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CHAPTER ONE
JUDE MESCAL walked through the office and Cleo thought, as she had thought so many times before: he moves like a cat, a mean, moody, magnificent cat.
She had heard other adjectives ascribed to the chief executive of Mescal Slade—cold, remote, terrifying. But one of the many advantages of being the personal assistant to the most powerful man in one of the City's most prestigious merchant banks was a certain degree of invulnerability. Jude Mescal didn't frighten her; nannies were rarely afraid of their charges, they knew them too well. And that was how Cleo sometimes regarded him—as a difficult but gifted charge.
He appeared to be in one of his thankfully rare irascible moods this morning, she decided with a serene half- smile as she noted the way his secretary, Dawn Goodall, cringed at her desk. The way the sedate middle-aged woman was lowering her head, hunching her shoulders and trying to look invisible made Cleo forget her own problems just for a moment.
Jude paused at the heavy, highly polished door to that inner sanctum, his office. He had failed to issue his customary cool good mornings, and the black bar produced by the frowning clench of brows that thundered down above the almost startling azure of his eyes and the forceful line of his nose attested to his ill temper even before the words, Tm seeing no one today, Cleo. Cancel all appointments. Understood?' were barked out in that husky, slightly gravelly voice that had the power to make even the chairman of the board look as though he felt like a five-year-old on his first day at school.
'Certainly, Mr Mescal.' Cleo dipped her smooth silver- blonde head, feeling the expertly cut wings of her hair brush against the perfect ivory of her pointed face, hiding the amused smile that hovered around the full, curved contours of her mouth. It was obviously going to be one of those days.
'And bring in the Research file on Chemical Holdings.' He slewed round quickly on the balls of his feet, the blue steel of his eyes turning Dawn Goodall to stone at her desk. 'And if anyone from First Union calls, I'm unavailable until the lunch appointment we arranged for tomorrow. Got that, Mrs Goodall?'
An agonised squawk was the nearest Dawn could get to an acknowledgement, but Cleo chimed in, ultra-sweet and smooth as silk, 'As rumour has it, First Union have been shopping around. Could tomorrow's lunch be the preliminary to a hostile bid?'
She hadn't been able to resist that dig, and for a moment the muscles of his wide shoulders tensed beneath the dark silk and mohair suiting, then his mouth quirked acidly. 'No one makes a bid, hostile or otherwise, for an efficient house. And Mescal Slade's one of the top rankers. Your job is safe, Miss Slade. For the moment. Bring that file through.'
In the silence following the thud as heavy mahogany closed on its frame Dawn let out a pent-up breath,
'The file's right here. I had it brought up from Research first thing. And rather you than me. I'd ask for a transfer to washroom attendant if I didn't need the money I get sitting here.' She scowled at a typing error and Cleo picked up the file, shaking her head,
'You're a damn good secretary, otherwise you wouldn't be sitting there,' she told the older woman. 'You've only been working for him for three months, you'll soon learn to ignore the iceberg image. He's a sweetie underneath.'
'If you say so.' Dawn didn't look convinced and Cleo turned away, going into her own small office to collect her notebook, the file from the Equity and Research department tucked under her arm.
Jude Mescal had a reputation for being an iceberg, a well-oiled automaton plugged into his work; remote as a god on top of Olympus, occasionally breathing fire and thunder down on the heads of lesser beings, but not often enough for it to become cause for justifiable complaint.
When she had been appointed as his personal assistant a year ago, with her degree in economics safely in her pocket and her inbred fascination with the world of merchant banking, she had known she could handle the Frozen Asset—as Jude Mescal was popularly and irreverently known. She had countered cool cynicism with a disregard that was in no way negated by her slightly amused smile, met his rare temper outbursts with total equanimity, did her job faultlessly and enjoyed the keen working of his incisive brain, even, latterly, anticipating the way his mind would jump. They made a good team and she was, quite possibly, the only one of Mescal Slade's employees who wasn't openly or secretly afraid of him.
He was standing at one of the windows, looking out, when she walked through. An undeniably attractive hunk, she thought inconsequentially as the cool, smoky grey of her eyes appraised the breadth of shoulder and back, the supple leanness of hip and length of leg. Wealthy, worldly, with a brain as quick and sharp as a rapier, he was one of the City's most eligible bachelors, never without a beautiful woman at his side when the occasion demanded such a decoration, and never—Cleo had noted with wry humour and a somewhat incomprehensible feeling of satisfaction—looking other than politely bored by the adoring postures and antics of the woman in question.
Rumour had it that Jude Mescal was wary, saw all women as mercenary gold-diggers, that he merely used them before they could use him. Idly, she wondered what it would feel like to be dated socially by Jude. Sheer hell, she decided, if boredom was the only emotion that looked out of those remarkable eyes. But if those eyes were to warm into sexual awareness, to intimacy...
'Sit down, Miss Slade.' The command was abrupt and he didn't turn. So Cleo sat, taking the chair angled across the huge leather-topped desk, smoothing the silver grey fabric of her designer suit over her knees. There it was again,
'Miss Slade' for the second time this morning. Annoyed by her dig about the prospect of a hostile takeover bid from the American bankers, First Union?
Possibly. Cleo sucked in her breath. So the biter didn't relish the prospect of being bitten!
As if the intensity of her gaze had penetrated his mood of absorption at last, he turned, his eyes briefly flicking over her, moving from the top of her groomed silver- blonde head to the tips of her expensively shod toes.
'Right. To work. Let's see if the findings from Research coincide with my gut reaction about CH.'
He kept her hard at it for over an hour, probing for her reaction to the report, the complicated balance sheets spread out before them, until Dawn came through with the coffee-tray, putting it down on the desk and sidling out apprehensively when Jude eyed the offering as if it were an intrusion of an unspeakably vulgar kind. Although Cleo had tried to reassure the older woman, Dawn didn't appreciate that when he was engrossed in his work he was on another plane entirely; it was nothing personal.
