Contracted: Corporate Wife
‘Oh, great.’ Patrick hunched a shoulder and Lou leant forward.
‘You’re obviously not aware of the fact that Schola Systems has always had a very good reputation for family-friendly policies,’ she admonished him. ‘I was lucky to get a job there when I had to go back to work and the children were small, and especially to have such an understanding boss. Bill Sheeran was always flexible when people needed time at home for one reason or another.
‘It won him a lot of loyalty from the staff,’ she added warningly, ‘so if you were thinking of holding parenthood against your employees, you might find yourself without any staff at all!’
‘There’s no question of holding anything against anyone,’ said Patrick irritably.
He didn’t want to hear any more about how marvellous Bill Sheeran had been. Not marvellous enough to save his own company, though, Patrick thought cynically. It was all very well being friendly and flexible, but if Patrick hadn’t taken over all those admiring employees would have been spending a lot more time at home than they wanted. There was no point in being family friendly if your firm went bust and your staff found themselves out of a job.
‘I just wish you’d told me, that’s all,’ he grumbled to Lou.
Lou didn’t feel like making it easy for him. Honestly, the man never even asked her if she’d had a nice weekend on a Monday morning. ‘If you’d shown any interest in your new PA at all, you would have known.’
‘I’m showing an interest now,’ he said grumpily. ‘Is there anything else I need to know?’
‘Is there anything else you want to know?’ she countered.
‘You don’t wear a wedding ring,’ said Patrick after a moment.
‘I’m divorced. Why?’ The champagne was definitely having an effect. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got a problem with divorce as well as children?’
‘Of course not. I’m divorced myself.’
‘Really?’
‘Why the surprise? It’s not exactly uncommon as you’ll know better than anyone.’
Quite, thought Lou. ‘You’re right. I don’t know why I was surprised, really. I suppose it’s because you don’t seem like the marrying kind,’ she said, thinking of his lifestyle. Playboy or not, he clearly didn’t spend much time at home.
‘I’m not,’ said Patrick with a grim smile. ‘That’s why I’m divorced. We were only married a couple of years. We were both very young.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a mistake for both of us. That’ll be a bit of news for the girls in Finance,’ he added, not without a trace of sarcasm.
‘I’ll pass it on,’ said Lou, smiling blandly in return.
Patrick held up the bottle and squinted at the dregs in surprise. ‘We seem to have finished the bottle,’ he said, sharing out the last drops and upending it in the ice bucket. ‘Do you want another? Your toy boy is probably longing for an excuse to come over and see you again!’
Lou rolled her eyes. ‘I think I’d better eat,’ she said, ignoring the toy-boy crack.
The champagne had slipped down very nicely. A little too nicely, in fact. She was beginning to feel pleasantly fuzzy. She might even be a bit tipsy, Lou realised, hoping that she would be able to make it to the restaurant without falling over or doing anything embarrassing. They hadn’t had time for a proper lunch and it was all starting to catch up with her.
She felt better in the restaurant. The waiters fussed around, bringing bread and a jug of water without being asked. Obviously they could see that she needed it.
Lou took a piece of bread, and spread butter on it. This was no time to worry about her diet. She needed to line her stomach as quickly as possible.
She tried to focus on the menu, but kept getting distracted by Patrick opposite. He had been easier to talk to than she had expected. Of course, the champagne had probably helped. He certainly wasn’t as brusque and impersonal as usual. She had even found herself warming to him in a funny kind of way. It was as if they had both let down their guards for the evening. It must be something to do with being stranded away from home and tired…and, oh, yes, the champagne.
She really mustn’t have any more to drink, Lou decided, but somehow a glass of wine appeared in front of her and it seemed rude to ignore it. She would just take the occasional sip.
‘So,’ said Patrick when they had ordered. ‘What’s happened to your children tonight? Are they with their father?’
‘No, Lawrie lives in Manchester.’ There was a certain restraint in her voice when she mentioned her ex-husband, he noticed. ‘I knew I’d be late back to London even if the trains had been running, so I arranged for them to stay with a friend. They love going to Marisa’s. She lets them watch television all night and doesn’t make them eat vegetables.’
Which was probably more than Patrick needed or wanted to know. He was only making polite conversation after all. She was getting garrulous, a sure sign that she had had too much to drink. Better have another piece of bread.
