CHAPTER TWO

      ASHLEY HARCOURT DIDN’T know that today was to mark the beginning of a completely different phase in her life. her desk calendar looked the same as usual. It bore no big red letters to give warning of something momentous about to happen. There was no sense of premonition hovering in her mind.

      She was faced with a particularly nasty piece of work in the person of Gordon Payne, who was sitting in her home office, filling the chair on the other side of her desk and voicing a string of complaints. But she was ready to deal with that. More than ready.

      Giving satisfaction was a high professional priority to Ashley. She prided herself on running her employment agency effectively, fitting the right people into the right jobs. But there was a limit, a very definite limit, to how much satisfaction any one person could demand from another.

      Ashley had precisely formed opinions on this point. She was twenty-nine years old, had worked hard to build up her own business after being widowed and had dealt with a great many people in a wide variety of situations. Satisfaction in any relationship was a two-way street, a compatible, complementary give-and-take situation.

      As she listened to Gordon Payne revealing himself in his true colours, she silently berated herself for a bad mistake in judgement. The affable manner that had fooled her into misplacing a top quality client with him smacked of the same polished charm that had fooled her into a miserable marriage ten years ago. She should have recognised it, been suspicious of it. Warning signals should have crawled down her spine.

      ‘When I dictate a letter, I expect my secretary to type it word for word, each word spelled correctly,’ Gordon Payne ranted on. ‘I do not want her assuming she knows the English language better than me. If there is corrections to be made, I make them.’

      Ashley held her tongue, mentally noting the two grammatical errors in that little speech. Here was another king-size ego who knew everything and could do no wrong! Ashley had been married to one for long enough to have experienced the God complex at close quarters. She had learnt there was no reasoning with it, no appeal that would pierce it, no way to get around it.

      In her youthful naivety, Ashley had fallen blindly in love with Roger Harcourt. He had been handsome, always well-dressed, sophisticated in his tastes and strongly athletic, excelling in all competitive sports. Self-assurance had oozed from him, and during their early days together, Ashley had thought him utterly perfect.

      Having drifted between divorced and disinterested parents for most of her teens, she had loved the way Roger took charge of everything and told her what was best for her to do. Ashley had interpreted that as proof of his caring for her. She’d had no perception of how tyrannical it could become.

      She had thought she was getting love and strength and support and direction in her life when she had married Roger Harcourt.

      She had certainly got direction.

      She had had such a surfeit of direction from Roger, she doubted she would ever stomach the idea of marriage again. However difficult she sometimes found running her own life and being a single parent, it was still preferable to having her subordination taken as someone else’s right.

      Gordon Payne was now behaving as though she was subordinate to him, too. ‘Run proper tests on these women in future. Don’t believe their résumés,’ he commanded. ‘It’s nothing but pretentious twaddle.’

      As head of a home construction company—Painless Homes with Gordon Payne—and a member of the local shire council, he was a man of considerable standing in the community. Ashley had thought him a valuable business client, someone who would direct others to her agency if her service satisfied him. After hearing the dismissed secretary’s story earlier this afternoon, she had decided then and there to cut him from her files, regardless of cost or consequences.

      She was still inwardly fuming over the treatment that this pompous pain of a man had dished out to a young woman whom any sensible employer would cherish. Cheryn Kimball was too good for him. That was the problem.

      Cheryn was not only highly qualified in all the areas Gordon Payne had demanded, she presented herself with style and polish and had a natural charm of manner that would endear her to most people. She had been traumatised, reduced to floods of tears by the unjust haranguing and arbitrary dismissal over doing what she believed to be her job.

      ‘And I don’t want a woman who talks back at me!’ the monster ego raged.

      That hit a particularly raw point with Ashley. Roger had felt he had the right to silence her by icily declaring, ‘I am the head of this house!’ What was she supposed to have been? The tail? The feet running after him all the time? She had discovered, too late, there were only one-way streets with Roger.

      Ashley barely stopped herself from glowering at Gordon Payne. What he wanted was a mechanical robot programmed to toadying submission. Yes, master. At your service, master. Whatever you say, master.

      The warm indulgence he had displayed towards his previous long-time secretary was explained in Cheryn’s report. The woman had been mollycoddling him for the past twenty years. Even though she had retired, she had ‘dropped in’ at the office each day this week to ‘break Cheryn in to the way dear Gordon likes things done,’ and deliberately, jealously undermined Cheryn’s confidence in her position and abilities.

      Just like Roger’s mother.

      Ashley shuddered.

      Roger’s mother had considered herself a cut above everyone else since she was supposedly connected to some great line of landed gentry in Britain. Such pretensions had obviously contributed to Roger’s sense of superiority. Her condescending manner had been a constant burr under Ashley’s skin.

      She hadn’t wished Roger and his mother dead. She had made up her mind to divorce both of them. The fight for freedom had just begun when fate intervened and released her from the trauma of battling a custody case over William.

      Of course, any reasonable person wouldn’t have tried to drive across a bridge that was partly submerged by torrential floodwaters. Roger hadn’t