The Temp and the Tycoon

‘Can you wait until I find out where Kitty needs to go before you sack me?’ she asked.

‘You’re not getting off that lightly.’ He snagged a passing female in a uniform with a glance—something she had signally failed to do with any number of glances—and said, ‘Lady Milward is having trouble finding her check-in desk. Will you please take care of her?’

And then he really smiled. The full-scale, hundred-and-fifty-watt variety. The girl was putty by the time he’d reached sixty watts—if he’d looked at her like that Talie would have been putty—and she briefly considered a lecture on energy saving. Then decided she was in enough trouble…

‘Have a good trip, Kitty,’ he said, turning to the old lady and offering his hand. ‘I hope to see you at the next shareholders’ meeting.’

‘You know her?’ Talie demanded, having rescued her own luggage from Kitty’s trolley before it was whisked away.

‘When she said she was a shareholder I looked at her luggage label. You were suckered, Talie Calhoun. But I don’t suppose you’re the first person she’s fooled with that helpless dithering act. It’s by getting other people to do their dirty work for them for nothing that her kind got rich in the first place.’

‘I don’t care how much money she has,’ Talie said, outraged. ‘She needed help; I gave it.’ And, since she had nothing to lose, ‘What’s made you so cynical?’

‘Experience. Make a note to send her an invitation to the cocktail party.’

A note? As in, like his personal assistant? And suddenly his ‘You’re not getting off that lightly,’ made sense. Sacking her would be too kind. She was going to have to work for him and suffer.

In New York, she reminded herself. In New York.

‘Which cocktail party?’ she asked.

‘The one we hold for shareholders after the Annual General Meeting.’

‘Right.’ She made a move to dig out her notebook.

‘A mental note. We have to check in before they close the flight.’

He picked up the cheap-and-cheerful holdall that had seen her through her student days but which looked embarrassingly scruffy next to the wheel-on laptop bag that Heather had sent with the car, and placed it beside his own equally worn leather holdall.

The thing about buying quality, she thought, was that it matured with age. The scuffs lent it character. Unlike cheap-and-cheerful which, once past its cheerful stage, just looked—well, cheap.

‘Passport.’ He held out his hand for it as they reached the first-class check-in desk.

He had good hands. Large enough to be comforting, with long fingers and the kind of broad-tipped thumb that… Well, never mind what the thumb suggested to her overheated imagination.

But you could tell a lot from a man by looking at his hands.

His lied.

She handed over her passport and tickets. The clerk already had all the details of the change of passenger in her computer, so there was no delay, and it occurred to her that, for a woman distracted by the difficulties of her daughter’s labour, Heather had done an amazing job of handling the details so that Jude Radcliffe’s life would proceed as smoothly as if she was there herself.

It was scarcely surprising that he was irritated to discover that instead of perfection he’d been lumbered with her. Maybe she was being a little harsh. Stifling a yawn, she made a silent vow not to do anything to annoy him further as she and the wheel-on laptop bag put in the occasional hop and skip in an attempt to keep pace with him as he strode towards the boarding gate, making no concession to the fact that her legs were at least a foot shorter than his.

She revised her earlier regret about her shoes, too.

In four-inch heels she’d never have made it.

She also vowed to keep her mouth shut. Not speak unless she was spoken to.

It wasn’t easy. Her student travelling had been done using the cross-Channel ferry and backpacking across Europe, which she’d loved. Her one and only experience of flying was cattle-class on a package tour charter flight, and she’d hated every minute of it.

But this was different, and despite her apprehension—she refused to admit to the flutter of anxiety that until now she’d been too distracted to notice—she looked about her, eager to enthuse about the size of the seats, the amount of space each passenger had and the neat little individual television screens. She always talked too much when she was nervous.

Biting her lower lip to keep her mouth shut, she explored her space, picking up the entertainment programme. ‘We get a choice of films?’ she asked, forgetting her vow of silence in her astonishment.

‘Other people might. You are here to work.’

For seven solid hours?

‘Of course. I was merely making an observation,’ she said crisply, and, restricting her enthusiasm to the business at hand, she opened the laptop bag. ‘This is the note that Heather sent you, Mr Radcliffe,’ she said, handing him an envelope. ‘To explain about me.’

‘I know all about you,’ he said, without enthusiasm. ‘You watch romantic films, attract trouble and are always late.’

This was definitely a moment for silence.

Satisfied, he said, ‘And you will call me Jude.’

‘Oh, but I couldn’t!’

Well, that didn’t last long…

‘Try,’ Jude insisted, trying very hard to keep his temper. Why on earth had Heather picked this woman as her stand-in? It was bad enough that he’d found himself constantly distracted by the memory of those few seconds they’d spent together in the lift, wasting time he’d allocated to thinking about the direction in which he should take the company during the next five years.

