The Boss's Proposal (3 page)

‘But, really, I'm afraid I must say no.'

It took a few seconds for that to sink in.

‘What?' Not much floored him, but for a passing moment he could feel himself rendered speechless.

‘I can't accept.'

He looked at the small, elfin face, the delicate mouth, the soft brown eyes fringed with impossibly long auburn lashes, and was assailed by a humiliating sensation of powerlessness. He couldn't
make
her accept his offer—he wasn't even that sure
why
he was so infuriated by her refusal; he just knew that he wanted to shake her until she agreed to work for him. The absurdity of his reaction was enough to make him shake his head and smile. He must be losing his mind. Wrapping up New York and then moving to the UK must have conspired to bring about some kind of subliminal breakdown, or else why would he now be staring at a perfect stranger and feeling this way?

He glanced down at the desk and began drumming his pen on it.

‘Of course, if I can't persuade you…'

‘I'm flattered that you've been prepared to try…' She stood up and gave him an awkward and, he was irritated to see, relieved smile.

‘Thousands of people would kill for the job offer I've just made you.' He heard his over-hearty voice and bared his teeth in a smile of good-mannered regret. His eyes flicked to her face and he could feel himself stiffen once again at the thought of what she would look like with her hair down. Then, to his utter disgust, and completing his inexorable decline into pubescent irrationality, he glanced down at her breasts, two small bumps underneath the bulk of shirt and jacket, and wondered what they would be like. Tiny, he imagined. Small, pointed, freckled with rosy nipples. Red hair tumbling down a naked body and rose-peaked breasts just big enough to fit into his…

He virtually gulped and was obliged, as he stood up, to conceal his treacherous body by leaning forward on the desk and supporting himself on his hands.

‘Are you quite sure you won't reconsider…?'

‘Quite sure.' She looked at him uncertainly, then stretched out her hand, which he took and shook, paying lip service to good manners. He could tell that even that small gesture was not one she particularly wanted to make but courtesy had compelled her.

What was her story?

He made her nervous, but
why
? He didn't threaten her…or did he? He wondered whether they'd met before, but he was sure that he would have remembered. There was something unforgettable about the ethereal delicacy of that face and the teasing disarray of that remarkable hair. She
had
been to Australia, however…

‘If I speak to James, I shall mention I've met you,' he murmured, walking her to the door and he felt the momentary pause in her steps.

‘Of course. And do you…keep in regular touch with him?'

‘I used to. He occasionally kept an eye on my wayward brother.'

‘And he no longer does?'

He picked up the struggle in her voice with interest.

‘My brother died a while back in a car crash, Miss Lockhart.'

Vicky nodded, and instead of proffering the usual mutterings of sympathy rested her hand on the door knob and turned it, ready to flee. She knew that she should express some kind of courteous regret at that, but honesty stopped her from doing so. She had no regrets at Shaun's fate. To forgive was divine, but it wasn't human, and she had no aspirations to divinity.

‘Well, perhaps we'll meet again.'
Perhaps, indeed. Much sooner than you think.

‘I doubt it.' She smiled and pulled open the door. ‘But thanks for the job offer, anyway. And good luck in finding someone for the post.'

T
HE GARDEN
had been the most distressing sight to greet her upon her return to England and to the modest three-bedroom cottage that had been her mother's. She'd more or less expected to find the house in something of a state. It had seen a variety of tenants, not all of them reliable family units, and even when her mother had been alive it had been in dire need of repair. But the garden had broken her heart. A combination of young children, cigarette-smoking teenagers and, from the looks of things, adults with hobnailed boots had rendered it virtually unrecognisable.

One more thing, she thought wearily, to bring to the attention of the agency that had handled the letting, although what precisely the point of doing that would be, she had no idea. Marsha, the woman in whose hands Vicky had hurriedly but confidently left the house, had left the firm eighteen months back, and since then the house had been handled by a series of people, none of whom had done justice to it. Perhaps they'd thought that she would never return to England, or at least not quite as unexpectedly as she had in the end.

It broke her heart to think of all the time and effort that her mother had spent in the small, immaculate garden. A decade ago, it had been her salvation after the death of her husband, Vicky's father, and it had steadfastly seen her through her ups and downs, providing comfort and soothing her when her illness took hold and she no longer had the energy to go walking or attempt anything energetic.

She'd laid borders and hedgerows and planted wild roses and shrubbery with the imagination of someone whose every other outlet had been prematurely barred. Vicky could remember the summer evenings spent out in it, listening to the sounds of nature and appreciating the tumult of colour.

The cottage was set back at the end of a lane in a part of Warwickshire noted for its rural beauty. The small garden, now sporting an interesting array of weeds which formed a charming tangle around the occasional outcrop of lager bottles, ambled down to a white fence, beyond which stretched cultivated fields. A plot of reasonably well-maintained land bordered by trees separated the cottage from its neighbour, a rather more substantial family house to the right. To the left woodland kept the well-used roads at bay.

