Читать книгу Secretary On Demand - Кэтти Уильямс, Cathy Williams - Страница 6

‘GUESS who’s here, Shannon!’

Shannon paused for a second to look up at her friend who was contributing to the general chaos of the kitchens by balancing a large circular tray, laden with empty crockery, precariously above her shoulder on the flat of her hand.

‘Who?’ She flexed her fingers and grinned which was an open invitation for Sandy to deposit her tray on the stack of paperwork on the desk and lean forward with a conspirational gleam in her eyes. Sandy did amateur dramatics twice a week and devoutly believed that there was nothing in life that couldn’t benefit from elaborate gestures. She would never make it to the big screen.

‘Guess!’

‘I would if I thought that Alfredo would let us get away with playing a few guessing games when it’s pandemonium in here.’ On cue, Alfredo yelled something threatening from across the kitchen and was blithely ignored. ‘The Queen?’ Shannon hazarded. ‘A famous Hollywood star interested in sampling a more down-market venue in fashionable Notting Hill? Someone from the Lottery Board coming to present you with a cheque for several million pounds?’

‘He’s here!’ Sandy straightened up with a smug smile of satisfaction.

‘What on earth is he doing here at this time of day?’ Shannon felt a sudden little swell of excitement.

‘Watch it, kid, you’re going red in the face.’

‘Who is he with?’

‘No one. At the moment…’ Sandy allowed the tantalising titbit to drop. ‘But he’s requested two menus!’

‘We’re sad people, Sandy.’ Shannon stood up and smoothed down her calf-length black skirt. ‘Wasting our time speculating on someone we don’t know from Adam…’ Which wasn’t entirely true. They did know him, in a manner of speaking. The man had been coming in regularly to grace their eating establishment every morning, no later than seven, for months. In fact, almost as long as Shannon had been living in London, and there was a pleasurable familiarity about the routine.

Of course, they had both given in to wild speculation about him.

He was too aggressively good looking to ignore. His hair was very short and very dark and the sum total of his features added up to an impression of understated power that made their spectator sport of watching him virtually irresistible.

‘Where are you going, my little Irish friend?’ Sandy asked tartly. ‘Don’t you have a spot of important typing to be getting on with?’

‘I’ll just have a quick peek at him. See if he looks the same at lunchtime as he does first thing in the morning.’

‘You mean you think that his mascara might have smudged? Lippy worn off a bit? Facial T-zones looking a bit greasy and in need of a dash of Almond Beige pressed powder?’

Shannon ignored her and quickly grabbed the cream and blue apron folded in the corner of her desk. She’d originally been hired as Alfredo’s secretary, to look after his books, do his typing, take phone calls and generally make sure that the nuts and bolts of the restaurant were well oiled and running smoothly, but the plan had gone pear-shaped on day three when one of the waitresses had failed to show up and she’d been requisitioned to help serve tables. Since then, Shannon had combined her well-honed secretarial skills with her newly discovered waitressing talents, donning an apron whenever the situation demanded, and always in the morning when the paperwork could be left for a couple of hours.

By the time she had quickly slipped the apron over her head, Alfredo had appeared in all his five-feet-four, seriously corpulent Italian glory.

He was one of the few men in the entire world, Shannon was sure, whose lack of height made it possible for her to address him on an eye-to-eye level.

‘Just taking over serving, Alfredo…’ Shannon looked meaningfully at her friend who was hovering to one side like a spare part. ‘Sandy’s hurt her foot.’

‘Don’t you tell Alfredo anything about the hurt foots, missy! The foots looked just fine when she came a running over to whisper to you when it is madness here and I am not paying her to have the little cosy chats when she should be taking orders! Don’t you two little missies think that Alfredo does not have the eyes at the back of the head! I see everything!’

The hurt foot had been a good idea. It released Sandy’s barely contained lust for drama and she instantly shot into wounded mode, removing one shoe and tenderly touching her ankle as though it might explode at any minute if too much pressure was applied.

Shannon took the opportunity to scuttle through the kitchen, pausing to glance at the orders stacked on the counter, then hustled outside into the restaurant.

