Beyond All Reason Read online

  ‘Then why,’ Ross continued with a hint of impatience, ‘have you been sitting there for the past half-hour looking as though the world’s caved in? Have you been listening to a word I’ve been dictating?’

  ‘Of course I have.’ She held up her notepad which was full of scribbled writing and tried not to fling it at him.

  ‘It’s because I turned up at that engagement party of yours last night, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why did you?’ Their eyes met but she didn’t look away. Why bother to pretend that she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about?

  He shrugged and looked at her. ‘Curiosity, I guess. If you hadn’t been so secretive about the whole thing, I probably wouldn’t have.’

  Curiosity. She digested the word with something approaching dislike.

  His sudden appearance in her flat had elicited varying reactions from the assembled guests. Martin’s parents, with a certain amount of obtuse naivete, had assumed that he had been invited, in the capacity of Abigail’s boss. They had even made an effort to involve Fiona in conversation, seemingly not noticing the languid boredom on her face or the way her eyes skimmed derisively over the décor. Her own mother had viewed him with rather more suspicion, and Abigail had seen the twitching antennae with a sinking heart. More lectures to come on good-looking men and how they should be avoided at all costs; remember Ellis Fitzmerton. We don’t want you making a fool of yourself over another boss, do we?

  And of course Martin, who had never met Ross before, as if sensing unfair competition, had adopted an air of macho aggressiveness which had not sat well on his shoulders. Poor Martin. That, in some respects, had been the worst thing about Ross’s unexpected arrival. He had stridden into the small sitting-room, with his bottles of expensive champagne, tall, commanding, sexy, and instantly everyone had seemed very dull in comparison. Including Martin.

  ‘Come on.’ He stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets and Abigail said, bewildered,

  ‘Come on? Where? What are you doing?’

  He had walked over to where she was sitting opposite him and proceeded to frogmarch her to the door, while she made ineffectual protesting noises.

  ‘I’m taking you to the boardroom,’ he said, pulling open the outer door and unceremoniously escorting her out. ‘Life’s just too damned offputting with you in this kind of mood. Whatever little resentments you’re nursing, you’ll bloody well tell me about them over a cup of coffee.’

  ‘No!’ She tried to pull away, not liking the way his fingers burnt her skin. ‘What about work? This is silly!’

  He ignored the protests and continued to pull her along the corridor.

  ‘Work can wait.’

  They reached the boardroom and he pushed her in, slamming the door behind them.

  ‘Now,’ he said tightly, turning to face her with his arms folded, ‘get it off your chest.’

  He stood with his back to the door, staring at her, his black eyes glittering, and she gave him a weak smile.

  ‘It won’t work,’ he informed her in a curt voice, and when she looked at him with a question in her eyes he continued tersely, ‘that smile of yours. It won’t work.’

  ‘What smile of mine?’ She smiled.

  ‘That one. The placating one that you produce every time you’re in an uncomfortable spot. The one that precedes a change in conversation.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she muttered, looking away, and he said, moving towards her with his arms still folded,

  ‘Oh yes, you do. You’re fine just so long as work is involved but the minute I make any personal remark to you, however damned inoffensive, you throw me one of those smiles, edge away and take refuge behind the word processor, or the telephone, or that notepad of yours.’ He whipped the notepad out of her fingers and she instantly felt bereft without it.

  ‘Now sit down!’ he barked, making her jump, and she sat down, following him warily with her eyes as he walked across to the coffee-machine and began fiddling with it. After a few minutes, and cursing under his breath, he shot her a black look and said with disgust, ‘The damn thing’s broken.’

  ‘It was working yesterday,’ Abigail offered, and he scowled. ‘Are you sure you know how to work it?’

  ‘Of course I know how to work it,’ he told her impatiently. ‘It doesn’t take a degree in metaphysics to work a blasted coffee-machine, does it?’

  She got up and went across to the non-functioning coffee-machine, pressed a few buttons, and was rewarded by the familiar gurgling noises.

  He looked at her with a disgruntled frown, as if she had been personally responsible for its previous lack of co-operation with him, and said under his breath, ‘Pointlessly fiddly gadget. I suppose manufacturers think it’s clever to make something simple as complicated as they can.’

  ‘I suppose they do,’ she agreed easily, feeling much more relaxed.

  ‘And that’s another thing!’ he roared at her. ‘Another trait of yours! Agreeing with everything I say if you think it’s going to get me off your back!’

  Abigail started to smile soothingly, and stopped in time. She made their cups of coffee and retreated back to the sanctuary of her chair. For a minute there, standing so close to him, she had felt her heart beating fast and her pulses racing, as if she had just finished running a marathon.

  He sat down next to her and crossed his legs, his eyes speculative, trying to read inside her mind, to unearth what thoughts were flitting through her head. It filled her with a trace of alarm, because there were times when he had shown a distinct talent for doing just that, and it had always unnerved her.

  ‘Why were you so put out last night? When you opened the front door and saw us standing there, your face was like a thundercloud.’

