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Like his hair, raven-black and close-cut, he was intensely physically controlled. He never lost his temper or his cool, and was courteous to his staff even when he was chewing them out. His unyielding sense of honour was legendary in an intensely competitive business environment where personal ethics were often considered as negotiable as bearer bonds.
Brian Jessop cleared his throat and tried again. ‘I…er…spilled my coffee, you see, and we were just changing my shirt—’
‘We?’ The deep, resonant voice was mocking. ‘Do you mean to tell me that one of my most senior executives has yet to learn how to dress himself?’
Harriet mistrusted the hint of sardonic amusement. The stern chairman of Trident wasn’t renowned for his sense of humour. She was suddenly impatient with her boss for his floundering, and with herself for trying to fade into the background. She was falling back into old bad habits already!
She boldly stepped out into the open. ‘Mr Jessop’s cuff-link got caught and since it was my fault he spilled his coffee I felt it was the least I could do to help untangle him.’
‘You know what a whiz Miss Smith is at untangling knotty problems,’ Brian Jessop joked weakly.’
‘Miss Smith?’ Marcus Fox’s head turned sharply, all his concentration abruptly shifting onto Harriet. As his ice-blue gaze swept her a lightning glance from head to foot his pupils seem to shrink into tiny black pinpoints, but when he blinked an instant later they were normal size again and Harriet decided that she must have imagined that fleeting visual recoil.
Not a muscle had altered in his expression as his eyes returned to hers.
‘Ah…yes, Miss Smith,’ he murmured blandly. ‘You’ve had a miraculous recovery, I take it?’
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. It was obvious that he must have identified her voice in the background during the telephone call.
‘I wasn’t ill, sir,’ she said flatly, piqued by his lack of reaction to the Harriet Mark 2 model. So much for Brian Jessop’s fear of lobbing a blonde bombshell into the chairman’s face; she had fizzled like a damp squib. The man was impervious to shock—it would probably take a nuclear explosion to buckle that iron dignity.
‘No? That’s not what Brian led me to understand.’
Aware of her boss’s strangled apprehension, Harriet took another reckless step into the unknown. She brazenly lied, ‘Mr Jessop was rather confused himself. When I rang early this morning to let him know I’d be late for work, and to remind him of several things that required his serious attention, the messages unfortunately got mixed up—’
‘Who?’
She was disconcerted by the interruption to her inventive flow.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Who was it who took the message?’
‘Oh.’ She saw the danger immediately. She couldn’t allow some poor, innocent switchboard operator to take the heat for her outrageous lie. ‘It wasn’t a who, it was a what. The answering machine was playing up, and when Mr Jessop tried to replay the garbled messages for clarification they were completely wiped off.’
Pleased at her cleverness in tying up all possible loose ends, Harriet tried out the glitzy smile that she had practised in the mirror all weekend. She tossed back her startlingly pale hair and smoothed her palms down the side-seams of her miniskirt. To her frustration the hooded blue gaze didn’t waver from hers.
‘Have you reported the fault to the telephone company?’ he enquired mildly.
And to think she used to admire him for his meticulous attention to petty details! She shrugged—a gesture of subtle insolence which would have horrified her a week ago. It felt good. ‘I haven’t had the chance yet.’
‘I see…’
She feared that he did, but she also knew that he couldn’t prove a thing. She hung onto her smile and batted her baby-blues innocently, making the most of her lavishly mascaraed eyelashes.
Brian Jessop cleared his throat again and readjusted his tie with evident relief. ‘Yes…it was all a bit confusing, but we’ve cleared it up now. Uh…I was just explaining to Miss Smith about your phone call—’
‘So I inferred…’
His dry comment prompted a tiny silence as they all remembered the conversation from which he had drawn that inference. Exactly how much had he overheard? Harriet wondered, and then decided defiantly that she didn’t care.
‘Since I’m here I can save you any more unnecessary explanations, Brian,’ he continued in the same ambiguous tone. ‘No doubt you’ll want to get busy with your own work so Miss Smith will accompany me back to my office and I can brief her there.’
‘Oh, but—’
The beetling black brows rose ominously. ‘You have a problem with that, Brian?’ The hard mouth crimped at one corner when no immediate answer was forthcoming.
‘No? Good; that’s settled, then. Miss Smith?’ He turned sideways and extended his arm towards the door, inviting her to precede him. No, commanding…
