Husband-To-Be Read online

  Meanwhile, Uncle Walter brought the conversation round to Mallett’s adventures. For the second time that day, Rachel had to give credit to Mallett for surprising niceness. You’d have thought he had nothing better to do in the world than repeat, for probably the five-hundredth time, a lot of stories for a middle-aged man of no influence or importance.

  Uncle Walter and Aunt Harriet punctuated the stories with admiring exclamations of, ‘You don’t say!’ and ‘Think of that!’ Even Rachel was interested to hear some of the details that hadn’t made it to the Press—though naturally she was glad she wasn’t involved with the kind of man who let this kind of thing interfere with his research. Thank goodness Driscoll was more sensible.

  ‘Of course, Rachel has had quite an eventful career,’ began Uncle Walter. For a horrible moment Rachel expected her secret to be revealed. But Mallet came to her rescue.

  ‘I’ll bet she has!’ he exclaimed. ‘She’s quite a character, isn’t she?’ He grinned. ‘It’s not every girl, after all, that carries around a genuine Mexican tarantula as a companion. I met William this afternoon.’

  There was a small silence.

  ‘William?’ said Aunt Harriet ominously.

  ‘Er…’ said Rachel.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Aunt Harriet, ‘that you were delivering him to a client?’

  ‘Er…’ said Rachel. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ said Aunt Harriet, ‘that you have brought one of those frightful creatures into my house?’

  ‘I was going to ask you—’ began Rachel.

  ‘No,’ said Aunt Harriet. ‘I am not having one of those things under my roof.’

  ‘But it’s just till I find him a home,’ Rachel said pathetically.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Aunt Harriet. ‘Driscoll wouldn’t like it. I can’t imagine what he’ll say when he finds out—’

  And at this there was an unexpected interruption. ‘Well, if Driscoll wouldn’t like it it’s obviously out of the question,’ said Mallett, all wide-eyed innocence. ‘Tell you what, Rachel—you can keep him over at Arrowmead.’

  ‘How do I know I can trust you to look after him?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Oh, you’d have to come and feed him,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Unless, of course, you think Driscoll would object.’

  Rachel ground her teeth. ‘Of course he wouldn’t object!’ she exclaimed. Well, not once she’d explained, anyway. She paused, then added, ‘You know, if I’m going over there anyway, I might just as well be your secretary.’

  ‘A secretary!’ exclaimed Aunt Harriet, shocked. ‘Rachel, I don’t think Driscoll would like that at all!’

  And now a look of pure devilry came into the brilliant blue eyes. ‘Do you really think so?’ said Grant Mallett. ‘Because I’m beginning to think Rachel is just the girl for the job!’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘How could you?’ Rachel said accusingly. She stood by the Jaguar outside the house, William’s box in her hand, and glared at William’s future host, her new employer.

  ‘How could I what?’ Grant asked innocently. ‘Have seconds of dessert? Separate you from your favourite pet?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ said Rachel. ‘How dare you talk that way about Driscoll? You don’t even know him!’

  ‘I didn’t say a word!’ he protested. The brilliant eyes danced. ‘It was your aunt who thought he wouldn’t like William, remember? And how could I possibly disagree? As you say, I don’t even know him.’

  ‘So why did you give me the job just to annoy him?’

  ‘I think you’re imagining things,’ said Grant. ‘You kept telling me how good you’d be, and I do need someone down here fast. You convinced me you’d be a good thing. Of course, I have to admit that a man who’d even object to your working as a secretary sounds pretty Victorian. This is the twentieth century, after all, and women have just as much right as men to economic independence—but that’s for the two of you to discuss. I’m a complete outsider. It’s hardly for me to express an opinion, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Rachel agreed emphatically, but she gave up the argument as a bad job. ‘Do be careful with William, won’t you?’ She handed him the box.

  ‘I’ll make sure no one bothers him,’ he assured her. ‘And once you’ve started work you can keep him in your office, so he won’t feel lonely.’