Yes, so what if she was sad? A sad twenty-five-year-old girl who had fled Ireland in a welter of misery and had grasped at the giggling normality of fantasising about a mysterious customer who had fired her imagination. Didn’t her imagination deserve to be fired after what she had been through? It was all a silly game but silly games had been just what her depressed soul had needed.

She walked briskly over to his table and appeared to be startled at finding him there.

If she had been Sandy, she would have been far more elaborate when it came to playing startled. Instead, she smiled with consummate politeness and said, ‘Oh! What a pleasant surprise to see you here at lunchtime, sir! Shall I take your order or are you waiting for someone?’

‘Oh! And what a pleasant surprise, seeing you at lunchtime, and, yes, you may take my order for a drink but I am waiting for someone.’

He had a deep, slow voice that had a disturbing tendency to curl around her nervous system, which was what it was doing now. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her with amusement.

‘I thought your little blonde friend was serving me.’

‘Oh, Sandy’s hurt her ankle. She’s sitting for a few minutes.’

‘In that case, I’ll have a bottle of the Sancerre. Could you make sure that there’s ice in my glass? I like my white wine very cold.’

‘Of course, sir. Will that be all?’

‘Now, there’s a leading question,’ he murmured, and Shannon’s colour rose. Was he flirting? No. Impossible. The man might be terrifyingly good-looking but he was also highly conventional. Didn’t he wear impeccably tailored suits and read the Financial Times every morning?

She cleared her throat and met his dark eyes steadily. ‘Perhaps I could bring you a little appetiser to sample while you wait for your friend? One of our chefs has prepared some delicious crab and prawn pastries.’

‘Tempting.’

‘Or you could wait until your partner arrives.’

‘My partner?’ he drawled with lazy amusement. ‘In what context would you be using the word “partner”?’

Shannon looked at him in confusion. She’d assumed that his lunch date was with a woman. Maybe even his wife, although he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Or maybe, she thought sheepishly, she had just been fishing for information.

‘You blush very easily. Has anyone ever told you that? And when you blush, you look even more like a schoolgirl, especially with those braids on either side. What sort of partner do you think I’m meeting for lunch? A female partner, perhaps?’

‘I’m very sorry, sir. I just assumed…perhaps your wife…or maybe a female friend…’

‘I don’t have a wife, actually, and a female friend…’ He let his voice linger on the description for a few seconds while he continued to watch her gravely. ‘What an extraordinarily quaint way of putting it. Alas, though, no female friend on the scene either.’

Her surprise must have registered on her face because he laughed softly and raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes, I’m one of those sad old men who is still waiting for the right woman to come along and make an honest man of him.’ Disconcertingly, the mildness in his voice seemed to encourage a response to this, but for the life of her Shannon couldn’t think of a thing to say. She got the distinct impression, in fact, that the man was trying to tease her.

‘I’m sure that’s not the case,’ she replied tartly, shoving the order pad into the pocket of her apron and doing something pointless with the cutlery on the table because she was rather enjoying the feeling of being watched by those incredible eyes.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘If that will be all, sir, I’ll just go and fetch your wine.’

‘You mean you’re leaving me in the middle of my unanswered question?’

‘I’m very busy at the moment, sir.’ She drew herself up to her full height of five feet three and looked down at the darkly amused face. ‘I’ll return with your drinks order…’

‘And some of the delicious crab and prawn pastries…’

‘What? Oh, yes. Right.’

It was the strangest conversation she’d had with him since he’d appeared through the door months earlier and she found that she was shaking when she returned to the kitchens. Let that be a lesson to her not to indulge her curiosity! She’d been bitten by the speculation bug and he’d returned the favour with panache, deliberately playing verbal games with an air of complete fake gallantry. She would be better off getting back to the work she was paid to do.

‘Your foot’s completely better,’ she informed Sandy, when she managed to eventually corner her, ‘and table four wants a bottle of Sancerre. A bucket of ice on the table as well.’

‘Oh, dear. I take it your curiosity has been satisfied?’

‘The man,’ Shannon said loftily, ‘is not quite the paragon of politeness we thought he was.’

Sandy’s eyes gleamed with sudden alertness. ‘Ooh… Tell me more… Was he rude?’

