by Jessica Hart
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said with a shrug. ‘You don’t get to be a panther without developing a very tough skin! Ah, good,’ he interrupted himself as there was a general movement at the other end of the room. ‘It looks as if something is happening now…’
Sure enough, the course facilitators were beginning to divide everybody up into groups and Perdita found herself separated from Edward Merrick.
Just as well, she thought, torn between relief and chagrin. She couldn’t believe what a mess she had made of her first meeting with him! It wasn’t that she had ever had any intention of grovelling to him, but it irked her that she had been betrayed into those careless remarks. Perdita had always prided herself on her professionalism and she was mortified at the idea of not appearing at her best.
Of course, Ed Merrick would probably say that was the peacock in her. What a lot of rubbish that was!
Determined to prove him wrong about her, Perdita resolved to sit quietly in her group and let everyone else do the talking this time. If Ed cared to glance her way, he would see that she wasn’t showing off, but blending in perfectly with all the owls and dolphins.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t taken into account just how uncomfortable it was for her to sit in silence. Everyone in the group had been given a few strips of paper each and there was an awkward pause as it became clear that they were going to have to work out the task themselves.
OK, she could do this, Perdita told herself, shifting uneasily. She would show Edward Merrick. She wouldn’t be the first to speak. She would let someone else take the lead.
But the silence was so oppressive that she couldn’t resist murmuring an aside about the facilitator to her neighbour, who started to laugh, and before she knew quite how it happened the rest were joining in an animated conversation. They had to be reminded of their task by the facilitator and, forgetting that she was supposed to be taking a back seat, Perdita was the first to lean forward with a suggestion.
After that, the ideas started coming thick and fast. ‘Wait, wait, wait!’ she cried, waving her hands around. ‘Slow down, people! We need to keep track of all this. Andy, why don’t you be chair?’
They were discussing the best way to proceed when Perdita happened to glance across at the neighbouring group, which just happened to include Ed Merrick, who just happened to look up at the same time. The cool grey gaze encompassed the animated group around Perdita and he smiled knowingly as his eyes met hers, and she flushed, knowing exactly what he was thinking.
What was it he had said? If you were in that group…you’d be dominating it completely…making sure that they were all looking at you.
Tilting her chin, she jerked her gaze crossly away. She had just wanted to get things happening or they would be here until teatime. Huffily, she tried to concentrate on the task in hand, but it wasn’t that challenging and, in spite of herself, her eyes kept wandering back to Ed’s group.
A panther like him was a fine one to talk about dominating! It was easy to see who was leading that group, although Perdita struggled to work out exactly how he was doing it. He wasn’t showing off or being loud or forceful or saying very much at all, in fact, but there was no question that Ed was the centre of his group quite as much as she was of hers.
It puzzled Perdita. She was very conscious of her own stylish outfit, painted nails and lipstick. The other women had gone for a much more casual look, but Perdita didn’t do casual-never had and never would. So perhaps it was inevitable that she should stand out within her group, but Ed had no such excuse. He was just sitting there, wearing that dull grey top with the sleeves carelessly pushed up his forearms. He wasn’t taller or better-dressed or better-looking than the others, but there was just something about him that made him stand out.
Studying him surreptitiously, Perdita could see the way the others in his group were deferring to him, but it didn’t make sense. If he were really the panther he claimed to be, shouldn’t he be riding roughshod over them all? Instead he seemed to be dominating the group by not doing very much at all.
The more she watched him over the day, though, the more Perdita recognised a quiet but steely strength to him that translated as a natural gravitas, a quality as unmistakable as it was hard to define. Ed didn’t need to snarl to control a situation, it seemed, and, although he was hardly prowling, he held himself with an enviable assurance that put her in mind of a big cat’s leashed power.
Maybe there was something pantherish about him after all, Perdita decided. It was lucky that he had told her about his owlish streak, or she might have had to be impressed. As it was, whenever she remembered the glimmer of amusement in his expression as he had told her about his owl ascendant, part of her wanted to laugh, while another part would squirm uneasily at the memory of the humorous gleam in his eyes and that unexpected smile.
She couldn’t even accuse Ed of being standoffish. As soon as she could, she had warned her colleagues that their new boss was among them, which meant that they, at least, were able to make a good impression on him. Perdita saw him talking to them all at one time or another, but he never made any effort to talk to her again. Perhaps it wasn’t that surprising after she had accused him of being pretentious, but she couldn’t help feeling a little miffed that he appeared to have dismissed her already.
The hotel was out in the wilds of the Lake District and after dinner there was nothing to do but head for the bar. A natural extrovert, Perdita was on sparkling form, but Ed was clearly unimpressed by her social skills, treating her on the few occasions their paths crossed that evening with a kind of amused detachment that left Perdita’s peacock feathers distinctly ruffled.
Some people were intimidated by her, she knew, some were dazzled, but most others tended to respond to her quick intelligence and humour. Not Edward Merrick, apparently. It wasn’t that he was openly rude or even ignoring her, but she couldn’t shake the sense that he thought that she was a bit silly and superficial somehow.
