Mistletoe Mistress

“I work for you, that’s all...” About the Author Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Copyright

“I work for you, that’s all...”

“Perhaps I don’t want that to be all,” Hawk said silkily. Joanne’s eyes were locked with his. “What about you, Joanne?” His voice was warm and deep. “What do you want?”

She wanted to tell him she wasn’t interested, that he was the very last man she would get involved with, but somehow all she could do was stare at him.

“You are...tantalizing, do you know that?”

“I’ve always held the belief that work and play should be quite separate,” Joanne said, avoiding his eyes.

“So have I. But there always has to be one exception to the rule....”

HELEN BROOKS lives in Northamptonshire, England, and is married with three children. As she is a committed Christian, busy housewife and mother, her spare time is at a premium, but her hobbies include reading and walking her two energetic and very endearing young dogs. Her long-cherished aspiration to write became a reality when she put pen to paper on reaching the age of forty, and sent the result off to Harlequin.

Mistletoe Mistress

Helen Brooks

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘HEY, what’s with all the long faces? There hasn’t been a major disaster while I’ve been away, has there?’ Joanne’s bright smile dimmed and then faded altogether as her antennae picked up the waves radiating from her office staff.

‘You . . . you haven’t heard?’

‘Heard what?’ Joanne’s wide honey-brown eyes narrowed slightly as she repeated, ‘Heard what, Maggie?’

‘About what’s happened.’

‘Maggie.

‘About the takeover, and Mr Brigmore, and... everything.’ Maggie wriggled slightly in her typist’s chair and half turned in the seat to include the rest of the office of six, all of whom patently ignored the silent plea for help, their faces clearly stating that Maggie had started this and she could finish it.

‘The takeover? Maggie, I haven’t got a clue what you are talking about,’ Joanne said as patiently as she could. Brusqueness never helped with Maggie; she flustered very easily. ‘And where does Mr Brigmore come into all this?’

‘He doesn’t, not any more.’ Maggie’s plump plain face was very earnest, and Joanne knew she wasn’t deliberately trying to be obtuse, but something of the urge she felt to wring her junior’s neck must have shown on her face because Maggie added hastily, ‘Mr. Brigmore’s gone—early retirement or something. It all happened last Thursday, when the takeover was announced; he went the same day. I left a message on your answer machine—’

‘I haven’t been back to my flat yet; I stayed overnight with a friend...’ Joanne’s voice trailed away as the enormity of what Maggie was saying hit her. ‘Are you telling me Mr Brigmore was axed?’ she asked faintly. ‘Because if you are I can’t believe it. Who’s stepped into his shoes, then?’

‘A relation of the mogul who now owns the firm.’ Maggie’s voice was full of meaning and Joanne nodded silently to what remained unsaid. So, nepotism was alive and well at Concise Publications, was it? And all this had happened during the month she had been gaily backpacking round Europe on a reunion with old university friends?

She had heard about these savage ‘off with the old, on with the new’ mergers, where the new ruling directorate were merciless in their desire to sweep clean, but she had never actually experienced one first-hand in her eight years of working life. And Charles, of all people...

Suddenly the anger was there, hot and fierce. Charles was the fatherly figure who had given her the sort of chance, five years ago, that she had been craving since leaving university, choosing her above a host of other more qualified applicants who had been eager for the post of publishing assistant to the managing director of Concise Publications.

He had been her mentor, her champion, but most of all her friend—he and his wife, Clare, taking her under their parental wing and giving her her first real glimpse of family life. And he had been replaced? By some young upstart, no doubt, who probably didn’t know one end of a book from another.

‘Male or female?’ Her voice was quivering, but it was with sheer fury, not weakness.

‘Male.’ Maggie knew how much her superior thought of their ex-managing director, and she took a deep breath before she added, ‘His name is Mallen. Hawk Mallen.’

‘Hawk Mallen?’ Joanne’s voice was scathing, her emotion blinding her to the fact that Maggie had suddenly become very still and very quiet, her eyes no longer focused on Joanne’s angry face. ‘What sort of name is that?’

