Two well-muscled, married legs.
DANIEL headed for the airport, picked up his passenger, delivered him to his hotel in Piccadilly and drove back to the garage. The traffic was a nightmare but he was working on automatic, his head full of Mandy Fleming.
How long had it been since a woman had stayed in his head for more than five minutes? How long had it been since he couldn’t wait to renew the acquaintance? But then Miss Fleming was one stylish lady. Those legs. That mouth.
His brows drew together as his thoughts strayed to the way she dressed. She had expensive tastes for a secretary. Even a top-of-the-range, seriously expensive Garland Agency secretary who merited a chauffeur-driven car.
Yet there had been something in her voice, something in her smile that had made his skin prickle with excitment. And the air had positively crackled with electricity when she’d put her hand on his for that briefest of touches. Oh, she’d been cool, her back ramrod-straight, but he knew she’d felt it too. The care with which she had removed her fingers from his had been too studied for anything else.
Then he pulled a face. Mandy Fleming wasn’t the kind of woman to be interested in a chauffeur. Well-educated, lovely to look at, she was the kind of secretary who would have her eyes firmly fixed on the boss rather than one of the bit-players. The thought brought an ironic smile to his lips, a smile that quickly faded.
Things had been so straightforward when he had been struggling to make a living with a one-car business. If a girl had smiled at him then he’d been sure that it wasn’t his money she was smiling at. All that had changed the day he’d bought a second car and taken on his first employee.
He pulled into the valeting area. ‘Any news from the hospital, Bob?’
‘It’s a girl, boss. Mother and baby doing well.’ There was nothing wrong with the words, just something about the way Bob said them that alerted him to trouble.
‘So what’s the problem?’ he asked.
Bob didn’t lift his gaze from the coach-built body-work he was stroking to an eye-dazzling shine; he simply jerked his grey head in the direction of the office. ‘Sadie arrived about half an hour ago. She’s in the office.’
Dan said something short and scatological.
‘It’s not half-term is it?’
‘No.’
The older man straightened, wadded his duster, squinted along the gleaming bonnet. ‘Thought not.’
No one was eager to meet his eye as he strode through the yard and into the office. As he set eyes on his daughter, he could see why.
She was sitting in his chair with her knee-high Doc Martens propped defiantly upon his desk. Her clothes, black to a stitch, could only have come from some charity shop, and her hair, shoulder-length and gleaming chestnut the last time he had seen her, had been cropped and dyed the kind of black from which no light escaped. Her face, in contrast, was dead white, her eyes rimmed with heavy black lines, her nails painted to match. She looked as if she was auditioning for the role of Morticia Addams but had forgotten the glamour, and it was all he could do to prevent himself from flinching. Since that was undoubtedly the effect she was striving to achieve, he made the effort.
He’d hoped that this was simply a day-trip, an excursion, a little French leave from the boarding school that charged a queen’s ransom to turn the daughters of those who could afford the fees into the very best they could be, academically and socially—and, in his daughter’s case, were fighting a losing battle. One look was all it had taken to quell any such notion.
‘Mercedes,’ he murmured, acknowledging her presence as he helped himself to coffee from the machine his secretary kept permanently on the go. Sadie hated being called that. She knew as well as he did that her name had been Vickie’s idea of a joke, a constant reminder that he’d had to cancel the Mercedes he’d had on order when he’d discovered that he was about to become a father. But right now he wasn’t in the mood to indulge his daughter with pet names. ‘I didn’t realise you had a holiday.’ He lifted her boot-clad feet from his desk and dropped them to the floor before turning his diary round to check the entries against the date. ‘No, you’re not here. It’s not like Karen to make a mistake—’
‘I didn’t think I had to make an appointment to see my own father.’ Sadie pushed the chair back and stood up. Dear God, she seemed to grow six inches each time he saw her. Guilt suggested that was because he didn’t see her often enough. But that was her choice. Apart from a grudging week at the cottage, she’d spent the entire summer with school-friends.
‘You don’t. Just lately it’s been the other way around.’
‘Yes, well, that’s all about to change. I’ve been suspended from school,’ she declared defiantly. ‘And you might as well know, I’ve no intention of going back.’ He made no comment. ‘You can’t make me.’
He was well aware of that fact. She was sixteen, and if she refused to go back to school there was precious little he could do about it except point out the pitfalls of cutting short her education.
‘You’ve re-sits in November,’ he reminded her calmly. The expletive that told him what he could with his re-sits would have earned him boxed ears from his mother at that age. But then Sadie didn’t have a mother, at least not one who cared to be reminded that she had a daughter rapidly approaching womanhood, so he ignored the bad language, as he had ignored her appearance. She was doing her level best to shock him, make him angry. He was both, but he knew better than to show it. ‘You won’t be able to do anything without English and maths.’
‘You didn’t bother about exams—’
‘Nobody cared what I did, Sadie. Does Mrs Warburton know where you are?’ He mentioned her headmistress before she could point out that her mother didn’t care much about her own firstborn, either.
‘No. I was sent to my room to wait until someone could spare the time to bring me home. They probably think I’m still there.’ She threw back her head and laughed. ‘They’ll be running around like headless chickens when they realise I’ve gone.’
He pressed the intercom. ‘Karen, call Mrs Warburton at Dower House and let her know that Sadie is with me.’
‘Yes, Dan.’
‘Then will you organise some flowers and fruit for Brian’s wife—’
‘I’ve already taken care of it. And Ned Gresham’s agreed to come in and cover for him.’ Karen might not have the glamour of a Garland Girl, but she was their equal in every other way. Dan recalled Mandy’s smile, slightly parted lips, the way her fingers had felt as they had rested briefly on his and the way his skin had tightened at the contact. Not quite every way, which was probably just as well. A sexy secretary combined with a garage full of impressionable drivers and mechanics was nothing short of a recipe for disaster. ‘Do you want me to write him in for the five o’clock pick-up from The Beeches?’ She didn’t say, Now that Sadie’s arrived. She didn’t need to.
With just a touch of regret, he surrendered the memory, the anticipated pleasure … But not to Ned Gresham. With his public school accent and chiselled good looks, the man thought he was God’s gift to women. A lot of women thought that too. The idea of him flirting with Mandy Fleming … ‘No. Ask Bob to do it.’ He kept his finger on the button for a moment. ‘Tell him he can take Miss Fleming home rather than back to the Garland offices if she prefers.’
Karen laughed. ‘Pretty, was she?’
‘Simple public relations, Karen. Please the secretary and you’ve got the boss.’
‘And if Miss Fleming lives on the other side