His Girl Monday to Friday Read online

  Even as she thought it he was buttoning up his shirt and shaking out his cuffs. He slipped on his jacket and put his tie in a pocket.

  Barbara fastened her bra and began to button up her dress.

  Charles gave her a rueful smile. ‘God, I hate to see you do that,’ he said.

  She smiled at him shyly. Maybe he would be like this as long as he was here, then as soon as he walked out the door there would be a sea-change and he would never smile at her like this again.

  ‘Well, what do you say to one for the road?’ he said.

  She walked into his arms and raised her mouth to his. She’d long ago lost count—this could have been anything from twenty to one hundred. The only thing she knew for sure was that it was the last. She devoured his mouth, trying to fix its taste in her mind—trying to fix in her mind for ever what it felt like to have him want her so badly.

  At last he raised his head.

  ‘Here’s hoping they don’t pull me over for driving under the influence,’ he said quizzically. ‘I think we read a poem at school about kisses like wine; they didn’t tell us the half of it.’ He glanced at his watch and whistled. ‘You’d better start packing yourself,’ he said. ‘See you in the office at nine?’

  Barbara nodded speechlessly.

  ‘Terrific.’ He bent his head and brushed her mouth with his for positively the last final time, and he was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BARBARA got into the office a couple of minutes before nine. She had showered and changed and packed, and all in all she felt pretty good, considering she’d had no sleep and was about to be comprehensively snubbed by the only man she had ever loved for having kissed him the night before.

  Charles’s door was open.

  ‘No, of course it’s not a problem,’ he was saying. ‘It needs a little fine-tuning, obviously, but we can certainly get the preliminary proposal in by Tuesday. Thanks for letting me know.’

  Barbara put her things by her word processor and turned it on. Then she wandered over to his door just in case a miracle had happened.

  It hadn’t. Charles was leafing through her Barrett presentation, his expression black. He looked up to see her at the door, and the scowl deepened to a glower.

  ‘Good morning, Barbara,’ he said coolly. ‘Would you mind coming here a moment?’

  Barbara walked up to his side. She hadn’t expected to like being snubbed and she didn’t like it—but the funny thing was that, just at the moment, it wasn’t the fact that he was ignoring last night that bothered her. The Barrett presentation was her baby; he was holding it in his hands and instead of exclaiming in amazement over the marvellous infant, he had actually had the audacity to frown at it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said frigidly.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ he said, slapping the presentation with an impatient hand.

  ‘Where did I get it?’ she repeated doubtfully.

  ‘Where did you get the material you were reformatting?’ he said irritably.

  ‘Well, from Mr Carlin…’ Barbara said uncertainly.

  ‘You must have taken the wrong disk,’ Charles informed her.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ Barbara asked.

  ‘You could say that,’ Charles said grimly. ‘Cancel our reservations for Prague, will you? Something’s come up that I can’t walk away from. Oh, and get Mike Carlin up here pronto.’

  Barbara went out to her desk and called the travel agency. Then she called Mike Carlin and told him Charles wanted to see him. Then she went back into Charles’s office to defend her baby.

  ‘What exactly is the problem?’ she asked challengingly.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘I know you were trying to be helpful, Barbara, but you’ve just wasted everybody’s time by reworking the wrong thing. If you’d shown it to me when I asked I could have told you two days ago.’ He tossed the presentation aside contemptuously. ‘As it is, Barrett have just moved the deadline up again. They want the preliminary proposal in by Tuesday and we’ve lost time we could ill afford while you polished up something we can’t use. I’ll have to see this through myself now, and frankly I can’t really afford not to be going to Prague either.’

  Barbara would have liked to argue, but she was afraid of getting Mike in trouble if she said too much. She just looked at her darling presentation and smouldered.

  Mike came through the door five minutes later. He still looked haggard—well, goodness only knew how much sleep the Polish deal was costing him.

  ‘Hi, Mike,’ said Charles.

  ‘Charles,’ said Mike.

