Tiger, Tiger

‘But you manage.’

Her smile was ironic. ‘I do a good job, and if they’ve got any intelligence at all—and most of them have—they realise that soon enough. The others I get heavy with.’

He laughed softly, and her heart clenched. ‘Horses for courses.’

‘Anything that gets the job done,’ she admitted. ‘What about your organisation? Do you employ women as executives?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘All I’m interested in is whether a woman can do the work.’

Lecia nodded, holding his eyes. ‘But if one of her children is sick,’ she asked, ‘what happens then?’

He lifted his brows. ‘Some women arrange for work to be sent home, some use the company nurse. We have a set of systems that we use, adapting them to each case.’

‘Very advanced,’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘I run a profitable business, and that means dealing with life as it’s lived today, not as it was forty years ago. Women work, so business has to accommodate them and their needs. It applies to men too; the days are long gone when companies expected men to put their welfare before that of their wives and families. I don’t work long hours myself—I certainly don’t expect my employees to make such sacrifices.’

‘And you don’t notice any loss of efficiency?’

‘As far as I’m concerned, a man who has to work more than eight or nine hours a day is either overworked, in which case we hire someone else to take up the extra, or he’s not efficient. If he’s not efficient, he gets help. Of course, if he doesn’t improve then he doesn’t last long.’

Advanced ideas, certainly, but he was tough with them.

After they’d ordered they discussed business generally, and his business especially. He made her laugh with some of his stories, and he treated her as a professional equal. As they talked she kept catching glimpses of compassion and understanding beneath his sharply dynamic intelligence.

He wasn’t the sort of man anyone would try to exploit, she thought, but he was obviously a good employer, a man who respected his employees while expecting them to do their jobs properly.

She said something about the generators he made, adding when he raised his eyebrows, ‘I have a professional interest in filters, but I read about your company in an article a friend sent me.’

‘Was that the friend who gave you an ice cream as I came level with you at the Domain?’ Keane’s smile hardened swiftly into a challenge. ‘The man who kissed you.’

‘Did he?’ She met his gaze with a cool challenge of her own. ‘I don’t remember. And no, it wasn’t Peter. Andrea, the tall redhead who was also there, faxed me the article.’

‘I remember. Very attractive, with excellent bones. She’ll make a stunning octogenarian,’ he said, adding idly, ‘Is the ice-cream man your lover?’

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