The Boss's Proposal (2 page)

‘So,' the dark, velvety voice drawled, dragging her away from her painful trip down memory lane and back to the present, ‘you claim to be neurotic and highly strung, yet—' he reached forward to a stack of papers on the desk and extracted one, from which he read ‘—you still managed to sustain a reasonably high-powered job in Australia from which you left with glowing recommendations. Odd, wouldn't you agree? Or perhaps your neuroses were under control at that point in time?'

Vicky refrained from comment and instead contented herself with staring out of the window, which offered a view of sky and red-brick buildings.

‘Has Geraldine given you any indication as to why this post has become available?' He moved around the desk and perched on it, so that he was directly facing Vicky, looking down at her.

‘Not in any great detail, no,' Vicky told him, ‘but honestly, there's no point launching into any explanations. The fact of the matter is…' What
was
the fact of the matter? ‘The fact of the matter is that I had really set my heart on working in a typing pool…'

His lips twitched, but when he answered his voice was serious and considering.

‘Of course. I quite understand that you might not want to compromise your undoubted talents by getting a good job with career prospects…'

Vicky shot him a brief look from under thick, dark lashes, momentarily disconcerted by the suggestion of humour beneath the sarcasm. ‘I have an awful lot on my plate
just now,' she said vaguely. ‘I wouldn't want to take on anything demanding because I don't think that I would be able to do it justice.'

‘What?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘
What
have you got on your plate?' His eyes scanned her CV then focused on her.

‘Well,' Vicky stuttered, taken aback by the directness of the question, ‘I've only recently returned from Australia and I have a lot of things to do concerning…my house and generally settling in…' This explanation skirted so broadly around the truth that she could feel the colour rise to her cheeks.

‘Why did you decide to go to Australia?'

‘My mother…passed away…I felt that the change would do me good…and I just happened to stay a great deal longer than I had anticipated. I landed a job in a very good company quite early on and I was promoted in the first six months. I…it was easier than coming back to England and dealing with…'

‘Your loss?'

Vicky stiffened at the perceptiveness behind the question. She'd once considered Shaun to be a perceptive, sensitive person. Perhaps illusions along those lines ran in the Forbes family.

‘I would appreciate it if we could terminate this interview now.' She began getting to her feet, smoothing down the dark grey skirt, nervously brushing non-existent flecks of dust from it rather than face those amazing, unsettling grey eyes. ‘I'm sorry if I've wasted your time. I realise that you're a very busy man, and time is money. Had I been aware of the situation, I would have telephoned to cancel the appointment. As I said, I'm not interested in a job that's going to monopolise my free time.'

‘Your references,' he said coolly, ignoring her pointed attempt to leave his office, ‘from the Houghton Corporation are glowing…' He looked at her carefully while she remained in dithering uncertainty on her feet, unable to turn her back and walk out of the office but reluctant to sit back down and allow him to think that the job in question was open for debate. ‘Very impressive, and all the more so because I know James Houghton very well.'

‘You
know
him?' Several potential catastrophes presented themselves to her when she heard this and she weakly sat back down. It wouldn't do for Max Forbes to contact her old boss in Australia. There were too many secrets hidden away there, secrets she had no intention of disclosing.

‘We went to school together a million years ago.' He pushed himself up from the desk and began prowling around the room, one minute within her line of vision, the next a disembodied voice somewhere behind her. If his tactic was to unsettle her, then he was going about it the right way. ‘He's a good businessman. A recommendation from him counts for a hell of a lot.' He paused and the silence from behind her made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. ‘Where in Australia did you live?'

‘In the city. My aunt has a house there.' There was an element of danger in this line of questioning but Vicky had no idea how to retrieve the situation.

‘Did much socialising?'

‘With whom?' she asked cautiously. It would help, she thought, if he would return within her line of vision so that she could see the expression on his face—but then, on reflection, perhaps it wasn't a bad thing that she couldn't. After all, he would be able to see hers, and she had a great
deal more to hide than he would ever have imagined in a million years.

‘People from your work.' She could sense him as he walked slowly round to the side of her. His presence made her feel clammy and claustrophobic. Out of the corner of her eye, she could make him out as he lounged against the wall, hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, head tilted slightly to one side as though carefully weighing up what she was saying. Weighing it up and, she thought with a flash of sudden foreboding, storing up every word to be used at a later date in evidence against her.

Not that there would
be
a later date, she reminded herself. Powerful though he was, he couldn't compel her to work for his company. He might grill her now because she had been stupid enough to make him think that there was more to her than met the eye, but very shortly she would be gone and he would be nothing more than a freakish reminder of how eerie coincidence could be. The thought of imminent escape steadied her nerves and she even managed to force a smile to her face.

‘Off and on. I had a lot of friends in Sydney. The Australians are a very friendly lot.' She risked a sideways glance at him.

‘So I've been told. My brother certainly thought so.'

‘You had a brother out there?' A slow crawl of treacherous colour stole across her face and she could feel a fine perspiration begin to film above her lip.

‘Shaun Forbes.' He allowed the name to register. ‘My twin.'

He had never told her. She'd known Shaun for nearly a year and a half and he'd never once mentioned that the brother whose name he reviled was his identical twin. She imagined now that it must have been deeply galling to have so spectacularly failed to live up to a brother who
had emerged from the womb at the same time as he had and had been given exactly the same upbringing and privileges, yet had succeeded.

Seeing Max Forbes had been a heart-stopping shock. There was enough in their physical make-up to send her spinning sickeningly back into the past and every memory she had spent so long trying to crush had reared their ugly heads with gleeful malice.

‘He was quite prominent on the social scene, I gather.' His mouth twisted and he turned away and strode towards the desk.