‘Have you got any children?’ she asked, thinking it might be better to switch the conversation back to Patrick before she started telling him how good at sport Grace was or how adorable Tom had been as a baby.
‘No,’ said Patrick, barely restraining a shudder at the very idea. ‘I’ve never wanted them. My ex-wife, Catriona, did. That’s one of the reasons we split up in the end.’ His mouth pulled down at the corners as he contemplated his glass. ‘Apparently I was incredibly selfish for wanting to live my own life.’
Lou frowned a little owlishly. ‘But isn’t the reason you get married precisely because you want to live your life with another person, that you want to do it together and not on your own?’
She’d spoken without thinking and for a moment she thought she might have gone a bit far.
‘I told Catriona before we got married that I didn’t want children,’ said Patrick, apparently not taking exception at the intrusiveness of her question. ‘And she said that she understood. She said she didn’t want a family either, that she didn’t want to share me with anyone else, not even a baby.’
He rolled his eyes a little as if inviting her to mock his younger self who had believed his wife, but Lou thought she could still hear the hurt in his voice. He must have loved Catriona a lot.
‘We agreed,’ Patrick insisted, even as part of him marvelled that he was telling Lou all this. ‘It wasn’t just me. I thought we both wanted the same thing and that everything would be fine, but we’d hardly been married a year before she started to lobby for a baby.’
He sounded exasperated, and Lou couldn’t help feeling a pang of sympathy for poor Catriona. You’d have to be pretty brave to lobby Patrick Farr about anything.
‘It’s quite common for women to change their minds about having a baby,’ she said mildly. ‘It’s a hormone thing. You can be quite sure you’re not interested, and then one day you wake up and your body clock has kicked in, and suddenly a baby is all you can think about. I was like that before I had Grace.’
‘Yes, well, I’ve learnt the hard way that women change their minds the whole time,’ said Patrick grouchily. ‘If I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have believed Catriona in the first place. But I was young then, and it was a blow.’
‘It must have been a blow for her too,’ Lou pointed out. ‘It doesn’t sound as if you were prepared to compromise at all.’
‘How can you compromise about a baby?’ demanded Patrick. ‘Either you have one or you don’t. There are no halfway measures, no part-time options, on parenthood.’
That would be news to Lawrie, Lou couldn’t help thinking. He seemed to think that he could drop in and out of his children’s lives whenever it suited him.
‘Plenty of fathers don’t have much choice but to see their children on a part-time basis,’ she said, struggling to sound fair. ‘It can work.’
‘I didn’t want to be a father like that,’ said Patrick flatly. ‘I don’t believe in half measures. Either you do something properly, or you don’t do it at all.’
Not the king of compromise, then.
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOU could say that about marriage too,’ said Lou, courage bolstered by all the champagne she had drunk.
Patrick twisted a fork between his fingers, his expression bitter. ‘I would have stuck with our marriage no matter what, but Catriona wanted a divorce. So that’s what happened. We didn’t do it at all.’
‘What happened to Catriona?’
‘Oh, she met someone else. She got her children…three of them…but now she’s divorced again. Her husband ran off with his secretary for a more exciting and child-free life, I gather, so she’s on her own again.’
‘You know,’ he confided slowly, ‘Catriona always used to say that if only she could have a baby, she would never be unhappy again, but I still see her occasionally, and she doesn’t look very happy to me. She’s got the children she wanted, but she looks exhausted and worn down.’
‘I’m not surprised if her husband’s left her and she’s dealing with three children by herself,’ said Lou.
‘She’s got help,’ said Patrick unsympathetically. ‘She got the house and she’ll have someone to clean it and an au pair to take care of the kids. She doesn’t even have to work. And when it comes down to it, it was her choice.’
‘It’s tiring bringing up children,’ said Lou, although she was feeling less sympathetic since hearing about the cleaner and the au pair and the lack of a mortgage.
A cleaner, imagine it! Imagine having a house with no rent or mortgage to pay. Even better. She’d hold on the au pair though. Grace would make mincemeat of the poor girl.
‘Kids can be very consuming,’ she said.
