Sleeping With The Boss

She didn’t want Victor Temple showing any sort of interest in her, even interest of the most casual nature. She had become accustomed to their well-tuned, impersonal relationship. Now she could feel her eyes drifting to him, surreptitiously taking him in, just like all those women whose eyes travelled over him whenever he was in their company.

She woke from her semi-reverie to hear him talking to her about his latest project.

‘It’s a rather grand house.’ There were a series of photos which he began to extract from a folder, flicking through them, turning the pictures this way and that with a frown. ‘Handed down through the generations. The gardens have been landscaped by someone rather famous. The inside of the house itself is quite special, and apparently there are all manner of royal connections, albeit in the past.’

‘Why have the owners come to you?’

‘Owner. Just the one chap and I gather the cost of running the place is proving to be a strain on his bank balance. Reading between the lines, I’d say that the chap in question has eaten his way through quite a bit of the family money and now finds himself with a title and not much else to go with it.’

He looked up and tapped his fountain pen on his desk. ‘Usual story. Large family inheritance which has gradually been whittled down through the ages. Now there’s just the house and the upkeep is fabulously high. Our client figures that if the house is opened to the public he might be able to recover some of the costs of running it. Our job is to sell it, discreetly.’

‘Oh, right.’ She was almost back to normal now, thank heavens. Mind firmly anchored on the task at hand, and Victor back to his usual self. That brief moment had been unsettling to say the very least.

‘Have a look at the photos. Tell me what you think.’

He handed the large, glossy prints to her, and Alice felt a cold chill of horror spread through her. It started in the pit of her stomach and gradually spread through her body until she felt as though her limbs had frozen completely. She couldn’t move. She could hardly think straight. She sifted through the photographs with shaking hands and then placed them on the desk in front of her.

‘Well? What do you think?’ He looked up from the file, which he had been scanning.

‘What sort of advertising campaign does he have in mind?’ Alice asked faintly. Her brain, which had been temporarily numbed, now began working in overdrive. There was no reason, she told herself, that this project should intrude on her life. There was no need for her to involve herself in it in any way whatsoever. She would remain calm, cool, collected.

Victor’s eyes narrowed. ‘A series of spreads in one of the more prestigious country magazines. He wants to open the house and grounds to visitors. In due course, he has plans to turn the place into a country hotel.’

‘I see.’

‘Where the hell are you this morning, Alice?’

‘What do you mean?’ She attempted a smile but the muscles in her face felt stiff.

‘I mean,’ Victor said very slowly, with exaggerated patience, ‘you look as though you’ve seen a ghost. You’re as white as a sheet. Don’t tell me that you’ve picked up some bug on holiday. I don’t think I can stand another fortnight with a temp.’

‘No. I’m fine.’ She swallowed, and rummaged around in her head for something intelligent to say about the campaign. ‘Yes! It doesn’t sound as though it should be a terribly difficult job. I mean, the house more or less speaks for itself.’

‘Right. That’s what I thought.’ He began explaining what he had in mind, while she half-listened and nodded—she hoped in all the right places. ‘I’ve made an appointment for us to visit in a week’s time.’ He snapped shut the file. ‘We should get more of a feel for the place when we see it.’

‘We!’

‘Naturally. I’ll want you there to observe and take notes.’ He scrutinised her face. ‘Why? Is there a problem with that?’

‘No!’ There wasn’t a problem with that, she thought wildly. There were several thousand problems with it. ‘It’s just that I’m not sure whether I shall be able to find the time... I mean, it looks as though Rebecca has left quite a backlog of work to be brought up to date. And then, some of the accounts are a bit behind. I shall have to devote some time to chasing them...’ Her voice drifted off into silence and he looked at her as though she had taken leave of her senses.

‘You can clear the backlog in a matter of a day or two,’ Victor said slowly, as though talking to someone mentally deficient. ‘And Sam’s handled some of the overdue accounts. I made sure that she brought them up to date. Any more excuses?’

