by Isobel Chace
Yet there had been a certain star-spangled splendour about the evening which refused to go away. Not even the prospect of being Miss Black and having to go to work just as though nothing had happened could quite banish the glow that surrounded her.
Cautiously, hedging her recollections about with stern reminders that she was not to make too much of them, she allowed herself to dwell once again on the silent journey they had made coming back from the bridge. Neither of them had said a single word; she, out of sheer nervousness, and he—? He wasn’t the type to suffer from nerves. Besides, it couldn’t have been the brand new, shattering experience for him that it had been for her. Perhaps he had been savouring his conquest, which it had been, she confessed to herself, for her defences had crumbled at his very first touch—and she had liked it!
So where did she go from here? When she shut her eyes she could still hear the horse’s hooves and the jangle of the harness and the complete silence within the carriage itself. Why hadn’t he said anything? Was it because she had disappointed him in some way? Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to kiss her again? She felt a pain in her middle at the thought. How would she ever know how he had felt? Certainly not in the office while she was acting as his secretary. She would have to school herself to be as impersonal as he all the time she was working for him, but at least it would be an opportunity to get to know him better on a safe, ordinary level. And that would be a very good thing, she told herself severely. She wasn’t the type to lose her head just because a man had kissed her. Well—perhaps she had lost her head, a little, but she certainly wasn’t going to lose anything else! Her heart would be bestowed only after she was sure that it would be properly valued by the recipient. Untidy love affairs were not for anyone who liked everything in its proper place as she did. She would have to see to it that he didn’t kiss her again until she was quite, quite sure what he meant by it.
It seemed strange to push open the heavy swing door that led to the company’s offices on her own. In all the time she had been working she had always arrived in her father’s company. Now she was on her own and she hoped passionately that she would be able to manage with no one to turn to at the first sign of trouble. She smiled at the Iranian who looked after the reception area and was rewarded by his answering grin.
‘Salaam, Ali,’ she murmured. ‘I’m not the last, I hope?’
‘The new boss is not here yet,’ he answered in his careful English. He answered an imperative buzz from the internal telephone at his side. ‘They are asking where you are, Miss Black,’ he told her. ‘There is some trouble up in your office.’
Stephanie stepped into the lift, steeling herself to press the button that would take her up to her floor. Every time she did so she got a mild shock, and the sensation didn’t appeal to her. In vain, she had spoken to her father about it, but he had dismissed it as a commonplace vagary of local workmanship.
‘They all do it, Stephanie,’ he had told her wearily. ‘It’s just the same when I open my window in the office. You’ll get used to it.’
The lift staggered upward, came to a halt between floors, the lights flickering uncertainly, and then reversed itself and went back down to the ground floor again. Stephanie sighed with irritated resignation. That was another thing that it would take her time to get used to. She liked lifts to arrive at their first destination before rushing off to obey the next summons.
The doors swished open and Cas looked at her in surprise.
‘I thought only children played at going up and down in elevators, Miss Black?’
She cast him a speaking look. ‘Good morning, Mr. Ruddock,’ she said with visible restraint.
Cas eased himself into the small space beside her and she kindly allowed him to get the electric shock by pressing the button this time.
‘Just as well I haven’t got a tin arm,’ he commented. ‘Have this fault seen to, will you, Miss Black?’
‘You get used to it,’ she answered, just as her father had done. ‘My father said the window in his—your office—’
‘Get it seen to,’ he cut her off.
‘It will take time to get an engineer,’ she warned him.
‘Don’t be silly, Miss Black. The whole place is bulging with engineers. If you can’t get in a local electrician, you’d better make up to one of our own men and see what he can do. I dislike being surrounded by things that don’t work properly.’
He could say that again as far as people were concerned too, his tone of voice informed her, and she gritted her teeth. It was obviously useless to point out the impossibility of trying to change something that was considered normal by everyone else.
‘I’ll try,’ she muttered.
‘If you’re wise,’ he retorted, ‘you’ll get it done!’
Quite why it should annoy her that this time the lift should arrive at the right floor without incident, Stephanie could not have said. That it did, she found very hard to hide as she stepped out of the lift before Cas, taking a deep breath to celebrate the sudden freedom from being crowded by his huge frame in such a restricted space. It was that which had made breathing difficult inside the lift, of course. She had had no trouble in that direction before he had got in.
The knot of girls standing in the doorway of her office made her pause. She had always got on fairly well with them all, but she was wise enough to know that there had been a certain restraint between herself and them. They had never forgotten that the man she worked for was not only the head of the Iranian project but her father as well. It had been natural that they should have been careful of what they said to her and had avoided being seen to be too friendly with her.
Fatemeh, the most senior of the Iranian girls, turned and saw her first. ‘It is terrible! Who could have done this thing!’ she burst out, the tears pouring down her face. She changed to her own language in a flood of speech that became more and more hysterical.
‘Please, Fatemeh, I don’t understand a single word you’re saying—’
The Persian girl fell back against the wall. ‘Look!’ The stark tragedy in her tones aroused an urge in Stephanie to giggle which she suppressed with some difficulty. ‘See for yourself!’
