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The taxi came to halt outside an elegant house tucked away behind a high wall in a discreet garden square in Kensington. ‘Here we are, miss,’ the driver said, opening the door for her. She paid him what he asked and then boldly added a tip. He grinned at her. ‘Thanks. Do you want a receipt?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes. Thanks for reminding me, I’m not used to this.’ She took the slip of paper he handed her and turned to the black-painted gate set into the wall and pressed the bell.
‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice enquired from a small speaker.
‘Jilly Prescott,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m from the Garland Agency.’
‘Thank goodness. Come in.’
A buzzer sounded and she pushed the gate open. She had no time to stare up at the elegant façade of Max Fleming’s home, or take in more than the briefest impression of his elegantly paved garden, the stone urns planted with evergreens, a small bronze statue of a nymph tucked into a wall niche above a semi-circular pool.
The grey-haired woman who had answered the bell was standing in the open doorway beckoning impatiently. ‘Come along, Miss Prescott, Max is waiting for you.’ She led the way through a spacious hall, passed a curving staircase and paused at a wide panelled door. ‘Go straight in,’ she said.
Jilly found herself on the threshold of a small panelled office. Beyond it an inner door was open and she could hear the low growl of a masculine voice apparently speaking on the telephone since she could hear only one person.
She dropped her suitcase beside the desk, slipped off her gloves and jacket and glanced around her. On the desk were two telephones, an intercom, a partly used shorthand notebook and a pot full of sharpened pencils. Behind it on a custom-built workbench were a state-of-the-art PC and printer. She wondered what software package was installed and, retrieving her spectacles from her handbag, propped them on her nose and leaned forward to switch it on.
‘Harriet!’ The disembodied voice had apparently finished with his telephone call and Jilly abandoned the computer, retrieved the notebook from the desk, grabbed a handful of pencils and, swiftly tucking in a slither of hair that was hell-bent on escape from her French pleat, she pushed open the inner door. Max Fleming was standing at the window looking out over the wintry garden and he didn’t look round. ‘Hasn’t that damned girl arrived yet?’ he demanded.
Jilly’s first impression of Max Fleming was that he was too thin; too thin for his height and too thin for the width of his shoulders. It was an impression that seemed to be confirmed by the way his suit jacket hung loosely about him as if he had lost a considerable amount of weight since it had been made for him. But his hair was dark like his sister’s, and, like hers, wonderfully thick and beautifully cut, the darkness only emphasised by a streak of silver at his temple.
That was all she had time to notice before he banged on the floor irritably with a slender ebony cane upon which he had been leaning. Then he half turned and caught sight of her. For a moment he said nothing, simply stared as if he couldn’t believe his own eyes.
‘Who the devil are you?’ he demanded.
It would have been so easy to be intimidated, Jilly thought. His sister had already warned her that he could be a monster and, looking into a pair of eyes that glittered at her darkly out of his thin face, she believed it. And as they swept over her she recognised the moment for what it was. If she showed the slightest hint of nervousness under the challenge in those hard eyes she might as well turn around and walk out right now because he would take advantage of that weakness and run her ragged. What was it his sister had said? If he shouted at her, be direct.
‘I guess I’m your damned girl,’ she said, as directly as she knew how, and stared right back at him. She might be the wrong side of her twenty-first birthday, just, but she had never been scared of playground bullies and she certainly wasn’t going to crumple now. For a moment the room was shockingly silent. Then Jilly, having demonstrated that she wasn’t to be intimidated, pushed her spectacles up her nose and offered a truce. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve kept you waiting, but the traffic was terrible. I wanted to come by underground but Ms Garland said I should take a taxi.’
One arched brow rose a fraction. ‘Did she say anything else?’
Plenty, but she wasn’t about to repeat it. ‘That you would pay the fare?’ she offered.
‘Did she, indeed?’ She’d hoped for a laugh, or at least a softening of that hard mouth into something approaching a smile. She didn’t get it. Nor, she discovered, could she reduce this austere man to a mental laughing stock with a picture of him naked. Imagining Max Fleming naked wouldn’t work at all, she decided as her cheeks, and just about everything else, heated up under the continued intensity of his unsparing gaze. It was as if he were looking right through to her bones, assessing what she was made of, and for just a second or two her determination not to be outfaced wavered.
‘Well, someone will have to because I can’t afford to go gallivanting about in taxis,’ she said, determinedly forcing herself back onto the offensive. And she crossed what seemed like an acre of exquisite oriental carpet to place a small slip of paper on his desk. ‘That’s the receipt. I’ll leave you to sort it out between you.’
Max Fleming’s first thought was that she couldn’t possibly be one of Amanda’s sought-after Garland Girls. She lacked any trace of the style and the exquisite grooming for which they were so justly famous. She wasn’t even pretty. Her eyes were hidden behind the owlish glasses, but her nose was too big and so was her mouth. Wide, full and simply bursting to smile given the slightest encouragement. And as for her hair…milk-chocolate brown, it was beginning to slide untidily from the combs doing an inefficient job of anchoring up the strands which refused to comply with her regulation French pleat. Then there were her clothes…
She was dressed in a neat white blouse and a plain grey skirt of undistinguished origin that stopped demurely just above her knee—an ensemble that suggested a school uniform. Then he realised it didn’t remind him of a school uniform, she was far too tidy for that; what she reminded him of was an old-fashioned secretary, right down to the heavy tortoiseshell spectacle frames…
And suddenly it all became clear.
His sister was having a little joke at his expense, a little pay-back for all the trouble he had caused her. Any minute now this girl would fling off the spectacles, pull out the combs battling to hold her hair in place and reveal herself for what she undoubtedly was: a sexy-secretary kissogram.
Clearly impatient with his thoughtful scrutiny, the girl finally said, ‘Are you ready to begin, Mr Fleming?’ He was certain that whatever he said would set the whole wretched performance in motion, and there had been a time when he would have enjoyed the joke… ‘Your sister said you were desperate—’
Desperate. Desolate. Empty. All of those things.
‘It would appear that my sister has been more than usually garrulous.’ But even if she was, as always, right, he could have told her that this wasn’t going to help. He was beginning to think that nothing would ever help.
He pushed that depressing thought firmly away and concentrated on the girl. Was she an actress, down on her luck? Unlikely. An actress would have taken more trouble to excise any hint of an accent; an actress would have looked just a little more the part. This girl had to be a student of some kind making a little money to see her through her studies.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Jilly Prescott.’
Jilly. Hardly a name for a grown woman and yet she was clearly that. Beneath the cheap tailoring there was the kind of old-fashioned hourglass figure only emphasised by the kind of waist that invited a man to span it with his hands if he felt so inclined.
Max frowned as the thought took hold. Then he shrugged,