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‘I hope you know what you’re doing… just what you’re throwing away,’ Ryan told her silkily. ‘We could have been very good together, you and I… in bed and out of it…’
Deborah suppressed her anger. ‘Professionally, I value your advice and friendship, Ryan, but I won’t sleep with you,’ she told him steadily.
‘No? Isn’t it a bit too late to tell me that now…?’
‘Too late?’
‘Come on, Deborah, you’re an intelligent woman. You know the score…’
‘I thought I did,’ she agreed. ‘But now I’m not so sure.’ Her heart was beating heavily and painfully. Mark, it seemed, had been right after all, and yet she had been so sure that he was wrong, that she could handle Ryan, that she had made it clear to him that she was not prepared to trade sex for promotion. She had believed also that Ryan knew and accepted this.
‘Perhaps you’d better enlighten me, Ryan.’ She lifted her head and stared directly at him. ‘When you promoted me I believed that promotion was given on merit… professional merit…’
‘What promotion?’ he taunted her softly. ‘You haven’t got it yet.’
Deborah felt as though her whole body had been immersed in icy water, disbelief following shock.
‘You offered me that promotion on merit,’ she protested, but even as she said the words she was remembering the other women who had walked this road ahead of her.
‘Grow up, Deborah,’ Ryan advised her. ‘Nothing in this world comes for free. You should have learned that by now. After all, it’s a fine old tradition in business… the giving and taking of favours… in one way or another…
‘Networking, I believe they call it today,’ he told her. ‘The name is maybe different but the principle is the same. We all bargain for what we want with what we’ve got. That, my dear Deborah, is the way of the world.’
‘Are you saying that the only reason you offered me promotion was because you wanted to go to bed with me?’
She couldn’t quite keep the anger or the disillusionment out of her voice.
‘Not the only reason,’ Ryan told her with a smile. ‘I have my position within the partnership to consider, and if I hadn’t thought you were up to the job…’ He gave a small shrug. ‘The job was there; someone had to have it… why not give it to you and kill two birds with one stone…?’
‘By using promotion as a means of blackmailing me into sex?’
‘Blackmailing you?’ He almost looked hurt. He was over the loss of control, of superiority her rejection had caused, Deborah recognised now, and if anything he was almost enjoying taunting her, forcing her to acknowledge his power over her, professionally if not sexually. ‘Hardly. What I had in mind was something that would have been a mutual pleasure… a mutual benefit. Promoting you would simply have made it easier for us to be together… for me to show you how much I enjoyed and valued you…’
Deborah digested the words and their past tense in silence.
‘You’re a good accountant, in fact you’re a very good accountant, but it takes more than professional skill to succeed, and if I could give you a small piece of advice…
‘People-management, Deborah… you need to polish up the way you relate to your colleagues… I hate to say it, but there have been one or two comments about the way you seem to have let your new role distance you a little too much. Kim Wright mentioned to me the other day that you were rather off with her.’
Deborah bit down hard on the words about to spring to her lips.
Don’t drop down to his level, she warned herself, he was playing games with her now and he was enjoying it.
‘There is far more involved in running your own department than merely getting through the workload. Have you ever considered taking a staff-management course of any kind?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did one when I was with Crook’s,’ she told him quietly. ‘It was on my c. v.’
She wa
sn’t going to remind him that she had received a very high commendation from the tutor on the course for the work she had done; after all, no course could teach her or anyone else to become as expertly manipulative of other people as Ryan was. That was something you were born with… or without…
‘Pity…’ Ryan told her just before he turned away from her. ‘I was looking forward to having you as my… protégée…’
After he had gone, Deborah sat down in a chair and closed her eyes. Oh, Mark, she thought tiredly.
She had his phone number. He had left it and his address on the answerphone, the answerphone he had insisted she keep, just as he tried to insist that he would continue paying half the rent on the flat. She had taken the phone but refused the rent. After all, why should he pay for something he no longer wanted?
She looked at the telephone, and then, before she could give in to her own weakness, she got up and walked quickly away from it.
