Seduced By The Boss. Sharon Kendrick
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there’s no need to sound quite so outraged!’ he defended as he clipped the words out. ‘I’m thirty-three years old—not quite at the stage of queuing up for my pension book. Anyway, she’s nearly twenty.’
Megan tried to sound worldly-wise. ‘And you’ve been having an affair with her, have you?’
Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t used to people he barely knew making negative character assessments about him that made him feel so uncharacteristically angry. But whatever it was—in that moment, Dan felt like striding across the office and shaking her!
‘Bloody hell!’ he swore. ‘You’re making me sound like Bluebeard! No, I have not been having an affair with her—cradle-snatching has never turned me on!’
‘Well, what is it, then?’ asked Megan in confusion. ‘What’s her name, and what’s it all about?’
Dan sighed. He kept his private life just that. Private. But if Katrina had started phoning and writing to him here, then inevitably his professional life would be involved. And compromised, too, if he wasn’t careful.
‘Her name is Katrina,’ he said. ‘And she thinks she’s in love with me.’
‘Why?’
In spite of everything, Dan laughed. He threw his dark head back and let rip with a throaty chuckle as her question brought him crashing down to earth. Because if his ego had been threatening to get out of hand that guileless one-word query had checked it! But then he saw the reproach which had clouded those huge hazel eyes of hers, and felt his temper flare. Again.
‘Why do you think?’ he demanded. ‘Because I had my wicked way with her when she was barely out of nappies?’
‘Dan!’
‘Well, that’s what the prissy look of concern on your face is implying, isn’t it, Megan?’
‘No!’
‘And you’ve obviously taken her side—’
‘I haven’t taken anyone’s side! I felt sorry for her, that was all.’
‘Even though,’ he continued furiously, his grey eyes growing thunder-dark, ‘even though you don’t know her and you barely know me? In fact, you don’t have a clue about the true situation!’
‘Maybe I don’t,’ she agreed. ‘But that’s easily remedied. Why don’t you tell me?’
Dan’s mouth flattened into a thin, hard line, and he stared at her with misgiving. He had been brought up to view the airing of emotions as a weakness—while to take a virtual stranger into his confidence would be interpreted as positively indulgent.
But he couldn’t just carry on ignoring a situation which was threatening to spiral out of control, could he? And Megan had no axe to grind. She didn’t know Katrina. She stood to gain nothing by giving him her opinion. Surely it would not be disloyal to confide in his assistant?
‘Maybe I should tell you,’ he said slowly.
But, even so, Megan was amazed when Dan sat back in his chair and studied her intently from between narrowed eyes, the way he sometimes studied a spreadsheet.
‘Okay.’ He nodded, and gave a smile which managed to be angry and thoughtful all at the same time. ‘I will. I’ll tell you the whole story about Katrina and then we’ll see where your sympathies lie, won’t we, Megan?’
‘PICTURE the scene,’ said Dan, and picked up the smooth round paperweight which lay on his desk. At its centre sat a small pink shell and usually he found it restful to look at. Not today, though. ‘Of a little girl growing up without any men around.’
Megan watched him run his long fingers over the cool, curved glass. What he was describing was the exact reverse of her own upbringing. There had been men galore around—or boys, to be exact—when she had slipped into the role of caring for her four younger brothers.
But she knew that having your mother die in childhood wasn’t typical. Thank God. She pushed away the poignant memories and looked into his cool grey eyes. ‘This is Katrina we’re talking about, I presume?’
‘That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘She and her mother used to live close to us. My mother is her godmother, and I’ve known Katrina for most of her life.’
‘Right,’ nodded Megan cautiously.
‘She is the daughter of an actress who happens to be very, very beautiful—’
Megan found herself wondering whether Katrina was as beautiful as her mother. But she didn’t ask.
‘And very self-obsessed,’ he continued, only now the edges of his voice were roughened with disapproval. ‘And, like many beautiful women, she regarded the arrival of a daughter as something of a catastrophe—’
‘Oh.’ Megan’s eyes widened. ‘Why?’
He seemed faintly taken aback by the genuine surprise in her question. Didn’t she realise how competitive women could be? He looked at her. No. Maybe she didn’t.
‘Because daughters have a habit of growing up!’ he answered. ‘They provide the physical evidence of how quickly the years are passing, don’t they? And there’s nothing an actress hates more than growing old. You can’t carry on pretending to be in your mid-thirties if you have daughter who is in her twenties!’
‘No, I suppose you can’t,’ said Megan slowly. ‘I never thought of it like that.’ She looked at him, fascinated by what he was telling her. Dan McKnight, of all people, pouring his heart out—why, she hadn’t thought he had one! ‘So where do you fit into the picture?’
Dan had recently been asking himself the same question, searching back in his memory for something he might have said or done which could have been misinterpreted by a naive young girl.
He frowned. ‘Ever since Katrina was a little girl, she latched herself onto me and followed me around the place, whenever I was around. Which wasn’t often enough for her to see for herself that idols often have feet of clay,’ he added, with brutal honesty.
‘You mean you were her idol?’
He thought it might sound unacceptably arrogant if he corrected her sentence from past to present tense. ‘I guess I was.’ He also thought that Megan could have taken that note of astonishment out of her voice. ‘She used to trot round beside me, gazing up at me as though I could do no wrong.’ And he would be lying to himself if he denied that he had liked the young girl. And enjoyed her unconditional adoration. It had worked both ways—because Katrina had been like the little sister he’d never had.
And that was part of the problem. You could tell a sister to go away and she would probably listen to you.
‘So what did you do about it?’ she asked.
Dan sighed, accepting now that he might have adopted entirely the wrong strategy. He had thought that, by ignoring the young girl’s obsession with him, she would grow out of it, the way she’d grown out of having puppy fat. ‘Nothing,’ he admitted. ‘I just acted exactly the same as I always had towards her.’
‘And how was that?’
‘Big-brotherly, I suppose.’
‘So there was no attraction between you at all?’
Dan shook his dark head. ‘Not on my part, certainly! The age difference between us is too great for us to have anything in common—apart from geographical proximity, of course.’
Megan nodded, looking closely at the cool, clever face. ‘And what is the age difference, exactly?’
‘Thirteen years.’