‘My sort of name, Ms...?’

The deep male voice was not loud, but the timbre was such that Joanne felt liquid ice run over her nerves. She didn’t turn for a good thirty seconds from her position just a few inches into the room, and when she did move it was with the knowledge that she had blown it—good and proper, as Charles would have said. And she cared. Oh, not because of her job, precious and important as it had been to her up to this minute in time, she told herself bitterly, but because she had wanted to fling her resignation into the lap of this faceless bureaucrat and walk away with her head held high—not be caught out like a child telling tales out of school.

‘Crawford.’ Her chin was high, her golden eyes shooting sparks as she looked up into the hard dark face of the big man standing in the doorway behind her. ‘And it’s Miss.’

‘Ah . . . yes, of course. Charles’s elusive publishing assistant. How nice to meet you.’ On face value the words were polite and courteous, but, spoken as they were, in a dark cold drawl that was both menacing and patronising, they were anything but. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come through to your office so we can discuss recent events in comfort?’

He meant without the twitching ears and avid interest of the outer office, Joanne thought tightly, but for once the professionalism she prided herself on had flown out the window. ‘Is there any point?’ she asked stiffly, knowing she was glaring but quite unable to help herself.

The suit this man had on would have paid her salary for months, she thought bitterly, and was indicative of his sovereignty somehow. He reeked of wealth and power; it flowed out of every pore and was in every gesture he made. This was a man who was used to being obeyed without question. Well—tough. There was no way she was going to be intimidated by the man responsible for sacking the only person she had any real affection for in the whole wide world. Well, there was Clare too, she qualified hastily as a little stab of disloyalty to Charles’s wife made itself known; she loved her too, but Charles was Charles...

‘Every point, Miss Crawford.’

When, in the next moment, her elbow was taken in a firm, uncompromising grip and she found herself all but flying through the outer office and into her small but comfortable little oasis, she was too surprised to make a sound. Until the door closed behind them, that was. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ The explosion was in line with the vibrant chestnut-red of her hair, its glowing colour a clue to the volatile temper she had battled with all her life. ‘How dare you manhandle me—?

‘I’m trying to stop you making a bigger fool of yourself than you have done already,’ he said with a grimness that was insulting.

‘Now look—’

‘No, you look, damn it!’ It was more of a pistol shot than a bark, and as her eyes widened with shock he pushed her none too gently into the seat in front of her desk, propping himself against the dark wood and staring down at her with blazing, piercingly blue eyes. Beautiful eyes, she thought inconsequentially, before the rage took over again. ‘I’m trying to do this the nice way—’

‘Like you did with poor Charles?’ she cut in testily, the colour in her cheeks vying with her hair.

‘Give me strength...’ He shut his eyes for an infinitesimal moment, raking a hand through his jet-black, very short but expertly cropped hair before saying, in a tone that was very flat and very hard, ‘Do you want me to gag you? Because so help me you’re a moment away from it.’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’ But he would—she knew, without knowing how she knew, that he would.

‘Try me. Just open that delectable mouth one more time before I finish saying what I want to say and try me. The pleasure, as they say, would be all mine.’

She opened her mouth to fire back an equally caustic reply, glanced at the blue silk handkerchief he had just drawn out of his breast pocket, and shut it again. The pig! The arrogant, overbearing, stinking swine—

‘And I dare bet I fit most of the names that are swirling through your head right at this moment,’ he drawled easily, temper and composure apparently perfectly restored, ‘but unfortunately that’s where they’ll have to stay—in your head. Now, where were we? Oh, yes, I was trying to save you from looking ridiculous...’

She spluttered, gulped, but was forced to admit silently to herself that she didn’t dare call his bluff.

He had raised dark eyebrows at her mini paroxysm but when no verbal abuse was forthcoming smiled nastily before continuing, ‘Charles has left messages for you over half of Europe, there is a letter explaining the full details of the merger with Mallen Books sitting on your doorstep at home, which is repeated at length on your answer machine, but I presume, from your rather undignified outburst out there, you haven’t received any of them?’