Perdita couldn’t put her finger on why she felt that. It might have been something to do with the arid edge to his voice when he spoke to her, or that disquieting gleam in the grey eyes that seemed to see much more than she really wanted them to. Whatever it was, Perdita didn’t like it one little bit.
Naturally, she responded by ignoring him and sparkling even harder, and if that made Ed decide she was even sillier than he had thought, that was tough. She couldn’t care less.
It didn’t stop her keeping a surreptitious eye on him as she held court, but for once it felt like hard work. When she saw him leave at last, Perdita should have been able to relax and be herself, but instead the evening seemed suddenly flat.
It was time she rang her mother anyway. Laughingly refusing the offers of a last drink that were pressed on her, Perdita made her escape from the bar. It was a relief to stop smiling when she got outside and she frowned slightly as she walked along the long corridor to her room.
What was the matter with her? She wasn’t usually like this. So Edward Merrick wasn’t that taken with her? It didn’t matter whether he liked her or not as long as they could have a good professional relationship. OK, that hadn’t got off to the best of starts when she had called him pretentious, but she had apologised, and he hadn’t seemed that bothered. There was no reason why they shouldn’t work together perfectly well, and if Ed didn’t want to be friends…well, she had plenty of friends already. She didn’t care.
Much.
Throwing herself on her bed, Perdita pulled out her BlackBerry and pressed the short dial to call her mother.
‘Mum? It’s me,’ she said when her mother answered. ‘How are you?’
As always, Helen James insisted that she was absolutely fine, but Perdita couldn’t help worrying about her. It was hard to put her finger on why, but her mother seemed to have got older and a little querulous quite suddenly. She wasn’t as active as she had once been, and the house she had once kept so immaculately clean had begun to seem less well cared for, as if she couldn
’t be bothered with dusting and polishing any more.
Once or twice, Perdita had suggested getting her some help, but her mother refused point-blank to even consider the possibility. ‘I’m not having strangers poking around in my private business!’ she declared. ‘I suppose you’ll want to put me in a home next!’
She got so upset if Perdita tried to pursue the matter that, in the end, Perdita had to let it drop and took to calling in every couple of days instead to help out as discreetly as she could.
‘Millie popped in to say hello,’ her mother told her. ‘She said she was just passing.’
Perdita was relieved to hear no hint of suspicion in Helen’s voice. She had asked her best friend to look in on her mother while she was away on the course, but it had been a risk. If Helen had thought she was being checked up on, she would have been furious.
‘Oh? How was she?’
‘She’s put on weight since her divorce,’ her mother said disapprovingly. ‘She’ll have to be careful not to let herself go.’
Millie had more important things to worry about than her figure, Perdita reflected as she said goodbye to her mother. Her husband had left her with a huge mortgage and the main responsibility for caring for two teenage daughters, and there had been times when her friend’s buoyant sense of humour had been severely tested over the last few years.
Settling herself more comfortably against her pillows, Perdita rang Millie next to thank her. Typically, Millie brushed aside any gratitude. ‘It was fun,’ she said. ‘I always liked your mum. I created an elaborate charade to explain why I was passing in case she decided to interrogate me-you know how scary she can be-but she didn’t ask. I was quite disappointed!’
‘How did you think she was?’
‘She seemed fine to me,’ said Millie. ‘A bit older, of course, and I can see that she’s difficult but, let’s be honest, she was never the easiest of people in the first place, was she?’
‘No, that’s true.’ Perdita sighed. She loved her mother, but she had always been a rather prickly character.
‘Stop worrying about her and tell me about this course you’re on instead.’
‘It’s ridiculous,’ grumbled Perdita, obediently changing the subject. ‘They’ve divided us into personality types and they keep telling me I’m a peacock!’
Millie hooted with laughter. ‘I could have told them that!’
‘You don’t think I’d be a good dolphin?’ asked Perdita, a little put out.
‘Nope, you’re definitely a peacock. Your new boss could have saved the company hundreds of pounds if he’d just asked me instead of forking out for a whole course.’
‘Oh, talking of my new boss…he’s here!’ said Perdita, who had had enough of people failing to recognise the easygoing, fun-loving, dolphin aspects of her personality. She had thought Millie at least would have known her better!
‘No!’ Millie was gratifyingly intrigued by the news. ‘What’s he like?’
‘Well, he’s…’ Perdita stopped, realising that she didn’t really know how to describe Ed.
She knew what he looked like, could picture his face with alarming clarity, in fact: the cool eyes, the cool mouth, that unsettling gleam of humour. He had ordinary brown hair, greying at the temples, and that intriguing fan of laughter lines creasing the corner of his eyes. But she couldn’t tell Millie that.
‘He’s not what I was expecting,’ she finished lamely at last.
‘Oh?’ Millie prompted, drawing out the syllables with exaggerated effect. ‘Attractive?’
‘Not really…Well, sort of, I suppose…I don’t know!’ said Perdita, flustered when Millie started laughing.
‘He sounds gorgeous!’