  ‘When do you want me to start work?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Well, if you could manage Monday that would be great, but I realise it’s short notice—’

  ‘No, Monday’s fine.’

  ‘Good.’ There was a short pause in which he seemed, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words. At length he set the box on top of the car and dug into a pocket. ‘Look, I hope you won’t be offended, but I’m still trying to raise some funding for this, so presentation actually does matter. I realise you weren’t planning to dress like this for the office, but you may still find an office job five days a week puts an unexpected strain on your wardrobe. Why don’t you go into town tomorrow and see if you can’t find a use for this? I don’t suppose they run to Paris couture, but I’m sure they’ll have something suitable.’

  He took out a thick sheaf of banknotes and pressed them into Rachel’s hand.

  ‘Good, then that’s settled,’ he said hastily, snatched William’s box off the car, opened the door, and slid into the driver’s seat before Rachel could murmur a word of protest. The powerful motor roared into life—and the car disappeared down the street while Rachel discovered that she’d just had seven hundred pounds, in cash, thrust into her hand.

  Rachel had qualms, at first, about actually spending the money she’d been given—but then a terrible, irresistible thought occurred to her. If she bought clothes with it she would have an ironclad reason why she couldn’t possibly give up the job—something Driscoll would otherwise be sure to insist on as soon as he heard of iL

  She went into Canterbury and spent a day ecstatically buying separates. Previously, separates in Rachel’s wardrobe had consisted of T-shirts and jeans; now she acquired skirts in linen and silk, jackets, blouses, even a couple of waistcoats.

  Maybe she didn’t look like Julie Andrews, she thought, admiring herself in a fitting-room mirror, but there was no doubt about it—the new clothes did make her look less like the drummer in a rock band and more like some sophisticated icon of the screen. It was just like Eliza being transformed into Miss Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, she decided. ‘How kind of you to let me come,’ she said to her reflection, trying to look like Audrey Hepburn. ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.’

  Driscoll never seemed to notice how Rachel looked: even on very grand occasions, when she set out to dazzle, the only thing that ever interested him was who’d got tenure. She’d come to take it for granted. That was just the way men were. The reaction of her new employer came as something of a surprise.

  ‘Wow,’ said Grant, the brilliant blue eyes seeming to widen to twice their normal size, and to blaze at about fifty times their normal intensity. Rachel had been escorted by some kind of man-of-all-work down long, dusty halls, through rooms swathed in sheets, to emerge at last at a small, chaotic office at the back of the house. Grant was leafing through stacks of brochures, drinking coffee out of a plastic cup. He’d looked up and clutched ostentatiously at the table for support.

  ‘Catch me if I fall,’ he told her. ‘I don’t think I can stand the shock. Did I say wow? I always think understatement is so much more effective, don’t you?’ He gave a wolf-whistle, which was probably his idea of something subtle and understated.

  ‘Let me get a good look at you,’ he added, putting down the coffee and walking around her to get the full impact of the very pale pink suit, its skirt as short as was consistent with good business practice, and high-heeled pink sling-backs. Rachel had made her face up—the kind of thing that fieldwork did not leave much scope for—with very pale foundation and lipstick, and just the faintest touch of charcoal eyeshadow
and black mascara on her lashes; she’d thought the extra formality of the look was needed to counterbalance the rather shocking haircut. Her efforts seemed to have paid off.

  ‘Just promise me one thing,’ Grant said very seriously as he came round to the front again.

  ‘What’s that?’ Rachel asked suspiciously.

  ‘Promise me you will never, ever again wear jeans. It’s a sin to cover up those legs.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Of course, I have to admit I miss the T-shirt, but I suppose I should try to keep my investors’ minds on business some of the time.’

  ‘I thought you were engaged to be married,’ said Rachel.

  ‘I am engaged to be married, but it hasn’t affected my eyesight,’ said Grant. ‘It was an expression of purely aesthetic appreciation.’ The blue eyes danced at Rachel’s sceptical look. ‘Which is more,’ he added with a grimace, ‘than I can express for this place. It’s pretty chaotic, I’m afraid—one reason I’m so glad you can start today.

