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His tack had changed. She swallowed hard, finding herself suddenly at a loss. She had seen it before—this mercurial ability to totally change direction in the midst of a heated discussion. He used the ploy often in business, usually with devastating consequences to his opponents, leaving them confused at best and at his mercy at worst. But she was not confused, she reassured herself silently, and neither was she at Conrad Quentin’s mercy!
‘Would it be very crass of me to say it wouldn’t appear so from this morning’s episode?’ she asked doggedly with flat directness, calling on all her resources and looking him in the eye.
‘No, not crass, merely misguided,’ he answered smilingly, good humour apparently perfectly restored. ‘I’m never bored with you, Sephy, and that’s quite a compliment if you did but know it. I bore easily. Madge never bores me either,’ he added softly.
‘Oh, good.’ It was deeply sarcastic, and she wasn’t quite sure why she felt so affronted, but the urge to knock the satisfied arrogant smile from his dark face was strong. ‘I’m glad Madge and I have our uses,’ she said scathingly.
He gave a soft laugh and she could tell he was really genuinely amused. That made her madder.
‘No man in his right mind would compare some of your uses with Madge’s,’ he said silkily, his eyes taking on a smoky hue as they wandered over the thick silk of her hair for a moment. ‘And Madge has certainly never been responsible for challenging one concept I have always held dear.’
‘Which is?’ She hadn’t really wanted to ask but she needed to know the answer.
‘Never to mix business with pleasure,’ he answered smoothly, before turning and walking into his office and shutting the door.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE two months until Madge returned to work were difficult ones for Sephy. Not that Conrad was anything less than the perfect boss?
??polite, detached, fair and supportive—but all the time she was on edge.
It was as though the incident on the morning Jerry had given her a lift to work had opened a Pandora’s box of emotions, and she could never quite get the lid on it again.
She went over and over his last words to her on that caustic occasion until she thought she’d go mad, and finally came to the conclusion that he couldn’t have meant what she had—foolishly—thought he was suggesting. He didn’t seriously fancy her; she would know if he did, she told herself firmly, several days after the episode had happened. He had merely been giving her a brief, placatory compliment because he had known—even before she did—she’d taken umbrage at being viewed in the same way as the elderly spinster.
No, he didn’t fancy her—the comment had been a sop to her feminine pride, that was all, she finally decided, and as his cool attitude confirmed the conclusion without any shadow of a doubt that should have been the end of the matter. But somehow, since that fateful day, all her senses seemed to be tuned to breaking point if he was anywhere in the vicinity, and he ruthlessly invaded her head every night with such erotic dreams that she blushed to think about them in the cold harsh light of morning.
As the Christmas party approached she secretly degenerated into a bag of nerves whilst telling herself that whereas everyone else might let their hair down and flirt outrageously Conrad had never been known to as much as dabble in a spot of chatting up. And then, two days before Christmas Eve, twenty-four hours before the party, he called her very early to tell her he was leaving within the hour for Germany, to finalise a deal they had been setting up for weeks with a leading electronics firm who had finally—and very suddenly—capitulated to Conrad’s terms.
And that was that. She went into work later that morning to find a Christmas card, with a mind-blowingly generous Christmas box in the form of a cheque tucked inside, on her desk. The card read, ‘Have a great Christmas, Sephy, and please accept the cheque with many thanks for helping out. C.’
‘C’. She stared at the scrawled initial for some time. He hadn’t even bothered to write his name. And ‘helping out’ couldn’t have made it plainer she was a very transitory figure in his life. Which she had known all the time, of course. Of course. She was a sensible, mature woman, wasn’t she?
She hired a car and drove to Banbury to spend Christmas with her mother, and the two of them indulged in a truly traditional Christmas Eve by decorating the little cottage and trimming the tree as they drank hot mulled wine and ate too many mince-pies.
They woke up to snow on Christmas Day—great white flakes that settled immediately and turned the village into a chocolate-box wonderland—and after a service in the thirteenth-century parish church trudged home to a roaring log fire, turkey and plum pudding, followed by the Queen’s speech.
Friends from the hospital where her mother worked called round for tea in the afternoon and stayed all evening, and they were invited out on Boxing Day to a party at one of the consultants’ homes, which went on into the early hours.
The holiday flew by in a festive haze of eating, drinking and making merry, and Sephy enjoyed herself—she really did—so why was it, she asked herself during the drive back to London, that all the time a tall, dark, blue-eyed spectre had been broodingly present on the edge of her consciousness?
And then the New Year swept in, at one of Maisie’s wildly sensational parties; a wet, damp spell removed the last trace of the holiday spirit, and the first three weeks of January were gone in a hectic spell at the office which had her working twelve-and fourteen-hour days and even through all one weekend.
So she ought to have been glad—delighted, even—when, on the last Monday in January, Conrad stopped by her desk on the way into his office and said, his voice crisp and businesslike, ‘Good news by the way, Sephy. Madge has had the all-clear and is returning to work next week. I’ve said you’ll take the day off on Friday and spend it at her home, acquainting her with anything you think is important and bringing her up to date on the bigger events of the last three months.’
They looked at each other for a second, her honey-brown eyes wide with shock and his crystal-clear blue gaze as cold and deep as an arctic sea. Good news. She was going and it was good news?
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ His utter detachment enabled her to draw on her pride and answer as coolly as he had spoken. ‘I’ll clear out my things on Thursday afternoon.’
For a second his eyes narrowed, a flare of something she couldn’t understand at the back of them. Then the hard male head nodded abruptly and he passed her without another word, although she thought his door was shut on something of a bang before she assured herself she must be mistaken.
Just like that! No thank you, no word of appreciation, she thought grimly. The man was a machine, a mass of steel components made into the likeness of a human being. She had never known anyone who could keep themselves so aloof on a personal level as Conrad. And yet the evening of that first day she had worked for him— She caught hold of the thought sternly. She had made a vow to herself to put that out of her mind and she’d succeeded…most of the time.
It didn’t matter that the long days she had worked for Conrad, often until well into the night when all the other staff had gone home, leaving just the two of them in their luxurious eyrie high at the top of the building, had meant she had got to know every little mannerism and characteristic of this powerful, magnetic man. She knew what the downward quirk of his firm bottom lip meant—trouble for someone! And the way he raised one black eyebrow ever so slightly just before he went in for the kill on a business deal. And…oh, hundreds of things. But just because they had virtually lived in each other’s pockets for several months, that didn’t mean she was any nearer to breaking into that formidable, essentially private part of him than anyone else was.
She stared at her word processor in horror. Where had that thought come from? she asked herself silently. The last thing, the very last thing she needed in her life was any sort of complication with someone like Conrad Quentin. Not that he would dream of looking at her twice, of course.
She let her mind play over the article in one of the more glossy periodicals that had surfaced recently, which had been reporting on some lavish première or other. The photograph of Conrad had been a good one, and the exquisite blonde hanging like a limpet on his arm had looked extremely pleased with herself. As well she might, Sephy thought sourly.
