A Suitable Mistress. CATHY WILLIAMS
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the verge of qualification,’ she admitted, steeling herself for another fight, but he made no comment, and she explained to him just what she could do, what areas of tax she felt qualified to cover, how knowledgeable she was on company litigation, all the aspects of audit control which she had found very simple at the time. While she spoke, he nodded, listening in silence until she had finished, and she gave a nervous little laugh.
‘Of course, I may have forgotten all of it.’
‘I hardly think so. If anything, you’re probably overqualified for the job I have in mind, but if you were temping then it’ll be more challenging that what you must have been doing.’
‘When it comes to photocopying and filing, most things pose a greater challenge,’ she said with a laugh. Strange, but it felt as though she hadn’t laughed in years. She could hardly believe that that carefree amused sound had actually come out of her. And in the company of a man who sat on the opposite side of the fence to her.
He told her how much she would be paid, and she looked at him with a fair amount of amazement.
‘That’s awfully high,’ she said at last, and he shook his head in genuine amusement.
‘You will never get far in business if you insist on being honest to that degree,’ he said. ‘I pay my workers well because I want their loyalty and hard work. After all, they are the backbone of the company and if they’re disgruntled they won’t stay. High turnover of staff is very bad if a company is to succeed.’
‘And success is what it’s all about.’
‘That’s right.’
She looked at him frankly. If success was what his priority was, then he had attained his goal, because it sat on his shoulders, followed him like a shadow, was there in the dark look of self-assurance and power.
‘Will I be working for you?’ she asked suddenly. For some reason she found the idea of that slightly alarming. She could cope with bumping into him occasionally in the apartment, but the prospect of having him around on a more permanent basis made her uneasy.
‘Oh, no.’ He reached forward and deposited his cup on the table in front of him, then he linked his fingers behind his head and surveyed her. ‘I am involved in a company that is quite removed from the one in which you will be working. I leave the running of this particular publishing company in the hands of my directors. They report back to me at frequent intervals.’
‘So who is going to be my boss?’ Just so long as he bore no resemblance to the odious Mr Slattery then she would be all right.
‘A woman by the name of Angela Street. She’s American. I sent her over about four months ago when I knew that I would be moving back here. She’s smart and efficient and doesn’t let the grass grow under her feet.’
A woman? From America? All the way from America when London was full of smart, efficient women?
Who was he trying to kid? She might be naive but she wasn’t born yesterday. Smart, efficient Angela Street was more than a work machine. Why didn’t he say so? Why didn’t he say that she was his lover?
CHAPTER THREE
WERE clothes for women anything over size ten designed to make them look dull? It appeared so. Suzanne looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom and decided that she looked frumpy. She had worn the suit for two months without that thought ever crossing her mind, but it crossed it now, and she tried, without much success, to smooth the skirt into a semblance of something chic.
It was a light summer suit but the colours were insipid and the overall grey effect didn’t do much for her.
She had tied her long, unruly hair back into a French plait which hung down her back, but strands kept escaping and short of gluing them to the side of her head there seemed little she could do to avoid it.
It was, all things considered, just as well that Dane wasn’t around. He was out of the country for a few days. He wouldn’t have said anything about her appearance but those cool, assessing grey eyes would have said it on his behalf anyway and she would have instantly retreated into a position of muted self-defence, which was childish, she knew, but which was something she couldn’t seem to prevent.
He had, he had told her, spoken to Angela and there was nothing to be nervous about.
‘Why on earth should I be nervous?’ she had asked him airily. ‘Does she bite?’
‘Nothing quite so dramatic,’ he had answered drily, his eyes resting on her and making her feel hot and bothered, and cross to be feeling that way. ‘But she’s extremely capable and quite intolerant of temper tantrums.’
‘I did not lose my last job because of a temper tantrum,’ Suzanne had told him hotly, but she was uncomfortably aware that her outspokenness to her last boss, justified though it had been, had stepped beyond the lines of good sense.
At the time she hadn’t cared. She hadn’t enjoyed the job, she had been paid a pittance and she had had no real idea of why she had stuck the damn thing out for so long, apart from the fact that it had been convenient
She found now that she cared a great deal about keeping this job. It might have been a charitable handout to assuage Dane Sutherland’s guilty conscience, it might have been offered out of remembered affection for her father and the daughter who had harboured a teenage crush on him, but she wasn’t about to live down to his expectations of her as a child by jeopardising it in any way.
She looked at the photograph of her father, which she had put on the dressing table, and for once she found that her eyes did not automatically fill with tears. She told the picture of the middle-aged man with the kind eyes and the self-conscious expression of someone posing for the camera that her personal dislike of Dane Sutherland wasn’t going to get in the way of doing a good job.
‘He won’t be able to think, even for a fleeting second, that I failed the test and what else could you expect of the chauffeur’s daughter.’ Her voice echoed in the silence of the room and she grinned and wondered whether she was going mad. Talking to photographs. What next?
The company was one of four that Dane had bought over the three years that he had been away and hauled out of the doldrums, back into mainstream life.
It was, she discovered as she stood in front of it later, larger than she had anticipated. For the first time she acknowledged a certain nervousness underneath the defiant desire to succeed.
She had expected something altogether smaller—a little building, in need of renovation because of its slow decline into debt. She hadn’t realised quite how drastic its kiss of life had been.
The office block was a large, three-storeyed building which seemed to consist mostly of glass—smoky-grey glass. There was a stream of people hurrying in. Suzanne stood for a while in the cool summer sunshine and watched the figures being absorbed one by one into the bowels of the glass building; then she took a deep breath and joined the throng.
She had brought her briefcase with her, partly so that she could carry in a couple of accountancy books and one law one, and partly because the briefcase had been given to her by her father as a present and she wouldn’t have dreamt of going into any job without it, even if the job had involved manual labour on a building site. It was her good-luck charm.
She laid it protectively on her lap as she sat in the reception room and waited to be summoned.
It was, she thought, very American in its decor, or perhaps the places where she had worked before—small, fairly stuffy offices—were just very English in their shabbiness.
There was a feeling of space and light and a great many plants everywhere. The three large paintings on the wall were all abstract, their colours strong and defined, red, orange and blue lines that swept across the canvases, conveying a message which, Suzanne thought, was lost on her. She personally preferred paintings which contained things that were recognisable—scenes