastily assured him that, yes, indeed, she could do exactly that.

As Saul Parenti left the office with Mr Shepherd, Giselle lifted her chin. She wasn’t going to let anyone, least of all him, know how hurt and afraid she felt.

She was still daring to challenge him, Saul thought furiously as he saw her lifted chin. Well, she’d soon learn that that was a dangerous mistake. Dangerous for her.

CHAPTER TWO

SEVERAL hours later, still seated in one of the senior partners’ offices, whilst they thrashed out the details of the revised plans, Saul found that his thoughts were still straying irritatingly to Giselle.

It was unheard of for any woman to occupy his thoughts when they should be focused on more important matters, and turning this project from the disaster it had been heading for into a financially successful venture was important to him both on a business and a personal level. His success as an entrepreneur had brought him plenty of competitors who resented his success and would be happy to see him fail.

But he was not going to fail—as he had already been making plain to the senior partners via his caustic condemnation of the excesses proposed by the island’s previous owner and what Saul considered to be the firm’s lax attitude to the control and costing of the plans it had been responsible for drawing up.

‘I do not have the time to sift through every detail of each part of the plan and its costing to ensure that your people are doing what I have instructed them to do,’ Saul pointed out acerbically. ‘And yet it is essential that they do exactly that if this project is to be successful and ultimately financially viable.’

‘I accept that.’ Mr Shepherd nodded.

‘Good. To ensure that my wishes are carried out what I propose is that you second to me one of your best junior architects—someone who would be directly responsible to me for ensuring that the plans adhere to my requirements, and for alerting both me and you should they fail to do so.’

‘That sounds an excellent idea,’ the Senior Partner agreed.

‘I shall require someone well qualified and able to carry out such a role,’ Saul told him warningly.

‘Of course—and I think I know exactly the right person. You met her earlier—Giselle Freeman.’

Saul looked sharply at the senior partner to assure himself that the other man was not attempting some kind of ridiculous joke. The last person he would want for such a role was Giselle Freeman. The older man’s expression, though, was completely serious and free from humour, leaving Saul to battle with a variety of unfamiliar emotions. It was very rare for him to be caught off-guard, and even more rare for him to find that he was in a situation he did not wish to be in and could not easily get out of. Shepherd might not be joking, but Saul’s suspicions were aroused that he could be trying to offload an unwanted and ineffective member of his staff off on him. He certainly wasn’t going to allow that to happen, and thankfully—because of his suspicions— Saul could now see a way of rejecting the other man’s recommendation.

‘Yes. I remember. She’s been working on the air conditioning plans. I gained the impression that she isn’t very popular with her colleagues. Anyone seconded to me in the role I envisage will have to be able to work well with other people.’

‘There is some hostility towards Giselle in that office,’ the senior partner agreed. ‘But it is not her fault.’ He sighed, and then continued, ‘The truth is that Giselle is far better qualified than her colleagues. She graduated with honours and won an internationally acclaimed prize for her final-year project. She’s a dedicated, hardworking professional with the qualifications to have a glittering career in front of her. The reality is that because of the downturn we simply don’t have the work for her here that would put her skills to their best use. She’s extremely loyal, though. An exemplary employee. I happen to know that in her first year here with us she was approached by two different headhunters working on behalf of international concerns. One job offer was in the Arabian Gulf, the other was in Singapore, but she chose to stay with us. She’s only been working on the air con plans because the chap who was doing so before made such a complete hash of things that we had to move him on to something less demanding.’

Saul’s expression had grown more grim with every word of praise the senior partner had given Giselle. Praise for her was not, after all, what he had wanted to hear—but now that he had heard it, and if she was as good as the senior partner was claiming, it would look decidedly odd and unbusinesslike if he refused to have her working for him. Saul was too good a businessman to allow his personal feelings to affect his business decisions. She might not appeal to him as a woman, but as an architect she was apparently very much ‘best in class’. And he simply did not have time to waste sifting through a whole raft of possible candidates with potentially inferior abilities. The reality was that the project needed to get underway and be completed with some speed if he was to make the profit he wanted from it.