Stephanie peered over another girl’s shoulder into her own office and was astonished to see papers everywhere, scattered all over the floor, pulled at random out of files, and left in tottering piles all over her desk.
The only other English secretary, a girl called Gloria, pointed faintly into the room with her nail file. ‘Did you ever see anything like it?’
‘But why?’ Stephanie gasped.
‘And who?’ Gloria added. ‘I’d like to know who even more. Who else has the keys to your files, love?’
Stephanie went pale. ‘No one,’ she murmured.
‘Not your father?’ Gloria insisted.
Stephanie shook her head. ‘I have his keys too.’
‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten. He’s gone back to England, hasn’t he? Have you seen the new man yet? It’ll be quite a change for you, won’t it? And what will he say about this?’
Stephanie had no idea. She pushed through the cluster of people in the doorway and stood in the middle of her office, looking gloomily about her. Was that why her father had looked so bent and defeated as he had flown off the day before? Had he had something to do with this? Stephanie would not allow herself even to consider such a thing. Her father was entitled to her loyalty and she had always given it to him unstintingly, and now was the time when he needed it most of all, when he had been recalled England and his job given to another. Why would he need the papers anyway? If he had asked her, she would have made him a parting present of the lot of them!
‘Will you know if anything is missing?’ Fatemeh enquired. ‘I can send some girls up to help you put things straight, if you wish me to?’
‘Thank you,’ Stephanie returned automatically, ‘but I’d better do it myself. A lot of the papers are confidential—’ She broke off, feeling quite hollow inside. The confidential papers had be
en mostly to do with the equipment they were still waiting for and the resulting letters between her father and the head office in London. They weren’t letters that she relished falling into anyone else’s hands. Her father’s letters had begun by being querulous and had ended on a whining note that she had regretted and had done her best to soften by changing a word here and there as she had typed them. The replies had been as bad. They had given him a free hand to do his own bargaining from the very beginning, until at last, patience exhausted, they had sent a terse message recalling him to London and appointing someone else in his place.
Cas Ruddock! Stephanie blinked, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t need her for anything in the next couple of hours. He was the very last person she wanted to see those letters—or to know if any of them were missing.
‘Fatemeh, I’ve changed my mind. I’d like some help if you can spare someone for an hour or so. I can sort and she can put away. The sooner we get this mess cleared out of the way the better!’
Gloria tapped Stephanie’s arm with her nail file. ‘If you take my advice, you’ll take time out to confess all to the new boss,’ she advised without malice. ‘He’ll have to know in the end and you don’t want him to go thinking things you’d rather he didn’t, do you?’
‘Like what?’ Stephanie demanded.
‘Like you have the keys and could be hiding something up for your father,’ Gloria drawled.
Stephanie looked paler than ever. ‘You don’t think that, do you?’ she almost pleaded.
‘No, I don’t,’ Gloria maintained. ‘But what I think doesn’t matter. If you ask me, you’d have been far too busy packing your father’s bags and fretting over his departure for you to have had time to come back here. But who else could it have been?’
Her father himself? ‘I don’t know,’ Stephanie admitted She examined the drawers of the file which was always kept locked and, with a sinking heart, noticed they hadn’t been forced or broken into. ‘Someone else must have a set of keys.’
‘A likely tale!’ Gloria murmured.
The sudden silence amongst the girls in the doorway made Stephanie turn her head to see what was happening, but she knew, even before she saw him, that it was Cas who had caused the flutter and the ensuing quiet. The girls were looking at him as though they had never seen a man before, and Gloria was the worst of them all, fluttering her eyelashes and smiling like the cat who had just swallowed the pet canary.
‘Stephanie,’ she whispered, ‘who’s this?’
‘Mr. Ruddock,’ Stephanie’s voice didn’t sound like her own and she cleared her throat with a nervous smile of her own. ‘My—my father’s replacement,’ she added unnecessarily.
‘But you’re an American!’ Gloria exclaimed. ‘How interesting!’
‘Fascinating,’ Cas drawled. ‘What’s been going on here?’
‘Oh, Mr. Ruddock, we don’t know! We found it like this! Isn’t it awful?’
Cas almost smiled at her. ‘If you say so, Miss—?’
‘Gloria.’
‘Gloria what?’ he demanded, his irritation, getting the better of him. ‘I think you should know that I think it a mistake to introduce first names into one’s place of work. It leads to slackness in other areas all too easily.’
‘But I thought Americans—’ Gloria began, changed her mind and tried another smile. ‘Lake,’ she supplied reluctantly. ‘Gloria Lake. My mother was going to call me Veronica, but my father didn’t like the idea. Pity, isn’t it?’
Cas looked baffled.
‘Veronica Lake was a film star,’ Stephanie supplied, struggling not to laugh.
Cas turned to her with something like relief. ‘Have you seen about that lift yet?’ he barked at her.
She was justifiably incensed. ‘The lift? I haven’t given it another thought! I can’t do everything at once!’