Vicky, sweating in her layers of clothing and grimy with the exertions of her Saturday morning garden clear-out, peered through some bush at yet another aluminium can. Robert ‘call-me-Robbie' at the agency had assured her that whatever she'd found in the garden had not been there when the house and grounds had been inspected, and she knew, anyway, that she was pretty late to be lodging complaints about the state of the garden. Only recently had she managed to find the time to do anything other than superficially maintain it, a thirty-minute job whenever she found the time to spare.

This was the first time she'd really got stuck in, and that only because she'd managed to farm Chloe out to one of her playmates from school.

The thought of her five-year-old daughter automatically brought a smile to her lips.

At least she had no worries on that front. Chloe had
taken to the school and her classmates like a duck to water and that had been an enormous source of relief.

She stuck on her gardening glove, wriggled her hand into the undergrowth, half her mind still playing with the thought of her gorgeous raven-haired daughter, so different physically from her, and the other half preoccupied with the unwelcome thought that she might find one or two bugs in addition to the can, and was about to reach for the offending object when a voice said from behind her,

‘Thought I might find you here. Hope I'm not interrupting anything.'

The shock of the voice sent her falling face-first into the bush, and when she emerged, after a short struggle with greenery, earth and some unfortunate spiky things, she was decidedly the worse for wear.

‘What are
you
doing here?' She hadn't even rescued the can!

Max Forbes, in the bracing winter sunshine, looked horribly, impossibly
good
. The brisk wind had ruffled his dark hair so that it sprang away from his face in an endearingly boyish way that was at odds with the powerful angularity of his features, and as his trench coat blew open she spotted a casual attire of dark trousers and a thick cream jumper with a pale-coloured shirt underneath. The shock of seeing him in her garden and the impact of his presence made her take a couple of steps back.

‘Be careful you don't fall into the bush again.'

‘
What
are you doing here?' Now that her slow-witted brain had come to terms with his looming great masculine presence, her thought patterns suddenly shot into fifth gear, and the realisation that Chloe was out for the morning was enough to render her weak-kneed with relief.

‘Actually, I've just come from your neighbours down
the road. Small world, wouldn't you say? Thompsons. Live three houses away.'

‘I don't know the names of the people here, aside from the elderly couple opposite.'

‘So I thought I'd drop in, see whether you'd managed to find yourself a job as yet.'

Standing opposite him, head tilted at an awkward angle because without heels she was a good ten inches shorter than him, Vicky felt small, grubby and disadvantaged. The long braid hanging down her back was an insult to anyone with a sense of style and there was mud and soil all over her face, clothes, hands—probably in her hair as well. Her sturdy wellingtons were covered in muck. When she removed the gardening gloves, she would doubtless find that they matched the state of her nails.

‘It's only been three days and no luck yet. Thank you.' She refused to budge even though the cold was seeping through her jumper and waxed jacket and making her shiver. She stuck her hands in the pockets of the jacket and glared at him.

‘Too bad.'

‘I'm sure something will turn up.'

‘Oh, I don't know. Jobs in typing pools are thin on the ground. 'Course, you'll have no trouble getting something much better paid with infinitely more prospects, but who needs
that
sort of work?'

There was a veiled amusement in his voice that only made her more addled and crosser than she already was.

‘Look, why don't we go inside? I've got time for a cup of tea and you can tell me all about Australia.'

‘There's nothing to tell.' A telltale pulse was beating rhythmically in the hollow of her neck and the little bud of panic that had begun to sprout the minute she'd heard his voice flowered into full bloom.

They couldn't possibly go inside. Chloe wasn't around, but signs of her were everywhere. He didn't know that she had a child and that was the way she intended it to remain. It had been the only piece of sheer luck since meeting him. She'd answered the advertisement and had sheepishly omitted to mention Chloe simply because she had gleaned from several sources that a child in the background prompted awkward questions about childcare and being a single parent; this was the road to certain rejection by any company. School and Betsy, the lady who helped her out in the evenings sometimes, meant that there were no problems on the childcare front, and she reckoned, naively, that if she ever got offered a job she would inform her employers at that point and hope that they would take her on the strength of her interview, even once they knew of Chloe's existence.

 

Max looked down at her and confusingly wanted to do a number of things at the same time. First, he wanted to clear out, because he had no idea what had possessed him to go there in the first place. Unfortunately, and much to his immense frustration, he also wanted to stay put, because seeing her again had somehow managed to render him even more intrigued than he'd been on their first encounter. He also wanted to brush some of that dirt off her face, if only to see what her reaction would be. In fact, the urge to do just that was so powerful that he clasped his hands behind his back and purposely looked away.

‘Actually, I haven't just dropped by,' he said eventually, resenting her for putting him in a position where he was about to embark on an out-and-out lie and resenting himself for his own pathetic weakness that had brought him here to start with.

