Читать книгу A Bride For Barra Creek - Jessica Hart - Страница 9

THE look in his eyes was making Lizzy’s heart pound, and she could feel herself blushing. Don’t be an idiot, she told herself fiercely. He’s talking about a job. He’s not interested in you.

‘Great,’ she said with an unconvincing smile.

To her relief, the barman arrived just then with an ice bucket. He set it down on the table between Tye and Lizzy, and her eyes widened at the label on the bottle as he drew it from the ice and eased out the cork with a subtle, extremely expensive pop. If this was the champagne Tye was used to drinking, it was no wonder he had turned up his nose at what had been served at Ellie’s wedding!

Tye waited until the barman had poured two glasses, settled the bottle back on the ice and disappeared as noiselessly as he had arrived. He leant forward and picked up his glass, chinking it against Lizzy’s.

‘Here’s to a successful partnership!’ he said.

Partnership? Did he say partnership? Lizzy stared at him. ‘You mean I’ve got the job?’ she asked incredulously.

‘If you want it,’ said Tye carefully.

Did she want it? Did a drowning man want a lifebelt? Lizzy laughed.

‘I want it,’ she assured him gaily. ‘Oh, this is fantastic! Thank you!’ She beamed at him as they chinked glasses again, her blue eyes sparkling with delight. ‘I can’t tell you what a relief it is,’ she babbled on, all smiles as she settled back into her chair, able to relax at last. ‘I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever find another job!’

To think that she had been contemplating that advert for a waitress in the local café, and now here she was being offered a job with GCS! Lizzy’s mind raced ahead to the future. Working for such an international company, there were bound to be opportunities for travel, weren’t there? Lizzy pictured herself armed with a battery of mobile phones and an electronic organiser, jumping on and off planes, dashing around New York and…And what?

Her careering fantasy screeched to a halt as she realised that she still had no idea at all of what the job entailed. ‘Er…what exactly is this special project you want me for?’ she asked Tye.

He hesitated. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said at last. ‘And very sensitive. I don’t want to say any more until I’m sure that I can trust you.’

Lizzy’s rocketing spirits collapsed. ‘You mean, you might not want me after all?’ she said, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice. Surely he had said that the job was hers if she wanted it?

Tye looked at her, the corners of his mouth lifting in a slight smile. ‘Oh, no, I want you all right,’ he said. ‘But you might change your mind when you know what’s involved, and I don’t want to explain that just yet. Do you mind?’

Lizzy didn’t think that she was in any position to mind. ‘Well, no, of course not,’ she said, completely mystified.

What on earth was he going to ask her to do? The obvious suspicion flickered across her mind, only to be dismissed. A man like Tye didn’t need to pay women to sleep with him, and anyway, judging by those whose names had been linked with his in the gossip columns, she wasn’t exactly his type. He seemed to like his women dark and exotic, and she could hardly be described as either. She was too blonde, too normal.

Too nice.

Lizzy looked at the tiny bubbles drifting lazily upwards in her glass and sighed.

‘I’m sorry if it seems unreasonable,’ said Tye, misinterpreting her expression, ‘but you’ll understand later why I don’t want to put all my cards on the table right now.’

‘Can’t you say anything about it?’ Lizzy pleaded. ‘At least tell me if it’s a PR job!’

‘I think you could say that,’ he conceded.

‘Doesn’t GCS have a PR department already?’

Tye frowned down into his champagne. ‘This isn’t to do with GCS,’ he said, and then lifted his eyes to meet Lizzy’s confused blue gaze. ‘It’s to do with me.’

‘I see,’ she said, although she didn’t.

‘Look,’ he said, raking a hand through his dark hair in a gesture of frustration, ‘let’s start again, shall we? We’ll treat this as an ordinary interview, and I’ll explain everything later.’

‘All right,’ said Lizzy in some relief. She knew where she was with an interview. ‘Not that most ordinary interviews are conducted over champagne like this!’ she couldn’t resist adding with a glance at the bottle.