  ‘I don’t happen to like my private life intruded into on the grounds of curiosity!’ she snapped. She had wondered why he had marched her along to the boardroom for coffee and a so-called chat when both could have been accomplished back in his office, but now she knew. He had brought her here to disorient her, to talk to her out of familiar surroundings, where he would have the clear advantage. In this silent, large boardroom, with its stark gleaming table and its array of chairs standing to attention around it, there was no easy flight behind familiar objects. And no distracting telephone calls which might have given her the opportunity to leave his office quietly when he was too busy talking to intervene. Here, there were just the two of them and her thumping heart.

  ‘All right then, forget curiosity. I’ve known you for eighteen months. I came to extend my congratulations to you formally.’

  She didn’t believe a word of that and her look said as much.

  ‘Dammit, Abby!’ he bit out impatiently. ‘You made it patently clear from the start that you weren’t interested in a boss who was going to…to…’

  ‘Flirt with me?’ she offered with irony, and he glared at her.

  ‘If you want to put it that way.’

  ‘I’m not interested in that,’ she said, hearing the bitterness creep into her voice and wiping it out before he could start making deductions.

  ‘And I’ve tiptoed around you for long enough. Why did it make you so uncomfortable having me around?’

  She flushed and looked away. Why had it? she wondered uneasily. He was just her boss, she thought. They worked well together and that was that.

  ‘Your girlfriend was bored stiff,’ she said, deflecting the unwelcome thought. ‘She perched on the edge of her chair, looking as though she might catch something infectious at any moment. How do you think it feels to have that at your engagement party?’

  She glanced down at her finger, now sporting a discreet engagement ring, and felt a strange quiver of unreality. Suddenly things seemed to have happened very quickly, almost behind her back, when she hadn’t been looking.

  ‘Fiona can be tactless at times,’ he admitted, ‘but you still haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘I didn’t like the thought of your barging in, if
you must know, looking at us as if we were strange oddities.’

  ‘What the hell do you think I am?’ he said, his face hardening. ‘Did you imagine that I came to sneer?’

  She didn’t answer and that seemed to make him angrier.

  ‘I suppose not,’ she conceded reluctantly, not daring to meet his eyes, ‘but I’m just your secretary, after all. We don’t exactly move in the same circles, do we?’

  Watch out, Abby, a little voice warned her, you’re beginning to sound bitter again.

  She couldn’t help it though, the shadow of Ellis Fitzmerton made that impossible. After he had broken off with her, he had explained in a phoney, gentle voice that had nothing to do with sympathy and everything to do with reminding her of her position, that she must have been suffering from delusions if she thought that they could have made anything out of their brief, albeit pleasant, relationship. And when she had seen his girlfriend, she had understood why. They may have drifted into something because of circumstance, but there was a dividing line between them that was insurmountable. He had reinforced the refrain that had played in her ears ever since she had been a young child. Them and us and ne’er the twain shall meet. Beauty, her mother had once told her, can jump all barriers, but you might as well be honest and face facts, you’re no great beauty.

  Ross gave her a long, intense stare, then said suddenly, ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Who?’ Abigail stammered, going bright red, and clutching the seat of the chair to stop her hands from trembling.

  ‘The man who filled your head with rubbish like that?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said sharply. ‘And I don’t have to stay here a minute longer and listen to this!’

  ‘Was it your mother, then?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ At this point, every nerve in her body was jangling. This was the first time, she realised with panic, that he had ever managed to get any conversation between them on to an intimate footing and hold it there.

  ‘She struck me,’ he murmured thoughtfully, in a deceptively mild voice, ‘as the sort of woman who doesn’t mind thrusting her opinions on to other people, including her own daughter. That can be a disaster when it happens to a child, or an adolescent.’

  He gave her a sidelong glance from under his lashes.

  ‘She can be a bit domineering, I suppose,’ Abigail admitted, only realising afterwards that she had fallen for a trap. He had given her a choice of talking either about a man or her mother, and she had chosen her mother when in fact, if she had been thinking straight, she would have seen that she was under no obligation to discuss either.

  ‘This is stupid,’ she said, fidgeting but not actually summoning up the courage to get up, ‘sitting here, wasting time talking about nothing, when there’s a pile of work back in the office waiting to get done.’

  ‘We’re not talking about nothing. Unless that’s how you would describe your life.’

  ‘And stop putting words into my mouth!’

  Their eyes clashed and she felt a strange, giddy sensation overwhelm her.

  ‘How long did your friends stay?’ he asked, veering off at another tangent. He sipped his coffee and regarded her over the rim of the cup. Compelling. That more or less described him. His looks, his mind, everything about him compelled. Why else would she be sitting here being persuaded, against her will, to talk about herself?

  ‘An hour or so after you left,’ she said.

  ‘Very nice girls,’ he murmured, and she had the sneaking suspicion that he was leading up to something, though what, she couldn’t quite figure out. ‘Have you known them a long time?’

  ‘Years. I grew up with Alice, in fact. I’m an only child and she was like a sister to me.’

  ‘Down-to-earth, sensible girl,’ he mused, leaning back in the chair, his long, lithe body dwarfing it.

