‘Okay, Megan. You know where I’ll be. See you in about an hour,’ he promised, and closed the office door quietly behind him.
The room felt a bit empty after he’d gone and Megan threw herself into organising an off-site meeting for the following month, where Softshare employees would congregate for one of the team-building programmes which the company promoted so fiercely.
She was just thinking about eating her own sandwich—which she always made up for herself at home before she drove her scooter into work—when the telephone rang and she picked it up.
‘Hello, Dan McKnight’s office, Megan speaking. How may I help?’
There was a breathy pause. And then a young woman’s voice—asking a studiedly casual question which came out sounding as if it had been rehearsed over and over. ‘Is he there, please? D-Dan, I mean.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Megan. ‘He’s out at a meeting.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ The voice sounded so young and so crestfallen that all Megan’s protective instincts came hustling to the surface.
‘May I take a message?’
‘Not really.’
‘Or say who was calling?’
‘No, no! That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Honestly.’
But the girl sounded so dejected that Megan felt impelled to ask, ‘Are you sure? I can get a message to him if you like. He’ll be back very soon.’
A noise followed which sounded suspiciously like a gulp. ‘Well, I don’t know if it’ll do any good…’ The voice tailed off uncertainly.
Megan was not the oldest of five children for nothing—and she could tell when someone wanted to get something off their chest. ‘Oh, go on,’ she coaxed gently. ‘You can tell me.’
‘Well…um, do you know if he’s been getting his mail?’ asked the voice tentatively.
Certainty hit Megan like a slap to the face. This was the writer of the elaborate envelopes—she would bet her entire month’s salary on that! But how could she admit to the woman that her letters had been arriving without also having to admit that Dan McKnight had been refusing to read them?
‘Dan always has a great mountain of mail—electronic and conventional mail,’ said Megan smoothly. No lies there. ‘But he’s been snowed under with work lately.’ Which was also the truth. ‘So he probably hasn’t got around to reading them.’ Now…did the fabrication sound as loud to the mystery caller’s ears as it did to her own?
‘Yes,’ said the voice dejectedly. ‘I guess that’s why I haven’t heard.’
‘So why don’t I have him call you when he gets back?’
There was a rather hollow laugh. ‘No, that’s okay. I’ll be seeing him at the weekend. I’ll talk to him then. Th-thanks for all your help.’
The connection was broken and Megan was left staring blankly down at the phone, but her protective instincts had been roused. She found herself logging appointments into Dan’s diary with only half a mind on the task in hand, so that by the time he returned from his lunch she had worked out exactly what she was going to say to him.
Dan walked into the office to find his assistant looking puffed-up and slightly self-important, and began to wonder whether his satisfaction in her performance had been a little premature.
She’d been nothing but a pain this morning! The way she kept drawing his attention to those confounded letters—letters which were currently burning an uncomfortable hole in his conscience.
Yet, at her interview, Megan Phillips had not only displayed all the characteristics which Softshare specifically looked for in an employee, she’d had the added advantage of not being the type to stand out in a crowd, which was definitely a plus as far as Dan was concerned.
He’d had beautiful assistants before—women who seemed to think that a lovely face and stunning body would catapult them from their assistant’s desk into the high-ranking security of the boss’s bed!
Not that Megan Phillips was ugly, he conceded wryly. In fact, she came nowhere near being ugly—she was just refreshingly and unthreateningly ordinary. She didn’t wear make-up and she didn’t wear short skirts, either. In fact, she never wore skirts at all—always trousers. Presumably to cover up her fat ankles. And that was just fine by him.
Because Dan McKnight had one prime rule in business.
That he never slept with anyone he worked with.
Megan was itching to tell him about the phone call, but equally determined to be professional, so she toiled away all afternoon and waited until it was almost going-home time before she brought the subject up. ‘Dan?’
‘What?’
‘Your girlfriend rang while you were out.’
He lifted his dark head and the grey eyes took on a wary expression. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ There was something about the tone of his voice which made her feel faintly uneasy. Megan blinked at him, waiting for some clarification—until she realised that she wasn’t going to get any.
‘Which girlfriend would that be?’ he queried unhelpfully.
‘You mean you’ve got more than one?’ She couldn’t keep the indignation out of her voice. Or the accusation.
There was a frosty shimmer of silence while Dan tussled with the idea of sending her packing right there and then, until common sense reasserted itself. And there were no absolutely no grounds for sacking your assistant just because she thought you had an overgrown libido! Maybe he should be flattered by it!
‘I have lots of friends of both sexes,’ came the silky correction. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Er, yes,’ stumbled Megan, feeling slightly foolish. ‘Of course I do.’
He continued to look at her questioningly. ‘So who was it?’
Horror dawned on her as she realised that she hadn’t even asked the woman’s name! ‘Er, I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’ he repeated ominously.
‘No.’
‘You didn’t think to take a name?’
‘Well, I—’
‘Aren’t you aware that taking incomplete messages is one of the most irritating traits known to mankind?’ he demanded heatedly. ‘It’s bad enough in a flatmate—but in an assistant it becomes more than merely irritating, it veers into the realms of sheer incompetence!’
Megan felt torn between protecting her job and protecting the woman on the telephone—even though the job was the best-paid she had ever had, and she didn’t know the woman from a bar of soap.
But…sisterhood, and all that.
Which was presumably why she found herself staring fearlessly into those grey eyes and saying, ‘She told me she’d written to you, but said that you hadn’t bothered to reply.’
He saw that her gaze was now burning into the top drawer of his desk where he’d stashed the stack of pastel-coloured envelopes in the hope that they might somehow go away if he ignored them for long enough.
‘Oh, did she?’ he asked, in a voice so soft that Megan failed to notice the dangerous undertone to it. ‘And what else did she say?’
‘That she would see you this weekend, and talk to you then.’
Dan let out a long, resigned sigh. ‘I see.’
Megan made one last attempt in the name of female solidarity. ‘She sounded very…upset, Dan.’
He correctly latched