Tye shrugged. It was clearly your common-or-garden everyday champagne as far as he was concerned. ‘I thought if we had a drink together, and dinner, it would be a good way to find out more about you,’ he said with an edge of impatience. ‘We can go back to the office and sit on either side of a desk if you’d prefer.’

‘No, no, this is fine!’ said Lizzy hastily. She put her glass on the table, sat upright, smoothed her dress down over her knees and looked expectantly at Tye. ‘Where do you want me to begin? With my last job?’

‘No.’ Tye waved her precious work experience aside. ‘I’m more interested in your personal background.’

‘But you know all that,’ she objected.

‘Do I? I know you grew up in the outback but live in the city. I know that you’re very sociable, and that you have a very…’ He paused, searching for the right word. ‘A very individual taste in shoes,’ he decided. ‘But that’s about it. There must be more to you than that.’

God, yes, there must, thought Lizzy, racking her brains to think of something else to convince him that she was really a complex and interesting personality. A sociable, city-dwelling shoe-lover. All true, but it did make her sound a bit superficial.

‘I like reading,’ she said lamely, although she really preferred a good movie, or an afternoon’s shopping.

She could see from Tye’s face that he was not impressed. ‘Well, what else do you want to know?’ she asked crossly.

‘How about why a woman with your personality and apparent ability is so desperate for a job that she’s prepared to take on an assignment without even knowing what it is or what she’ll have to do?’ Tye suggested in a dry voice.

‘It was my own fault,’ Lizzy admitted after a long pause. She might as well tell him. ‘It took me ages to decide what I wanted to do. I tried all sorts of jobs, but eventually I ended up in PR, and it was perfect for me. I loved the parties and the organisation and the…the buzz.’

She waved her hands to try and illustrate the excitement of those heady days. ‘I managed to get a job with one of the top agencies in Perth, and for a while everything was fine. It was more than fine, actually. I had a great job, a fantastic social life, a wonderful boyfriend. We got engaged, had a wild party.’ She smiled a little sadly. ‘I thought I had it all.’

‘So what happened?’ asked Tye, a faint sneer in his voice. ‘Did your wonderful boyfriend turn out to be not so wonderful after all?’

‘No, nothing like that.’ Lizzy shook her head. The light gleamed on her blonde hair as she leant forward to pick up her glass and sipped her champagne as she tried to think how to explain to someone as cynical as Tye what had prompted her to do what she had done.

‘An old friend of mine got married,’ she said at last. ‘I went up for the wedding, and seeing Gray and Clare together…well, I guess it made me realise what I was missing. I don’t really know how to explain it,’ she went on, looking at Tye’s sceptical expression. ‘I enjoy my life, but theirs was somehow more intense, more vivid.

‘I realised that I was in a rut, not just professionally but emotionally. Stephen was—is—wonderful, but we didn’t have what Clare and Gray have. We’d been living together for about a year, and we’d sort of drifted into the idea of getting married. We were good friends, comfortable together, and there wasn’t anyone else for either of us. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but when I compared our relationship to Gray and Clare’s, I knew that it wasn’t enough.’

Lizzy’s head was bent as she told her story, apparently absorbed in the invisible patterns she was tracing on the arm of the chair, but she looked up then to see if Tye was listening. ‘When I went home, I told Stephen I wouldn’t marry him.’

‘It was a bit hard on him, wasn’t it?’ Tye had been listening all right, but he obviously wasn’t impressed. His grey eyes were alert and very cool.

‘Stephen didn’t mind.’ Lizzy went back to her patterns, remembering how they had talked that night. An angry scene would have been awful, but at least it would have meant that Stephen had cared enough about her to try and make her change her mind. Instead it had all been very civilised. He had listened and agreed that breaking their engagement would be for the best.

‘I think he was quite relieved really,’ she went on. It had been just the same with Gray all those years ago. ‘I seem to be the kind of woman men just want to be friends with,’ she sighed.