‘I really would rather not be on this particular job,’ Alice confessed flatly, when she couldn’t think of another excuse to give him. It made no difference anyway. She recognised that glint in his eye. She could throw a million excuses at him and short of her taking to her bed with a broken leg he would simply demolish them one by one until he had got what he wanted. Namely, her presence there.

‘Why not?’

‘I’d rather not go into it, if you don’t mind. I’m only asking you to respect my request.’

‘And I’d rather you did go into it, if you don’t mind. When I hear what you’ve got to say, then I’ll tell you whether I shall respect your request or not.’

Typical, she thought with helpless, frustrated despair. Typical, typical, typical. Anyone else would have simply nodded and let the matter rest. Anyone else with even an ounce of sympathy would have trusted that her reasons were valid, and would have acquiesced to her request. But not Victor Temple, oh, no. If he saw a Keep Out sign, then his immediate response was to try and get in. And he wouldn’t be content to try and find the easiest entrance. He would simply take the quickest route and would use whatever methods he had at his disposal. The man was a shark.

How could this have happened? How could the one man in the world she wanted to have nothing to do with, with the one stately house in the world she would rather never have re-entered, have chosen the one advertising company in the country she worked at to promote his wretched place?

She knew how, of course. Victor Temple ran the tightest ship. His advertising firm was highly respected because it was highly successful.

But, she reasoned, she need not divulge any of her private affairs to him. She nodded, defeated. ‘All right. I’ll come with you. Perhaps you could give me the precise date so that I can enter it into the diary?’

‘Dates. We’ll be there for a total of three days.’

Could it get worse?

‘And do you mind telling me why,’ Victor said casually, before they moved on to other things, ‘you’ve changed your mind?’

‘Yes. Actually, I do.’

The shrewd grey eyes looked at her carefully, as though he was seeing her for the first time.

‘What a day of revelations this is turning out to be,’ he said dryly. ‘First your little display of temper, and now some deep, dark secret. I’m beginning to wonder what other surprises you have in store for me.’

‘It’s no deep, dark secret,’ Alice told him, and she punctuated the lie with a light laugh. ‘And I don’t have any surprises in store for you, or anyone else for that matter.’

‘Well. I suppose we shall just have to wait and see.’ He returned her laugh with one of his own, but she could tell from the expression in his eyes that his curiosity had been aroused, and she contemplated the prospect of three days at Highfield House with sick trepidation.

They said that you could never really leave your past behind. Sooner or later it caught up with you.

Now her past was catching up. All she could do was ensure that it didn’t sink its claws into her.

CHAPTER TWO

THE following week was a nightmare. The pace at work was frantic. It seemed as though hundreds of clients had all decided to descend upon them at precisely the same time. The phone hardly stopped ringing, and the meetings were endless. Victor could exist indefinitely on a diet of no sleep—his stamina was amazing—but Alice could feel her nerves shredding as she trudged to meeting after meeting, taking notes, writing up minutes and in between catching up on everything else.

Portugal and sunshine seemed like months ago. And it didn’t help matters that Highfield House hung over her head like a dark cloud, full of the promise of thunder.

Her capacity to remember amazed her. All those years ago, and still she could recall entire conversations with James Claydon, as though they had taken place the day before. And it seemed as though each passing hour added another little snippet of recollection, another small, bitter memory of the past she had spent four years trying to forget.

On the morning they were due to travel up, her nerves had reached such a point that she felt physically ill when she went to answer the door to Victor.

He had decided against having his chauffeur drive them and as she pulled open the door she saw, immediately, that he had not dressed for work. No suit. In its place, dark green trousers, a striped shirt and a thick cream woollen jumper over it. Alice looked at him, taken aback by his casual appearance, and after a few seconds of complete silence he said sarcastically, ‘I do possess the odd change of clothes.’

‘Sorry.’ She bent to pick up her holdall, which he insisted on taking from her, and then followed him out to his car—a black convertible Jaguar which breathed opulence.