  ‘There’s a desk you can use somewhere under that pile of papers by the window, the phone’s on the floor, there’s a fax machine in the corner and a PC in a box in the next room—we’ll be linked by network to the London office, obviously, but that’s run into a couple of hitches, so you’ll have to use it stand-alone for now. Sorry it’s not already up and running, but I’ll configure it for you as soon as you’ve got your desk sorted out so you can get down to work—’

  ‘Oh, I’ll take care of that,’ said Rachel. ‘And I’ll see if I can’t sort out the link with the network. Are you using a contractor? I can’t imagine what the problem could be…’

  ‘I know.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s someone Olivia recommended, supposed to be as good as they come—I’ll give you the details and you can see what you can get out of him.’ He turned back to the table piled high with brochures. ‘Oh, and I’ll just give you the general picture about this place.’

  He picked up a brochure and glowered at it.

  ‘Basically, there are two stages to the project,’ he told her. ‘I’ve already got planning permission to use this place for conferences, so now we’ve just got to get it up and running—as soon as possible, obviously, so we can cover our costs and start turning a profit. The science park is a longer-term thing, because we’ve got to get clearance for something that’s bound to have a much bigger impact, whether good or bad, on the area. The provisional deadline for getting the house ready is May, believe it or not, and if we could get some bookings for the summer so much the better.’

  He slapped the brochure absent-mindedly against a thigh, and gave Rachel a rather rueful smile.

  ‘The thing is, my main interest really is on the science-park side, specifically in getting a core of high-powered inventors who can bounce ideas off each other. I don’t know much about conferences, to tell the truth; the centre was Olivia’s idea. I think she’s absolutely right in a lot of ways—good to give the place a high profile to attract the right people to the park, help with cash flow, and of course it will give us a fantastic base when we get married…’

  Rachel felt her encouraging smile stiffen on her lips. ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘But I don’t have much of an idea what to aim at,’ he confessed. ‘I look through these things and it all seems so unnecessary. I mean, I once made a million dollars out of an idea I got from talking with a couple of people over a campfire, eating baked beans and drinking tea out of the tin the baked beans came in. Does anyone really need overhead projectors and felt display boards with Velcro attachments? But even I see that I can’t offer people baked beans from the tin followed by bean-flavoured tea.’

  He tossed a few catalogues to the ground and sat on the edge of the table, tossed a few more to the ground and gestured for Rachel to join him. ‘I thought maybe we could put our heads together.’

  Rachel stared at him.

  ‘What is it?’ He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You’re not at all my idea of a self-made millionaire,’ Rachel blurted out. It was odd the way she felt she could say anything to Grant. Somehow, she had to weigh every word when she talked to Driscoll, even if he was her fiancé.

  ‘Really? Why? Is a profound respect for felt display boards with Velcro attachments supposed to come with the territory?’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘No, but—aren’t you supposed to be steely-eyed and granite-jawed? Shouldn’t you have a five-year plan? Shouldn’t you be shouting at me for being five minutes late, or wearing too short a skirt—?’

  ‘I won’t hear a word against that skirt,’ he interrupted.

  ‘How could you just offer me a job on the spur of the moment? You should be grilling me on my qualifications—you didn’t even ask me to take a typing test!’ she said accusingly.

  He considered a moment, absent-mindedly fanning the pages of the catalogue, then met her eyes with another of those quizzical smiles. Rachel didn’t know how Olivia could be so impervious to them—Rachel could feel her own mouth smiling back, could even feel her pulse speeding up, and she, after all, was madly in love with Driscoll.

  ‘Sorry, I suppose it must seem a bit haphazard.’ The blue eyes were mildly amused. ‘Well, it probably wouldn’t hurt to get a few things straight.’