Tye looked at her across the table. She might sound despondent, but it was hard for her to look glum. There was an irrepressibly merry curve to her mouth, and the laughter lines starring the corners of her deep blue eyes with their tilting lashes gave her expression a warmth and a humour that was much more appealing than mere beauty.

His gaze dropped to her bare shoulders. Her creamy skin was dusted with a golden summer glow. It shadowed invitingly into her cleavage and in the hollow at the base of her throat. Aware of his eyes, Lizzy lifted her hand and pushed the silky mass of hair away from her face in an unconsciously nervous gesture, but it wouldn’t stay behind her ears and fell forward again, swinging softly against her cheek.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he said, and he smiled a wickedly attractive smile that sent the colour surging into Lizzy’s cheeks.

How old did you have to be before you stopped blushing when a man looked at you? Lizzy wondered in despair. Avoiding his gaze, she took a defiant gulp of champagne and set her glass back on the table with a sharp click.

‘Yes, well, anyway,’ she said with a tiny cough to clear her throat. ‘Once I’d sorted things out with Stephen I felt much better, but I knew I had to do the same with work. I’d been at the agency too long and I was getting stale. I went in the next day and handed in my resignation in a grand gesture. I told them I needed a new challenge and that I was going to set up on my own as a freelance consultant.’

‘And did you?’

‘I tried, but it was hopeless. There wasn’t enough work to go round as it was, and I couldn’t compete with the agencies. I must have trudged round every office in Perth looking for a client, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was about to give in when I met you and you mentioned this job. It’s my last chance to make it on my own.’

‘I’m beginning to see why you were so keen to be considered,’ said Tye.

Lizzy’s colour deepened. He hadn’t said anything, but she knew that he was thinking about the way she had kissed him at the wedding, and she tilted her chin. It wouldn’t do any harm for him to realise that she had only kissed him like that because she had been desperate.

‘It’s been months now since I had a regular income,’ she told him. ‘I know I should be able to manage, but I’m not very good at economising, and I’m up to my ears in debt.’ She sighed. ‘I went about things all wrong; I know that now. I should have waited until I’d decided exactly what I was going to do and had my financial situation sorted out instead of just chucking in a really good job and then wondering how I was going to get by.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Tye to her surprise.

Lizzy had been prepared for him to pour scorn on her, and his unexpected support took her aback. She eyed him a little warily, wondering if he was being sarcastic.

‘I bet you’d never do anything that stupid!’

‘I believe in going all out for what you want,’ he said coolly, ‘and you don’t get what you want without taking risks. Do you think I’d have got where I am today if I’d played safe? Twenty years ago I left home with nothing. I worked my way to Sydney and found myself a job and somewhere to live. Those aren’t things you take for granted when you’ve had to survive without either, but when I had an idea I took a chance and gambled everything on it.’

He didn’t sound triumphant about it, merely matter-of-fact, and Lizzy looked at him curiously, trying to imagine him as a young man, finding his way in the city, alone and homeless. From that unpromising beginning, he had built up an empire, a vast conglomerate that stretched around the world and had become a watchword for quality and innovation. It made her own idea of a challenge seem pretty pathetic.

‘All you need is ambition,’ said Tye, ‘and if you want it badly enough you can get there. You must have an ambition, don’t you?’

Did she? Lizzy considered the matter. ‘I’d like to do well at my job, of course, but I don’t have any burning desire to succeed. As long as it’s interesting and I’ve got enough to live on, I don’t mind. My ambitions aren’t that focused. What I’d really like is marriage, a family of my own, the usual. I just want to be happy.’

Tye didn’t quite sneer, but there was something very scornful about the way he reached for the champagne bottle and topped up Lizzy’s glass.

‘What about you?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Me?’

‘What are your ambitions, or have you achieved them all?’

‘No,’ said Tye, replacing the bottle carefully in the ice, so that Lizzy couldn’t read his expression. ‘I’ve still got one.’