‘I know,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s precisely why I’ve chosen not to have them. You can keep all your dirty nappies and your grazed knees and your adolescent tantrums. I don’t want to be bothered with any of that.’
‘But are you any happier than Catriona?’
‘Of course I am!’
Lou looked unconvinced. ‘You say she’s not happy, but I bet she is. I bet she doesn’t regret having those children for an instant. Of course it’s hard work. There are days when I’m so exhausted just getting through the day, and it all seems a never-ending battle, and then I’ll look at the back of Tom’s neck, or hear Grace laughing, and they’re so…miraculous…I feel like my heart’s going to stop with the sheer joy of them. Do you ever feel like that?’
‘I do when I look at my Porsche,’ said Patrick flippantly.
‘Enough to make up for a failed marriage and losing your wife?’
‘Look, I was bitter when Catriona left. Of course I was,’ he said, a slightly defensive edge to his voice. ‘I’m not going to pretend I’ve been ecstatically happy all the time, ever since, but I’ve moved on. I’ve been successful in a way I would never have dreamed of when I was married to Catriona. I’ve built up some great companies, and I’ve made lots of money while I was at it. I’ve worked hard and I’ve had a good life. And I’ve got the kind of car most men can only fantasise about.’
‘Oh, well, as long as you’ve got a nice car…’
‘You may mock, but it means a lot.’
‘I think you may need to be a man to understand that one,’ said Lou. Tom and Lawrie certainly would.
‘Let’s put it this way,’ said Patrick, pointing a fork at her for emphasis. ‘I can do what I want. I can go where I want, when I want, with whoever I want. You don’t think that makes me happy?’
‘Right.’ Lou nodded understandingly as she buttered another piece of bread. She hoped the food was coming soon. She was starving. ‘So when was the last time you went away? You certainly haven’t been anywhere in the last three months.’
‘I’ve been busy, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ said Patrick, thrown off balance by this new, combative Lou. ‘I had a company to save!’
‘Hey, we managed for years before you came along! We wouldn’t have fallen apart if you’d taken a long weekend. You didn’t even go away at Easter. Don’t you ever wish that you were working for something more than to make more money? That you had someone to go home to at the end of the day?’
‘Aren’t you trying to ask me if I ever get lonely?’ said Patrick sardonically.
‘Well, don’t you?’
‘I don’t need to be on my own if I don’t choose to. I’ve had plenty of relationships, and I’m not short of female company.’
So Lou had gathered from the gossip columns.
Perhaps it was just as well that the food arrived before she had time to frame a tart retort. Patrick had to watch while Lou went through her smiling routine again, and the waiter, this one old enough to have known better, fell over himself to serve her. He picked up her napkin, refilled both of her glasses, offered to fetch her more bread and ground pepper from an extremely suggestive-looking mill.
Extraordinary, thought Patrick. He studied her across the table. She had taken off her jacket and was wearing a simple, silky sort of top with a scoop neck, its plainness set off by a striking silver necklace. OK, she was elegant in a classic way and she had a charming smile—it seemed to work on waiters and barmen, anyway—but there wasn’t anything particularly special about the rest of her.
Well, she had nice eyes, he supposed, amending his opinion slightly, and all the assurance of an older woman, but there was no way you could describe her as beautiful. Not like Ariel, who had all the bloom and radiance of youth. Still, now that he was looking at her properly, he could see that she did have a certain allure with that dark hair and those dark eyes.
Funny, this was the first time he had really been aware of her as a woman. He must have seen the line of her throat and the curve of her mouth almost every day for the last three months, and yet tonight was the first time he had noticed them at all.
Patrick frowned slightly. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to start noticing things like that about Lou. There was something vaguely unsettling about thinking of her as a woman, warm and real, as opposed to the impersonal PA who ran his office so efficiently. About realising how oddly the generous curve of her lips sat with that air of cool competence or the ironic undertone in her voice sometimes.
And there was something very unsettling about noticing the way that top shifted as she leant forward to pick up her glass. The material seemed to slither over her skin, and it was impossible not to wonder how it would feel beneath his hands, how warm and smooth her body would be underneath…
Patrick looked abruptly away. Enough of that.
‘What about you?’ he said, struggling to remember what they had been talking about. She had been making him cross, and that was good. Anything was better than watching that top slip and slide as she breathed. ‘Are you Mrs Happy?’