‘No.’ Shannon sat down and rustled lots of paper into a stack then she pushed a button on her computer so that the screen lit up. How was she supposed to get any work done when her desk was stuck here off the end of the kitchens without even a partition to separate one from the other? It was noisy and disorienting and she felt giddy.

‘Oh. Did he make a pass at you, then?’

Shannon’s eyes shot to her friend’s with horror. ‘He most certainly did not!’ she denied vehemently.

‘Then what did the man do?’

‘He…he… Nothing really, I suppose,’ she said lamely. ‘But you can carry on serving him, and you’d better hurry with his wine before he marches in here to find out what’s going on. Oh, and he wants some of those crabby pastry things as well.’

She would take no further interest in him, or his lunch companion for that matter.

So when, ten minutes later, Alfredo announced to her that she would have to help out with the serving, she point-blank refused. Albeit in a pleading tone of voice and sheltering behind the excuse of having to catch up on her paperwork.

‘Are you disobeying me, missy?’ Alfredo’s jowls wobbled and he folded his arms expressively. He had an array of menacing gestures which routinely failed to work because his jolly approach to life was always too near the surface. He was a sucker for giving leftovers to their little coterie of down-and-outs who stopped by every night at closing time and sometimes he would force them to comment on some of his concoctions. How could anyone resist Alfredo?

Which was why Shannon ended up sticking on the apron again with a little sigh of frustration. As luck would have it, table four needed their order. She decided that it would be good practice at smiling brightly and acting like a sophisticated Londoner who could handle most things without batting an eyelid, which was the image she was steadily trying to create. On no account would she allow the man, still nameless, to think that he had thrown her into a tizzy with his word games.

She approached his table with the plates, studiously avoiding eye contact, and gently deposited the halibut in front of him. Then she decided to further test her savoir-faire by asking him whether his wine was all right.

‘Enough ice, sir?’

‘A bucket is more than enough,’ he agreed in a murmur. ‘And the little crab pastries were truly exquisite. My compliments to the chef.’

‘I’ll pass on the message,’ Shannon said, rather proud at her self-containment.

‘Very obliging of you.’ He looked at his food and she had a sneaking suspicion that there was something resembling a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth.

She turned to his companion and the practised smile froze. She could feel the colour drain away from her face.

‘You!’ she whispered, clutching the plate of food. ‘What are you doing here!’ Her fragile mastery over her emotions crumbled spectacularly away in the face of Eric Gallway, who was sitting back in his chair, looking at her with smiling, polite blankness. He was as blond-haired and blue-eyed as she remembered, with the plastic good looks of someone who had spent a lifetime cultivating their outward image to the detriment of everything else. He’d captured her with his looks and then used every ounce of smooth charm at his disposal to try and get her into bed with him. Goodness knew, he might have succeeded as well in the end if she hadn’t found out about his wife and his children and the whole life he had conveniently concealed while promising her happy-ever-afters and wedded bliss. Only then had he turned vicious and the mask had slipped away to reveal a small man with a nasty, cruel mind.

‘Excuse me, do I know you, miss?’

In retrospect, it was the worst thing he could have said. In retrospect, Shannon liked to think that she wouldn’t have done what she had if he’d acknowledged her. Looking at her coolly and blankly and pretending that he didn’t have a clue who she was, it sent all the vanished colour rushing back into her cheeks. Her frozen hands began to tremble with rage.

‘Maybe you don’t. How disappointing,’ she agreed. She heard her mother’s voice telling her to always count to ten because her temper would get her into trouble one day, and made it to two before she removed the plate from the tray and tipped twelve ounces of medium-rare steak, dripping with Alfredo’s special sauce, accompanied by potatoes and vegetables, straight onto the pristine jacket and well-tailored trousers.

It was intensely satisfying to hear Eric Gallway’s yelp of pain as hot food hit the thin covering of expensive wool. It reverberated through the restaurant like the crash of breaking crockery in a china shop. He stood up and frantically began wiping the food with his napkin, while everyone in the restaurant stopped eating and positioned themselves the better to look at what was going on.

‘How dare you?’ he growled. ‘How dare you throw a plate of food over me? I don’t know who the hell you are, miss, but I’m damn well going to make sure you’re sacked! Get me your boss! This instant!’