Instead of planning corporate strategy he’d been thinking about her ridiculous hair. That totally infectious smile…

He needed someone he could trust on this trip, and Heather was the one who’d suggested that this girl might have been putting on an act, for heaven’s sake. That her story had been just that. A story to snag his attention.

Except he’d just seen her in action. If she was that good an actress she was wasting her time in an office. But somehow the fact that her compassion, her enthusiasm for life, wasn’t an act disturbed him far more. He was more comfortable with guile. Understood it. Knew how to handle it.

He took a slow breath. He was stuck with her and they’d both have to live with it.

‘I may be a bastard,’ he said. ‘Although my mother might take issue with you on that. And I certainly don’t suffer fools in any shape or form in my organisation. But Heather calls me Jude and so will you.’ Then, in case she was under any misapprehension that he was being friendly—he was deeply regretting his uncharacteristic impulse to hold the lift for her— ‘That way I won’t be constantly reminded of her absence every time you speak.’

And, without waiting for her to reply, he opened the envelope and took out a single folded sheet of paper. The note was brief and to the point.

Jude, I know you’re going to be furious that I’ve had to miss this trip, but you know you’re going to have to get used to working without me in the near future. I gave you a year to find a replacement and time is running out. And, no, I didn’t do this deliberately. Even you must realise that I can’t control the arrival of an impatient baby.

Just don’t take it out on Talie. It’s not her fault. Mike raved about her. She takes shorthand verbatim, and I took the trouble to check out her story about the incident on the Underground last week. Unlikely as it may seem, your little blonde was telling the truth.

I know—she’s almost too good to be true. But I’m sure a week working for you will bring out any hidden flaws. If you behave yourself, you might even be able to persuade her to take you on full time. Heather.

He glanced down at the girl sitting beside him.’ Heather suggests you’re almost too good to be true. Shall we see if she’s right?’

‘What?’

It was just as well her eyes were blue or he’d be forced to compare them with a startled doe’s.

What an appallingly banal thought.

At least she’d made an effort to get her hair under control, stuffing it up into some kind of knot on the top of her head that was not so much a bun, more a cottage loaf. Even as he congratulated himself a curl sprang free, refusing to be confined by anything so feeble as a hairpin.

Realising that she was still staring up at him like a startled blue-eyed—and there really was no other word for it—doe, he said, ‘If you’d like to get out your notebook some time before we arrive in New York, maybe I can find out if you’re as good as Mike and Heather claim you are,’ he prompted.

‘But we haven’t even taken off…’ She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, presumably to prevent the rest of the sentence from escaping and thus provoking further sarcasm.

And that irritated him, too. He felt like being seriously—‘Would you fasten your seat-belts, please?’ a stewardess said as she walked through the cabin, checking that everything was properly stowed. ‘We’ll be taking off shortly.’

Talie, it seemed, had a firm grasp of the priorities and got out her notebook before she fastened her seat-belt, made a note of the time and date, wrote something else in shorthand—probably what she wanted to say out loud but thought it wiser not to—and then turned to him, her pencil poised and waiting.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ she said. ‘Jude.’

He dragged his attention from her hair, which was slowly unravelling, and began to dictate a series of notes on the ideas he’d had during his solitary days walking in the Scottish Highlands. The ones that didn’t involve the dimple that appeared for no reason at all every now and then at the corner of her mouth.

The plane backed slowly away from the gate before taxiing to the runway. There was a long pause as they waited for clearance and, glancing across to ensure that she was keeping up with him, he noticed that the knuckles of the hand gripping her pencil were bone-white.

She was nervous? This girl who, without a second thought, leapt to the aid of total strangers in distress?

As he hesitated, she glanced up at him. It wasn’t only her knuckles that were white, he realised, and as the engine noise grew and the plane began to speed down the runway he stepped up the speed at which he was dictating in an effort to distract her.

It might have worked, too, but when a day started out badly, it invariably kept going that way, and as they lifted off something crashed loose in the galley behind them. A woman in the aisle seat opposite them gave a startled scream and Talie jumped so violently that she would undoubtedly have left her seat if she hadn’t been strapped in. As it was, her notebook and pencil took off on a flight of their own, and the pins which had been struggling manfully with gravity to hold up her hair gave up the effort and the cottage loaf exploded.

‘Are we going to die?’ she whispered.

‘Yes,’ he said, reaching out and taking her hand. ‘But not today.’

He really was a bastard, Talie decided, as her heart rate slowly returned to normal. How could she ever have imagined for one minute that he was friendly? Charming? Totally scrummy, actually.

She had practically haunted the lifts of the Radcliffe Tower in her lunchtimes, hoping to run into him again. Knowing that she was being stupid. Just how stupid she couldn’t possibly have imagined.

