Buch lesen: «Seduced By The Boss»

CHAPTER ONE

IT STARTED with a letter.

Megan weighed it in her hand and studied it. A love letter, she thought.

The envelope was pink and had the fat, pampered feel of something which had been taken care of—and the handwriting was careful—using proper ink from a proper pen.

She turned the envelope over and smiled. How absolutely wonderful—to think that her coolly demanding boss was the recipient of yet another of these extravagant envelopes!

Who’d have thought it? Mr Cool getting love letters! Why, it almost made him seem human!

Except that Mr Cool hadn’t been living up to his name just lately. He had been edgy. Irritable. Uptight.

She just didn’t know why.

Megan had been working for Dan McKnight at Softshare for nearly three months now—and she still kept having to pinch herself. The offices were buzzy, the staff were young and it was almost obscenely well paid.

No, jobs in the computer industry of this calibre didn’t exactly grow on trees and Megan counted her blessings each and every day. And okay—maybe some women did look down their nose when you told them you were a personal assistant—especially to a man—but that was their problem, not hers!

Softshare was American-owned and cutting edge, its aim unashamed domination of the software market. A forward-thinking, right-on company—where the workforce was ninety per cent men to ten per cent women.

Which in theory should have been a single girl’s dream. The only trouble was that most of the men looked pretty much the same. And the way they looked was nothing to get excited about.

Only one stood apart from the rest of the herd—and that was Dan McKnight. Because Megan’s boss was the man who not only didn’t fit the technological stereotype—he had taken the mould and broken it into a thousand pieces!

As an industry famous for its lack of pretension and rules, the computer world attracted its fair share of nerds and boffins. But Dan was different. The nerds favoured pony-tails but Dan visited a barber shop regularly, and somehow he timed it so that his hair was never too long and never too short.

Most people in the building wore jeans and T-shirts and sometimes even kicked their shoes off when they were sitting at their desk. But not Dan. With his unruffled hair and perfect grey suits, Dan always looked as cool and as uncreased as if he had just stepped from the pages of a brand-new magazine.

Such a pity she didn’t find him attractive!

Megan turned the letter over in her hand and frowned as the door of the office was flung open and in walked Dan McKnight himself. She sat up immediately, the way she used to do at school when the headmaster came into the classroom unannounced.

And, when she came to think of it, wasn’t there something about him which reminded her of a head teacher? A kind of steely determination which meant that he usually got what he wanted without appearing to want it at all!

He was exceptionally tall—with both the height and the body to make the most of a suit. He always wore suits—cool grey suits which matched his eyes and contrasted with that neatly cut dark hair.

Only his mouth seemed at odds with the quietly controlled character of the man. It was too lush, too Latin—and far too sensual to belong to Dan McKnight, Megan had decided!

‘So what’s he like?’

Megan’s housemate was always asking her this particular question and Megan always had difficulty answering it. Because Dan had such a cool, analytical way of looking at people that it was hard to know what actually made him tick—though it certainly wasn’t for want of trying!

She knew that he was single and lived in an exclusive London suburb and had one of the keenest minds in the computer industry. But that was about all she’d gathered, other than his glaringly obvious attributes of being too rich and too smart and too handsome. And much too bad-tempered.

‘Good morning Dan,’ she said politely.

Dan had been deep in thought and her words shattered his concentration. He screwed his eyes up at her as if trying to remember who she was, then gave a small smile of satisfaction as he shut the office door behind him.

His new assistant seemed to be shaping up just fine, he thought. Hard-working. Enthusiastic. She was easy on the eye, too—though maybe not in the conventional sense. His eyes narrowed and he allowed a reluctant smile to cross his lips. She obviously had no vanities.

Today was a perfect example. That plain pair of beige trousers and an indeterminate-looking cream sweater did nothing for her rather sallow complexion, he decided. Dan liked his assistants to be ultra-efficient—and Megan was efficient, no question about that. He just didn’t like them to look too decorative—and so Megan fitted the bill perfectly.