Shannon had a strong urge to laugh and covered her mouth with her hand. No need to get her boss. Alfredo was hurrying over towards them while trying to encourage the other diners to carry on with their meals. Perhaps pretend that this was nothing but some simple Italian jollity.

‘What is going on here?’ Alfredo ignored Eric’s frantic cleaning-up process and stared at Shannon who hung her head. Hopefully, he would interpret that as a gesture of shame instead of an insane desire to stifle her mirth.

‘What,’ snarled Eric, ‘do you think the problem is? This…this…so-called waitress of yours has dumped a plate of food all over me and let me tell you right now that unless she’s sacked immediately, I’ll sue you for everything you possess! I’ll personally make sure that this restaurant is out of business!’

‘It sort of fell, the plate,’ Shannon said, her green eyes wide and luminous. If he could pretend not to know who the hell she was, then she could pretend that it had all been an unfortunate accident. ‘Sorry.’ She grabbed a serviette and made a flicking motion, which was venomously brushed aside. ‘I think some of the carrots oozed into your pocket, sir…and there are a few mange-tout on your left shoe…’

Eric seemed incapable of responding to the helpful observations and stared at her murderously as Alfredo launched into a profuse apology, ending with assurances that any dry-cleaning costs would be covered.

‘Oh, dear, your lovely patent leather shoes seem to be ruined,’ Shannon observed with extravagant seriousness.

‘Please, allow me to offer you a full replacement for your suit and your shoes.’ All eyes followed a path down the soaked trousers to the ruined shoes under discussion. Someone burst out laughing a few tables away.

‘You sack this creature immediately, my man, or you won’t be able to afford your next loaf of bread, never mind my clothes. And let me tell you something, I happen to know quite a number of people in high places!’

‘I think it’s time you took yourself off to the bathroom and cleaned up,’ drawled a familiar voice. ‘You’re making a spectacle of yourself.’

For a minute, Eric looked as though, now in his stride and regardless of the state of his clothes, he was more than prepared to stand his ground and continue his litany of threats, but after a few seconds he nodded and walked off, watched by everyone in the restaurant. Someone yelled for an encore and Shannon felt a rush of appreciation for the bawdy clientele who frequented their establishment.

‘I hope your friend will calm down,’ Alfredo began worriedly. ‘Of course, it was a dreadful accident, but all these threats of closing down my restaurant…well, I have a family to support! Perhaps I better go see what is happening in the bathroom, hope he listens to reason…’ He extracted a handkerchief from a pocket to wipe his brow and then hurried off towards the direction of the bathroom.

‘Sit down.’

Shannon slowly turned to look at the man, who seemed to be the only person in the restaurant unaffected by what had just taken place.

She slumped into a free chair and rested her head against her hands.

‘Feel better?’

She looked at him for a while in silence. ‘Not really, no, but thank you for asking.’

‘What was that all about?’

‘I’m very, very sorry that I ruined your lunch.’ She stared at the congealing halibut on his plate. There was nothing funny about what had just happened, she realised. Alfredo had had nothing to do with anything, but he had taken the brunt of it and it had all been her fault.

‘Forget the lunch,’ he said drily.

‘Poor Alfredo,’ she said miserably to herself. ‘I shouldn’t have dropped the plate of food all over your friend. It was wrong of me.’

‘He’s not my friend. You certainly know how to create a scene, don’t you?’

‘Were you very embarrassed? I’m very, very sorry.’

‘Will you stop apologising? And, no, I wasn’t embarrassed. It would take rather more than that little incident to embarrass me. Tell me what you’re going to do now.’

‘Resign, of course.’ She stood up and his eyes followed her thoughtfully. ‘What choice do I have? Alfredo will never trust me with another plate of food, and I couldn’t blame him. Who needs a waitress with a talent for flinging food over customers?’ Besides, she knew Eric Gallway and she knew that he was more than capable of doing his utmost to get what he would see as just revenge for his humiliation.

‘Resign, reds? And who will serve me my morning coffee and bagel?’

He was trying to be nice. In the midst of her misery, she realised that he had called her ‘reds’, a reference, she assumed, to her bright red hair, and the softly spoken intimacy was almost as powerfully unsettling as the prospect of her future without a job.

