‘It’s not to do with money, actually…’ Rose drew in her breath and looked at him steadily. ‘Firstly, I want to have a certain amount of notice if I’m required to work unusually late hours…’
‘A certain amount of notice?’ Gabriel exploded with disbelief. ‘How much notice did you have in mind? A week? Two weeks? A month?’ He shot out of his chair and prowled around the room, scowling. The hopeful anticipation with which he had awakened that morning had turned into grim faced frustration and was getting worse by the minute. And all because his dependable secretary had disappeared for three months and returned a hell cat. Lord only knew what thoughts that sister of hers had put in her head.
‘A day or two would be sufficient,’ Rose told him calmly. Her cool cream sitting room, with its small fireplace and its neatly spaced oak bookshelves on either side, seemed poky and cluttered with him in the room. Even when they were having a perfectly normal conversation, he still couldn’t obey the laws of common courtesy and sit down politely, hear her out without interrupting, just behave like a normal human being!
‘And would that be in writing?’ Gabriel asked sarcastically.
‘I’m not being unreasonable…’
‘No? You mean it’s common practice for someone in a responsible job, earning, might I point out, vastly more than the national average, to work to rule unless given notice?’
Rose had seen Gabriel in action before. He was physically intimidating and was not above bullying his opponents into submission.
‘I wasn’t implying that I would work to rule, Gabriel, just saying that, whilst I don’t object to working late now and again, you’ve frequently asked me to stay on at the office, sometimes until midnight, working on documents that have a deadline.’
‘Frequently is a bit of an overstatement,’ Gabriel muttered.
‘Whatever. I’m going to be occupied studying and I think it only fair that you respect that.’
‘What would you classify these unusually late hours you refer to?’
‘Anything beyond six-thirty would not be acceptable.’ Rose waited for the fallout but nothing came. Instead, he looked at her assessingly and, after a few seconds pause, he shrugged.
‘Fine.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Well, naturally, it’ll be inconvenient, but you’re right. You’re going to be studying. The last thing I would want to do is distract you from that…’ He lowered his eyes. ‘You will have to make sure that whoever replaces you is not going to be a clock-watcher.’
‘You might find it difficult to locate a temp who doesn’t mind staying on until whatever time you decide at the snap of a finger.’ Whoever replaces you? There was a permanent ring to that statement and it sent a chill down her spine even though it was, of course, precisely what she had wanted in the first place.
‘Not if I dangle enough money in front of her…and of course the promise of knowing that the job might very well be hers permanently, with all the perks that go along with it.’
‘You mean you’re writing me off already?’ Rose said lightly. ‘I thought I was indispensable.’
‘So did I.’
But somewhere along the line he had changed his mind. Probably when she made it clear that agreeing to stay in the job brought one or two conditions that he found unpalatable. He wanted someone who blindly obeyed, never mind the baloney about encouraging free speech with his employees. He wanted to be able to tell her, somewhere around five-thirty in the evening, that two lawyers would be coming in at six and she would have to stay on until all the nuts and bolts of some deal or other had been ironed out. He didn’t want to hear anything about outside commitments and he certainly wouldn’t want to give her any notice for inconvenience.
As long as she was quietly and competently invisible, all would be right in his world. Money would flow for her, company cars would be forthcoming. He neither wanted nor needed the hassle of a secretary who insisted on having a mind of her own. And Rose had passed four years obliging him on that count, keeping her thoughts firmly to herself.
‘There’s more,’ she said, going with the motto that in for a penny in for a pound.
‘Since when did you decide that being prickly was a helpful asset in your career?’ The mildness of his tone was marred by a faintly disgruntled edge.
‘I thought you welcomed your employees’ opinions?’ Rose said innocently.
‘Of course I welcome hearing what my employees think,’ Gabriel said irritably. ‘And please do me a favour and don’t launch into any long, boring speeches about my little world being so removed from reality that I wouldn’t recognise free speech if it hit me in the face.’ He looked at her, at her wry expression, and grunted. ‘Well, you might as well get on with it. What more complaints have you been nurturing?’
Trust Gabriel to turn the tables, Rose thought, and translate her very valid points as below the belt stabs.
‘These women of yours…’
‘What women…?’ It took Gabriel a few seconds to realise what she was talking about, then he narrowed his eyes cautiously. ‘Don’t go there, Rose.’
Rose could understand why she was in danger of becoming the Secretary from Hell. She felt a few fleeting seconds of sympathy for him. On top of her sudden demands for a change in her working hours, she was now about to inform him that taking care of his women was not part of her job specification and she would no longer be doing it. If he wanted to order flowers at the demise of a relationship, then he could phone the florist and order them himself. If he urgently needed an expensive token to compensate for cancelled dates, then he could set forth and purchase it himself.
‘I need to have my say, Gabriel…’
‘Which doesn’t include preaching to me about the way I conduct my life outside work. That, I warn you, is way beyond your brief.’ The flat, hard expression made Rose suddenly bristle. It was fine for him to ask her questions about her private life, to try and eke out information and then voice his opinions on the little he had managed to unearth, but he wasn’t about to allow her the same freedom! Three months ago it wouldn’t have occurred to her to speak her mind. In fact, the decent part of her knew that she should set him straight and tell him that she wouldn’t dream of saying anything about how he conducted his private life, that the changes she had in mind were of a more practical nature, but she wasn’t feeling particularly decent at the moment.
‘What do you think I’m going to say, Gabriel?’ She met his dark, brooding gaze evenly. ‘Since you seem to be a mind-reader on top of everything else.’
‘It doesn’t take a genius to work out what’s on your mind,’ Gabriel rasped. He was beginning to regret his instinct to hang on to his wonderfully reliable secretary come hell or high water. His wonderfully reliable secretary appeared to have gone to Australia and stayed there. In her place was this forthright bordering on aggressive creature with an axe to grind and himself firmly in her sights as the grinding block.
‘Oh, yes?’ Rose’s voice dropped by a couple of notches.
‘You’ve made it plain that you disapprove of my behaviour towards the opposite sex. You’ve already said so. Of course, it hasn’t crossed your mind that the women I date might actually enjoy going out with me, even if we do eventually break up.’
Rose raised her eyebrows, as if questioning his sanity in even thinking such a thing, and Gabriel glowered at her.
‘I show them a good time,’ he heard himself say. He wondered how it was that suddenly he was reduced to defending himself to someone whose business it most definitely was not. Or where, for that matter, that feisty look on her face had come from. ‘I wine and dine them…amongst other things…’ He took some satisfaction