  ‘Yes, well, we all are,’ Abigail said tartly. ‘Reality isn’t something you can escape from when you have to strive for every little foothold you gain in life.’

  ‘That sounds like philosophising to me.’

  ‘I guess it does,’ she answered with a reluctant grin. ‘I didn’t lead a deprived existence, I always knew that there would be food on the table, but that luxuries were out of the question. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘have I answered all your questions? Do you feel that you now know me? Can we return to work?’

  ‘There is all that paperwork on the takeovers to work through, isn’t there?’ he agreed, raising his eyebrows, as if only now giving that any thought at all.

  ‘Yes, there is!’ She didn’t want to sound eager, but on the other hand she had no desire to continue their fraught conversation. In fact, she would have happily taken on a charging bull with her notepad if it would have provided the necessary distraction from Ross’s intimate probing.

  ‘And you’re right, there’s a pile of paperwork waiting on my desk to be sifted. Usual stuff. Letters from clients, contracts that need signing, statements to look at. Routine things, but they do take up one’s time.’

  ‘Yes, they do!’ she agreed lustily.

  ‘But it can all wait, I think. At least until we have another cup of coffee.’ He held out his cup with barely concealed amusement and she threw him a furious look.

  Playing games. That was what it was all about, she thought, rapidly refilling his cup and handing it back to him. Games that had been initiated from curiosity. She hated games. She had always been a serious girl, with her feet firmly planted on the ground, and her head where it should be, not spinning somewhere in the clouds.

  The only man who had ever played games with her had been Ellis, with his smooth patter. Had his games been initiated through curiosity as well? Or boredom? Or maybe they had been the effect of their enforced late nights alone in an empty office? Whatever, they had taught her a bitter lesson, and she felt a sweeping resentment that Ross was toying with her as well.

  Martin was not a game-player. He took life seriously as well. She had a fleeting mental image of him. Pleasant-looking, with neatly combed brown hair and blue eyes. A thoroughly nice chap, as her friend Alice had whispered to her at some point during the engagement party.

  She wondered, in a flash of sudden insight, whether she hadn’t allowed herself to enter into a relationship with him because he was just so different from Ellis, because he was sincere at a time when sincerity was the one thing she desperately needed.

  She had met him at a dinner party, where they had automatically paired off, being both single, and it had just developed from there. No heady passion, no thunder and lightning, just a quiet, unfussy friendship between two people who shared similar interests. But would she have responded to him if that disastrous romance only months previously had not left such a sour taste in her mouth?

  The thought confused her.

  ‘The food was very good,’ he mused, holding her gaze until the unsteadiness that she had been feeling since they had entered the boardroom threatened to take over completely. ‘I never knew that you were such a good cook.’

  Abigail sighed in resignation. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  They both knew what she meant. He had broken through the carefully controlled barrier that had always separated her private life from her working life by turning up at that engagement party, and he wasn’t about to desist until his perverse curiosity about her was satisfied.

  ‘I’m not a bad cook,’ she said. ‘Why are you suddenly so interested?’

  ‘What makes you think that I haven’t been interested in you from the start?’

  It was a curious way to answer her question and for a minute it threw her into speechless silence. Her mind flew back over the past eighteen months, and snippets of conversation between them resurfaced from the depths of her subconscious, like little eels wriggling free from the rocks under which they had been firmly buried.

  She remembered times when he had asked her about herself, about what she did in the
evenings, what movies she liked, whether she ever went to the theatre. And she could remember her responses with equal clarity. The uninformative, abrupt answers, the firm closing of any door between them that he might have been trying to open.

  The rational side of her knew that it was stupid to let what had happened between her and Ellis affect the way she looked at the rest of the male sex, she knew that the constant erosive effects of her mother were a legacy she should leave behind. But she couldn’t help herself. Ross Anderson, she had known from the very start, was precisely the sort of man she should steer clear of, and she had made sure that she listened to her head and obeyed its instructions.

  He continued to stare at her in that unsettling way of his, until she said nervously, with a little laugh, ‘Of course I did far too much food! There was an awful lot left over. I shall be eating cold chicken and beef in various guises until doomsday.’

  ‘Sounds a dismal prospect,’ he murmured softly, tracing the rim of the cup with one long finger.

  ‘Do you do a lot of cooking?’ she asked awkwardly, wondering when the inquisition would come to an end.

  ‘Not if I can help it, no. In fact, I spend most of my eating time in various establishments. It suits me.’

  ‘Sounds an unhealthy habit,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘You’re probably lacking all the essential minerals and vitamins your body needs to grow.’ It had been a nervous quip, but once she had said it she groaned inwardly at her clumsiness. What on earth had taken possession of her? Where was all the cool self-control that had been in evidence ever since she had started working for him?

  ‘Do you think so?’ he asked seriously enough, although there was something wickedly amused in his voice.

  She kept her eyes firmly averted from his body.

  ‘My mother was a great believer in eating up all one’s greens,’ she said by way of reply. ‘I guess her constant reminders about carrots and eyesight and broccoli and strong bones must have stuck.’ She tried a cheerful laugh. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t afford to eat out every night of the week even if I wanted to.’