‘I’m going to pack up my things,’ she said glumly. ‘Thanks for being so understanding.’ She reached out to shake his hand, for some unknown reason, but instead of a shake, he casually linked his fingers through hers and squeezed her hand gently, then he reached for his glass of wine and sipped some, with his fingers still interlinked with hers. He rubbed his thumb idly against hers and she felt a curious sensation of prickling down the back of her neck. Then he released her.

‘I don’t suppose you’d like your meal replaced?’ she joked half-heartedly, and he raised his eyebrows, appreciating her attempt at humour.

Funny, during all their speculations about him, she had never noticed how strongly the curves of his mouth spoke of compassion and humour. Or maybe anyone would have seemed compassionate and humorous alongside Eric with his infernal vanity and monstrous self-absorption.

‘Strangely, I appear to have lost my appetite.’ He gave her a little half-smile.

‘Well.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘The halibut was very good. Trust me. Much better than the wretched steak.’

She walked the long walk back to the kitchens, and by the time she’d told Alfredo she was resigning, said her last goodbyes to everyone and cleared her desk of what belonged to her, her usual buoyancy was back with her.

She would find something else. She wasn’t fussy. Hadn’t she ended up enjoying Alfredo’s even though initially the early start had put her off and the hours were often longer than her contract demanded? She would find something else and she would enjoy it. And if she didn’t, then couldn’t she always head back up to Dublin?

True, it felt good to be away from the claustrophobia of having all her large family around her but if she did decide to go back to Ireland, she knew that she would settle back in without any real difficulty. And after all this time, they would have at least stopped oozing sympathy about her wrecked love life and making endless remarks about adulterous men and young, impressionable girls.

Things would work out. She had a sudden, wild memory of the man with his fingers entwined with hers and felt a little shiver of regret. One face lost to her for ever. For no reason whatsoever, the thought depressed her, and she was so busy trying to analyse the foolishness of her reaction that she didn’t notice him until he was standing in front of her. Towering over her, in fact. Shannon just manage to stop before she collided with his immovable force and it was only when her eyes actually trailed upwards that she recognised him and gave a little gasp of surprise. Mostly because he seemed to have materialised from the sheer power of the thoughts in her head.

‘How did it go?’

‘What are you doing here?’ She wanted to reach out and prod him to see if he was real.

‘Waiting for you, as a matter of fact.’

‘Waiting for me? Why would you be waiting for me?’ It wasn’t yet four-thirty, but the light was already beginning to fade and there was an unholy chill in the autumn air.

‘To make sure that you were all right.’

‘Of course I’m all right.’ She stuck her hands in her pockets and stared at his shoes. She hadn’t realised how big a man he was. Not just tall, but broad-shouldered and powerfully built. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ She raised her eyes to his and made fleeting contact.

‘Because, reds, you looked pretty shaken up back there in the restaurant.’

Shannon debated whether she should tell him to stop calling her ‘reds’ and decided, perversely, that she liked the nickname.

‘Did I?’ she said airily. ‘I thought I handled myself very well, actually. I mean, losing a job isn’t the end of the world, is it?’ Bills. Rent. Food. Not the end of the world but not far off.’

‘Look, it’s cold trying to hold a conversation out here. Why don’t you hop in my car. I want to talk to you.’

‘Hop in your car? I’m very sorry but I can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t know you. You could be anyone. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you’re an axe-wielding maniac, but you could be for all I know.’

‘An axe-wielding maniac?’ he asked, bemused.

‘Or a fugitive from the law. Anyway, my mother told me never to accept lifts from strangers.’

‘I’m not a stranger! You’ve been serving me breakfast every morning just about for months! Nor am I a fugitive from the law. If I were a fugitive from the law, wouldn’t I be hiding out somewhere less conspicuous than a busy Italian restaurant in the middle of crowded Notting Hill? Your imagination is obviously as vivid as your temper, reds.’

‘And stop calling me reds.’ She’d decided she didn’t care for the appellation after all. It was insulting.

‘Then accompany me, please, for a short ride in my car which is just around the corner. I want to talk to you.’