‘There really was no need for you to wear a suit,’ he said as she settled into the passenger seat. ‘This is supposed to be a relaxing three-day break. We’ll stroll round the grounds—’ he started the engine and slowly manoeuvred the car out ‘—have an informal, guided tour of the house so that we know which rooms will lend themselves to the most flattering photographs, discuss the history of the place.’ He shot her a quick, sidelong look. ‘No power meetings. I’ll expect you to make some notes along the way, naturally, but that’s about it.’

‘I didn’t think,’ Alice said, glancing down at her navy blue outfit, the straight-cut skirt and waist-length jacket, and the crisp white shirt underneath. The sort of clothing that was guaranteed to make the most glamorous woman totally asexual. She had chosen the ensemble deliberately. She supposed that she would meet James at some point during their stay, very likely as soon as they pulled up, and she needed the sort of working gear that would put her in a frame of mind that would enable her to cope with the encounter.

With any luck, he might well not recognise her at all, though it was highly unlikely. She had changed during the past four years, had cut her hair, lost a fair amount of weight, but most of the changes had been inside her. Disillusionment had altered her personality for ever, but physically she had remained more or less the same.

She tried to picture him, after all this time and with so much muddy water stretching between them, and her mind shut down completely.

‘I hope you’ve brought something slightly less formal than what you’re wearing,’ Victor told her. ‘We don’t want to intimidate the client. Which reminds me. There’s a file on the back seat Read it. It contains all the background information you need on him. Might find it useful.’

Alice hesitated. She had debated whether she should tell Victor that she knew James, or at least had known him at one point in time. After all, how would she explain it if he greeted her with recognition, as he almost inevitably would? On the other hand, she had no desire to open that particular door because Victor would edge in before she could shut it, and then subject her to a barrage of questions, none of which she would be inclined to answer.

In the end, she’d decided that she would go along with the premise that she didn’t know their client from Adam, and if James greeted her like some long-lost friend, then she would simply pretend that she had forgotten all about him; after all, it had been years.

Years, she thought on a sigh, staring out of the window and making no move to reach behind her for the file. Four years to rebuild the life he had unwittingly taken to pieces and left lying there. Four years to forget the man who had taken her virginity and all the innocence that went with it and for three years had allowed her the stupid luxury of thinking that what they had was going to be permanent.

She could remember the first time she had ever laid eyes on him. It had been a wet winter’s night and she had been working for his father for almost a month. Despite that, she had still not seen most of Highfield House. There had been just so much of it. Rooms stretching into rooms, interspersed with hallways and corridors and yet more rooms. And of course Henry Claydon, wheelchair-bound, had not been able to show her around himself.

She could explore, he had told her, to her heart’s content, and had then proceeded to pile so much work onto her that she had barely had time to think, never mind explore the outer reaches of the house.

She had loved it, though. Sitting in that warm, cosy library, surrounded by books, taking notes as the old man sifted through files and documents, watching the bleak winter outside settling like a cold fist over the vast estate and beyond. So different from the tiny terraced house in which she had spent most of her life before her mother died. It had been wonderful to look outside and see nothing but gardens stretching out towards fields, rolling countryside that seemed to go on and on for ever.

She had grown up with a view of other terraced houses and the claustrophobic feeling of clutter that accompanied crowded streets. Highfield House was like paradise in its sheer enormity. And she’d loved the work. She’d loved the snatches of facts, interspersed with memories, which she had to collate and transcribe into a lucid format, all part of a book of memoirs. She’d enjoyed hearing about Henry Claydon’s past. It had seemed so much more colourful than her own.

She had been working on, alone, in the study, when James Claydon had walked through the door, and against the darkness of the room, illuminated only by the spotlight on the desk, he had appeared like a figure of the night. Long, dark coat, dark clothes. And she had fallen in love. Hopelessly, madly in love with handsome, debonair, swarthy James Claydon.

‘Do I get an answer to my question?’ Victor asked. ‘Or do you intend to spend the entire journey with your head in the clouds?’

‘What? What question?’

‘Oh, good heavens,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘you’re as good as useless like this. I hope you intend to snap out of it sufficiently to be of some help to me on the trip. I don’t want you drifting down memory lane when you should be taking notes.’