‘Forgive me, but it doesn’t look as though any of you are doing anything!’ he shot back. ‘What is all this anyway?’
Fortunately for her peace of mind, Stephanie didn’t know how frightened she looked. ‘Someone must have broken in—’
‘Has anything been taken?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she managed to say. ‘They’ve had all the files out, though. Some of them are rather confidential and we’ve always kept them locked.’ She stood her ground, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘I have the only keys. My father gave me his set yesterday morning.’ She thought that by stressing the word she had made things worse than they were. ‘I mean, I locked them up myself and I had all the keys in my possession then. The files haven’t been forced. I don’t understand it!’
With a single look he sent the girls running back to work and even Gloria and Fatemeh began to gather themselves up as though they meant to go and do some work, albeit rather reluctantly.
Cas shut the door with a snap, almost catching their skirts in it in his hurry.
‘Now, Miss Black, tell me all about it,’ he invited her.
‘I can’t understand it!’ she repeated.
‘It would seem pretty obvious that someone else has a set of keys,’ he said.
‘But they haven’t!’
‘You’re sure of that?’
She nodded helplessly. ‘I made sure of it because—well, because the interchange between my father and our head office was best not seen by too many others. The other confidential files are the records of all employees working in Iran and other things like that. Nothing that would be of any use to anyone outside the firm.’
‘But it might be useful to someone inside the company?’
‘It could be,’ she admitted. ‘We only just managed to get this contract and the delays haven’t helped us. The exact state of play would be of interest to any of our competitors. We could even lose the contract if we fall down on any of the terms of the agreement.’
‘You’re telling me!’ His tone was wry, but not unreasonable. ‘You think that’s the most likely explanation, Stephanie?’
‘Yes.’ She flushed, moving a pile of papers on her desk from one place to another. ‘No. My father could have taken my keys yesterday afternoon when I was out.’ She gave him a shy look, remembering vividly their meeting in the Maidan. ‘I left them on my bedside table. I picked them up there this morning.’
‘It would be one way of getting his own back on the company,’ Cas said slowly. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it of a man like Desmond Black, however. You’d better get someone else to clear up in here. I want you with me this morning.’ He put out a hand and lifted her chin with a single finger. ‘Don’t look like that, my dear. We’ll get to the bottom of it sooner or later, I promise you that.’
‘I may not want to know,’ she whispered.
‘That’s a risk you’ll have to take.’ He looked at her, a smile gleaming in the back of his eyes. ‘By the way, how popular are you with your colleagues?’
‘I get on with them all right.’ She escaped his touch with a jerk of her head. ‘They wouldn’t have done this because of me!’
‘I hope not.’ He said it quietly, almost like a prayer, and she shivered, wondering if she could possibly have inspired that much hate amongst the people she worked with. It was no better than the alternative that her father had done this to conceal some letter from his successor’s and perhaps her own eyes.
‘Fatemeh is sending up someone to help restore order, but I shall have to do most of it myself,’ she began to explain the obvious to him in an attempt to escape the implications of her thoughts. ‘Some of the files are confidential.’
He grinned at her. ‘You’re itching to get your fingers on that mess, aren’t you? It offends you to see everything upside down like that, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose it does,’ she admitted.
‘Poor Stephanie! At least I can be pretty sure that you didn’t do it! If you had, you’d have left everything as neat as ever, wouldn’t you?’
‘Would I?’ She opened her eyes wide, a little surprised at herself.
‘Of
course you would! Do you really have to put it to rights straight away? I want you beside me when I make my presence felt this morning. Lock your door and leave it until later.’
‘Until this afternoon?’ she mused. ‘I could do that, I suppose.’
‘If you have to go on after hours I’ll come and give you a hand,’ he offered. ‘Will that suit you?’
It was ridiculous to feel so happy at the prospect, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she liked being with him, no matter what the circumstances. ‘I expect I’ll have finished before then,’ she said soberly. ‘One thing is certain, I can’t do any work in that room until I have got it back in order!’
He looked amused. ‘Come along then, Miss Black. We’d better go and face life in my office where there’s no mess to offend you. Will you lock the door, or shall I?’ There followed a morning that was quite different from any that Stephanie had spent working for her father. Where her father had hesitated, compromised, and delayed making any final decision until he had had time to think through the matter, Cas was quick to evaluate any problem and snapped out the solution he had decided on, passing on to the next item almost before she was aware. By lunchtime they had completed as much work as she usually did in a month and she felt as though a steamroller had passed right over her.
‘Right,’ Cas said at last. ‘That seems to be all for now. I shan’t expect those letters until tomorrow, but normally I like to sign everything before I go home at night. You’d better go and have some lunch now, Miss Black.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He tipped his chair back on to two legs, watching her through half-closed eyes. She wished he wouldn’t. She was sure the chair would collapse under his weight and she didn’t like being looked at in that way, just as though she had a smut on her nose! She passed a harassed hand through her hair and wondered why that seemed to amuse him. She took a quick step away from him when he stood up, but she hadn’t a hope of escaping his long arm.