After Hours...

No, died.

He really needed to allow the word into his interior monologue now. No one else had wanted to say it at the time, so he’d become used to employing all the gentler euphemisms himself, but there was no point pretending it was anything else. She’d died, so suddenly and unexpectedly it had left him reeling for months, and he still wasn’t used to living in this great big empty house without her. The house Jemima had inherited from her great-aunt. The home she’d wanted to fill with children—which he’d asked her to wait for—until he felt ready.

Pain twisted in his stomach as he thought about all that he’d lost—his beautiful, compassionate wife and their future family. Recently he’d been waking up at night in a cold sweat, reaching out to try and save a phantom child with Jemima’s eyes from a fall, or a fire—the shock and anguish of it often staying with him for the rest of the following day.

No wonder he was tired.

A movement in the corner of his eye broke his train of thought and he turned to watch Cara as she opened up the filing cabinet to the right of him and began to deftly slide documents into the manila folders inside.

Now that he looked at her properly, he could see the family resemblance to Poppy. She had the same shiny coal-black hair as his friend, which cascaded over her slim shoulders, and a very short blunt-cut fringe above bright blue almond-shaped eyes.

She was pretty. Very pretty, in fact.

Not that he had any interest in her romantically. It was purely an observation.

Cara looked round and caught him watching her, her cheeks flushing in response to his scrutiny.

Feeling uncomfortable with the atmosphere he’d created by staring at her, he sat up straighter, crossing his arms and adopting a more businesslike posture. ‘So, Cara, tell me about the last place you worked. Why did you leave?’

Her rosy cheeks seemed to pale under his direct gaze. Rocking back on her heels, she cleared her throat, her gaze skittering away from his to stare down at the papers in her hands, as if she was priming herself to give him an answer she thought he’d want to hear.

What was that about? The incongruity made him frown.

‘Or were you fired?’

Her gaze snapped back to his. ‘No, no, I left. At least, I opted for voluntary redundancy. The business I was working for took a big financial hit last year and, because I was the last in, it felt only right that I should be the first out. There were lots of people who worked there with families to support, whereas I’m only me—I mean I don’t have anyone depending on me.’

Her voice had risen throughout that little monologue and the colour had returned to her cheeks to the point where she looked uncomfortably flushed. There was something not quite right about the way she’d delivered her answer, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

Perhaps she was just nervous? He knew he could come across as fierce sometimes, though usually only when someone did something to displease him.

He didn’t suffer fools gladly.

But she’d been fine whilst persuading him to give her a shot at the PA job.

‘That’s it? You took voluntary redundancy?’

She nodded and gave him a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘That’s it.’

‘So why come begging for this job? Surely, with your six years of experience, you could snap up a senior position in another blue-chip firm and earn a lot more money.’

Crossing her arms, she pulled her posture up straighter, as if preparing to face off with him. ‘I wouldn’t say I begged you for this job—’

He widened his eyes, taken aback by the defensiveness in her tone.

Noting this, she sank back into her former posture and swept a conciliatory hand towards him. ‘—but I take your point. To be honest, I’ve been looking for a change of scene from the corporate workplace and when Poppy mailed me about this opportunity it seemed to fit with exactly what I was looking for. I like the idea of working in a small, dedicated team and being an intrinsic part of the growth of a new business. Poppy says you’re brilliant at what you do and I like working for brilliant people.’ She flashed him another smile, this time with a lot more warmth in it.

He narrowed his eyes and gave her an approving nod. ‘Okay. Good answer. You’re an excellent ambassador for yourself and that’s a skill I rate highly.’

Her eyes seemed to take on an odd shine in the bright mid-morning light, as if they’d welled up with tears.

Surely not.

Breaking eye contact, she looked down at the papers in her hand and blinked a couple of times, giving the floor a small nod. ‘Well, that’s good to hear.’ When she looked back up, her eyes were clear again and the bravado in her expression made him wonder what was going on in her head.

