Читать книгу Powerful Boss, Prim Miss Jones - Кэтти Уильямс, CATHY WILLIAMS, Cathy Williams - Страница 7

‘COMING back home?’ Elizabeth was utterly bewildered. Didn’t he live in London? ‘Don’t you live in London?’

‘Keep up here, Elizabeth. I’m moving back down to Somerset.’ He had resumed his seat at the desk and was tilting back in it, hands folded behind his head, his dark eyes gleaming with satisfaction. The whole upheaval should have been a major source of dissatisfaction for him. His office was the throbbing soul of his operations, and the thought of being plucked out of it for reasons not of his choosing should have set his teeth on edge, but he felt strangely content with the decision.

‘You’re moving back down to Somerset.’ She could scarcely believe her ears.

‘You seem to be in a state of shock.’

‘You’re moving back down to Somerset so that you can watch my every move. You said that you were going to give me the benefit of the doubt.’

‘And I have. Which is why you’re still in gainful employment!’

Elizabeth looked at him reprovingly and fumbled with the handkerchief which she was still clutching. ‘You would jeopardise your whole working life just because you think that I’m here to do I don’t know what?’

‘I’m not jeopardising anything,’ Andreas refuted smoothly. ‘I worked here perfectly fine when James returned from hospital. It’s a big house and, convenient though it is to be in an office environment where everyone is on hand, keeping in touch is really only the press of a button. The joys of the World Wide Web! Some of my employees actually design their own working hours to incorporate working from home. I’m a very progressive employer.’

Elizabeth was lost in her own tangled thoughts. How on earth was she going to avoid him when he planned on being around all the time, watching her every move? Would he follow her into town when she went to do the shopping? Lurk outside her bedroom with his ear pressed to a glass against the door to find out what she was up to? She imagined bumping into him at unexpected moments, or turning corners to find him lying in wait like a big-game hunter waiting to pounce. She shuddered and realised that he had been saying something.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘That’s going to have to change, for a start.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about your habit of not listening to me when I speak to you.’ Or else responding with the briefest of answers and with the general demeanour of someone who would prefer to be anywhere in the universe except in his company. Both traits irritated the hell out of him.

Elizabeth blinked, but, really, how surprised should she be? Andreas resided in a different hemisphere from most other people. In his rarefied world, he snapped his fingers and everyone saluted and jumped to immediate attention.

‘I do listen,’ she told him. ‘I was just thinking about how awkward it’s going to be if you’re following me around every second of the day…’

‘Why would I be following you around every second of the day?’ Andreas asked, his darkly handsome face incredulous at the suggestion. ‘I may be prepared to transfer operations down here for the foreseeable future, but I don’t intend to abandon work completely so that I can stalk your every movement.’

Foreseeable future?

‘You can’t migrate here for the foreseeable future,’ she said in a staggered voice. ‘Don’t you have to run your empire?’

‘We’re not talking about a pirate ship here,’ Andreas told her drily. ‘There won’t be mutiny if I’m not clocking in on a daily basis.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Apologies for pointing out the obvious, but that look of horror on your face isn’t doing your “give me the benefit of the doubt” cause any good.’

‘I’m horrified at the thought of you being around all the time!’ Elizabeth blurted out with brutal truthfulness. ‘I don’t like you. You make me nervous. Of course I’m not going to look forward to you moving in.’

Andreas gritted his teeth in the face of this level of blunt honesty. ‘Liking me isn’t a requirement,’ he imparted grimly. ‘In fact, not liking me would work very well for the situation I have in mind. However, reacting like a cat on a hot tin roof every time I talk to you isn’t going to do.’

Elizabeth couldn’t really imagine why someone would not want to be liked; it seemed the most basic and natural of human desires. But then Andreas wasn’t like everyone else, was he? ‘For the situation you have in mind?’ She looked at him blankly and waited for whatever new and disturbing revelation he had to relay.

‘I wondered when you would clock on to what I just said.’ He sighed elaborately, picked up James’s fountain pen which was lying on the desk and twirled it ruminatively between his fingers before transferring his gaze to her expectant face.

‘The wonders of Internet access only really go so far,’ he explained ruefully. ‘Nothing really replaces the good, old-fashioned secretary. Someone to file reports, fend unwanted phone calls, take notes, bring those essential cups of coffee…’ He paused, allowing that lazy observation to sink in and take root. ‘Which is where you come in.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, but yes.’ He dropped the pen and angled her a brooding, speculative look. There was so much that had his antennae on red alert, from that phone call to her ex-boss, to her evident alarm at the thought of him being around. Yet, if she did have something to hide, wouldn’t she be acting a little less distracted? If, as he had gleaned from reading between the lines, she had headed to Somerset with the express intention of meeting James, of edging her foot through the door and then hunting down the family jewels, wouldn’t she be playing it cool?