  ‘I’ve been looking through the Barrett presentation,’ said Charles. “There are some good things here, but I do have just one question.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Mike said wearily.

  ‘I’d just like to know,’ Charles said softly, his eyes cold with rage, ‘why this entire proposal is based on the last version of our software instead of the most recent one.’

  Mike looked at him for a moment.

  ‘Well?’ said Charles.

  Mike’s mouth hardened. ‘I’ll tell you why,’ he said quietly. ‘The reason is that the folder you saw a couple of days ago represented the sum total of the work I’d done on the project. Everything you see here was done by your secretary, based on previous bids we’d made and materials from Barrett. The previous bids were all made before we developed this version; I forgot to point that out to her.’

  There was a moment of dead silence. Green eyes met grey, then Charles began to talk. He didn’t raise his voice; he merely made clear, in a tone as icy and brutal as an Arctic sea, his opinion of a man who could take on one of the most important opportunities for the company, leave it as a few scrawls on scraps of paper in a file for four months and then, instead of allowing the problem to be faced head-on by those capable of dealing with it, delegate it to one of the secretaries.

  It went on for a long time, and Mike listened without protest until Charles wound down. At last he came to an end. ‘I’ve never questioned your talent, Mike,’ he said, in a tone of voice that made the comment sound like an insult, ‘but you’re obviously out of your depth. There are people you can throw in at the deep end and they thrive on it—I thought you were one of them. That was my mistake. It’s clear you just don’t have what it takes to operate at this level.’

  The haggard eyes narrowed, and Mike spoke at last. ‘I used to think I’d like to go out on my own,’ he said. ‘I had a lot of ideas that interested me which you didn’t want to follow up. Our competitors have come up with one or two of them independently and done pretty well out of them so there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have worked out eventually.’

  He shrugged. ‘But when my wife got pregnant a couple of years ago I thought I couldn’t afford to take risks.’ He looked at Charles, his grey eyes burning. ‘Well, I haven’t just missed the baby’s first word—I’ve got a two-year-old with a hundred-word vocabulary and I’ve missed every single damn one of them. I haven’t spent an evening with my wife in a year; I haven’t spent a whole day with my wife and child since the baby was born, and that includes Christmas. I don’t know what risks I thought I was sparing them, but they can’t be any worse than abandoning them in every sense but the legal one.’

  He threw his own copy of the proposal on Charles’s desk. ‘You’ll have my letter of resignation by the end of the day,’ he said. He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room.

  Barbara looked for some sign of regret on Charles’s face but there was none. Surely he must feel something, she thought. Mike had been a protégé of his, a university dropout he’d taken a chance on who’d turned out to be brilliant. Surely he wasn’t going to let it end like this?

  ‘Right, well, it’s got to be in place by Monday,’ he said curtly to Barbara. ‘You’ve cancelled Prague? Good. We’ve got from now to the end of the weekend to turn this round. Four days for the substance, one good night’s sleep and we’ll still have Monday to catch howlers and make it l
ook pretty. I’ll look at what you’ve got and bring it up to speed so we’re not selling an outdated package. If we work together we should be able to swing it.’

  Barbara folded her arms across her chest. ‘So you’re just going to let him walk out?’ she said incredulously. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘If he hadn’t resigned I’d have asked for his resignation,’ Charles said grimly.

  Barbara glared at him. First she’d wondered whether kissing him might make her go off him. It hadn’t seemed to—as soon as he’d stopped kissing her she’d just wanted him to start again. Then she’d wondered whether the powerful physical chemistry might somehow neutralise the exasperation she felt with Charles most of the time. Well, considering that she’d never before wanted to up-end an executive-sized flower arrangement—with water—over his head, the answer to that also appeared to be a resounding no.

  ‘You told me he was absolutely brilliant!’ she said accusingly.

  ‘We’re not competing for a Nobel Prize,’ Charles said drily. ‘We’re competing for market share against some of the most ruthless and powerful operators in the world. If somebody can’t take the pace we’re better off without him.’