She didn’t reply, and he didn’t seem to expect one as he went on, ‘I suggest you go home and read the letter, pop round and see Charles, do whatever it is that women do to cool down, and then we’ll go from there.’

‘You’re dismissing me?’ she asked with icy hauteur.

‘Don’t you ever listen?’

She had got under his skin. For all his apparent equanimity she had definitely got under his skin, she noted with some hidden satisfaction as she watched him take a deep hard pull of air before shaking his head slowly.

‘You’re a very intelligent woman, Miss Crawford; I know that much from your file and all that Charles has told me about you. I’ve seen some of your work and it’s impressive, damn impressive, so what’s happened during this jaunt round Europe to that noteworthy brain of yours? Are you really determined to throw your job—and the considerable salary that goes with it—to the wind on little more than a whim, a temper tantrum, because you weren’t in the know when all this happened? I know Charles respects both your work and you as a person, but he had to make a fast decision on our offer and you simply weren’t around to confer with. Okay?’

He thought her reaction was petulance because she hadn’t been consulted about the merger? She stared at him in amazement, unable to believe she was hearing right.

‘Okay?’ he said again, his voice cool and biting.

‘Mr Mallen, I couldn’t care less if you took over this firm and a hundred others besides every day for a month,’ she said furiously. ‘That’s not the issue here.’

‘Really?’ He smiled a smile that wasn’t a smile at all.

‘Yes, really.’ She had never wanted to wipe a smile from someone’s face so violently before. The only thing that concerns me is the way you’ve got rid of Charles. This firm was his lifeblood, his reason for living, and don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about,’ she warned testily as he opened his mouth to interrupt. ‘I know Charles—I know him better than you for a start—and to leave this firm would be like leaving his own child. He built Concise Publications up from nothing, sacrificed for it, lived his life around it, and now you sweep in and throw him out as though he’s nothing.’

‘You’ve got this all wrong—’

‘Oh, spare me.’ He wasn’t used to being spoken to like this, and his displeasure was evident in the narrowing of the brilliant blue eyes and hard line of his mouth. A sensual mouth, firm and full, with a sexy bottom lip—She caught the thought as it materialised, shocked to the core at its inappropriateness, and it made her voice harsh as she went on, ‘You’ve got rid of Charles and I don’t doubt for a minute that he won’t be the last to go. Well, I’ll make it easy for you, Mr Mallen, and resign right now. I’ve no wish to continue working under the new administration, okay?’

The last word was said with exactly the same emphasis he had placed on it a few moments earlier and spoke of her utter disgust more strongly than anything she had said before.

‘I don’t believe I’m having this conversation.’ As Joanne went to rise he pushed her back down in the seat with a mite more force than was necessary. ‘And sit still, damn it,’ he growled angrily. ‘I haven’t finished yet.

‘But I have.’ This time when she rose he let her, his eyes unblinking as she smoothed down the pencil-slim skirt over her hips and tugged the matching jacket into place with shaking hands. He was a brute of a man, a cold, arrogant tyrant. She’d seen plenty of the same since coming to London from her university in Manchester eight years ago, and had never stopped thanking the guardian angel who had led her to Concise Publications and the Brigmores. She couldn’t have wished for a better boss, and Clare had become more than a friend, almost a mother...

‘How can someone who looks so fragile be so impossible? ’ he asked with a quietness that had all the softness of tempered steel. ‘I’ve met some troublesome females in my time but you take the biscuit hands down.’ He had straightened as she’d stood, and now she became fully aware for the first time of his considerable height and bulk, his broad-shouldered, lean body towering over her five feet six inches in a way that made her feel positively minute. And she was aware of something else too, something . . . undefinable, magnetic that pulsed from the hard male frame with a drawing power that was formidable, and it was this that made her swing round on her heel and make for the door without another word.

‘Is that it?’

In any other circumstance, with any other man, the look of utter surprise on his face as she turned round would have made her smile; as it was she stared at him for a moment before she said, ‘There’s no point in continuing this, is there?’

