Dating Her Boss

‘Thank you…I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name. Mrs—?’

‘Jacobs.’ She smiled as she filled in the missing piece. ‘But, please, just call me Harriet. Everyone does.’

‘Thank you, Harriet.’ But when she got through to Gemma’s office she was told that her cousin was on holiday and wouldn’t be in the office until the end of the month. She sat and stared at the telephone for a moment. Richie was the only other person she knew in London. She hadn’t intended calling him until she was settled, until she could ring him and casually say, ‘Hi, I’m working in London, thought I’d give you a call…’ But this was an emergency and, after all, she was his ‘best girl’. She found the number in her address book and dialled it.

‘Rich Productions.’

‘Can I speak to Richie Blake, please?’

‘Who?’

‘Richie—’ Then she remembered. He was Rich now. Rich Blake, television’s newest and brightest star. ‘Rich Blake,’ she said. ‘This is Jilly Prescott. A friend,’ she added, then wished she hadn’t. It made her sound like some girl he’d met once trying to make it into something more important.

‘Mr Blake is in a meeting.’ The girl’s unhelpful response gave the impression that was exactly what she thought.

‘Then would you give him a message?’ Jilly persisted politely. ‘Will you tell him that Jilly Prescott called?’ She repeated her name carefully. ‘Will you please tell him that I’m in London and that I need to speak to him urgently? Ask him to call me back at this number.’ And she gave the girl Max Fleming’s telephone number. There was no response. ‘Have you got that?’ she asked, rather more sharply than she had meant to.

‘Sure. I’ll tell him.’ And Jilly had a mental image of the girl crumpling up the note and flinging it into the nearest bin. About to say that she really was an old friend, that he would want to know she was in town, she restrained herself. Richie—Rich—was a celebrity these days. Girls probably rang him all the time and Jilly was getting the distinct impression that the bored voice at the other end of the telephone had heard it all before.

Her mother was rather more pleased to hear from her. Too pleased. ‘Jilly! Thank goodness you’ve phoned. I’ve just found out that Gemma’s away.’ It was uncanny the way she did that. Just found out things. Where she’d been, who she’d been with. There had never been any point in telling her mother even the tiniest little white lie. She always found out. ‘Your auntie has just been round showing off a postcard Gemma sent her from Florida. She’s gone there with her boyfriend.’ Disapproval oozed down the telephone line. ‘I just knew it was a mistake for you to go racing off like that. What are you going to do now?’

She was being given a choice? She wasn’t being ordered back on the first train home like a child? No, her mother was cleverer than that. She would rely on the promise given that she would go straight home if anything went wrong—a promise she had given in the certainty that nothing could.

She was twenty years old, for heaven’s sake, nearly twenty-one. Not a child. A twenty-year-old, moreover, who had taken on a job, had people—well, Max Fleming—relying on her. Her mother would understand that, surely? ‘Mum, right now I have half a book of shorthand notes to type up. Until that’s done I can’t think about anything else,’ she said. But she was thinking that it would be nice, just for once, to behave like her madcap cousin, forget promises and do what she wanted.

Gemma was irresponsible, she dyed her hair and lived in London and her mother had always said she would come to a bad end. Maybe she would, but right now Gemma was on holiday in Florida. With a boyfriend. Jilly didn’t have a boyfriend. Not that she hadn’t had offers, but there had only ever been Richie and just lately he seemed to have forgotten she existed…

‘What a disappointment for you,’ her mother said, all sympathy now she was sure Jilly would be home in hours. ‘What’s it like? The job, I mean.’ Certain of Jilly’s obedient response to the jerk of the apron strings, she clearly felt at liberty to allow her curiosity its head.

‘The job?’ Jilly, who wasn’t feeling at all charitable towards her mother, her cousin or anyone else, laid it on with a trowel. ‘The job is wonderful. Mr Fleming was so eager to have me start that Ms Garland sent me here in a taxi. The money is four times what I was earning before and the office cloakroom is marble,’ she added. A marble cloakroom would really impress her mother.

‘Really?’ Her mother’s offhand tone and the little sniff that went with it were a dead giveaway. She was impressed all right. ‘And this Mr Fleming, what’s he like?’

‘Mr Fleming?’ What was Max Fleming like? She remembered the moment when he had turned from the window and stared at her. No man had ever looked at her quite like that before, made her feel quite that…transparent. Not that she was going to tell her mother that. Instead, with a flash of inspiration, she went for her sympathy. ‘He’s been ill, I think. He walks with a stick.’ That made him sound positively geriatric, she realised belatedly.

‘Ah, the poor man—’ Mrs Prescott was all concern.

Geriatric was good, Jilly realised. ‘And he’s obviously had a terrible time getting a temp that can take shorthand down here,’ she said, throwing in a sop to her mother’s northern prejudices.

‘Well, he won’t be able to complain about your work.’ Her mother’s smug satisfaction about that irritated her. What was the point of being the very best at your job if you had to live at home and work in some dreary solicitor’s office for a pittance? She wanted a job like Amanda Garland’s secretary; she wanted to dress in a suit that cost a mint of money, have her split ends trimmed by someone who knew the right way to hold the scissors…Heck, why stop at that? She wanted to be Amanda Garland, not her secretary. ‘What does he do?’ her mother asked, cutting in on this wild daydream. Her mother had no objection to chatting long distance on the telephone at someone else’s expense.