Not that he should concern himself with such things.

An odd moment passed between them as their gazes caught and he became uncomfortably aware of the silence in the room. He’d been on his own in this house for longer than he wanted to think about, and having her here was evidently messing with his head. Which was exactly what he didn’t need.

Cara looked away first, turning to open one of the lower filing cabinet drawers. After dropping the documents into it, she turned back to face him with a bright smile. ‘Okay, well, it won’t take me too much longer to finish this so I’ll nip out in a bit and get us some lunch from the café a couple of streets away. When I walked past earlier there was an amazing smell of fresh bread wafting out of there, and they had a fantastic selection of deli meats and cheeses and some delicious-looking salads.’

Max’s stomach rumbled as he pictured the scene she’d so artfully drawn in his mind. He was always too busy to go out and fetch lunch for himself, so ended up eating whatever he could forage from the kitchen, which usually wasn’t much.

‘Then, if you have a spare minute later on, you can give me access to your online diary,’ Cara continued, not waiting for his response. ‘I’ll take a look through it and organise any transport and overnight stays you need booking.’

‘Okay. That would be useful,’ he said, giving her a nod. It would be great to have the small daily inconveniences taken care of so he could concentrate on getting this report knocked into shape today.

Hmm. Perhaps it would prove more advantageous than he’d thought to have her around for a while.

He’d have to make sure he fully reaped the benefit of her time here before letting her go.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE WAS A terrible liar.

The expression on Max’s face had been sceptical at best when she’d reeled out the line about leaving her last job, but Cara thought she’d pulled it off. At least he hadn’t told her to sling her hook.

Yet.

She got the impression he was the type of person who wouldn’t tolerate any kind of emotional weakness—something she was particularly sensitive to after her last boyfriend, Ewan, left her three months ago because he was fed up with her ‘moaning and mood swings’. So she was going to have to be careful not to let any more momentary wobbles show on her face. It was going to be happy, happy, joy, joy! from here on in.

After slipping the last document into the filing cabinet, taking care not to let him see how much her hands were still shaking, she grabbed her coat and bag and, after taking a great gulp of crisp city air into her lungs, went to the café to pick up some lunch for them both, leaving the door off the latch so she wouldn’t have to disturb Max by ringing the bell on her return.

Inevitably, she bought a much bigger selection of deli wares than the two of them could possibly eat in one session, but she told herself that Max could finish off whatever remained for his supper. Judging by the emptiness of his cavernous fridge, he’d probably be glad of it later.

This made her wonder again about his personal situation. Poppy had told her very little in the email—which she’d sent in a rare five minutes off from her crazy-sounding filming schedule in the African desert. Cara didn’t want to bother her cousin with those kinds of questions when she was so busy, so it was up to her to find out the answers herself. For purely professional reasons, of course. It would make her working life much easier if she knew whether she needed to take a partner’s feelings into consideration when making bookings away from the office.

Surprisingly, Max didn’t put up much resistance to being dragged away from his computer with the promise of lunch and came into the kitchen just as she’d finished laying out the last small pot of pimento-stuffed olives, which she hadn’t been able to resist buying.

‘Good timing,’ she said as he sat down. ‘That deli is incredible. I wasn’t sure what you’d prefer so I got just about everything they had—hopefully, there’ll be something you like—and there should be plenty left over for tomorrow, or this evening if you don’t already have dinner plans.’

Good grief—could she jabber more?

Clearly, this had occurred to Max too because he raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say a word.

Trying not to let his silence intimidate her, Cara passed him a plate, which he took with an abrupt nod of thanks, and she watched him load it up with food before tucking in.

‘So, Max,’ she said, taking a plate for herself and filling it with small triangular-cut sandwiches stuffed with soft cheese and prosciutto and a spoonful of fluffy couscous speckled with herbs and tiny pieces of red pepper. ‘How do you know Poppy? She didn’t tell me anything about you—other than that you’re friends.’