Some of the other directors at Softshare had made the mistake of hiring secretaries who looked like out-of-work actresses. And Dan had watched with a kind of wry amusement as those same directors had struggled to keep their minds on the job instead of on a magnificent pair of legs!

‘Good morning, Megan,’ he said as he put his briefcase down.

‘How was the play last night?’ she queried.

Dan knitted his brows together. Had he told her he was going to the theatre? ‘It was…competent.’

‘I’m sure the playwright would be flattered to hear such a glowing description,’ observed Megan, with a sunny smile. ‘I saw it myself last week—and I thought it was terrific!’

‘Really? What a remarkable coincidence.’ He gave her a chilly look which matched his uninterested tone and stifled a sigh. If there was one thing he could fault Megan Phillips on, it was her irrepressible need to chatter. She talked about anything and everything. All the time. She wanted his views on music and newspapers and the state of the economy.

And sometimes—to his horror—he actually found himself discussing these things with her!

Dan frowned. ‘Perhaps we could get down to some work now—that is, if we’ve got all the theatre reviews out of the way?’

Which Megan supposed meant that she should shut up. Trouble was that she had trouble shutting up—which came from growing up in a large, noisy family, she supposed. ‘Shall I make us some coffee first?’ she asked eagerly.

His look was repressive. ‘Not for me—I’ve only just eaten breakfast.’

‘Oh. Right. Well, look what arrived in the post this morning.’ She held the plump pink envelope aloft.

‘Mmm?’ he said absently.

‘A letter.’

He paused in the act of hanging his jacket up and gave it a flicker of a glance, but she saw his features tighten. ‘Yes, I can see what it is!’

‘Another one,’ she emphasised deliberately.

‘Just put it in my tray, would you?’

Megan felt a stab of concern. Someone had clearly gone to a lot of trouble with this letter—surely he owed it more than that rather dismissive glance? ‘Aren’t you going to read it?’

Dan turned around, irritation sparking the dark grey eyes. She sounded just like his mother! ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Well, it’s just that I noticed several other envelopes which looked like this—’

‘And?’ he snapped.

‘And you haven’t even bothered to read them,’ she finished.

‘Oh, no—’ Dan shook his head and glowered. ‘To say that I haven’t “bothered” to read them implies that I’ve been either careless or neglectful. I chose not to read them.’

Megan’s curiosity was stirred, wondering who in their right mind could resist a handwritten envelope. ‘May I ask why?’

She was treated to an impatient glance.

‘No, you may not ask why! You’re paid to assist me—not interrogate me! So refresh my mind by telling me what’s on the agenda for this morning, will you, Megan? And put the letter in my tray like I asked you to. There’s a good girl.’

The patronising term annoyed her, but she didn’t show it. Reminding herself that the salary Softshare paid her was worth withstanding the occasional moody outburst, Megan gritted her teeth behind her most patient smile. ‘Certainly. There were two messages on your voice mail from Japan. Oh, and another call from the Czech Republic. Someone in the government there needs to talk to you and wondered if you could get back to them as soon as possible?’

‘Yep. Sure.’ He wandered over to the window and looked down onto the car park where a dozen powerful cars, including his own, glittered in the morning sunshine. ‘What else?’

‘You’re meeting Sam Tenbury to discuss the possibility of Softshare sponsoring a tennis tournament. You’re having lunch together—’

‘Where?’

Megan smiled confidently. She had asked one of the executive assistants for the name of the best local restaurant. And even the pernickety Dan McKnight surely couldn’t find fault with her choice. ‘I’ve booked that riverside restaurant—’

‘Change it.’

‘But—’

‘Change it,’ he repeated on a growl, meeting the be-mused question in her eyes. ‘I’m much too busy to have my time wasted by waiters who think that offering me an oversized pepper pot should be greeted with laughter and loud applause!’

