CHAPTER ONE
IT was quite a long way from the canteen to the office of the Editor of the Daily Globe, especially when one was carrying a tray holding two tea cups, a pot of tea, milk and sugar, but Briony Winters was used to it. Her small, slight frame belied her strength just as her soft, feminine features belied her nature.
She pushed open the door of the outer office, which was hers, noticing with a frown the heavy masculine topcoat flung carelessly over the spare chair. Doug Simons, her boss, often had visitors, but very few of them wore coats like that. It was wool, and expensive, meticulously tailored and lined in silk. Briony put down the tray, wondering about whether to give up her own cup for the visitor, when she realised that the inner door was not quite closed.
‘Well, you’ll have no problems with the job, of course,’ Doug was saying. ‘Not after working on the Telegraph.’
‘Which, I take it, means I could have in other areas.’
Although the man’s voice was faintly muffled, there was no mistaking its hard inflexibility, and Briony frowned, her lips drawing together in a cold line.
‘Well, it’s just Briony…’
The very mention of her own name should have been sufficient to send her out of earshot, but despite allegations among the male staff of the paper to the contrary, Briony was only human.
‘Briony?’
Again that note of sharp query.
‘Briony Winters, my secretary,’ Doug supplied. ‘Well, your secretary now. She might give you a hard time at first… until she gets used to you.’
‘She might…? My God, no wonder your sales are slipping if you allow your secretary to dictate to you, Doug!’
The coolly insolent words made Briony’s fingers curl angrily into her palms. For two pins she’d march right into Doug’s office and demand to know exactly why he thought it necessary to explain to his replacement that he might have ‘problems’. Didn’t she fulfil her secretarial duties with a good deal more efficiency and effectiveness than any of the other secretaries?
She had been away on a fortnight’s holiday when the news of Doug’s promotion broke and had come back to find the paper in an uproar, with Doug due to leave for New York only three days after his replacement arrived. Since the Globe had been taken over by an American newspaper group, such transatlantic moves had become commonplace, and Briony hadn’t been unduly surprised to hear that Doug’s replacement was from the States. She herself didn’t particularly like American men. They were inclined to be brash and noisy. And worse, they didn’t know when to take ‘no’ for an answer. She stared angrily at the door. Doug had no right… no right at all to discuss her like this.
‘What is she?’ she heard the other man say sardonically. ‘Some sort of female dragon? A Women’s Libber with her hair in a bun and thick ankles?’
‘No way,’ Doug said dryly. ‘As it happens, she’s got one of the sexiest bodies I’ve ever seen.’
Outside the door Briony writhed in furious resentment. Doug had never given the slightest inkling that he had even noticed her body, and if he had she wouldn’t have continued to work for him.
‘Woe betide you if you try to touch it, though,’ Doug was warning his companion. ‘Briony has a hang-up where men are concerned. She can’t stand them, and it isn’t a sham. Something to do with something that happened in her teens.’
‘A teenage romance goes wrong and turns her into a man-hater? Come on, Doug. These are the nineteen-eighties!’
‘Well, some people take things harder than others. I’m just warning you to take things easy. She’s the best secretary I’ve ever had—works hard and is meticulously efficient.’
‘Maybe so,’ the hard voice said curtly. ‘But if she wants the kid glove treatment she shouldn’t be working on a paper. Secretaries are expendable, Doug,’ the man added in a bored voice, ‘even the best of them.’
Briony gripped her desk, her voice white with fear and shock. There had been redundancies on the paper the summer before and she had been terrified, then, that she might lose her job. It was something she daren’t even contemplate. She depended on it too heavily. It paid well, and Doug had always been flexible about hours, which had been an added bonus. But now Doug was leaving and she would be working for a man she had already decided she hated, without even meeting him. He was still talking to Doug, and she moved away from the door on legs suddenly weak and trembling. Whoever he was, he was no American. His accent was English. She could tell that even though his voice was muffled by the door.
The intercom buzzed and she flicked it down, her voice coolly remote as she answered Doug.
‘Come into my office for a moment, would you, Briony?’ he requested. ‘There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.’
There was a small mirror on the wall behind her, but she didn’t bother to look in it. She stood up picking up her notebook and pencil through sheer force of habit, a small girl, with a mane of dark red hair that curled thickly round a perfectly oval face. Her skin was pale and creamy; almost translucent. She had delicate features and large green eyes which looked as though they might once have been vulnerable but which now reflected only the image of whoever looked into them. Looking into Briony’s eyes was like looking at a one-way mirror, from the wrong side, one of her infuriated male colleagues had once said. The only time anyone saw any expression in them was if some man tried to sexually belittle her. Then they filled with bitterness and contempt. Slender to the point of fragility, there was a steel-like quality about her, a coldness which allowed no one to trespass close enough to discover the woman she might be beneath the layers of ice in which she was encased. She was twenty-three and as composed as a woman ten years older. ‘Frigid’ and ‘incapable of feeling were just two of the many insults frustrated males had hurled at her, but they pleased rather than offended. Where men were concerned her emotions were completely burnt out, leaving nothing but bitter hatred.
Despite that, Doug was envied his secretary. She was cool, and calm, and could be relied on completely in an emergency. Her job was no sinecure. She was on the go from nine until six every day, working late quite often, and always ready
to work through a lunch-hour or give up free time if it was necessary. The other girls joked that she didn’t have a private life, and that the paper was her family; and although they were reluctant to admit it, most of them felt slightly in awe of her.
As she pushed open the door Doug smiled at her. Doug Simons was in his mid-fifties, a power-house of human energy, who had worked in newspapers since he left school. He and Briony got on very well—or at least she had thought they had until she heard him discussing her so freely. Happily married with a grown up family and a wife on whom he doted, he represented no threat to her defence systems. Neither did he constantly annoy her with unwanted sexually based conversation or false flattery of a type insulting to both her intelligence and her taste. Men thought they only had to smile and wheedle and girls would gladly jump into bed with them. Well, not her!
Doug smiled warmly at her, his expression faintly ingratiating as though he was half afraid of what she might do or how she would react.
She smiled back—a slight widening of warmly curved lips to show even white teeth, the smile not reaching her eyes, which remained as clear and cold as glass.
Doug’s companion had his back to her. He didn’t turn to look up at her, nor did he betray any other awareness of her presence, and she prickled with animosity. His hair was dark and thick, brushing the collar of the expensive suit he was wearing, and she stiffened as warily and antagonistically as a cat faced with a large, threatening dog.
‘Kieron, meet your new secretary, Briony. Briony—Kieron Blake.’
She at least had had the advantage of hearing his name, and thus the precious gift of a few seconds to prepare herself. He had had nothing, and she observed the shocked incredulity of his expression with grim satisfaction. Navy-blue eyes swept slowly and disbelievingly over her; looking for the scars? she asked herself bitterly. He wouldn’t find any. She had concealed them all too well.
‘Briony?’ His eyebrows rose in contemptuous accusation, and although inwardly terrified, Briony refused to be drawn. Let him think what he liked. He hadn’t changed. The long-boned Celtic face was still as physically compelling; the high cheekbones and harsh male features still as disturbing. His skin was tanned, the thick dark hair worn slightly longer than she remembered, and the suit more formal. He had himself under control now, the shock carefully masked, only the faint clenching of his jawbone revealing the control he was having to exert.