‘No!’ She tried to pull away, not liking the way his fingers burnt her skin. ‘What about work? This is silly!’
He ignored the protests and continued to pull her along the corridor.
‘Work can wait.’
They reached the boardroom and he pushed her in, slamming the door behind them.
‘Now,’ he said tightly, turning to face her with his arms folded, ‘get it off your chest.’
He stood with his back to the door, staring at her, his black eyes glittering, and she gave him a weak smile.
‘It won’t work,’ he informed her in a curt voice, and when she looked at him with a question in her eyes he continued tersely, ‘that smile of yours. It won’t work.’
‘What smile of mine?’ She smiled.
‘That one. The placating one that you produce every time you’re in an uncomfortable spot. The one that precedes a change in conversation.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she muttered, looking away, and he said, moving towards her with his arms still folded,
‘Oh yes, you do. You’re fine just so long as work is involved but the minute I make any personal remark to you, however damned inoffensive, you throw me one of those smiles, edge away and take refuge behind the word processor, or the telephone, or that notepad of yours.’ He whipped the notepad out of her fingers and she instantly felt bereft without it.
‘Now sit down!’ he barked, making her jump, and she sat down, following him warily with her eyes as he walked across to the coffee-machine and began fiddling with it. After a few minutes, and cursing under his breath, he shot her a black look and said with disgust, ‘The damn thing’s broken.’
‘It was working yesterday,’ Abigail offered, and he scowled. ‘Are you sure you know how to work it?’
‘Of course I know how to work it,’ he told her impatiently. ‘It doesn’t take a degree in metaphysics to work a blasted coffee-machine, does it?’
She got up and went across to the non-functioning coffee-machine, pressed a few buttons, and was rewarded by the familiar gurgling noises.
He looked at her with a disgruntled frown, as if she had been personally responsible for its previous lack of co-operation with him, and said under his breath, ‘Pointlessly fiddly gadget. I suppose manufacturers think it’s clever to make something simple as complicated as they can.’
‘I suppose they do,’ she agreed easily, feeling much more relaxed.
‘And that’s another thing!’ he roared at her. ‘Another trait of yours! Agreeing with everything I say if you think it’s going to get me off your back!’
Abigail started to smile soothingly, and stopped in time. She made their cups of coffee and retreated back to the sanctuary of her chair. For a minute there, standing so close to him, she had felt her heart beating fast and her pulses racing, as if she had just finished running a marathon.
He sat down next to her and crossed his legs, his eyes speculative, trying to read inside her mind, to unearth what thoughts were flitting through her head. It filled her with a trace of alarm, because there were times when he had shown a distinct talent for doing just that, and it had always unnerved her.
‘Why were you so put out last night? When you opened the front door and saw us standing there, your face was like a thundercloud.’
‘I don’t happen to like my private life intruded into on the grounds of curiosity!’ she snapped. She had wondered why he had marched her along to the boardroom for coffee and a so-called chat when both could have been accomplished back in his office, but now she knew. He had brought her here to disorient her, to talk to her out of familiar surroundings, where he would have the clear advantage. In this silent, large boardroom, with its stark gleaming table and its array of chairs standing to attention around it, there was no easy flight behind familiar objects. And no distracting telephone calls which might have given her the opportunity to leave his office quietly when he was too busy talking to intervene. Here, there were just the two of them and her thumping heart.
‘All right then, forget curiosity. I’ve known you for eighteen months. I came to extend my congratulations to you formally.’
She didn’t believe a word of that and her look said as much.
‘Dammit, Abby!’ he bit out impatiently. ‘You made it patently clear from the start that you weren’t interested in a boss who was going to…to…’
‘Flirt with me?’ she offered with irony, and he glared at her.
‘If you want to put it that way.’
‘I’m not interested in that,’ she said, hearing the bitterness creep into her voice and wiping it out before he could start making deductions.
‘And I’ve tiptoed around you for long enough. Why did it make you so uncomfortable having me around?’
She flushed and looked away. Why had it? she wondered uneasily. He was just her boss, she thought. They worked well together and that was that.
‘Your girlfriend was bored stiff,’ she said, deflecting the unwelcome thought. ‘She perched on the edge of her chair, looking as though she might catch something infectious at any moment. How do you think it feels to have that at your engagement party?’
She glanced down at her finger, now sporting a discreet engagement ring, and felt a strange quiver of unreality. Suddenly things seemed to have happened very quickly, almost behind her back, when she hadn’t been looking.
‘Fiona can be tactless at times,’ he admitted, ‘but you still haven’t answered my question.’
‘I didn’t like the thought of your barging in, if you must know, looking at us as if we were strange oddities.’
‘What the hell do you think I am?’ he said, his face hardening. ‘Did you imagine that I came to sneer?’
She didn’t answer and that seemed to make him angrier.
‘I suppose not,’ she conceded reluctantly, not daring to meet his eyes, ‘but I’m just your secretary, after all. We don’t exactly move in the same circles, do we?’
Watch out, Abby, a little voice warned her, you’re beginning to sound bitter again.
She couldn’t help it though, the shadow of Ellis Fitzmerton made that impossible. After he had broken off with her, he had explained in a phoney, gentle voice that had nothing to do with sympathy and everything to do with reminding her of her position, that she must have been suffering from delusions if she thought that they could have made anything out of their brief, albeit pleasant, relationship. And when she had seen his girlfriend, she had understood why. They may have drifted into something because of circumstance, but there was a dividing line between them that was insurmountable. He had reinforced the refrain that had played in her ears ever since she had been a young child. Them and us and ne’er the twain shall meet. Beauty, her mother had once told her, can jump all barriers, but you might as well be honest and face facts, you’re no great beauty.
Ross gave her a long, intense stare, then said suddenly, ‘Who was he?’
‘Who?’ Abigail stammered, going bright red, and clutching the seat of the chair to stop her hands from trembling.
‘The man who filled your head with rubbish like that?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said sharply. ‘And I don’t have to stay here a minute longer and listen to this!’
‘Was it your mother, then?’
‘What makes you say that?’ At this point, every nerve in her body was jangling. This was the first time, she realised with panic, that he had ever managed to get any conversation between them on to an intimate footing and hold it there.
‘She struck me,’ he murmured thoughtfully, in a deceptively mild voice, ‘as the sort of woman who doesn’t mind thrusting her opinions on to other people, including her own daughter. That can be a disaster when it happens to a child, or an adolescent.’
He gave her a sidelong glance from under his lashes.
‘She can be a bit domineering, I suppose,’ Abigail admitted, only realising afterwards that she had fallen for a trap. He had given her a choice of talking either about a man or her mother, and she had chosen her mother when in fact, if she had been thinking straight, she would have seen that she was under no obligation to discuss either.
‘This is stupid,’ she said, fidgeting but not actually summoning up the courage to get up, ‘sitting here, wasting time talking about nothing, when there’s a pile of work back in the office waiting to get done.’
‘We’re not talking about nothing. Unless that’s how you would describe your life.’
‘And stop putting words into my mouth!’
Their eyes clashed and she felt a strange, giddy sensation overwhelm her.
‘How long did your friends stay?’ he asked, veering off at another tangent. He sipped his coffee and regarded her over the rim of the cup. Compelling. That more or less described him. His looks, his mind, everything about him compelled. Why else would she be sitting here being persuaded, against her will, to talk about herself?
‘An hour or so after you left,’ she said.
‘Very nice girls,’ he murmured, and she had the sneaking suspicion that he was leading up to something, though what, she couldn’t quite figure out. ‘Have you known them a long time?’