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Marcus Fox was known to defend his privacy rigorously. In spite of his position and wealth he lived a very low-profile life, which meant that he was rarely the subject of speculation, either for his staff or the Press. Harriet knew only the bare bones—that he had a house in the country and a serviced apartment somewhere in the city, that he had married Serena Jerome when they were both very young and that his wife had died in the same car accident that had killed his father-in-law. He still wore his plain gold wedding band on his left hand, which suggested to Harriet that he was perfectly content with his widowed status.
‘I haven’t.’ A faint gleam of wry amusement thawed the blue frost in his eyes. ‘Nicola assures me she’s no longer a dependent child but an independent young adult.’
Harriet stayed silent as he paused expectantly. What did he want her to say to that? Why didn’t he just get it over with so that they could get on with the business at hand? She was dying to find out what his urgent new project was, and whether it would mop up some of her seething energy. She shifted in the chair and tugged absently at the hem of her skirt. His eyes dropped and she was immediately made conscious of the absurdity of the gesture. No amount of tugging was going to make the skirt modest.
‘Nicola is home on holiday at the moment and has apparently decided that, as a newly fledged adult, she needs to test the boundaries of her freedom.’ He lifted his eyes to hers again, and Harriet was struck by their renewed coolness. Did he think that she had deliberately drawn his attention to her legs?
‘Good on her,’ she muttered, smitten by a deep sense of injustice. Why would she want to flaunt her legs at a man to whom fun was an alien concept? He was flattering himself if he thought that she would bother to try and vamp him. Marcus Fox was most emphatically not the type of man she was looking for to enliven her existence. He might be attractive in a grim sort of way but he reminded her too much of Keith. Her ex-fiancé had been solid, pragmatic and unsentimental, possessed of a pessimism that he had preferred to call realism and a mistrust of open emotion which had slowly crushed all spontaneity out of their relationship.
Marcus Fox frowned. ‘As I said, she’s only fifteen. Far too young to do the things she says she wants to do.’
‘What kind of things?’ Harriet asked, interested in spite of herself. Anything that had a hint of rebellion about it interested her these days.
‘Drop out of school. Get a job. Date…’
Harriet blinked. At fifteen the girl wouldn’t even have minimal qualifications yet, nor
was she legally allowed to leave school. Marcus Fox, pillar of rectitude, the father of a teenage drop-out? No, that didn’t fit the image at all! Doubtless he had fixed ideas for his daughter’s future and she was kicking against the strait-jacket of his expectations. Go for it, Nicola, she urged silently, her full mouth curving at the idea of someone else out there making her reckless bid for freedom.
He leaned across the desk. ‘You find something funny in all this, Miss Smith?’ he demanded with lethal softness.
‘No, sir.’ She straightened her mouth hurriedly.
‘Then what were you grinning at?’
‘I wasn’t grinning, sir.’
‘Oh?’ He challenged the flagrant lie. ‘Then what were you doing?’
She had got into a rhythm now. ‘Thinking, sir.’
‘What about? And stop sirring me like that!’
‘Like what, sir?’ she asked innocently.
‘Like that!’
‘But I’ve always called you sir before,’ she pointed out reasonably.
‘You’ve always been a brunette before too, but you obviously had no trouble in changing that!’ His expression stiffened in self-reproach and Harriet realised that he regretted his reference to her changed appearance.
‘Actually it took a great deal of trouble.’ She pounced on the slip. ‘Don’t you like my new look?’
‘I hadn’t considered it one way or the other,’ he said crushingly.
‘Then my information was obviously at fault.’
‘What information?’
She couldn’t back down now. She fluffed her curls with the kind of self-consciously feminine gesture that she had formerly despised. ‘That you’re allergic to blondes.’
Retribution was as swift as it was shatteringly unexpected.
‘Only in bed.’
Harriet’s hand fell back into her lap and she went poppy-red.
Suddenly much of the knotted tension drained out of the taut body behind the desk. Marcus Fox leaned back in his chair and chuckled, the hard angles of his face relaxing, his eyes warming to a shade of blue very close to her own as he studied her blush. His body swivelled back and forth with a lazy movement of his chair, his gaze the only fixed point in a suddenly vertiginous universe.
