LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      ALICE pushed open the glass double doors to the office block, and at once had that comfortable feeling of coming home. She had just returned from a fortnight’s holiday in Portugal—two weeks of hot weather, blue skies, blue sea, cocktails round the pool every evening with the girl she shared a flat with. And at the end of it she had boarded the plane back to a grey, cold England that was emerging reluctantly from bitter winter to sulky spring, with a feeling of muted relief.

      Most people dreaded the thought of their holiday ending.

      ‘I could stay here for ever,’ Vanessa had told her four days into the holiday, luxuriating at the side of the pool with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

      ‘You’d be bored stiff after a month,’ Alice had said, rubbing suntan cream evenly over her body in the hope that a golden tan might endow her with at least a glowing, healthy look. She had long abandoned any ambitions of glamour. She was simply too thin and too unremarkable for that.

      ‘Okay,’ Vanessa had conceded. ‘For ever might be a bit much, but I wouldn’t spit in the face of an extra two weeks.’

      Alice had obligingly agreed, but by the end of two weeks she had had enough, was itching to get back behind her desk.

      Now, she pushed through the double doors, headed towards the lift, and wondered whether it wasn’t rather sad that she had actually missed her work. What kind of statement was that about her personal life? She was thirty-one now, and it didn’t take a leap of imagination to see herself in ten years’ time, a quiet little spinster who pottered at home on weekends and looked forward to Mondays. Not a pretty scenario.

      As usual when she started thinking along those lines, she pushed the thought to the back of her mind. There had been a time when she had been brimming over with enthusiasm, when she had made her plans and dreamed her dreams and had been young enough and naive enough to assume that most of them would fall in line. That was years ago, though, and she could hardly remember the girl she had been then.

      She opened the door of her office to hear the sound of a telephone being slammed down from her boss’s office.

      Was this what she had missed? She was hanging up her coat when he yanked open the connecting door and confronted her with his arms folded and a thunderous frown on his face.

      Alice looked back at him, unflustered. Over the past year and a half she had become accustomed to Victor Temple’s aggression. He could be intimidating, but he had never intimidated her. Or at least he had initially, but she had refused to crack under the ferocious impact of his personality, and after three weeks’ temping she had been offered the job permanently.

      ‘Well, I needn’t ask whether you had a good time or not.’ He confronted her, arms still folded, as she made her way to her desk and switched on her computer.

      ‘It was very pleasant. Thank you.’ She looked at him and was struck, as she always was, by the sheer force of his physical presence. Everything about him commanded immediate attention, but it went far beyond the mundane good looks of dark hair, grey eyes and a muscular physique. Victor Temple’s uniqueness came from a restless energy, a self-assurance and an unspoken assumption of power that defied description. When he spoke, people automatically stopped in their tracks and listened. When he walked into a room, heads swivelled around, eyes followed him.

      In the beginning, Alice had been amazed at the reactions of perfect strangers towards him. He had taken her out for lunch a couple of times, with clients, and she had seen the way men frowned, as though trying to place him, simply because he seemed to be the sort of person who should be recognised, the way women stared surreptitiously from under their lashes.

      ‘Spent all day swanning around a pool, turning into leather?’

      Alice looked at him and wondered, not for the first time, how she could possibly enjoy working for a man for whom common politeness was a concept to be blithely ignored, unless it suited him.

      ‘And very relaxing it was, too,’ she said, refusing to be provoked into a suitable retort. He had positioned himself directly in front of her desk and Alice sat down and pointedly began sifting through the mail she had brought from Reception, efficiently extracting the bits she knew she would be expected to deal with.

      However infuriating and demanding Victor Temple could be, they somehow worked well together, and gradually, over time, he had delegated a sizeable workload to her. He trusted her. Advertising was a demanding business to be in; some of their clients could be sensitive and temperamental. Alice knew that he found her useful in dealing with them. She never allowed her attention to waver and was clever at soothing frayed

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