Gold-diggers came in all shapes and sizes, admittedly, but they were universally manipulative, cunning and opportunistic. They didn’t spend hours browsing through junk shops with a cantankerous seventy-something, as he had gathered she had been doing from the various communications with his godfather over the weeks. They didn’t reject their host’s offers of having every meal catered to the highest standard in favour of trying out home-cooked food from the antiquated recipebooks James had stored in various cupboards in the kitchen. Nor did they spend their leisure time with the head gardener chatting about plants or else sitting in the walled garden with a book. That took cunning to an altogether new level, and one that Andreas had difficulty getting his head around.

Which was not to say that he didn’t feel compelled to oversee the situation. It never paid to take anything in life for granted, and that included the rest of the human race.

‘I can’t work for you. I work for Mr Greystone. I know you insisted that I answer to you, but at the end of the day…’

‘Let’s think out of the box for a minute. Yes, you do work for James, and from what I gather you’re the perfect companion—by which, I take it, you have inordinate reserves of patience. Apparently there was a fracas at the tea shop because the scones advertised had sold out?’

Elizabeth momentarily forgot her stress and gave him one of those radiant, transforming smiles. ‘Oh, did he mention that to you?’

‘Apparently he spent so long arguing with the manager about their policy of leaving the board up when the scones were no longer available that he’s been given a voucher for free teas there for the next fortnight.’

‘He did huff and puff about never darkening their doors again, but of course he will. He says they do the best creamteas in the county—even if he can’t have the cream—and, besides, I think he likes Dot Evans. She told him to stop spluttering because it wasn’t good for his blood pressure, and that if he kicked up a scene in her shop again she would drag him out to the kitchen and force him to do the dishes.’

Andreas was temporarily derailed by the first part of her remark. ‘Likes Dot Evans? Don’t be ridiculous. He’s known the woman for the past ten years! Don’t you think I would have known about it by now?’

‘I guess so,’ Elizabeth backtracked vaguely, shifting her gaze away and waiting in silence for him to return to the thorny subject of her impending doom.

‘Not so fast.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Don’t you think I’ve noticed that tendency you have to fall silent the minute a conversation gets a little awkward?’ Yes, spot on. He had read her correctly, judging from the sudden bloom of colour on her cheeks. Well, at least his ability to read women hadn’t been completely turned on its head in her case.

‘I don’t like talking about things James might have said. Or not said. Okay—said. When he’s not here to…um…say it himself.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What did my godfather say? You’re kidding about Dot Evans, right?’ His ebony brows knitted into a perplexed frown. He knew Dot Evans, of course. She had been a fixture of sorts on the scene for the past ten years, when James had loaned her money to set up the tea shop in the village. In actual fact she and James had been classmates at school a hundred years ago. He couldn’t remember her visiting the house, though. Or had she? Andreas had tried over time to visit his godfather as much as humanly possible, but the frantic pace of work had often waylaid the best thought-out plans. It was easy for things to be left unsaid when visits were snatched.

‘It’s just a feeling I get.’

‘And how is that I’ve been kept in the dark about this? You’re not breaking some secret code by telling me, so you might as well come clean.’

Elizabeth hesitated. Nothing said to her had ever been said in confidence. Although James could be belligerent, forthright and opinionated, he could also be endearingly diplomatic. Diplomacy had prevented him from telling his godson about Dot because when it came to the opposite sex he and Andreas were miles apart. He might have had an affair with her mother, but from what she had gathered about his ex-wife it had been a response to a loveless marriage. Of course, he had never mentioned a word about ever having had a mistress, but the more she knew him the more she realised that he was, essentially, a man of honour.

Would he have ended his marriage for Phyllis? She didn’t think so, but it was a question that could never be answered, because her mother had scarpered the second she had discovered he was married, taking the secret of her pregnancy with her. It was tempting to play with the fantasy of wondering what her life might have been like if James had been a free man, had been able to pursue her mother and marry her.

Lost in her day dreams, she started when Andreas snapped his fingers and delivered her a censorious frown.

‘You’ll be astounded to hear this, but most women don’t drift off into never-never land when I’m trying to have a conversation with them!’

‘Sorry.’

‘He must be ashamed of her,’ Andreas mused. ‘Can’t understand why, unless it’s a money thing, although James has never been a snob.’

‘Of course he’s not ashamed of Dot Evans. She’s a lovely lady. He just doesn’t think that you…’ The words were halfway out of her mouth before she realised that she had uttered them, and she was mortified when Andreas fixed her with his brilliant dark, questioning eyes.