‘No. The name doesn't ring a bell.' The words almost got stuck in her throat. This was what it felt like to be toyed with by the devil, she thought. Life had not been easy since she'd returned to England. The last batch of tenants to occupy her mother's house had been cavalier in their treatment of it and, frustratingly, the estate agents who handled the rental had had nothing to say on the subject. So, on top of the uphill task of finding work and getting her finances straight, there was the little problem of the house, which needed a complete overhaul. Even the walls seemed to smell.

And then there was Chloe.

Vicky half closed her eyes and a wave of nausea rushed through her.

‘I'm surprised. James spent a lot of time in his company. I might have expected that you would have seen him at some point in the offices.'

Vicky, whose vocal cords were failing to co-operate with her brain, shook her head and looked blankly at the man staring at her.

‘No?' he prodded, glancing back down at her CV, and she made an inarticulate, choking sound by way of reply.
‘Well, perhaps not. Shaun probably wouldn't have noticed you, anyway.'

That succeeded in clearing her head admirably. He surely couldn't have meant to insult her, but insult her he had. If only he knew that seek her out was precisely what his hideous brother had done. Charmed her with his smooth conversation and his offerings of flowers and empty flattery. Told her that she was destined to rescue him from himself, thanked her with tears in his eyes for making him want to be a better human being. And she'd fallen for all the claptrap—hook, line and sinker. It hadn't taken long before the mask had begun to disintegrate and she'd begun to see the ugliness behind the charming façade.

‘Thank you very much,' she said coldly.

‘Why did you decide to leave Australia if you had such a brilliant job and hectic social life?'

The question was irrelevant, considering she had no intention of working for the man, but fear of arousing yet more of his curiosity restrained her from telling him to mind his own business.

‘I never intended to build my life out there. I felt that it was time to come back to England.'

Chloe. Everything had centred around Chloe.

‘And you've had temp jobs since returning? The pay's pretty poor, wouldn't you agree?'

‘I get by.' Lousy was the word for it.

‘And you're living—?' For a minute, the piercing grey eyes left her face and perused the paper in front of him. ‘—just outside Warwick…rented place?'

‘My mother left her house to me when she…died. It's been rented out for the past few years.'

He shoved the paper away from him, leaned back in his
chair with his hands folded behind his head and looked at her without bothering to disguise his curiosity.

‘Young woman, who's just returned from abroad, and doubtless wants to refurnish house, rejects job that is vastly superior to the one for which she originally applied. Help me out there with a logical explanation? If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a mystery. I always feel that mysteries are there to be solved, and, by hook or by crook, guess what…?'

‘What?' Vicky asked, mesmerised by his eyes. When she'd first met Shaun, the first thing she'd noticed had been his eyes. Those pale eyes and black hair and the chiselled, beautiful lines of his face. He was like an Adonis. If she'd had any sense, she would have seen past the outside to the man within and it wouldn't have taken her long to notice the weakness behind the good looks, the restless feverish energy of a man who needed to find his fixes outside himself, the mouth that could thin to a cruel line in a matter of seconds.

With that in mind, it sickened her that she could feel something inside her tighten alarmingly at the sight of his twin.

‘I always get to the bottom of them.' He gave her a slow, dangerous smile and she shivered.

Max Forbes was so like his brother, and yet so dissimilar in ways that she couldn't quite put her finger on. If Shaun's looks had captivated because of their prettiness, his brother's hypnotised because of their power, and if Shaun had always known what to say to get the girls into bed, Vicky imagined that his brother achieved what he wanted by the very fact that he disregarded the normal little social conventions and said precisely what he wanted, despite the consequences. He had the sort of rugged, I'll-do-as-I-damn-well-want charisma that women, she suspected,
would find difficult to resist. Even Geraldine Hogg had become coy in his presence.

 

Max Forbes looked at the small figure on the chair. She looked more like a child than a woman, with that pointed elfin face and pale, freckled skin. The picture of innocence. But his instincts were telling a different story. Something was not quite above board and his desire to find out
what
surprised him. He hadn't felt so damned
curious
about anyone for a long time. He stared at her and felt a rush of satisfied pleasure when she blushed and looked away quickly.

Oh, yes. Life had ceased to be merely an affair of making money and making love, both with a great deal of flair and, lately, not much pleasure or satisfaction. Vicky Lockhart had something to hide and the thought of discovering what sent a ripple of enjoyment through him. It was a sensation so alien that it took him a few seconds to recognise what it was.

‘Oh, how very interesting,' she said politely, her brown eyes widening. The sun, streaming through the window, caught her hair and seemed to turn it to flames.

It was, he thought, a most unusual shade of red, and, connoisseur that he was, he was almost certain that it hadn't come out of a bottle. Of course, she wasn't his type. Not at all. He'd always gone for tall, full-breasted women, but still, he felt his mind wander as he imagined what that hair would look like, were it not pulled back. How long was it? Long, he imagined. Long and unruly. Nothing at all like the sleek-haired women he dated. Did the hair, he wondered, match the personality? Underneath that sweet, childish façade was there a hot, steamy, untamed woman bursting to get out? He smiled at the passing thought and was startled to find that his body had responded rather too
vigorously to the image he'd mentally conjured up. Getting aroused like this made him feel like an adolescent, and he cleared his throat in a business-like fashion.

‘I don't know if Geraldine mentioned the pay…' He waited for her curiosity to take the bait, then he rattled off a sum that was roughly twice what he'd had in mind for the job in question. He could see the glimmer of interest illuminate the brown eyes and her small fists clenched at the sides of the chair as though she had to steady herself.

‘That's a very generous salary. She did mention that the pay would be more than the job advertised in the newspaper…'

She wanted to accept. He could see it written on her face and he waited patiently for her to nod her head.