‘I think I’m pretty happy,’ she said, swirling the wine in her glass as she considered the matter. ‘Content, anyway. I’m not joyously happy the way I was when I was first married, and when Grace and Tom were babies, but I’ve got a lot to be happy about. My children are healthy, I’ve got a dear aunt who’s like a mother to me, I’ve got good friends…It’s just a shame about my awful job. I’ve got this boss who makes my life an absolute misery.’
‘What?’ Patrick did a double take. He had been so busy not noticing what was going on with that damn top—why couldn’t the woman sit still, for God’s sake?—that it took him a moment to realise what she had said.
‘That was a joke,’ said Lou patiently.
‘Oh. Right.’ Patrick was surprised by how relieved he felt. ‘Ha, ha,’ he said morosely, and then was startled when Lou laughed. She had a proper laugh, not a giggle or a simper, and it made her look younger, vibrant, interesting, really quite…sexy. Was that what the waiter had seen too?
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Just checking to see if you were listening!’
Patrick had the alarming feeling that things were slipping out of control and he got a grip of himself with an effort. There must have been something very odd in that champagne. He wasn’t feeling like himself at all.
‘You’re on your own, though.’ That was better; think of her as a sad divorcee. ‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘When you live in a tiny flat with two growing children, I can tell you that you long for the chance to be lonely sometimes!’ said Lou.
‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it,’ he said.
‘No, OK,’ she acknowledged. ‘I miss being married sometimes,’ she said slowly, pushing her plate aside so that she could lean her arms on the table and prop her face in one palm, oblivious to what that did to her cleavage, or what the effect on Patrick might be.
‘It’s hard bringing up children on your own,’ she told him, while he fought to concentrate. ‘There’s no one to talk to in the evening, no one to share your worries with, no one who cares the way you do about their little triumphs.’
She was gazing at the candle flame, miles away with her children, and Patrick wondered if she had forgotten that he was there. If she had, he didn’t like it, he realised.
‘It would just be nice sometimes to have someone to support you when everything seems to be going wrong,’ she said.
‘Someone to hold you?’ he suggested, his voice harder than he had intended, and Lou’s dark eyes flashed up from the candle to meet his for a taut moment while both of them tried not to think about being held.
Her gaze dropped first. ‘Yes, someone to hold me,’ she said quietly. ‘Sometimes.’
Patrick had a sudden memory of Lou walking across the lobby earlier that evening. She had seemed so prim and proper then, so cool and composed. Not appealing at all. He was almost appalled to realise how warm and soft and inviting she looked now, her eyes dark, gleaming pools in the candlelight, and her hair just a little tousled. He wondered what it would be like to touch it, to run his fingers through it and let the dark, silky strands fall back against her cheek.
What had happened? Then the neat suit and the demure top had struck him as merely dull. Now they seemed tantalising, as if they were specifically designed to make him wonder what she might be wearing underneath. If she were warm and willing in his lap, would he be able to slide his hand over her knee and under that businesslike skirt and discover that she was wearing stockings?
Patrick swallowed. God, he had to stop this right now. Talk about inappropriate. He didn’t want Lou to think that he was just another lecherous businessman fantasising about secretaries in tight skirts and stockings and high heels.
Although if the cap fitted…
Picking up his glass, he took a gulp of wine and made a sterling effort to pull himself together.
‘Yes, being held…I do miss that,’ Lou was saying thoughtfully, unaware of Patrick’s confusion. ‘I think what I miss most, though, is the feeling that you don’t have to deal with everything on your own, that someone is interested in you for yourself, and not just because you’re a mother and there to be taken for granted. I don’t mind when the kids do that, I know that’s part of their job, but still…’
She glanced at him, evidently hesitating, and Patrick cleared his throat and nodded encouragingly.
‘Go on, tell me. This is confession time, remember? Nothing to be remembered or held against you tomorrow!’
Lou laughed in spite of herself. ‘OK, then, but you get to tell me an embarrassing fantasy too.’
‘It’s a fantasy? Better and better!’
A slight blush crept up her cheeks, but she hoped the candlelight would disguise it. ‘Mine’s not a very exciting fantasy, I’m afraid. I imagine that I can skip the awkwardness of meeting a man, dating him, getting to know him, all of that. I don’t want the falling-in-love bit again. It’s too consuming, and it hurts too much when you lose it.’