‘Oh, no?' she asked warily.

‘It's to do with your house, as a matter of fact.'

‘What? What's to do with my house?'

‘Why don't we go inside and talk about it?' He didn't think that he had ever been so bloody underhanded in his life before, and all because he hadn't been able to get this chit of a girl out of his head. She had fired up his interest, for reasons he couldn't fathom, and now here he was, behaving like some shady character in a third-rate movie. He had never,
but never
, done anything remotely like this in
his entire life
because of a woman, and he could hardly believe that he was doing it now. Conniving like a two-bit criminal.

She didn't say anything. Instead, she headed towards the house, leaning forward into the wind, which looked as though it might just lift her off her feet and sweep her away if she wasn't careful. Max followed behind by a few paces, his teeth clenched in exasperation as she told him to wait outside until she'd tidied herself up.

He raised his eyebrows in amusement. ‘Why outside?'

‘Because,' Vicky said coldly, ‘it's my house and that's what I'm telling you to do.' Upon which she promptly shut the door in his face before he could open his mouth to protest further.

 

She had never moved with more speed. The house was thankfully clean, and in under three minutes she'd managed to stash away all evidence of her daughter. It took her a further five minutes to sling off the grubby clothes and replace them with a pair of faded jeans and a long-sleeved striped jumper that had seen better days. The hair would have to remain in its charming grass-ridden style.

‘So,' she said, yanking open the door to surprise him leaning against it, ‘what about my house?'

‘Has anyone ever mentioned to you that you are completely eccentric?'

‘No.' She led the way into the sitting room, which had been the first room in the house to undergo redecoration and was now in restful greens and creams and blessedly free of childish clutter. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was at least another two hours before Chloe was dropped back to the house. More than enough time to get rid of Max Forbes, whose presence was enough to bring her out in a cold sweat.

‘My house,' she reminded him bluntly, once she had installed him in a chair. ‘I won't sit,' she said. ‘I feel filthy. Now, what about my house?'

‘I can't conduct a conversation like this.' He shook his head and stood up. ‘Which is a shame because I think you'd be very interested in what I have to say, but if your ill manners override your self-interest, then—' he shrugged eloquently ‘—at least I tried…'

Vicky looked at him doubtfully. He really shouldn't be here at all, and she knew that she should just throw him out. In fact, she should never have let him in in the first place. Hadn't this been the same old story with his brother? From the minute she'd set eyes on him, she'd known that he was bad news. He'd been too good-looking, too smooth-talking and too well connected to be interested in a girl like her, but he'd stopped at her desk where she'd been working with her head down and he'd leaned over just enough for her to feel overpowered by him. Everything she'd said, even
Please go away, I really must get on with my work
had seemed to amuse him, and he had had a way of laughing deep in his throat, a sexy laugh, while his eyes never left her face, that had made her feel uncomfortable and excited at the same time.

So if Shaun had achieved that with her, then how much
more dangerous was his brother, who had struck her as being leagues ahead of him? And if her own need to protect herself wasn't sufficient to keep her away from Max Forbes, then what about her daughter?

Dark-haired, grey-eyed, Chloe had been the spitting image of Shaun from the day of her birth. There was no way under the sun she could have been anything but a Forbes, and time had strengthened rather than lessened the resemblance.

If only theirs had been the tried and tested failed romance. If only Shaun had done the decent thing and walked away from her and his baby so that they could live their lives in peace. But, like all weak men, Shaun had needed his punch bag, and she had been his. He had rarely raised his hand to her, and then only under the influence of drink or drugs, but he hadn't needed to go down that road to gain her compliance. All he'd had to do was threaten to take Chloe away from her. It had suited him to pretend to the world that he had never fathered a child, but he'd always taken great satisfaction in reminding her in private that if his family ever discovered his progeny then they would move in to claim what they would feel was rightfully theirs. Especially, he'd been fond of saying, if they could see the uncanny resemblance she bore to the Forbes clan.

So, however painful it was to her, she'd lived in the shadow of fear. Sometimes days would pass, weeks even, and there would be no sign of him. Then he would return and demand his sexual privileges—and she had slept with him and wept bitter tears afterwards.

To have Max Forbes under her roof was to have Lucifer with the key to her front door. She'd heard enough about him to know that the existence of Chloe would be of great interest to him. Would he try and spirit her away, or take
her through the courts for custody? Ninety-nine point nine per cent of her knew that her child was safe, but that nought point one per cent was enough to terrify.

She'd spent years protecting her daughter from an abusive man. She'd watched in helpless fear as he'd wielded his power over them both, smilingly and ruthlessly intimidating. Vicky had lived on a knife's edge, waiting in dreaded expectation of the worst. Now, Vicky knew she must keep Chloe's existence a secret from Max. For all she knew, these brothers might have more in common than mere appearance. Much more. And she had not escaped from one destructive cycle only to find herself hooked into another. She would never give a man that power over her again. Never.