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‘Unless it happens to reflect on the standing of this firm,’ he told her acidly, adding with scathing directness, ‘What do you imagine might have happened had the victim of your mistake been a client or a potential client?’
Debra winced. She did not need him to ask her that question. She had asked it of herself often enough after Leigh had explained to her that she had been watching the wrong man.
‘I’ve already explained what happened,’ she told him shakily. ‘It was a mistake... a misunderstanding.’
‘In the same way, I assume, that it’s also a misunderstanding that various members of the staff seem to think that your relationship with Eric Smethurst is based on a mutual interest in sex rather than on a mutual concern for his tax affairs,’ he suggested grimly.
Debra gasped, outraged by what he had said.
‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say,’ she told him.
‘Is it? Why? Are you sure that your client does not have any sexual interest in you? How can you be sure? Has he told you so?’
Debra knew that hot guilty colour was scorching her skin, but there was nothing she could do about it.
‘Of course he hasn’t. It’s hardly the sort of thing we would be likely to discuss,’ she managed to say.
‘One would hope not,’ Marsh agreed quietly. ‘But then, one would also hardly expect a client to send a dozen red roses as a Christmas present.’
‘He grows them,’ Debra told him stiffly. ‘He’s been trying to diversify... find other markets.’
‘Well, since your relationship with him is only professional, you won’t mind if I take over his account, will you?’ he suggested dulcetly.
There was nothing Debra could say.
Furiously she watched in silence as Marsh left her office. She had worked hard on Eric’s affairs, very hard, and she had just reached the stage where she felt she was actually making some headway, and now this.
Marsh Graham had no right to suggest that she was using her professional
status to cloak a personal relationship with Eric. No right at all.
Now, when he had gone, she wished she had told him so; that she had been more forceful; but he had taken her so off guard.
When he had walked into her office she had somehow assumed that he had come to tell her that he had been aware of all that she had felt in that brief moment of impact in Margaux’s office; that he had wanted to warn her that he was not remotely interested in her as a woman, even if he had kissed her.
To be virtually accused of using office time to further her personal relationship with Eric Smethurst had stunned her so much that she still felt as though she was in shock.
And to have the account taken from her... That had been both underhand and unfair.
And unnecessary?
Of course it was unnecessary, she told herself, but her conscience wouldn’t let her ignore how surprised and disturbed she had been to receive those roses, and how she had felt even today when she was with Eric, how aware she had been that, with the least encouragement from her, he would want to take their relationship on to a far more personal level.
If he had approached her in a different manner, if he had suggested that it was as much for her sake as the firm’s that he take over the account, wouldn’t she have found that her disappointment at losing Eric’s business just when she was beginning to experience the professional satisfaction of having got his affairs in order was tempered by the knowledge that she was beginning to worry just a little about Eric’s feelings towards her?
But Marsh hadn’t behaved as a compassionate, considerate superior. He had belittled her, and acted with such breathtaking highhandedness that even now she could hardly believe it had actually happened.
CHAPTER THREE
Debra glanced at her watch. She was going to have to hurry if she was going to make tonight’s meeting on time. She had only half an hour in which to get ready and to drive across Chester to Brian Hughes’s house.
Brian Hughes was the local co-ordinator for Debra’s voluntary group. Once a month they all met at his house to discuss with one another their progress and problems.
Debra was particularly anxious to attend tonight’s meeting. She felt she was not making any progress at all with Karen, and she was worried that she might be hindering the girl rather than helping her. She wanted to discuss this with Brian and to ask the group’s advice.
As she changed into her jeans and a sweat-shirt she firmly pushed the day’s events out of her mind. It wasn’t fair to Karen or to the others in the group to allow her own problems and emotions to intrude when she should be concentrating exclusively on them.
Her brain, her emotions were still quivering with the resentment and anger she had felt during her interview with Marsh, and worriedly she admitted that, behind the anger she had every right to feel, there was also a disturbing element of pain and hurt at having been misjudged by him; the kind of pain and hurt that came from being emotionally vulnerable to the person giving the criticism.