Megan frowned. She had briefly gone out with a waiter while she was still at secretarial college and knew what long hours they put in for what amounted to little more than a meagre pittance. ‘But they’re only doing their job, Dan—’

‘Yes, I know they are,’ he said, with a quick, impatient smile. ‘I just don’t want it to interfere with mine! And it’s the kind of restaurant where men take their mistresses—’

Megan looked up quickly. It was a very old-fashioned word for him to have used, she thought. And not a particularly flattering one. ‘How do you work that one out—is there a sign on the door or something?’

‘You’ve obviously never been there.’

‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t admit to it now—even if I had! What’s wrong with it?’

‘I just don’t think it deserves its reputation as being the best place to eat locally. It’s badly lit with corny music—the food is mediocre and it’s overpriced. I don’t want to browse through a menu of encyclopaedic length or have my wineglass filled every other second so that by the end of the meal I’m on my knees. I’m not planning a long, slow seduction—’

‘Gosh! Sam Tenbury will be relieved!’ she joked.

Dan sent her a glimmer of disapproval as he bit his words out. ‘I just want to eat and then talk business.’

‘Right.’ Megan stared at him—all health and vitality in that grey suit which made his eyes look like glittering slate in comparison. ‘Well, I really don’t know any other restaurants in the area. Any suggestions? “

Dan plugged in his laptop. ‘Why don’t we eat here?’

Megan conjured up a vision of herself flitting in and out, carrying plates of sandwiches. Did he expect her to make them as well? ‘What—in the office?’

He gave her the type of look he reserved for people who were being especially dense. ‘No, Megan, not here in the office,’ he answered sarcastically. ‘I don’t want crumbs in my keyboard! I meant the staff canteen.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

He heard the doubt in her voice. ‘The food is good—and there’s no chance of alcohol clouding our judgement, since the strongest liquid on sale is root beer!’

Poor old Sam Tenbury, thought Megan. If he thought he was about to have an extravagant time with one of the dynamic directors of Softshare he was about to be very disappointed! ‘Right,’ she said briskly. ‘I’ll cancel the table. Let’s hope Sam wasn’t expecting you to push the boat out!’

Dan looked at her with a faint air of disapproval. ‘Why should he? You must know the company philosophy by now, Megan—how long have you been here? A month, is it?’

‘Nearly three months actually,’ she corrected pithily, wondering if he had deliberately cultivated the knack of making a woman feel completely invisible.

‘And…’ He sat down behind his desk and stretched his long legs out in front of him. ‘What have you learned so far?’

Megan felt like a child asked to recite their times-tables in front of the teacher! ‘That frugality is the name of the game,’ she told him earnestly. ‘That Softshare directors fly economy class. That you don’t make your offices into palaces.’

‘And why not?’ he asked softly.

‘Because you plough all the profits back into keeping ahead of your competitors,’ she answered obediently.

‘Mmm. Very good, Megan,’ he said, looking closely at the screen in front of him.

‘Do I go to the top of the class?’ she wondered aloud.

But Dan wasn’t listening; he was staring at the figures on his screen with the kind of rapt fascination which most men reserved for beautiful women.

The office was large and spacious and had been designed with the full cooperation of a design consultant. Two desks sat facing one another, which was not really Megan’s idea of fun. Those cool grey eyes didn’t exactly make you feel relaxed. And you certainly couldn’t varnish your nails or telephone a girlfriend—even in your lunch hour—not when your boss was sitting only feet away!

The only respite she got was when Dan had to go away on business, which wasn’t as often as she would have liked. Because, like most assistants, she found the office ran much better when her boss wasn’t around!

In one corner of the room was a seating area which had made a couple of concessions towards comfort. It contained a sofa and two soft chairs, with a low table in between. Fresh flowers were sent each week by a florist and were subtle and scented. Clutter in the room had been kept to a minimum and Megan was trying to enter into the spirit of this new working environment. She had already ‘streamlined’ her desk, and eagerly studied the section of the Softshare manual which included guidelines on how to make your life less stressful. Though so far, at least, she wasn’t sure if it was working.