  ‘Oh, really!’ Barbara said scathingly. ‘Well, in my opinion they’d actually be better off without you. If they had someone at the top who didn’t expect everyone to be superheroes, like his conveniently unattached self, they could be part of a world-beating team.’ Her eyes sizzled. ‘The brains of the people in this organisation are your biggest assets and, considering that you’ve just decided it was a clever idea to force out one of the best people you’ve got, I’d say the best brains in the company aren’t at the top. In my opinion you should call him back and offer him six months’ paid paternity leave and an apology.’

  ‘You’re welcome to your opinion,’ Charles said coolly.

  ‘Now, if you’ve had your say, let’s get down to work.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Barbara. ‘If Mike leaves, I’m going with him.’

  Charles shrugged. ‘I’d just like to point out that if you leave before your year is up you forfeit this five per cent shareholding you’ve made so much of. I can’t say that agreeing to it was the best bargain I ever made, but you may want to think twice before giving up something likely to be worth several million pounds.’

  ‘It’s not going to be worth the paper it’s written on if you keep throwing away brilliant people,’ Barbara said acidly. ‘Besides, I happen to like Mike. I think it would be fun to work with him. It would certainly be an improvement on a year of your style of personnel management. Where exactly did you come up with it anyway? Did you find a previously undiscovered manuscript, passed down from Attila the Hun, or is it your own invention?’

  His jaw hardened. ‘Barbara, you don’t have the track record to entitle you to pass judgement on management decisions. I knew it was a mistake to kiss you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Barbara agreed sympathetically. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it? Before you kissed me I always agreed with everything you said. Funny how just a couple of kisses could make a girl so uppity.’

  He shot her a look of pure, unadulterated dislike.

  ‘At least think about it,’ pleaded Barbara. ‘I realise this is a tight deadline, but we can meet it and this could be a blessing in disguise. They’re a tough nut to crack. I don’t think the type of presentation you’ve made before would have worked for them, and Mike could have wasted a lot of time on it, without anyone actually being better off.’

  The dark blue eyes stared intently into his, willing him to listen to her.

  ‘Just think,’ said Barbara. ‘Even if Mike had miraculously managed to come up with a presentation, you wouldn’t actually have been better off if it had been completely off-track—and nobody here would have known it was off-track because you don’t know how Barrett work. Well, even if you think he should have managed better, what’s the point of losing him when you’re actually no worse off? And you’ve said yourself he’s brilliant. You said he had ideas so far ahead of the time there wouldn’t be a market for them for the next twenty years. Do you really think someone like that is going to just walk in off the street to take his place?’

  ‘You do like him,’ Charles said edgily. ‘Maybe work isn’t the only reason he hasn’t seen this wife and baby he was so touchy about.’

  The suggestion was so preposterous that Barbara couldn’t help laughing out loud. Mike Carlin was brilliant, and he wasn’t bad-looking, but she couldn’t even look at him when Charles was in the room.

  ‘He’s not my type,’ she said, her mouth curling up involuntarily as she remembered that she’d actually been kissed now by the only man she’d ever wanted. See how furious he looked now—good thing she’d got him to kiss her before all this blew up. Look at the way he’d said kissing her had been a bad idea—if he could, he’d probably take it back! Too late now. Her eyes sparkled.

  ‘I thought you didn’t have a type,’ said Charles.

  ‘I don’t,’ Barbara said, catching herself. ‘I like lots of different kinds of men,’ she lied offhandedly, ‘but Mike Carlin isn’t one of the kinds I like. On the other hand,’ she pointed out, ‘I didn’t think you picked your staff on the basis of whether I might like to sleep with them.’