He gave a small shrug. ‘We met at university.’

Cara waited for him to elaborate.

He didn’t. He just kept on eating.

Okay, so he wasn’t the sort to offer up personal details about himself and liked to keep things super professional with colleagues, but perhaps she’d be able to get more out of him once they’d built up a rapport between them.

That was okay. It was early days yet. She could bide her time.

At least she had some company for lunch, even if he wasn’t interested in talking much. She’d spent all her lunchtimes at her last place of work alone, either sitting in the local park or eating a sandwich at her desk, forcing the food past her constricted throat, trying not to care about being excluded from the raucous group of PAs who regularly lunched together. The Cobra Clique, she’d called them in her head.

Not to their faces.

Never to their faces.

Because, after making the mistake of assuming she’d be welcomed into their group when she’d first started working there—still riding on a wave of pride and excitement about landing such a coveted job—she’d soon realised that she’d stepped right into the middle of a viper’s nest. Especially after the backlash began to snap its tail a couple of days into her first week.

Fighting the roll of nausea that always assaulted her when she thought about it, she took a large bite of sandwich and chewed hard, forcing herself to swallow, determined not to let what had happened bother her any more. They’d won and she was not going to let them keep on winning.

‘It’s a beautiful house you have, Max,’ she said, to distract herself from the memories still determinedly circling her head. ‘Have you been here long?’

His gaze shot to hers and she was alarmed to see him frown. ‘Three years,’ he said, with a clip of finality to his voice, as if wanting to make it clear he didn’t want to discuss the subject any more.

Okay then.

From the atmosphere that now hummed between them, you’d have thought she’d asked him how much cold hard cash he’d laid down for the place. Perhaps people did ask him that regularly and he was fed up with answering it. Or maybe he thought she’d ask for a bigger wage if she thought he was loaded.

Whatever the reason, his frostiness had now totally destroyed her appetite, so she was pushing the couscous around her plate when Max stood up, making her jump in her seat.

‘Let me know how much I owe you for lunch and I’ll get it out of petty cash before you leave,’ he said, turning abruptly on the spot and heading over to the dishwasher to load his empty plate into it.

His movements were jerky and fast, as if he was really irritated about something now.

It couldn’t be her, could it?

No.

Could it?

He must just be keen to get back to work.

As soon as he left the room, she let out the breath she’d been holding, feeling the tension in her neck muscles release a little.

The words frying pan and fire flitted through her head, but she dismissed them. If he was a friend of Poppy’s he couldn’t be that bad. She must have just caught him on a bad day. And, as her friend Sarah had pointed out after she’d cried on her shoulder about making a mess of her recent job interviews, she was bound to be prone to paranoia after her last experience.

Once she’d cleared up in the kitchen, Cara got straight back to work, using the link Max gave her to log in to his online diary and work through his travel requirements for the next month. His former ire seemed to have abated somewhat and their interaction from that point onwards was more relaxed, but still very professional. Blessedly, concentrating on the work soothed her and the headache that had started at the end of lunch began to lift as she worked methodically through her tasks.

Mid-afternoon, Max broke off from writing his document for a couple of minutes to outline some research he wanted her to do on a few businesses he was considering targeting. To her frustration, she had to throw every molecule of energy into making scrupulous notes in order to keep focused on the task in hand and not on the way Max’s masculine scent made her senses reel and her skin heat with awareness every time he leaned closer to point something out on the computer they were huddled around.

That was something she was going to have to conquer if they continued to work together, which hopefully they would. She definitely couldn’t afford a crush on her boss to get in the way of her recuperating future.

After finally being released from the duress of his unnerving presence, she spent the remainder of the day happily surfing the internet and collating the information into a handy crib sheet for him, revelling in the relief of getting back into a mindset she’d taken for granted until about six months ago, before her whole working life had been turned inside out.

At five-thirty she both printed out the document and emailed it to him, then gathered up her coat and bag, feeling as though she’d done her first good day’s work in a long time.

