‘What I need,’ he said, each word given equal weight, ‘is for you to cooperate.’
He wasn’t listening, she realised. Didn’t want to hear what she had to say. Miles wasn’t interested in how this had happened, only in protecting his firm’s reputation. He needed a scapegoat, a fall guy, and it was her signature on the ad.
That was why he’d summoned her back to the office—to show the sacrifice to Darius Hadley. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t been impressed. He didn’t want the head of some apparently witless woman who stammered and blushed when he looked at her. He was going for damages so Miles was instituting Plan B—protecting the firm’s reputation by destroying hers.
She was in trouble.
‘I’ve spoken to Peter Black and he’s discussed the situation with our lawyers. We’re all agreed that this is the best solution,’ Miles continued, as if it was a done deal.
‘Already?’
‘There was no time to waste.’
‘Even so... What kind of lawyer would countenance such a lie?’
‘What lie?’ he enquired blandly. ‘Burnout happens to the best of us.’
Burnout? She was barely simmering, but the lawyers—covering all eventualities—probably had the press statement drafted and ready to go. She would be described as a ‘highly valued member of staff’...blah-de-blah-de-blah...who, due to work-related stress, had suffered a ‘regrettable’ breakdown. All carefully calculated to give the impression that she’d been found gibbering into her keyboard.
It would, of course, end with everyone wishing her a speedy return to health. Miles was clearly waiting for her to do the decent thing and take cover in the Fairview so that he could tell them to issue it. The clinic’s reputation for keeping their patients safe from the lenses of the paparazzi, safe from the intrusion of the press, was legendary.
Suddenly she wasn’t arguing with him over the best way to recover the situation, but clinging to the rim of the basin by her fingernails as her career was being flushed down the toilet.
‘This is wrong,’ she protested, well aware that the decision had already been made, that nothing she said would change that. ‘I didn’t do this.’
‘I’m doing my best to handle a public relations nightmare that you’ve created, Natasha.’ His voice was flat, his face devoid of expression. ‘It’s in your own best interests to cooperate.’
‘It’s in yours,’ she retaliated. ‘I’ll be unemployable. Unless, of course, you’re saying that I’ll be welcomed back with open arms after my rest cure? That my promotion to associate, the one you’ve been dangling in front of me for months, is merely on hold until I’ve recovered?’
‘I have to think of the firm. The rest of the staff,’ he said with a heavy sigh created to signal his disappointment with her. ‘Please don’t be difficult about this.’
‘Or what?’ she asked.
‘Tash... Please. Why won’t you admit that you made a mistake? That you’re fallible...sick; everyone—maybe even Mr Hadley—will sympathise with you, with us.’
He was actually admitting it!
‘I didn’t do this,’ she repeated but, even to her own ears, she was beginning to sound like the little girl who, despite the frosting around her mouth, had refused to own up to eating two of the cupcakes her mother had made for a charity coffee morning.
‘I’m sorry, Natasha, but if you refuse to cooperate we’ll have no choice but to dismiss you without notice for bringing the firm into disrepute.’ He took refuge behind his desk before he added, ‘If you force us to do that we will, of course, have no option but to counter-sue you for malicious damage.’
Deep, deep trouble.
‘I’m not sick,’ she replied, doing her best to keep her voice steady, fighting down the scream of outrage that was beginning to build low in her belly. ‘As for the suit for damages, I doubt either you or Mr Hadley would get very far with a jury. While the advertisement may not have been what he signed up for—’ she was being thrown to the wolves, used as a scapegoat for something she hadn’t done and she had nothing to lose ‘—it’s the plain unvarnished truth.’
‘Apart from the woodworm and the stairs,’ he reminded her stonily.
‘Are you prepared to gamble on that?’ she demanded. ‘Who knows what’s under all that dirt?’
She didn’t wait for a response. Once your boss had offered you a choice between loony and legal action, any meaningful dialogue was at an end.
TWO
How dared he? How bloody dared he even suggest she might be suffering from stress, burnout? Damn it, Miles had to know this was all a crock of manure.
Tash, despite her stand-up defiance, was shaking as she left Miles Morgan’s office and she headed for the cloakroom. There was no way she could go downstairs and face Janine, who’d obviously known exactly what was coming, until she had pulled herself together.
She jabbed pins in her hair, applied a bright don’t-care-won’t-care coating of lipstick and some mental stiffeners to her legs before she attempted the stairs she’d run up with such optimism only a few minutes earlier.
She’d been ten minutes, no more, but Janine was waiting with a cardboard box containing the contents of her desk drawers.
‘Everything’s there,’ she said, not the slightest bit embarrassed. On the contrary, the smirk was very firmly in place. They’d never been friends but, while she’d never given Janine a second thought outside the office, it was possible that Janine—behind the faux sweetness and the professional smile and ignoring the hours she put in, her lack of a social life—had resented her bonuses. ‘It’s mostly rubbish.’
She didn’t bother to answer. She could see for herself that the contents of her desk drawers had been tipped into the box without the slightest care.
Janine was right; it was mostly rubbish, apart from a spare pair of tights, the pencil case that one of her brothers had given her and the mug she used for her pens. She picked it up and headed for the door.
‘Wait! Miles said...’
In her opinion, Miles had said more than enough but, keeping her expression impassive, she turned, waited.
‘He asked me to take your keys.’
Of course he had. He wouldn’t want her coming back when the office was closed to prove what havoc she could really cause, given sufficient provocation. Fortunately for him, her reputation was more important to her than petty revenge.
She put down the box, took out her key ring, removed the key to the back door of the office and handed it over without a word.
‘And your car keys,’ she said.
Until that moment none of this had seemed real, but the BMW convertible had been the reward Miles had dangled in front of his staff for anyone reaching a year-end sales target that he had believed impossible. She’d made it with a week to spare and it was her pride and joy as well as the envy of every other negotiator in the firm. Could someone have done this to her just to get...?
She stopped. That way really did lie madness.
No doubt Miles would use those spectacular sales figures to back up his claim of ‘burnout’, suggesting she’d driven herself to achieve the impossible and prove that she was better than anyone else. So very sad...
He might even manage to squeeze out a tear.
All he’d have to do was think of the damages he’d have to pay Darius Hadley.
Taking pride in the fact that her fingers weren’t