‘Several months.’
‘So, if you haven’t been working or even, as you tell me, looking for a job, what were you doing for “several months”? Resting?’
‘Look, Mr Kemp,’ she said, through gritted teeth, ‘I came here for an interview. All these questions you’re asking me aren’t relevant to whether or not I’m capable of doing the job, are they?’
‘Miss Wade—’ he leaned forward and there was a soft, cold threat in his voice ‘—you don’t decide what’s relevant or what’s not. I do. If you don’t like it, then the door is right behind you.’ He stared at her, and for a split second she was seriously tempted to leave, but strangely she didn’t want to be browbeaten by this man.
‘So,’ he said with the same unsettling softness in his voice, ‘are we going to continue?’
She nodded. There really was something very threatening about this man, she thought. It sat on his shoulders like an invisible cloak.
‘Shall I tell you why you haven’t bothered to stir yourself into getting a job sooner, Miss Wade?’ he asked with pointed casualness. ‘Your father is a rich man, and rich girls have no need for jobs. No doubt jobs get in the way of late nights, partying, men—’
Francesca’s head shot up at that one. ‘That’s an insult, Mr Kemp!’ she snapped. ‘You have no right to make assumptions about my character!’
He shrugged negligently and stood up. She watched him as he strolled across to the window, one hand casually thrust into his trouser pocket, his face half turned away as he idly surveyed the scene outside.
There was a panther-like grace about him. His body was lean, muscular, as much of a threat as his dark good looks. All in all, she didn’t like him—about as much as he didn’t like her. He had no intention of employing her, of course. No doubt the only reason he had agreed to see her in the first place was because he vaguely knew her father. She should never have let herself be emotionally railroaded into this.
‘You need to settle down,’ her father had told her the evening before. ‘You’re a bright girl—too bright for a life of constant parties and holidays and shopping.’
For the first time she had sensed a certain amount of irritated despair in him. There had been no gentle teasing in his voice, none of the sly nagging in which he took great amusement.
He was right, she had thought reluctantly. She had left her expensive private school at eighteen, with three A levels under her belt, had sailed through a very expensive secretarial course, which she had taken simply because she couldn’t face the thought of going to university, and ever since then had done very little about finding a job.
She frowned at the image her mind threw up of herself—too rich, too pretty, content to drift along with her crowd of friends who appeared to fritter their lives away happily doing nothing in particular, or else indulging in sporadic bursts of fruitful energy when they would do a course on photography or cordon bleu cookery, or anything else that enjoyably absorbed a bit time but didn’t inconveniently leave an aftertaste for something more.
She wasn’t like that. She knew that. But if she wasn’t why had she allowed herself to flow with the tide instead of taking her life in her own two hands?
Oliver Kemp had turned to face her. His back was to the window now, and the harsh, winter sun threw his face into angular shadows.
‘The fact is, Miss Wade, that I don’t know precisely what your motives are in coming here, but if the only reason is to get your father off your back then you’ve come to the wrong place.’
He hadn’t smiled once, she realised, since she had walked into this office.
‘Of course that’s not the reason why I’m here—’ she began, reddening because there was too much truth in his observation for comfort, and he cut in abruptly.
‘Really?’ The ice-blue eyes raked over her thoroughly, and clearly disapproved of what they saw.
‘I apologise for taking up your time, Mr Kemp,’ Francesca said stiffly, standing up. ‘But I’m afraid I made a mistake in coming here; I’m afraid that I can’t accept any job you have to offer.’
‘Sit back down, Miss Wade, and kindly do not think about leaving until I am through with you.’
‘I have no intention of sitting back down, Mr Kemp,’ she replied equally coldly, ‘and kindly do not patronise me by treating me like a child.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ he said smoothly, ‘if you would start acting like an adult. Your father mentioned that you needed to settle down, that he was at his wits’ end with you. God only knows what sorts of high jinks you’ve been getting up to, but I can well imagine. The fact is that I don’t really give a damn what you do or don’t do in your personal time, but my company isn’t a rehabilitation clinic and I’m not in the business of setting wayward children back on the straight and narrow.’
Francesca actually only managed to absorb part of this. Her mind seemed to shut off when he got to ‘high jinks’, and anger flooded through her like a crashing tidal wave.
‘I am not,’ she managed to splutter, ‘some kind of charity case, Mr Kemp. I was not obliged to come here and you are certainly not obliged to give me this job!’
‘No,’ he agreed, but his expression was shuttered.
‘And for your information I am not a wayward child!’
‘Really?’ Mild disbelief bordered on downright indifference, but he wasn’t about to let her put her point across. He pointed to the word processor on the table.
‘Let’s dispense with the histrionics,’ he said coolly, making her sound, she thought furiously, like a candidate for the local mental asylum. ‘I might as well find out if you’re qualified for the job anyway. I want you to type the document at the side of the computer, and then I’ll dictate some letters to you.
‘Your father said that your secretarial skills were excellent but—’ he looked at her with enough disbelief to make her teeth snap together in anger ‘—whether that was paternal pride talking is left to be seen.’
Francesca smiled sweetly at him and rose to go over to the terminal. ‘Indeed,’ she said. This at any rate was one area in which she was supremely confident. ‘And, forgetting paternal pride,’ she said, sitting down and quickly switching on the machine, ‘anything I learnt at secretarial school might well have been forgotten after six months of partying, late nights and—what was it? Oh, yes—men. And high jinks and debauchery. Wouldn’t you agree?’
She threw him another sweet smile. He didn’t smile back at her, but there was a sudden shift in his expression, and she glimpsed behind the powerful, aggressive face a suggestion of charm that was an unnerving as his insolence had been.
She looked away quickly and began typing, her fingers flying smoothly over the keyboard. She could feel Oliver Kemp watching her, perched on the edge of the boardroom table, one hand resting lightly on his thigh—watching and waiting for her to sink obligingly to the level of his preconceived notions of her.
She glared at the word processer. True, she had come here of her own accord; true, her father, although he hadn’t actually arranged the interview himself had hinted long and hard enough. He had also caught her at her weakest moment.
She frowned, and wondered whether she would be sitting here now if she had not spent that one misguided night with Rupert a few days before. Dear Rupert—tall, blond, carefree, with more money than sense most of the time. Her father thoroughly disapproved of him, and when he had discovered her whereabouts he had hit the proverbial roof. It had made not the slightest difference that Rupert Thompson held about as much sexual allure for her as a