Okay. She’d give him the killer good looks—even if he was using those slate eyes to freeze her to her seat—and she was right about his hands. They were strong and capable and very good for holding on to when you thought your last moment had come.

Admittedly he’d lost the smooth, boyish look of the average pop idol, and settled into that look men achieved around their mid to late thirties and hung on to until the muscles started to sag a little around the jaw, when they were so old that it didn’t matter. When he smiled he didn’t look anywhere near old enough to be the ill-tempered tycoon described by her colleagues.

Unable to rescue her notebook until the seat-belt sign went off, Talie remained absolutely still, trying to ignore the warmth of his palm pressed against hers, the way his long fingers curled reassuringly around her hand. Instead she closed her eyes and re-ran their encounter in the lift, trying to work out how she could have got it so wrong.

He’d seemed friendly enough, but then she hadn’t given him much of a chance to be anything else, prattling on about being late. He probably wouldn’t have spoken to her at all under normal circumstances. Most of his staff probably wouldn’t have dared say anything beyond good morning.

None of them would have yelled at him to hold the lift. They’d rather have been late.

And he wasn’t being funny when he said she could talk her way out of anything, she realised belatedly. He was being sarcastic.

The seat-belt sign pinged off, but before she could move, reclaim her notepad, he had released her hand and picked it up for her.

‘Have you stopped shaking sufficiently to carry on?’ he asked, handing it to her. ‘Or do you require a medicinal brandy?’

‘If I had a medicinal brandy that would be the end of my working day,’ she said. ‘Not the beginning of it.’

She looked around for her pencil, but it had rolled away under a seat somewhere, and since she wasn’t about to crawl around on her hands and knees looking for it she took a new one from her bag. Then, suspecting that she might need more than one, she swiftly anchored her hair back into place and stuck some spares into the resulting bird’s nest, so that she wouldn’t have to cut him off in full flow.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ she said. Then, when he didn’t immediately begin, she glanced up at him and realised that he was staring at her hair. For just a moment she thought he was going to make some seriously cutting remark.

Maybe she was mistaken. Or maybe he’d wisely thought better of it. Because after a moment he sat back, closed his eyes and continued pouring his thoughts out at a rate that kept her fully occupied for some time.

Her attention briefly wandered when an infant whose mother was deeply engrossed in the film she was watching caught her eye and with a giggle tossed a drinking cup in her direction, hoping for a playmate.

Any other time she’d have been there…

The cup rolled away down the aisle and the child started to cry. Talie found it really, really hard to stay put when every instinct was urging her to leap up and retrieve it. Instead she took a deep breath and, as she turned the page, hit the buzzer to attract the attention of the stewardess.

‘Good decision,’ Jude said.

She’d written it down before she realised that it was a comment rather than dictation. Clearly his eyes weren’t as firmly closed as she’d imagined.

The flight passed without further incident. She typed up the notes Jude had dictated until the laptop battery beeped a warning that it was about to go flat. But if she thought all she had to do was hit ‘save’and then relax for the rest of the flight, she was mistaken.

Jude stopped working on some figures, took a special adapter from his own laptop bag and leaned across her to plug it into the power outlet of the aircraft—obviously concerned that she’d do fatal damage to the aircraft electronics if he left her to do it herself.

He might be an unmitigated bastard as a boss, but he did have gorgeous hair, she thought with an envious sigh as she got an unexpected close-up. Dark as bitter chocolate, perfectly cut so that every silky strand knew its place. Even the lick that momentarily slid across his forehead needed no encouragement to return to order.

She tucked a stray curl behind her ear and comforted herself with the thought that good hair wasn’t everything.

Kindness was much more important.

He refused all offers of tea, coffee, even lunch when it arrived, and, taking only water, kept working. She had no idea if he expected her to follow his example, but enough was enough. He might be able to function on fresh air, but she needed a substantial amount of calories if she was going to keep up this level of output. She made a mental note to stock up on an emergency supply of chocolate at the first confectionery outlet she passed.

After the stewardess had removed her tray, he began again. This time dictating notes for an after-dinner speech he was going to make to some business group, stopping just before her right hand began to scream for mercy.

She began to wonder if Heather’s daughter had really gone into early labour. She might just have decided that she could do with a break, and could always say it had been a false alarm…

Mentally slapping herself for having such evil thoughts, she applied herself to the keyboard, and was taken by surprise when the Captain announced that they would shortly be arriving at JFK.

‘I don’t believe it! A yellow cab!’

Jude glanced across the road to where a constant stream of cabs was picking up new arrivals. ‘No, you’re right. It’s yellow.’ Then, spotting his driver climbing out of a waiting limo, he said, ‘This is our car.’

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