Approaching his desk, she cleared her throat and laid the printout onto it, trying not to stare at the way his muscles moved beneath his slim-fitting shirt while she waited for him to finish what he was typing. Tearing her eyes away from his broad back, she took the opportunity to look at his hands instead, noting with a strange satisfaction that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring on his long, strong-looking fingers.

Okay, not married then. But surely he must have a girlfriend. She couldn’t imagine someone as attractive as Max being single.

He stopped typing and swivelled round in his chair to face her, startling her out of her musings and triggering a strange throb, low in her body.

‘You’ve done well today; I’m impressed,’ he said, giving her a slow nod.

She couldn’t stop her mouth from springing up into a full-on grin. It had been a long while since she’d been complimented on her work and it felt ridiculously good.

‘Thank you—I’ve really enjoyed it.’

His raised eyebrow told her she’d been a bit over-effusive with that statement, but he unfolded his arms and dipped his head thoughtfully.

‘If you’re still interested, I’m willing to go ahead with the one-month trial.’

Her squeak of delight made him blink. ‘I can’t promise there’ll be a full-time job at the end of it, though,’ he added quickly.

She nodded. ‘Okay, I understand.’ She’d just have to make sure she’d made herself indispensable by the end of the month.

He then named a weekly wage that made her heart leap with excitement. With money like that she could afford to stay in London and keep on renting her flat.

‘I’ll see you here at nine tomorrow then,’ he concluded, turning back to his computer screen.

‘Great. Nine o’clock tomorrow,’ she repeated, smiling at the back of his head and retreating out of the room.

She floated out of the house on a cloud of joy, desperate to get home so she could phone her landlord and tell him she was going to be able to make next month’s rent so he didn’t need to find a new tenant for her flat.

It was all going to be okay now; she could feel it.

Back in her flat, she dialled her landlord’s number and he answered with a brusque, ‘Yes.’

‘Dominic—it’s Cara Winstone. I’m calling with good news. I’ve just started at a new job so I’ll be able to renew my lease on your property in Islington.’

There was a silence at the end of the phone, followed by a long sigh. ‘Sorry, Cara, but I’ve already promised my nephew he can move in at the end of the week. I got the impression you wouldn’t be able to afford the rent any more and I’ve kept it pitifully low for the last couple of years already. I can’t afford to sub you any more.’

Fear and anger made her stomach sink and a suffocating heat race over her skin as she fully took in what he’d just said. He was such a liar. He’d been hiking the rent up year on year until she’d felt as if she was being totally fleeced, but she hadn’t wanted the hassle of moving out of her comfortable little flat so she’d sucked it up. Until she wasn’t able to any more.

‘Can’t you tell your nephew that your current tenant has changed her mind?’ Even as she said it she knew what his answer was going to be.

‘No. I can’t. You had your chance to renew. I couldn’t wait any longer and my nephew was having trouble finding somewhere suitable to live. It’s a cut-throat rental market in London at the moment.’

That was something she was about to find out herself, she felt sure of it.

‘Do you have anywhere else available to rent at the moment?’ she asked, desperately grasping for some glimmer of a solution.

‘No. Sorry.’

He didn’t sound sorry, she noted with another sting of anger.

‘You’ve got till the end of the week, then I want you out,’ he continued. ‘Make sure the place is in a good state when you leave or I’ll have to withhold your damage deposit.’ And, with that, he put the phone down on her.

It took a few minutes of hanging her head between her knees for the dizziness to abate and for her erratic heartbeat to return to normal.

Okay, this was just a setback. She could handle it.

Just because it would be hard to find a decent flat to rent in London at short notice didn’t mean she wouldn’t find somewhere else. She’d have to be proactive though and make sure to put all her feelers out, then respond quickly to any leads.

That could prove tricky now that she was working so closely with Max and she was going to have to be very careful not to mess up on the job, because it looked as though she was going to need things to work out there more than ever now.

