Husband-To-Be. Linda Miles
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when we get married...’
Rachel felt her encouraging smile stiffen on her lips. ‘Yes?’ she said.
‘But I don’t have much of an idea what to aim at,’ he confessed. ‘I look through these things and it all seems so unnecessary. I mean, I once made a million dollars out of an idea I got from talking with a couple of people over a campfire, eating baked beans and drinking tea out of the tin the baked beans came in. Does anyone really need overhead projectors and felt display boards with Velcro attachments? But even I see that I can’t offer people baked beans from the tin followed by bean-flavoured tea.’
He tossed a few catalogues to the ground and sat on the edge of the table, tossed a few more to the ground and gestured for Rachel to join him. ‘I thought maybe we could put our heads together.’
Rachel stared at him.
‘What is it?’ He raised an eyebrow.
‘You’re not at all my idea of a self-made millionaire,’ Rachel blurted out. It was odd the way she felt she could say anything to Grant. Somehow, she had to weigh every word when she talked to Driscoll, even if he was her fiancé.
‘Really? Why? Is a profound respect for felt display boards with Velcro attachments supposed to come with the territory?’
Rachel shook her head. ‘No, but—aren’t you supposed to be steely-eyed and granite-jawed? Shouldn’t you have a five-year plan? Shouldn’t you be shouting at me for being five minutes late, or wearing too short a skirt—?’
‘I won’t hear a word against that skirt,’ he interrupted.
‘How could you just offer me a job on the spur of the moment? You should be grilling me on my qualifications—you didn’t even ask me to take a typing test!’ she said accusingly.
He considered a moment, absent-mindedly fanning the pages of the catalogue, then met her eyes with another of those quizzical smiles. Rachel didn’t know how Olivia could be so impervious to them—Rachel could feel her own mouth smiling back, could even feel her pulse speeding up, and she, after all, was madly in love with Driscoll.
‘Sorry, I suppose it must seem a bit haphazard.’ The blue eyes were mildly amused. ‘Well, it probably wouldn’t hurt to get a few things straight.’
He drummed his fingers on the table-top. ‘The thing is, the main thing you find out from any test is whether someone can pass the test. If you grill someone, you find out how they stand up to a grilling—but it’s not much of a way to getting at what you really want to know, and you may have alienated a first-class worker before their first day on the job. In my experience what actually matters is how much somebody wants to do a job, and how good they are at getting what they want—of course skills matter, but they’re secondary.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, you were persistent, and prepared to go for the job under embarrassing circumstances, in the teeth of probable opposition from your fiancé—so the will was there. And you were apparently somebody who’d succeeded in getting an ordinary member of the public on first-name terms with a tarantula, so I reckoned you could find a way when you had the will. It was just a hunch, but my hunches usually work out pretty well—if you ask me, that’s probably the thing self-made millionaires usually have in common.’
Rachel fought down an almost irresistible urge to ask if he’d had a hunch about Olivia. Or was she somebody else who’d wanted a job badly enough? Had Olivia convinced him she wanted the job of wife? But she’d seemed so perfunctory about everything but selecting the furniture! ‘Well, I’ll try to justify your faith in me,’ she said primly instead.
He laughed. ‘You already have. You look like a million dollars—definitely a credit to the firm. As for typing, I assume you wouldn’t have wanted the job if you didn’t have some knowledge of a keyboard. There won’t be a huge amount to get through, so as long as the finished product looks all right I don’t care whether you type a hundred words a minute or use the fast three-finger method.’
‘And what if I don’t work out?’ Rachel persisted, oddly curious.
‘Oh, I’ll just have to practise looking steely-eyed when I shave. Seriously, though—if you’re not up to the job I’ll have to get someone else in; it’s as simple as that—and I can certainly show someone the door if I have to. But even then I’d still think I could’ve made a more expensive mistake using some big recruitment agency that gave spelling tests and typing tests and couldn’t see the potential in a girl with a way with spiders.’
He opened the catalogue again and gestured beside him. ‘So there you have it,’ he said, with another of those knee-weakening grins. ‘The secret of my success. But my Achilles’ heel is a complete lack of sympathy for office or any other furniture—so any advice you can give will be more than welcome.’
Rachel hesitated, then hopped up to sit beside him on the table and look down at the furniture portrayed in the glossy pages. Suddenly her skirt seemed a lot shorter, she realised; an endless expanse of gleaming, Lycra-clad leg seemed to swing over the edge of the table. And Grant, suddenly, seemed not just close but disturbingly close. Their knees were almost touching; he’d put the catalogue on her lap now, and leant over her shoulder to inspect it. She could see the smooth, clean line of his jaw, the ashdark hair cut close to the skull around his ear, shading the bright gleam of hair that had been burnished by the sun.
‘Is something the matter?’ he asked, the brilliant blue eyes meeting hers. ‘I’m really not a hard taskmaster, you know.’
Rachel shook her head.
His eyes dropped to the page again. ‘I don’t know,’ he said gloomily. ‘This all seems so unnecessary. Do you know anything about conferences?’
He stretched out a hand to turn a page, accidentally brushing Rachel’s arm. She felt as if an electric shock had suddenly run up her arm; in her confusion she forgot that too much knowledge was a dangerous thing.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I know all about conferences. You really don’t need to worry about all this paraphernalia—I mean, you need enough to look respectable, but it’s not the main thing.’ She was speaking rapidly to distract herself from his closeness now—saying the first thing that came into her head.
‘The thing you’ve got to remember is that the papers aren’t really the point—they’re an excuse. The overhead projectors are just to make it look like a good excuse. The big names will come and give papers they’ve put together in three days—they won’t waste time doing something big for a mere conference—and shoals of minor people will give things they’ve cobbled together to get a publication record.’
‘You’re very cynical, Spidergirl,’ he told her. ‘If you’re right, it’s hardly worth doing at all, is it? I might as well turn the place into an adventure park.’
Rachel shook her head. ‘Not necessarily,’ she assured him. ‘The point of it all is—it’s sort of like giving people a chance to have those conversations you had over a campfire drinking tea from a tin. Nobody’s going to pay an airfare to let someone sit by a campfire and eat baked beans, whereas people can get funding to go to a conference, especially if they’re giving a paper. And once they’re there—with a bit of luck—some sparks might fly.’
She flicked the catalogue dismissively. ‘Of course a lot of it’s just people promoting their careers, but a few ideas can come out of it. So the crucial thing is to make it easy for people to socialise outside the papers. Keep the bar or, better, bars open as long as you can. Have lots of little nooks where a few people can sit over coffee. Make it easy to get refreshments in an informal way any time of the day or night. Get that right and, frankly, no one will care whether you’ve got Velcro or Sellotape on your felt-backed boards.’
It was only when she reached the end of this little speech that she realised that Grant was looking at her oddly.
‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ he remarked. ‘I thought there was more to you than meets the eye.’
‘Oh...’