‘Very well,’ he agreed, before warning, ‘but if I find she isn’t up to the job then I’ll expect you to take her back and supply me with someone else.’

Having dealt with the senior partner, Saul resolved grimly that if Giselle was to be seconded to work for him then there was one thing she would have to be taught—and speedily. The rules he made she would have to obey, or face the consequences.

‘I imagine you will want the secondment to commence as soon as possible?’ said the senior partner.

‘Yes,’ Saul confirmed. He suspected that Giselle Freeman would want to work for him as little as he wanted her to, and that would certainly afford him a certain amount of cynical satisfaction—that and making sure she knew just how much she had transgressed by stealing the car parking space for which he had been waiting so patiently. He already had a plan to make sure she knew that, though. He had already confirmed that the Human Resources department held copies of the keys to all the company cars, and now the spare keys to Giselle’s car were in his pocket.

Not that he should be wasting his valuable mental energy on Giselle, Saul warned himself. He had far more important things to think about—one of the most pressing of which was the financial problems currently being experienced by his cousin.

Normally Saul enjoyed problem-solving. He thrived on juggling a variety of problems and then finding solutions to them. Doing just that had been his way through the bleakness of his despair in the long months after his parents’ death, when he had struggled to cope with their loss.

They had been killed when a building had collapsed on them after they had gone to the aid of victims of an earthquake disaster in South America. The pain his parents’ death had brought him had shocked him. Like their deaths, he hadn’t been prepared for it. His overwhelming emotion initially had been anger—anger because they had risked and lost their lives, anger because they had not thought of how their deaths might affect him, anger because they had not loved him enough to ensure that they would always be there for him. It had been then that he had recognised the effect the loss of parental love and simply ‘being there’ could have on a child—even when that child was eighteen and officially an adult.

He had sworn then that he would never have a child himself, in case he unwittingly caused it to suffer the pain he himself was suffering. That was when he had also fully recognised just how glad he was that it was his younger cousin who was heir to the family title and lands and not him, that it was on his cousin’s shoulders that the responsibility to do his duty would rest for putting their small landlocked country before his own desires.

Aldo wasn’t like him. He was a quiet, gentle academic—no match for the scheming daughter of a Russian oligarch who was now his wife, and with whom he was so obviously and desperately in love. Poor fool.

Saul did not believe in love. Desire, lust, sexual hunger—yes. But allying those things to emotion and calling it love—no, never. That was not for him. He preferred his emotional freedom and the security it gave him—the knowledge that he would never again suffer the pain he had experienced when he had lost his parents.

Where Aldo thrived on tradition and continuity, Saul thrived on mastering challenges. And the Kovoca Island project was turning out to be a very considerable challenge indeed. Under-funded and over-budget, the original project had contributed to the financial downfall of the island’s previous owner—who, it seemed to Saul, had wanted to outdo Dubai in his plans for the island.

Saul had already drawn a red line through his predecessor’s plans for an underwater hotel, complete with a transparent underwater walkway, and for a road connecting the hotel and the island to the mainland. Just as he had drawn a red line through an equally over-ambitious plan to turn the island’s single snow-capped mountain into a winter ski resort, complete with imported snow.

It was a pity that for now at least he could not draw a similar red line though Giselle Freeman’s involvement in the project.

Everyone else might be celebrating the fact that the new owner of the Kovoca Island had given the go-ahead to the previous owner’s project and was keeping them on as its architects, and were keen to show their commitment by working late into the evening, but Giselle had another client to deal with—which was why right now she was on her way to the car park to collect her car. She would drive over to the shabby offices of the small charity which, having been left a plot of land, was now keen to develop it into a community centre and accommodation for homeless people. The charity had appealed for architectural help with the project and Giselle had taken it on as a non-fee-paying commission, in her own free time, with the agreement of her employers that she could use their facilities.

It was important not only that the new building blended in with its surroundings and provided the facilities the charity wanted, but also that it would be affordable to build and to run, and Giselle had spent a great deal of her spare time looking into various ways of meeting all three of those targets.

Then tonight when she got home she would have to e-mail the matron of the retirement home in which her great-aunt lived to see if her aunt had recovered from her cold yet.