‘You really intend to throw in the towel because you consider Charles has been hard done by?’ He surveyed her cynically, his mouth hard. ‘What sort of relationship did you have with your departed boss anyway?’ he added silkily, his meaning plain.

‘I don’t even intend to acknowledge that with the favour of a reply,’ she said icily, her eyes wishing him somewhere very hot and very final as she glared at him one more time, before opening the door and sweeping into the outer office with a regality that wasn’t lost on Hawk Mallen as he watched her go.

He liked her style. He watched her cross the outer office and exit without turning her head or faltering in her purpose. Yes, whatever else, she had one hell of a way with her.

Once in the corridor outside, Joanne set her face in a practised smile and made for the lift, passing the other offices on the exalted top floor of Concise Publications without looking to left or right. There were three floors in all, and as the lift took her swiftly downwards Joanne found she had gone into automatic, her whole being concentrating on getting out of the building and into her car without the humiliation of breaking down. One of Charles’s editors—no, not Charles’s any more, she corrected herself painfully—was in Reception and raised a hand to her as she passed. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Fine, fine.’ She smiled and nodded but didn’t stop, her mind registering the stupidity of her reply in the circumstances.

Once in her snazzy little red car she sat for a whole minute just breathing deeply before she could persuade her shaking hands to start the engine. Her whole life, the interesting, vital life she had fought for so hard, had just been turned upside down and the shock waves had her head buzzing.

She should have phoned Clare and Charles last night—she had meant to—but her flight from France had been delayed and when Melanie had offered her a bed for the night, rather than her having to drive right across London in the rush hour to her flat, she’d accepted gratefully. And then she had had a bath, and they’d eaten, and consumed one of the bottles of wine they’d brought back between them...

‘Damn, damn, damn...’ She turned and glanced at her huge rucksack in the middle of the back seat, surrounded by bags of wine and boxes of Belgian chocolates she’d brought back as presents, and then slipped off the jacket to the suit she had borrowed from Melanie and flung it on the seat beside her as she started the engine. Well, it was too late now; she had quite literally walked into the lion’s mouth and definitely come off the worse for wear, but the main thing was to touch base with Charles and see how he was. It was so ironic that all this had happened during the first real holiday she had had in years, she thought miserably as she steered the car out of her reserved space in Concise Publication’s small car park, and on to the busy main road.

The urge to see Charles was overwhelming, and as his house in Islington was on her route home she headed for there, forcing herself to concentrate on the morning traffic rather than her jumbled thoughts that were flying in all directions. The September day was balmy and mellow, the warm sunshine pleasant but lacking the fierce heat that had characterised July and August, but Joanne was oblivious to the weather as she drove through the London streets in a turmoil that made her soft full mouth tight and stained her creamy, sun-tinted skin an angry red.

It was ten o‘clock when she drew up outside Charles and Clare’s large three-storeyed terraced house in its wide and pleasant street, and by five past she was seated in a cushioned cane chair in the garden with a box of tissues at her elbow and a steaming cup of coffee in front of her. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cry on you...’

Clare, who was sitting on the arm of Joanne’s chair, pulled her closer to her maternal bosom as Charles tuttutted from his vantage point opposite. ‘It’s our fault, Joanne; it must have been such a shock to you,’ Clare said worriedly. ‘But apart from leaving a message for you to ring us when you got home, and the letter, of course, we didn’t know how to contact you. The postcards kept coming from somewhere different every few days. Did you have a nice time?’ she added as an afterthought.

‘Lovely.’ Joanne dismissed the month of fun and laughter in one word.

‘And you only found out about the merger when you went in this morning?’ Clare enquired anxiously.

Joanne nodded. She had only been able to blurt that much out on the doorstep before bursting into tears, from which point it had been all action.

‘And did Hawk Mallen explain it fully?’ Charles asked now. ‘I couldn’t have refused, Jo; offers like that don’t come every day. Besides which...’ He paused, glancing at Clare who nodded encouragingly. ‘I haven’t been too well recently and this seemed to present itself as a chance to get out of the rat race and have a few years enjoying ourselves before we’re too old.’