They worked non-stop until Megan’s stomach began to rumble. When Dan was working, he seemed to forget about such mundane matters as food and drink.

‘Would you like some peppermint tea?’ she asked hopefully. ‘Or maybe you’d prefer camomile?’

Dan winced. ‘No, I wouldn’t! I’ll have that coffee now—strong and black, the same as always.’

‘But too much caffeine can make you irritable, Dan—’

‘Yes, and you seem to be doing a pretty good job of that, too! Why on earth would I need coffee, Megan?’ he snapped sarcastically as he checked his e-mail.

Megan went out to fetch him coffee served just the way he liked it—which was ebony-black without any sugar—and was presumably what kept him so alert. And so lean. She set it down on his desk in front of him, then ate a large green apple while Dan spoke at great length to someone in Tokyo, frowning at her every time she crunched.

After that he took a conference call. At noon Reception buzzed to say that Sam Tenbury was waiting downstairs, and Dan stretched his arms high above his head and gave a lazy yawn.

Megan found herself wondering who he had taken to the theatre with him and how late a night it had been afterwards. And also wondered if the lucky woman was the same woman who had penned the letter which still lay unopened in his in-tray. Megan gazed down at it, but Dan was already by the door and didn’t appear to have noticed her pointed stare.

Anyway, it was none of her business.

‘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 onto the disapproval in her voice. ‘And?’ he questioned silkily.

Megan blinked. He seemed to be asking her opinion, so why not give it? Wasn’t that what she was being paid to do? ‘I think you owe it to her to at least do her the courtesy of replying.’

Dan almost laughed aloud at what was, in fact, a beautifully worded insult. From his assistant, no less!

‘Oh, do you?’ he questioned, keeping his irritation at bay with difficulty. ‘And didn’t it occur to you that there might be a reason why I’ve let them all go unanswered?’

‘Some men play hard to get,’ suggested Megan boldly. ‘Treat them mean to keep them keen! Maybe you’re one of those men?’

‘I can see that I’ve already reached dizzy heights in your estimation of me,’ he said sarcastically.

‘It was only an option,’ Megan shrugged. ‘I don’t really know you very well.’

‘No, you don’t!’ he grated. ‘Because if you did you would know that my ego isn’t in any way fragile! And that I certainly don’t need to encourage the attention of lovelorn teenagers in order to get my kicks!’

‘Teenagers?’ asked Megan in a voice so shocked that Dan glared at her some more. ‘Lovelorn?’

‘Well, there’s no need to sound quite so outraged!’ he defended as he clipped the words out. ‘I’m thirty-three years old—not quite at the stage of queuing up for my pension book. Anyway, she’s nearly twenty.’

Megan tried to sound worldly-wise. ‘And you’ve been having an affair with her, have you?’

Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t used to people he barely knew making negative character assessments about him that made him feel so uncharacteristically angry. But whatever it was—in that moment, Dan felt like striding across the office and shaking her!

‘Bloody hell!’ he swore. ‘You’re making me sound like Bluebeard! No, I have not been having an affair with her—cradle-snatching has never turned me on!’

‘Well, what is it, then?’ asked Megan in confusion. ‘What’s her name, and what’s it all about?’

Dan sighed. He kept his private life just that. Private. But if Katrina had started phoning and writing to him here, then inevitably his professional life would be involved. And compromised, too, if he wasn’t careful.

‘Her name is Katrina,’ he said. ‘And she thinks she’s in love with me.’

‘Why?’

In spite of everything, Dan laughed. He threw his dark head back and let rip with a throaty chuckle as her question brought him crashing down to earth. Because if his ego had been threatening to get out of hand that guileless one-word query had checked it! But then he saw the reproach which had clouded those huge hazel eyes of hers, and felt his temper flare. Again.

‘Why do you think?’ he demanded. ‘Because I had my wicked way with her when she was barely out of nappies?’

‘Dan!’

‘Well, that’s what the prissy look of concern on your face is implying, isn’t it, Megan?’

‘No!’

‘And you’ve obviously taken her side—’