  The angry look in his eyes had given way to a kind of exasperated amusement. ‘Why the hell did I think I wanted to work with you for a year?’ he asked, looking at the cocky stance and unfazed expression of the Perfect Secretary, the only member of a staff of 465 who’d never for even two seconds looked afraid of him.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Barbara riposted instantly. ‘One thing I do know is it wasn’t for my looks, because you specifically said you didn’t want to get involved with your secretary.’ Her mouth quirked up again, remembering those lovely, lovely kisses. Ha! ‘At one point,’ she said primly, ‘I got the impression you’d changed your mind on that one. Now you appear to have reconsidered your position. I wonder whether it might be worth maintaining a similarly flexible approach to a member of staff you once described to me as a genius.’

  He drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘You could be right,’ he said at last, to her amazement. He flicked her a gleaming glance. ‘Maybe I should reconsider just how uninvolved I want to be with my secretary while I’m about it, but first things first.’

  He picked up his phone and punched in an extension. ‘Mallory here. I want to talk to Mike Carlin. Isn’t he in his office? Oh, I see. Well, get him to pick up, will you?’

  He put the phone on ‘speaker’.

  There was a short pause, then the secretary’s voice came crackling through.

  ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t want to talk to you, Mr Mallory.’

  Charles gave a short laugh. ‘Well, I can’t say I blame him, but I’d like a word with him. Look, I want you to go back in and say two words to him and see if that gets him to the phone.’

  ‘What are the words, Mr Mallory?’ Even over the crackle the voice was sceptical.

  ‘Paternity leave.’

  ‘I’ll try, sir.’

  There was another pause. Then a man’s voice came on the line.

  ‘Carlin speaking.’

  ‘Mike.’ Charles ran a hand absent-mindedly through his hair. ‘Barbara’s just been pointing out to me that we can’t get another genius by putting an ad in the paper. She says we should do whatever it takes to get you to stay. She said she thought six months’ paid paternity leave would do for starters. I don’t know if I can really stretch to that, but I wondered what you’d say to this: Six months’ paid paternity leave, with as much work as you want to keep you from going insane among the nappies, or whatever damned thing it is they wear at two.’

  There was a very long silence. At last a voice came slowly over the line. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘I never joke about babies, Mike. You’re a braver man than I am. Look, I’ll draft the offer and get Barbara to type it up and take it down. Just don’t walk out without thinking it over.’ He cu
t the connection and gave Barbara a sardonic look. ‘Well?’

  Barbara raised an eyebrow. ‘All right, maybe I won’t sell my shares after all.’

  ‘You don’t have any shares yet. You’re just a probationary shareholder.’

  “That didn’t seem to bother you last night,’ Barbara said pertly.

  He grinned. ‘I had other things on my mind.’

  He stood up. ‘Now, of course,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I realise that you’re an actual secretary and only a potential shareholder, and that kissing you is a very bad idea.’ He came around the desk to look down into her vivid face, the brilliant red hair and brilliant blue eyes crackling with energy. His mouth quirked up in the crooked smile that was so disarming. ‘But I’m going to do it anyway.’

  He bent his head and kissed her swiftly and ruthlessly.

  It was over too soon, but Barbara wasn’t complaining. Now he’d kissed her again after he was never going to kiss her again! In years to come, while Charles went on avoiding babies and accumulating lovers till they outnumbered his ties, she’d be able to remember all these kisses. First she could remember daring him to kiss her in the car, and then she could remember that he’d kissed her later without even being asked. Didn’t that count for something?

  And then he’d actually kissed her the morning after when she thought she’d exhausted her ration for a lifetime because the morning after Charles always moved on to the brush-off. And for about two seconds there’d been a sort of smiling look in his eyes, too.

  ‘I’ll come out to your word processor and just dictate the offer over your shoulder,’ said Charles, just as if nothing had happened. ‘We’d better get it down to Mike before he decides to go it alone out of sheer bloody-mindedness.’

  ‘Something you would naturally never do,’ Barbara quipped. Her mouth was still stinging from his kiss. Maybe she should try that one of these days—just say, ‘I know kissing you is a bad idea but I’m going to do it anyway,’ and go ahead with it. He might not be trying to brush her off yet, but it would come. When it did, she could take matters into her own hands.