* * *

The rest of the week flew by for Max, with Cara turning up exactly when she said she would and working diligently and efficiently through the tasks he gave her.

Whilst it was useful having her around to take care of some of the more mundane jobs that he’d been ignoring for far too long, he also found her presence was disrupting his ability to lose himself in his work, which he’d come to rely on in order to get through the fiercely busy days.

She was just so jolly all the time.

And she was making the place smell different. Every morning when he came downstairs for his breakfast he noticed her light floral perfume in the air. It was as though she was beginning to permeate the walls of his house and even the furniture with her scent.

It made him uncomfortable.

He knew he’d been rude during their first lunch together when Cara had asked him about the house and that he’d been unforthcoming about anything of a personal nature ever since—preferring to spend his lunchtimes in companionable silence—but he was concerned that any questions about himself would inevitably lead on to him having to talk about Jemima.

Work was supposed to be sanctuary from thinking about what had happened and he really didn’t want to discuss it with Cara.

He also didn’t want them to become too sociable because it would only make it harder for him to let her go after the promised month of employment.

Clearly she was very good at her job, so he had no concerns about her finding another position quickly after her time was up, but it might still prove awkward when it came down to saying no to full-time employment if they were on friendly terms. He suspected Cara’s story about taking voluntary redundancy wasn’t entirely based on truth and that she and Poppy had cooked up the story to play on his sympathy in order to get him to agree to take her on. While he was fine with allowing his errant friend to push him into a temporary arrangement to appease her mollycoddling nature, he wasn’t going to allow her to bully him into keeping Cara on full-time.

He didn’t need her.

After waking late on Friday morning and having to let an ebullient Cara in whilst still not yet ready to face the day, he had to rush his shower and hustle down to the kitchen with a pounding headache from not sleeping well the night before. Opening the fridge, he found that Cara had stocked it with all sorts of alien-looking food—things he would never have picked out himself. He knew he was bad at getting round to food shopping, but Cara’s choices were clearly suggesting he wasn’t looking after himself properly. There were superfoods galore in there.

He slammed the fridge door shut in disgust.

The damn woman was taking over the place.

Cara was in the hallway when he came out of the kitchen a few minutes later with a cup of coffee so strong he could have stood his spoon up in it. She waved a cheery hello, then gestured to a vase of brightly coloured flowers that she’d put onto the hall table, giving him a jaunty smile as if to say, That’s better, right? which really set his teeth on edge. How was it possible for her to be so damn happy all the time? Did the woman live with her head permanently in the clouds?

They’d never had fresh flowers in the house when Jemima was alive because she’d suffered with bad hay fever from the pollen, and he was just about to tell Cara that when he caught himself and clamped his mouth shut. It wasn’t a discussion he wanted to have this morning, with a head that felt as if it was about to explode. The very last thing he needed right now was Cara’s fervent pity.

‘I thought it would be nice to have a bit of colour in here,’ she said brightly, oblivious to his displeasure. ‘I walked past the most amazing florist’s on my way over here and I just couldn’t resist popping in. Flowers are so good for lifting your mood.’

‘That’s fine,’ he said through gritted teeth, hoping she wasn’t going to be this chipper all day. He didn’t think his head could stand it.

‘I’ll just grab myself a cup of tea, then I’ll be in,’ she said.

Only managing to summon a grunt in response, he walked into the morning room that he’d turned into an office. He’d chosen it because it was away from the distractions of the street and in the odd moment of pause he found that staring out into the neatly laid garden soothed him. There was a particular brightly coloured bird that came back day after day and hopped about on the lawn, looking for worms, which captivated him. It wasn’t there today, though.

After going through his ever-growing inbox and dealing with the quick and easy things, he opened up his diary to check what was going on that day. He had a conference call starting in ten minutes that would probably last till lunchtime, which meant he’d need to brief Cara now about what he wanted her to get on with.