Read Online The Boss's Proposal by Cathy Williams - Free Book Online Page B

lighted onto the correct one.
    She mumbled something about there being no joke to share, making sure that she kept her eyes firmly averted from his face, and then said crisply, ‘Tuesday looks fine. If you tell me what clients you’d like to visit, then I can try and arrange them.’ She was still speaking to the diary. In a minute, when her head had completely cleared of its treacherous suggestion, she would resume normal behaviour patterns.
    â€˜If we meet the first, Prior and Truman, at nine, then we can probably fit Robins in before lunch. Make sure that you leave a two-hour window for lunch, say between one and three, then a couple more and we can call it a day.’
    â€˜And which client would you like to take to lunch?’ Her heart rate was getting back to its normal speed, thankfully, and she risked a look at him.
    â€˜None. I think you and I could benefit from a bit of uninterrupted time together.’ He let the words sink in, then added, ‘To go through any little work problems you might have encountered that you need to ask me about.’ He wasn’t smiling , she noticed, when he said this, but there was the feeling of a smile tugging at his mouth and she shot him a quenchingly professional look, just in case there was anything there that needed snuffing out.
    Shaun had made her wise to the manipulations of the flirt. He himself had used more obvious tactics. He had often spread himself across her desk, before she’d insisted that he no longer come into her workplace, making sure that she’d had nowhere else to look but at some part of his reclining body; then, later, the big gestures of extravagant flowers and expensive dinners in the places where to be seen was to step up two notches on your street cred rating. The showy manoeuvres had lasted the length oftime it had taken to get her into bed, then gradually they had dwindled, until the day had arrived when the flowers and expensive dinners became things of the past. She would always, at the back of her mind, equate pregnancy with misery, because it was then that the seriously destructive verbal abuse had really begun, the taunts that would reduce her to uncontrollable weeping, the slamming of doors and jeering that had made her want to disappear from the face of the earth.
    She wondered whether Max Forbes was cut from the same cloth, just a different pattern. The more she saw of him, the more confused she was becoming, because her instincts were telling her that he was nothing like his brother, even though she was disillusioned enough to know that instincts had a nasty way of being wrong.
    Then, when her irritating speculations had reached a peak, she told herself that none of it mattered a jot anyway because, whether he was like his brother or in fact a saint in the making, he was still a dangerous and unwanted intruder in her life.
    â€˜Right. Anything else?’ he asked, pushing his chair back and stretching. He walked across to the door, on the back of which hung his jacket, slung negligently over the hook despite the hanger that was sitting there gathering dust. ‘I’ve got a couple of important meetings and, as you know, I’ll be out of the office tomorrow. Think you can cope?’
    â€˜I’ll do my best,’ Vicky told him. She could feel an unwelcome stir of excitement at the prospect of all the work that lay ahead of her. If Max Forbes thought that months of unsatisfactory temps was frustrating, then she could deliver a sermon of her own on the dissatisfaction of one very proficient temp, namely herself, who had spent the past few months photocopying, photocopying and doing yet more photocopying. In between she had managedto run errands that no one else wanted to run, do filing that had been studiously avoided for decades and transferred enough tedious information from sheets of paper to computer to make her goggle-eyed.
    â€˜You know where you can reach me. All my numbers, including the