‘Well, I did ask whether I might be excused from this particular job.’

‘So you did. And you never gave me your reason. Is it the house? You lived around here, didn’t you?’

Alice looked at him, surprised that he would remember a passing detail on an application form from eighteen months back.

‘Well? Didn’t you?’

‘Not very far away,’ she admitted reluctantly. It had. been her first job after her mother died, and London the bolt-hole to which she had fled in the wake of her miserable affair. Still, the first she had seen of Highfield House had been when she had applied for the job of working alongside Henry Claydon, even though the name was well enough known amongst the townspeople. It was a landmark.

‘How close? Everyone knows everyone else in these little country villages, don’t they?’

‘No,’ Alice said bluntly. ‘The town I grew up in was small but it wasn’t that small. People who live in the city always imagine that anywhere fifty miles outside of London is some charming little hamlet where everyone is on first-name terms with everyone else.’

‘And it isn’t?’ Victor exclaimed with overdone incredulity. ‘You shock me.’

‘Ha, ha.’

‘Oh, dear. Don’t tell me that your sense of humour has gone into hibernation.’

Alice shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something had changed between them, almost unnoticeably. It was as though his sudden curiosity about her background had moved them away from the strictly working relationship level onto some other level, though what she couldn’t make out. Whatever it was, it made her uneasy.

‘So, what’s the town like?’ He glanced at her and continued smoothly, ‘Might be interesting if we’re to find out how saleable Highfield House is for visiting tourists.’

Alice relaxed. This kind of question she could cope with. ‘Picturesque,’ she said with a small frown as she cast her mind back. ‘The high street is very pretty. Lots of black and white buildings which haven’t been mown down in favour of department stores. There’s still a butcher, a baker...’

‘A candlestick maker...’

She smiled, almost without thinking. ‘Very nearly. Or at least, there was when I was last there.’

‘Which was...?’

‘A few years ago,’ she said vaguely.

‘Any historic sights nearby?’

‘Remains of a castle. I’m sure there must be quite a bit of history around it, but if there is, then I’m the last person to ask because I don’t know. Stratford-upon-Avon’s not a million miles away.’

‘Sounds good. Any stately home that’s open to the public can only benefit from having interesting surroundings.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ she said, wondering for the first time whether the town would have changed much, whether her mother’s old house was still standing, whether Gladys and Evelyn who had lived on either side were still finding things to argue about. She had not given any of this much thought for years, but as the Jaguar ate up the miles she couldn’t help casting her mind back.

‘So Highfield House is close to the town centre...?’ Alice glanced at him and his face was bland. Interested, but purely from a professional point of view. Or at least that was what his expression told her.

‘Not terribly. At least twenty minutes’ drive away and not readily accessible by public transport.’

‘Set on a hill, though, from what I remember from the photos. Quite a commmanding view.’

‘Yes.’

‘And correct me if I’m wrong, but there was an old man there, wasn’t there? James Claydon’s father, I believe.’

‘That’s right.’ He had never known about her infatuation with his son. James had only appeared occasionally. She could remember anxiously looking forward to his arrivals with the eagerness of a teenager waiting for her first date. And he inevitably would arrive with flowers, or chocolates, or little trinkets which he would bring from London, or wherever else he had been. And there would be a few days of stolen heady passion, followed by weeks of agonising absence.

‘Died... Can’t quite remember when...’

‘After my time, I’m afraid,’ Alice said shortly. ‘I’d already left for London by then.’

‘Ah, so you did know at least something of what was going on at Highfield House. Wasn’t the old man a widower?’

‘Yes, he was.’

They had cleared London completely now, and she looked out of her window, marvelling at how quickly the crowded streets gave way to open space. It was still very developed, with houses and estates straddling the motorway, yet there was a feeling of bigness that she didn’t get in the heart of London.