‘So where does the fantasy come in?’
‘I just want to wake up and find myself comfortably married to someone,’ she confessed. ‘Someone nice and…kind. Someone I could lean on when I needed to, and support when he needed it, and the rest of the time we’d be…I don’t know…friends, I suppose.’
‘What’s embarrassing about that?’ asked Patrick, his mind straying distractingly back to Lou’s stockings. If they were stockings. He really, really wanted to know now.
Could he ask her? Patrick wondered, and then caught himself. What was he thinking of? Of course he couldn’t ask his PA if she was wearing stockings. That would be sexual harassment.
‘It’s so politically incorrect,’ said Lou guiltily. ‘I’m a strong, independent woman. I shouldn’t need anyone to look after me. I can look after myself. And I do, most of the time,’ she said, recovering herself. ‘I only think about having someone else when I’m tired, or feeling down, or one of the kids is being difficult.’
Which was a depressing number of times in the week, when she thought about it.
‘It doesn’t sound to me like an impossible fantasy,’ said Patrick carefully. ‘You’ll just have to keep an eye out for someone suitable.’
‘Oh, yes, and there are so many kind, supportive, single men out there!’
‘There must be someone,’ said Patrick. ‘You’re an attractive woman.’ Rather too attractive for his own comfort, it appeared.
‘I’m also forty-five and have two bolshy adolescents who consume every moment I’m not at work,’ she pointed out. ‘Would you want to take that on?’
‘Not when you put it like that.’
‘There isn’t any other way to put it,’ said Lou. ‘I’ve been divorced over six years now, and I’ve learnt to cope on my own. I’m not looking for a man.’
‘I’ve heard that before,’ said Patrick cynically, thinking of the women who had assured him that they were just out for a good time and then started dawdling past jewellers’ windows and dropping heavy hints about moving in with him.
This was good. He wasn’t thinking about stockings any more.
Much.
‘It’s true.’ Lou fixed him with one of her disconcertingly direct looks. ‘Frankly, I haven’t got the energy to put into finding a man, let alone maintaining a relationship. When you work all day, and go home to two children who need all your attention, it’s hard to imagine being with anyone new.’
‘And even if I did by some remote chance meet someone who didn’t mind only meeting every few weeks when I could persuade a friend to babysit, and wasn’t put off by Grace’s moods, or the fact that I don’t have a bedroom of my own, and was happy with only ever getting the fraction of my attention that was left over from my children, I’d still hesitate,’ she said. ‘It’s taken me a long time to build up my life again after Lawrie left. I’m not going to let it all come crashing down in smithereens like before.’
‘You mean if you were hurt again?’ said Patrick.
‘Yes. I won’t expose myself to it.’ Draining her glass, Lou set it down firmly in front of her, absolutely definite.
‘So you won’t even take a risk?’
‘If it was just me, maybe I would,’ she said, and then thought about the pain and the heartache she’d been through. ‘Maybe. But I’ve got two children who were caught in the fallout of a failed relationship. I won’t do that to them again. Anyway,’ she said, going on the counterattack, ‘I notice you haven’t rushed to remarry either!’
‘No, once was enough for me,’ Patrick agreed. ‘I wasn’t good at being married. I hated the endless negotiations and guessing games.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Lou pointed out. There had never been any question of negotiating with Lawrie. He had gone his own charming way without ever considering that she might be affected by what he was doing.
‘No, but it often is. Every relationship I’ve had since my divorce has been the same. The thing about women is that they’re never satisfied. You give them what they ask for, and then they want more.’
‘I don’t think that’s very fair,’ said Lou, trying to remember the last time she’d been given what she asked for by a man.
‘Isn’t it?’ Patrick demanded. He was feeling more himself now. Good. The stockings thing had obviously just been a momentary aberration.
He leant forward, counting off the points on his fingers. ‘You’re getting on well and having a good time together, but then they want to leave their hair-dryer or something at your house. Just something small to stake a claim on your space. They want you to say you love them, and when you say you love them, they want commitment. And when you’ve committed yourself, they want you to move in with them, or marry them, and then they want babies…