‘Talk about what?’

‘Oh, good grief,’ he groaned. ‘Let me put it this way, it’ll be worth your while.’ He turned on his heel and began walking away, expecting her to follow him, and she did, clutching her coat around her and half running to keep up.

‘I don’t even know your name!’ she panted in his wake. ‘And where are you planning on taking me for this little talk that will be worth my while?’

He stopped abruptly and she cannoned into him. Instinctively he reached out and steadied her. ‘Kane Lindley,’ he said, ‘in answer to your first question. And a little coffee-bar two blocks away in answer to your last. We could walk but my time on the meter is about to run out so it’s as easy for us to take the car and I’ll find somewhere else to park.’

She realised that he was still holding her by her arms, and he must have realised that as well because he politely dropped his hands and waited for her to respond.

‘Kane Lindley…’

‘That’s right. Have you heard of me?’

‘Why should I have heard of you?’ Shannon asked, puzzled.

He said swiftly, ‘Absolutely no reason. I’m not a celebrity but I own Lindley publications and I’m now in charge of a television network.’ He zapped open his car with his remote after a short mental tussle. Shannon hurried over to the passenger side and slipped in, slamming the door against the stiff cold.

‘I haven’t heard of Lindley publications,’ she told him as soon as he was sitting next to her.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ His voice was irritable. ‘I’m not trying to impress you. I’m merely trying to put you at ease in case you think I’m not to be trusted.’

‘Oh. Right. Well…’ She stared out of the window. ‘I’m Shannon McKee. How long were you lurking around, waiting for me to come out, anyway?’

‘I wasn’t lurking around, reds,’ he growled. ‘As a matter of fact, I went to buy some ties at a little shop tucked away around the corner and then dropped back here. Coincidentally, you were leaving.’

The coffee-bar really was only a couple of streets away and they got a parking space instantly. It felt kind of nice to be the one sitting at the table and being waited on for a change. Meals out had been few and far between since she’d moved down to London, where the cost of living had hit her for six and relaxed cups of coffee in trendy coffee-bars, as this one was, had been even more of a rarity.

He ordered a cafetière of coffee for two and a plate of pastries and then proceeded to look at her with dark-eyed speculation. ‘Now, tell me a little about yourself. I know you don’t like football, like the theatre even though you never get there, loathe all exercise except swimming and are self-conscious about your hair, but what are you doing in London?’

Shannon blushed. She never would have guessed that her passing titbits of information had been stored away. She would have assumed that he had more important things to think about than the details of a waitress’s life. ‘I am not self-conscious about my hair!’ she snapped, a little disconcerted by this regurgitation of facts.

‘Then why you do always wear it tied back?’

‘Because it’s convenient. And I’m in London because…because I wanted a change from Ireland. I lived in a little village about twenty miles outside Dublin and I guess I wanted to sample something a little different.’ Now that he had mentioned her wretched hair, she found that she couldn’t stop fiddling with it, tugging the ends of the braids. She had to force herself to fold her hands neatly on her lap.

‘I wish you’d stop looking at me,’ she said after a while. Here they were, one to one, no longer in the roles of waitress serving customer, and their sudden equality made her feel breathless. She felt as though those unreadable, considering eyes could see straight past the dross and into all the secret corners of her mind that she preferred not to share with anyone.

‘Why? Does it make you feel uncomfortable?’ He didn’t labour the point, though. Thankfully. Instead, once their coffee and pastries were in front of them, he began asking her about her work experience and what she had done in Ireland and what she had done since moving to London, tilting his head to one side as she rambled on about her education and her first job and her secretarial qualifications.

‘So,’ he said finally, ‘you did secretarial work, but really you’d call yourself quite adaptable.’

‘I can turn my hand to most things.’

‘I’ll get to the point, reds. Sorry, Miss McKee. I feel very badly about what happened today. I’ve been coming to Alfredo’s for months and I know that you’re good at what you do. I suspect you enjoyed working there and the fact is that if I hadn’t chosen to go there at lunchtime with that particular person, you would not now be out of a job.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

Kane relaxed back and folded his arms. ‘That’s as maybe, but the fact remains that I would like to make amends by offering you a job…working for…me.’