  He drummed his fingers on the table-top. ‘The thing is, the main thing you find out from any test is whether someone can pass the test. If you grill someone, you find out how they stand up to a grilling—but it’s not much of a way to getting at what you really want to know, and you may have alienated a first-class worker before their first day on the job. In my experience what actually matters is how much somebody wants to do a job, and how good they are at getting what they want—of course skills matter, but they’re secondary.’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, you were persistent, and prepared to go for the job under embarrassing circumstances, in the teeth of probable opposition from your fiancé—so the will was there. And you were apparently somebody who’d succeeded in getting an ordinary member of the public on first-name terms with a tarantula, so I reckoned you could find a way when you had the will. It was just a hunch, but my hunches usually work out pretty well—if you ask me, that’s probably the thing self-made millionaires usually have in common.’

  Rachel fought down an almost irresistible urge to ask if he’d had a hunch about Olivia. Or was she somebody else who’d wanted a job badly enough? Had Olivia convinced him she wanted the job of wife? But she’d seemed so perfunctory about everything but selecting the furniture! ‘Well, I’ll try to justify your faith in me,’ she said primly instead.

  He laughed. ‘You already have. You look like a million dollars—definitely a credit to the firm. As for typing, I assume you wouldn’t have wanted the job if you didn’t have some knowledge of a keyboard. There won’t be a huge amount to get through, so as long as the finished product looks all right I don’t care whether you type a hundred words a minute or use the fast three-finger method.’

  ‘And what if I don’t work out?’ Rachel persisted, oddly curious.

  ‘Oh, I’ll just have to practise looking steely-eyed when I shave. Seriously, though—if you’re not up to the job I’ll have to get someone else in; it’s as simple as that—and I can certainly show someone the door if I have to. But even then I’d still think I could’ve made a more expensive mistake using some big recruitment agency that gave spelling tests and typing tests and couldn’t see the potential in a girl with a way with spiders.’

  He opened the catalogue again and gestured beside him. ‘So there you have it,’ he said, with another of those knee-weakening grins. ‘The secret of my success. But my Achilles’ heel is a complete lack of sympathy for office or any other furniture—so any advice you can give will be more than welcome.’

  Rachel hesitated, then hopped up to sit beside him on the table and look down at the furniture portrayed in the glossy pages. Suddenly her skirt seemed a lot shorter, she realised; an endless expanse of gleaming, Lycra-clad leg seemed to swing over the edge of the table. And Grant, sudden
ly, seemed not just close but disturbingly close. Their knees were almost touching; he’d put the catalogue on her lap now, and leant over her shoulder to inspect it. She could see the smooth, clean line of his jaw, the ashdark hair cut close to the skull around his ear, shading the bright gleam of hair that had been burnished by the sun.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ he asked, the brilliant blue eyes meeting hers. ‘I’m really not a hard taskmaster, you know.’

  Rachel shook her head.

  His eyes dropped to the page again. ‘I don’t know,’ he said gloomily. ‘This all seems so unnecessary. Do you know anything about conferences?’

  He stretched out a hand to turn a page, accidentally brushing Rachel’s arm. She felt as if an electric shock had suddenly run up her arm; in her confusion she forgot that too much knowledge was a dangerous thing.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I know all about conferences. You really don’t need to worry about all this paraphernalia—I mean, you need enough to look respectable, but it’s not the main thing.’ She was speaking rapidly to distract herself from his closeness now—saying the first thing that came into her head.

  ‘The thing you’ve got to remember is that the papers aren’t really the point—they’re an excuse. The overhead projectors are just to make it look like a good excuse. The big names will come and give papers they’ve put together in three days—they won’t waste time doing something big for a mere conference—and shoals of minor people will give things they’ve cobbled together to get a publication record.’

  ‘You’re very cynical, Spidergirl,’ he told her. ‘If you’re right, it’s hardly worth doing at all, is it? I might as well turn the place into an adventure park.’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘Not necessarily,’ she assured him. ‘The point of it all is—it’s sort of like giving people a chance to have those conversations you had over a campfire drinking tea from a tin. Nobody’s going to pay an airfare to let someone sit by a campfire and eat baked beans, whereas people can get funding to go to a conference, especially if they’re giving a paper. And once they’re there—with a bit of luck—some sparks might fly.’