Page 2 of His Secretary's Nine-Month Notice
‘Want to have this conversation out here, Violet? I’m happy to knock on all the doors of your well-heeled neighbours and invite them outside to have a good old time earwigging. Everyone likes being outdoors in sunny weather, after all, and all the better if there’s a cabaret going on.’
‘You’re impossible, Matt.’
‘Well, at least we’ve dropped thesir.That’s a start. Let me in. I need something strong to drink.’
He rested the flat of his hand on the door. Violet sighed and opened it, and then she stood to one side so that he could brush past her into the small but exquisite hall, with its black-and-white flagstones and rich colours.
For a few seconds, he said nothing. He just turned a full circle and stared, taking his time, looking at everything while she remained where she was, already predicting the questions he would ask and resenting the answers she would be forced to give.
When his gaze finally settled on her, there was lively curiosity alongside the raging anger that had brought him to her door.
‘How did you get my address?’ she asked.
‘Going into the personnel files is hardly beyond the wit of man. Nice place, Violet. Who would have guessed?’
Violet reddened and glared at him. The infuriating man met her glare with a slow, curling smile, the smile of a shark that has suddenly and happily found itself sharing space with a tasty little morsel.
She spun round on her heels and headed straight for the kitchen.
The town house wasn’t big, but neither was it small. Off the hall, a highly polished staircase led up to the bedroom floor. Several doors opened out downstairs into a generous sitting room, a small snug that she used as her office and music room, a cloakroom lovingly displaying wallpaper and paint from its Victorian ancestry. And, of course, the kitchen, that was spacious enough to house a six-seater kitchen table on which were reams of papers that she hurriedly swept up into a bundle and dumped on the dresser. Then she turned to him, face still flaming red, leant against the counter and folded her arms.
Violet could not have felt more out of her comfort zone. Her neat work suits protected her from him, established all the necessary divisions between boss and secretary.
Here, in her house, dressed in a pair of jeans and an old tee shirt handed down from her dad’s bad old days, she felt...exposed and horribly vulnerable.
But she wasn’t going to let that show on her face.
‘You never told me that you lived in an exquisite little jewel like this,’ he mused, settling into one of the kitchen chairs, for all the world as though he was in it for the long haul.
‘I don’t believe I ever told you anything about where I lived,’ Violet returned, and he tilted his head to one side and nodded slowly.
‘My point exactly. Why would you hide this sort of thing from me? Most people keep quiet about their homes because they’re embarrassed.’
‘I have coffee,’ Violet offered. ‘Or tea. Which would you like?’
‘Does that mean that there’s no whisky lurking in any of the cupboards? No? Well, coffee it is, in that case. You know how I take it, Violet, because you know everything there is to know about me...’
He sank lower into the chair, his long body dwarfing it, his legs stretched out in front of him, his body language that of someone in no rush whatsoever. He folded his hands behind his head and looked at her with undisguised curiosity.
In terms of nightmares coming true, this was pretty much up there with the best of them.
Matt Falconer, billionaire legend of the IT and telecommunications world, the man adored by the press and women alike, in her house, nose twitching, because nothing would please him more than to ferret out information about her, information she had always made a point of keeping very firmly to herself.
From the very moment she had walked into his office, nestled high up in one of London’s most iconic buildings, she had sensed that her boss wasn’t going to be like the other two guys for whom she had worked. He wasn’t going to be affable or fatherly like George Hill, with whom she had worked for two years before having been made redundant. Nor was he going to be anything like Simon Beesdale, her last boss, who had been a proud new daddy with photos of his family spread along his desk, keen to integrate her intohis ‘other family’,as he called his team of fifteen people, always smiling, always encouraging.
No, Matt Falconer had kicked off proceedings by turning up late on day one, leaving her kicking her heels in his office, and from thereon in she had been tossed into the deep end and left to fend for herself. She’d had to rise to the challenge and learn fast on the spot. And she’d enjoyed every second of it. She’d loved the early mornings and the late nights, the buzz of activity and the frenetic, fast pace. She’d enjoyed the informality of the working environment, even though, orderly as she was, she knew she really shouldn’t. And she’d kept up, earning his respect and seeing her salary rise several times in the space of two years.
But Matt’s brilliant intellect and demanding work ethic were twined with staggering self-assurance of the kind she found vaguely disconcerting, an abundance of charm that brought out every cautious instinct in her and an inquisitive, questioning personality that was programmed to ignore all boundaries and every singledo-not-trespasssign.
She had stood firm against the barrage of questions that had greeted her on a daily basis when she’d first joined his company. She had sidestepped the idle prying into her private life and had failed to rise to the bait when, in week three, he had told her with a certain amount of tetchiness in his voice that women tended to respond when he showed interest in their private lives.
‘I’m afraid that won’t be me,’ she had murmured, with a blatant lack of sincere apology in her voice. ‘I believe in keeping my private life strictly separate from my working life.’
And she had not regretted her decision because, as time had moved on, as she had with deep reluctance fallen further and further under the spell of her charismatic boss, she could only thank the Lord that common sense had prevailed from the outset.
So his presence here now, in her charming mews house, was sending her body into panicked overdrive.
‘For instance,’ he was drawling now, ‘I’m guessing that you know me well enough to have realised that I should have been out with Clarissa at the ballet this evening...and so wouldn’t have read your email until tomorrow morning. Presumably, you intended to waltz in at some ungodly, late hour in the hope that I might have digested the bare bone message that you’re walking out on the best paid job you could hope to find. Not to mention the most invigorating.’