‘What do you mean, not too well?’ Joanne knew Charles; he would rather walk through coals of fire than ever admit he was less than one hundred per cent fit. It was something she and Clare, along with the couple’s three children, called his obstinate streak.

‘We haven’t told the children, for the same reason we didn’t tell you—you’d all worry yourselves to death. But that time three months ago when Charles had a week off with flu—it was a minor heart attack. Very minor,’ Clare added hastily as Joanne’s eyes shot to Charles’s sheepish face, ‘but I’ve persuaded him to take it as a warning, and when this offer from the Mallen Corporation came along it seemed like the answer to everything.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about the heart attack?’ Joanne asked faintly. ‘I could have helped.’

‘I wanted to,’ Clare said quickly, ‘but you know Charles. He loves you like one of our own, Joanne, and he didn’t want any of you worried—’

‘Or fussing,’ Charles cut in wryly. ‘Clare did all the fussing that was necessary, believe me.’

‘How long has this takeover been in the offing?’ Joanne asked numbly, feeling as though the ground was moving under her feet. Charles was ill, with heart trouble? Charles?

‘There has been the odd feeler there for a couple of months,’ Charles said quietly, ‘but the thing only crystallised the week you left for Europe. The Mallen Corporation is huge—I don’t know if Hawk explained to you, but the publishing side is just one of their interests. When the offer became concrete I jumped at it, it’s as simple as that really, and I decided to cut the umbilical cord in the process.

‘Hawk Mallen is old man Mallen’s grandson and right-hand man; apart from knowing everything there is to know about publishing, he’s a brilliant businessman and entrepreneur—something I’ve never pretended to be,’ he added drily. ‘He’s the future, I’m the past; if I had stayed I would have got in his way and that wouldn’t have been good for either of us. He’s a ruthless so-and-so, but he’s got what it takes, Jo; you can’t fault the man on business acumen.’

‘I see.’ As Charles went on, explaining the details of the transaction and the part everyone had played in it, Joanne’s heart sank deeper and deeper.

It had been Charles who had insisted on the opt-out clause, Charles who had wanted to walk away at once without any long-drawn-out and heart-rending, mentally exhausting valedictions. And she’d accused Hawk Mallen of... She inwardly squirmed as she remembered the exact charges she’d laid at his feet. Oh, what a mess, what a terrible, almost laughable mess. Thank goodness she could rely on Charles for a good reference because she sure as eggs wouldn’t get one from the eminent Mr Mallen.

If he wasn’t as mad as hell at her, he’d be laughing his head off, and of the two options she’d much prefer the former, she thought painfully as a pair of piercingly blue cold eyes set in a hard, uncompromising face swam into the screen of her mind. But fortunately she’d never know one way or the other anyway, having burnt her bridges so completely.

And now she would have to tell Clare and Charles...

They were upset, horrified, bewildered—blaming themselves, Hawk Mallen, anyone but Joanne—but by the time she left their tranquil home, after an alfresco lunch under the clear September sky, she had their solemn promise not to try to get her reinstated in any way.

She had made her bed and she would lie on it, she thought determinedly on the drive home, and maybe it was time for a change anyway. She was twenty-nine years of age, and after the years of exams and striving for her degree she had only had two jobs—one of which was Concise Publications—and had hardly seen anything of life. The trip round Europe these past weeks had opened her eyes to the fact that there was a big wide world out there, just waiting to be explored, and perhaps this was the nudge she needed to get moving?

She had been happy and safe the last few years, Charles and Clare’s open-armed drawing of her into their family going some way to heal the hurts of the past, but whilst she was cocooned in such a protected environment she would never reach out for more. And she wanted more.

The thought was a surprise, opening her eyes wide for an instant as she considered it. But it was true. Not the bonds of matrimony or a husband—she felt the panic and fear that accompanied such a possibility wash over her before she thrust them back behind the closed door in her mind—but she wanted to travel, to see new places, new cultures, work in different environments. And she could do it; she could. As Charles had said, the umbilical cord had been cut, nothing would be the same again, so now was the time.