He didn’t immediately fill the void, but instead gave her a look that took in her entire appearance, from the top of her embarrassing hair, via the comfortable trouser suit—it had been a toss-up between style and comfort and, taking into consideration the fact that she’d be sitting in it for seven hours, she’d gone for comfort—to her lowest heels. Right now she wished she’d gone for style, four-inch heels and to hell with practicality…
At that moment Kitty stopped fussing with her bag and looked up. ‘Good Lord, aren’t you Jude Radcliffe?’ she said. ‘I bought shares in your company after I saw you on TV. You were so charming when that nasty interviewer was rude to you…’
‘Charm is all a matter of perspective. From Miss Calhoun’s point of view I’m a total…’ And that enticing left eyebrow invited her to fill in the blank.
The word that slipped from her lips wasn’t the one she’d heard applied to him. But it was near enough.
CHAPTER TWO
‘WELL,’ Talie said, since she had to say something. ‘Now we both know that I’m just as good at talking myself into trouble as out of it.’
It earned her a smile of sorts. The kind that said ‘Now I’ve got you…’ And she began to see how, while the ‘sex-on-legs’tag fitted him to a T, he might not be the kind of man you’d want to work for.
Not that she anticipated having that particular problem for very long.
‘Can you wait until I find out where Kitty needs to go before you sack me?’ she asked.
‘You’re not getting off that lightly.’ He snagged a passing female in a uniform with a glance—something she had signally failed to do with any number of glances—and said, ‘Lady Milward is having trouble finding her check-in desk. Will you please take care of her?’
And then he really smiled. The full-scale, hundred-and-fifty-watt variety. The girl was putty by the time he’d reached sixty watts—if he’d looked at her like that Talie would have been putty—and she briefly considered a lecture on energy saving. Then decided she was in enough trouble…
‘Have a good trip, Kitty,’ he said, turning to the old lady and offering his hand. ‘I hope to see you at the next shareholders’ meeting.’
‘You know her?’ Talie demanded, having rescued her own luggage from Kitty’s trolley before it was whisked away.
‘When she said she was a shareholder I looked at her luggage label. You were suckered, Talie Calhoun. But I don’t suppose you’re the first person she’s fooled with that helpless dithering act. It’s by getting other people to do their dirty work for them for nothing that her kind got rich in the first place.’
‘I don’t care how much money she has,’ Talie said, outraged. ‘She needed help; I gave it.’ And, since she had nothing to lose, ‘What’s made you so cynical?’
‘Experience. Make a note to send her an invitation to the cocktail party.’
A note? As in, like his personal assistant? And suddenly his ‘You’re not getting off that lightly,’ made sense. Sacking her would be too kind. She was going to have to work for him and suffer.
In New York, she reminded herself. In New York.
‘Which cocktail party?’ she asked.
‘The one we hold for shareholders after the Annual General Meeting.’
‘Right.’ She made a move to dig out her notebook.
‘A mental note. We have to check in before they close the flight.’
He picked up the cheap-and-cheerful holdall that had seen her through her student days but which looked embarrassingly scruffy next to the wheel-on laptop bag that Heather had sent with the car, and placed it beside his own equally worn leather holdall.
The thing about buying quality, she thought, was that it matured with age. The scuffs lent it character. Unlike cheap-and-cheerful which, once past its cheerful stage, just looked—well, cheap.
‘Passport.’ He held out his hand for it as they reached the first-class check-in desk.
He had good hands. Large enough to be comforting, with long fingers and the kind of broad-tipped thumb that… Well, never mind what the thumb suggested to her overheated imagination.
But you could tell a lot from a man by looking at his hands.
His lied.
She handed over her passport and tickets. The clerk already had all the details of the change of passenger in her computer, so there was no delay, and it occurred to her that, for a woman distracted by the difficulties of her daughter’s labour, Heather had done an amazing job of handling the details so that Jude Radcliffe’s life would proceed as smoothly as if she was there herself.
It was scarcely surprising that he was irritated to discover that instead of perfection he’d been lumbered with her. Maybe she was being a little harsh. Stifling a yawn, she made a silent vow not to do anything to annoy him further as she and the wheel-on laptop bag put in the occasional hop and skip in an attempt to keep pace with him as he strode towards the boarding gate, making no concession to the fact that her legs were at least a foot shorter than his.
She revised her earlier regret about her shoes, too.
In four-inch heels she’d never have made it.
She also vowed to keep her mouth shut. Not speak unless she was spoken to.
It wasn’t easy. Her student travelling had been done using the cross-Channel ferry and backpacking across Europe, which she’d loved. Her one and only experience of flying was cattle-class on a package tour charter flight, and she’d hated every minute of it.
But this was different, and despite her apprehension—she refused to admit to the flutter of anxiety that until now she’d been too distracted to notice—she looked about her, eager to enthuse about the size of the seats, the amount of space each passenger had and the neat little individual television screens. She always talked too much when she was nervous.
Biting her lower lip to keep her mouth shut, she explored her space, picking up the entertainment programme. ‘We get a choice of films?’ she asked, forgetting her vow of silence in her astonishment.
‘Other people might. You are here to work.’
For seven solid hours?
‘Of course. I was merely making an observation,’ she said crisply, and, restricting her enthusiasm to the business at hand, she opened the laptop bag. ‘This is the note that Heather sent you, Mr Radcliffe,’ she said, handing him an envelope. ‘To explain about me.’
‘I know all about you,’ he said, without enthusiasm. ‘You watch romantic films, attract trouble and are always late.’
This was definitely a moment for silence.
Satisfied, he said, ‘And you will call me Jude.’
‘Oh, but I couldn’t!’
Well, that didn’t last long…
‘Try,’ Jude insisted, trying very hard to keep his temper. Why on earth had Heather picked this woman as her stand-in? It was bad enough that he’d found himself constantly distracted by the memory of those few seconds they’d spent together in the lift, wasting time he’d allocated to thinking about the direction in which he should take the company during the next five years.
Instead of planning corporate strategy he’d been thinking about her ridiculous hair. That totally infectious smile…
He needed someone he could trust on this trip, and Heather was the one who’d suggested that this girl might have been putting on an act, for heaven’s sake. That her story had been just