Victor began chatting to her about one of their clients, a problem account, and they moved on to art, music, the theatre. She could feel some of the tension draining out of her body. He was good at conversing and could talk about practically anything. His knowledge stretched from politics to the opera and he spoke with the confidence of someone who knew what they were talking about. It was a valuable asset when it came to dealing with other people, because he was informed enough on most subjects to pick up on the slightest hint of an interest and expand on it. He could put people at ease as smoothly as he could intimidate them when the occasion demanded.

She rested her head back and half-closed her eyes, not thinking of Highfield House or James Claydon, or any of those nightmarish thoughts that had dogged her for the past few days.

‘What made you decide to come down to London to work?’ he asked, digressing with such aplomb that it took her a few seconds to absorb the change of subject.

‘I thought that I might get a more invigorating job in the capital,’ she said carefully.

‘So you swapped the open fields for the city life.’ It wasn’t a question. It was more said in the voice of someone thinking aloud. Musing, but with only the mildest curiosity expressed.

‘It’s not that unusual.’

‘Quite the opposite.’ He paused. ‘What exactly were you doing before you came to work with me?’

‘Oh, just a series of temp jobs,’ Alice said, dismissing them easily.

‘And before that?’

She gave him a guarded look. ‘I wasn’t working for a company,’ she said evasively. On her application form, she had not extended her work experience beyond her temporary jobs, all of which had earned her glowing references; and because she had joined the firm as a temp herself there had been no in-depth questioning about her work background. Her experience within the company and the fact that she had worked smoothly with Victor had been all that was necessary.

‘Still at secretarial school?’

‘No.’ The nakedness of this reply forced her to continue. ‘I worked freelance. Actually I was transcribing a book.’ Well, it was the truth, shorn of all elaboration, and Victor nodded thoughtfully.

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Was it ever published?’

‘I have no idea.’ She doubted it At the time, Henry Claydon had shown no real rush to finish his memoirs. It was a labour of love, something of a hobby. He’d certainly had no need of any money it might have generated. No, she was sure that it had remained incomplete.

‘Bit odd for you to take off for London in the middle of a job like that...’

She didn’t care for this line of questioning. She knew where it was leading, but she was wary of the circuitous route. This was how Victor was so clever at manoeuvring people into revealing more than they had bargained for.

‘The money wasn’t very good,’ Alice told him, truthfully enough, ‘and it looked as though it was a book that could have taken decades to write. I simply couldn’t afford to stay in the end.’ It was a sort of truth.

‘He must have been disappointed.’

‘He?’

‘He or she. Whoever was writing this mysterious book. You must have built up some kind of rapport, working in such intimate conditions.’

Alice shrugged. ‘I suppose so, although, to be fair, I did give him six months’ notice.’

‘Ah. So it was a him.’

‘That’s right.’ She could feel him testing her, trying to persuade confidences out of her. She had given him the irresistible—a shady past lying underneath the crisply ironed shirts and the sober working suits. When she thought about it, she realised that it had been a mistake to react to those photos. She should have agreed instantly to the trip up and then promptly cancelled at the very last minute, when it would have been too late to rearrange the whole thing. True, she would not have been thanked by any of the secretaries who might have found themselves replacing her, but then she would have been spared the ordeal that lay ahead. And, almost as important, she would have been spared Victor’s curiosity, which, once aroused, might prove unstoppable.

‘What kind of book was he writing?’ he asked casually, and Alice suddenly realised where all his questions were leading.

Victor Temple thought that she had been having some kind of affair with Henry Claydon. Except he had no idea that Henry Claydon had been her employer at the time. She could almost hear his brain ticking over.

‘Documentary of sorts,’ she said, thinking that this could be her way out, as far as revealing too much of her past was concerned.

‘Lots of research?’ He gestured to her to check the map, glancing across as she laid it flat on her lap and followed the road sequences with her finger. They had left London behind and she felt an odd stirring of nostalgia as the open spaces became more visible. Over the past two days the weather had cleared, and as the Jaguar silently covered the miles everywhere was bathed in sunshine. The sky was a hard, defined blue and everything seemed to be Technicolor-bright.