Читать книгу A Suitable Mistress - Кэтти Уильямс, CATHY WILLIAMS, Cathy Williams - Страница 8

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 of mountains or lakes or forests which seduced you into closing your eyes and imagining that you were far away from the hustle and bustle of the twentieth century.

To the far right from where she was sitting was a bank of four lifts. Angela Street, she thought, would emerge from one of those, and reluctantly she allowed herself to give free rein to the curiosity which had been gnawing away at her ever since she had drawn her conclusions on Dane’s relationship with Angela.

She had told herself that it was pointless speculating on the American, because she really couldn’t care one way or another whether he was sleeping with her, proposing to marry her, or even planning a brood of miniature Dane Sutherlands, but still she wondered what the other woman was like.

Would she be like the girls he used to bring back to the house? Small and pretty and with smiling, awed eyes that followed him around wherever he went?

Suzanne had observed them all from a distance, occasionally hearing more about them from her brother who had found it all wildly exciting, and she had hated them all.

She was still absorbed in her trip down memory lane when she saw a mousy-haired girl with earnest eyes approaching her, and she stood up and held out her hand.

‘Miss Street?’ she asked hesitantly, and the girl’s pale, thin face broke into a smile.

‘One of Miss Street’s secretaries,’ she explained, leading the way to the lift while Suzanne followed in her wake. ‘And she likes to be called Angela, by the way. She says that there shouldn’t be barriers between boss and secretary.’