‘He’s an economist; he’s working with the World Bank to find money to finance water resources for those poor little children in Africa. You know, the ones you see on the television.’ Tugging shamelessly on her mother’s well-developed sense of sympathy, she sighed dramatically. ‘I don’t know how he’s going to manage…’ Then, ‘I’ll have to go now, Mum, I’ve a pile of work to do—’

But her mother wasn’t finished. ‘Have you spoken to Richie Blake, yet?’ She kept her voice carefully neutral, but even so the distrust seeped around the edges.

‘No, not yet.’ The plain unvarnished truth.

But the day was not yet over.

‘Well, I’d better let you go, Jilly. Ring me and let me know what train you’ll be on.’

Her mother’s complacent belief that she would give up the best job she had ever had and return home without making an effort to find somewhere to stay until Gemma returned was practically an incitement to rebellion.

Promptly at three o’clock she tapped on Max Fleming’s office door, entered and placed the completed report on his desk.

He glanced at the report, then at the clock on the mantelpiece striking the hour, and then sat back in his big leather chair and regarded her with those penetrating grey eyes. ‘Tell me, Jilly, did you wait until you heard the clock begin to chime or was it pure chance that brought you through the door on the stroke of three?’

He knew the answer to that as well as she did, but she refused to be intimidated. ‘Pure chance,’ she replied without hesitation.

‘In a pig’s eye.’

Jilly blinked. Her solicitor would never have dreamed of saying anything like that. But he was right, of course, she’d been finished in plenty of time. She’d used it to try Richie’s office again. He’d gone out. ‘Whatever you say, sir.’

He looked quickly down at the report, but not before she’d seen his mouth twitch in a rather promising way. ‘Max. Call me Max. And sit down while I check this for mistakes.’

‘You won’t find any.’

‘Then it won’t take long, will it?’

She didn’t reply, but flinched as he checked some figures against a computer printout and then crossed through the ones she had typed, replacing them with a new set. He glanced up and this time there was no doubt about the smile. ‘I had second thoughts about those figures. Reprint it, will you? Six copies. And call a courier. I want it biked over to the ODA the minute it’s printed.’ He saw her blank look. ‘The Overseas Development Agency,’ he explained. ‘There’s an address book on your desk. Not that they’ll do anything with it until it’s too late.’

Unable to think of any suitable reply to that, she picked up the report and headed back to her office.

‘Then bring your book in,’ he added before she reached the door. ‘If I clear my in-tray tonight you can start working on it first thing in the morning. I’ll be out until midday—’

She stopped, turned to look at him, her heart in her boots. There was no point in putting it off any longer, she would have to tell him. ‘I’m sorry, but I doubt if I’ll be here in the morning, Mr Fleming.’

He glanced up from the pile of mail in front of him. ‘Not here? Of course you’ll be here. Didn’t Amanda tell you that I needed you for at least two weeks, possibly longer?’

‘Yes, she did. But you were right. My cousin is on holiday—she’s in Florida, so I’ve got nowhere to stay.’

‘But that’s no reason to go rushing back to…’ He paused, clearly trying to remember where it was she had said she came from.

‘North of Watford,’ she reminded him.

‘Somewhere no one has ever heard of,’ he retaliated. Then, ‘She won’t be away for ever.’

She might as well be. ‘Until the end of the month.’

‘Exactly. Two weeks. You can stay in a hotel until then.’

Just like that? ‘I’m sure you mean well, Mr Fleming—’

‘Max,’ he reminded her.

‘Max,’ she repeated awkwardly. She’d never called anyone she worked for by their first name before. ‘I’ve been temping since November and in case you hadn’t noticed we’ve just had Christmas. I had to pay for my train fare down here on my credit card—’

‘In other words, don’t be such an idiot?’

‘I didn’t say that—’

‘You were thinking it, and you were right. But you’re not going anywhere, Jilly Prescott. You’re the first girl I’ve had in this office in the last two weeks who even comes close to Laura…’ he saw her frown ‘…my secretary. She’s away looking after her mother.’

‘Yes, Ms Garland told me.’

He regarded her closely. ‘There must be somewhere you can stay?’

Must there? ‘Any number of park benches,’ she offered. ‘And there’s Waterloo Bridge if I provide my own cardboard box—’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he said angrily. The very thought of her sleeping rough sent a shiver up his spine. But there had to be some solution. He’d call Amanda; having found the perfect secretary for him, she would surely do anything to help him to keep her, if only to keep him off her back. ‘Sit down.’

‘What about this report?’

He didn’t answer, simply fixed her with his eyes and waited for her to obey him. She returned to the chair in front of his desk and sat down without another word. Only then did he reach for the telephone. ‘Amanda? I need another favour.’

‘Please tell me that you haven’t given that poor girl such a hard time that she’s left already? I did warn you—’

‘That “poor girl” needs none of your sympathy. What she needs is a roof over her head for the next two weeks.’

‘So?’

‘Can you find her somewhere?’

‘I run an employment agency, darling, not an accommodation bureau.’ He waited. ‘I don’t understand why you need my help,’ she added unhelpfully.

‘Who else would I ask?’

‘Darling, look around you. You’ve got enough room in that barn of a house for twenty secretaries. Put her in one of them. She’ll be handy when you get some brilliant idea in the middle of night.’

‘I can’t do that—’

‘Why not? Really, Max, if you’re worried that she’ll think you’re lusting after her luscious young body tell her that you’re gay.’

‘Mandy!’

‘No? Macho pride couldn’t stand it? Well, in that case you’ll just have to convince her that Harriet will make a perfectly adequate chaperon, won’t you?’ And with that she hung up.

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