‘He’s not gorgeous,’ snapped Perdita. ‘He’s just a sensible executive with greying hair who thinks I’m a bit silly.’ She told Millie about her faux pas and Millie seemed to think that was funny too.
‘It sounds as if you might have met your match at last, Perdita. Is he available?’
‘He doesn’t wear a wedding ring,’ said Perdita, and then was furious with herself for admitting that she had noticed.
‘Hmm…doesn’t mean anything,’ said Millie. ‘Find out more tomorrow and report back to me!’
CHAPTER TWO
‘T HIS morning you’ll all be divided into pairs and given a series of tasks to achieve.’ Perdita slipped into the dining room as the chief facilitator was making his announcement at breakfast the next morning. Her morning routine always seemed to take twice as long in an unfamiliar bathroom and she was running late.
Grabbing a cup of coffee, she stood at the back and found herself scanning the room for Edward Merrick as she pretended to listen to the instructions for the day.
‘You’ve all been allocated a task to complete at first on your own, but over the course of the day you should meet up with other pairs and eventually you’ll form four large groups. It’s important that you check the list in reception for the location of your first task before you go outside.’
Outside? Perdita grimaced. When she had pulled back her curtains that morning, she hadn’t even been able to see the surrounding hills for the heavy grey cloud. Outside, the tree tops were swaying wildly in the wind, and rain streaked the big windows of the dining room.
She had been hoping that the facilitators would change their minds about running part of the course outside when they saw the conditions. Perdita was not a fan of the great outdoors and although wet weather gear had been specified in the joining instructions for the course she really didn’t have anything suitable to wear. The jacket she had brought with her was adequate to protect her against a shower in the city but would be useless in this rain. She was going to get soaked, and it was all Ed Merrick’s fault.
Perdita barely had time to swallow her coffee before everyone was filing out, apparently keen to start the day. They had all had the forethought to bring coats and boots downstairs but, of course, she had to run up to her room for hers. Really, it would be so much easier if they could just do all these stupid tasks indoors.
Wrapping a fuschia-pink pashmina around her throat for warmth, Perdita made her way reluctantly back down to find her partner. There was only person left in reception when she got there and, with a strange sense of inevitability, she saw that it was Edward Merrick.
‘It looks as if we’re meant to be together after all,’ he greeted her.
Meant to be together…He was joking, that much was obvious, but the very idea made Perdita feel a bit odd.
‘What’s the reasoning behind pairing us off?’ she asked, hoping that she sounded curious rather than as if her heart were pitter-pattering in the most absurd way at the prospect of being alone with him.
‘I suspect it’s because they think I’m the only one you might not be able to boss around,’ he said, cocking a glance at the facilitator, who grinned as he nodded. ‘We all saw how you couldn’t help but take over every task you did yesterday. Today’s a chance for the poor old dolphins and owls to develop their own leadership skills.’
‘Oh, that’s ridiculous!’ said Perdita, exasperated, but aware that a tiny part of her was pleased to be prodded out of her self-consciousness. ‘I made a point of not taking over, in fact. I wasn’t chairperson once.’
‘No, but who decided that a chairperson was needed in the first place?’ asked Ed. ‘Who put forward a candidate every time and got everyone to agree?’
‘Well…that’s only because they were wasting time,’ she said defensively. ‘I just wanted the team to succeed. That’s not the same as bossing everyone around!’
‘Perhaps not, but you’ve got to admit that you’re a hard woman to resist,’ he said, and, although he didn’t actually smile, the corners of his eyes creased and, as her gaze met his, Perdita felt her heart jerk alarmingly.
She pulled her pashmina tighter around her throat. ‘You don’t seem to have any problem resisting me,’ she said crisply to disguise her sudden, embarrassing, breathlessness. ‘Maybe I won�
��t be able to resist you,’ she added, and then wished that she hadn’t. There were too many double meanings to all this talk of resistance and it unnerved her. ‘Nobody seems to think that would be a problem, do they?’
Ed’s gaze rested on her. The vividly coloured scarf was the perfect foil for her dark colouring. With her glossy hair, expressive face and those bright, dark eyes, she reminded him of a rather cross robin. At forty, she was far from the youngest woman on the course, and she was by no means the prettiest either, but there was a vivacity to her that made it hard to look at anyone else when she was there.
Perdita wasn’t at all what he had been expecting. He had heard glowing reports of her efficiency, and her CV was undeniably impressive, but neither had done anything to prepare him for the reality of her. He had imagined an intensely professional, rather serious woman, dedicated to a career rather than to a family-and yes, maybe he had assumed that because he knew that she was single, Ed thought, rather ashamed of his own prejudices-but Perdita was nothing like that.
Nothing like that, in fact. She was sharp and funny instead of serious, extrovert rather than intense. Given her CV, it was obvious that she was perfectly capable of being professional, but Ed would never have guessed it from his covert observation of her so far. She evidently spent nearly as long grooming herself as his teenage daughter, which was saying something, and she was always perfectly made-up and stylishly dressed. All in all, she seemed far too frivolous for a forty-year-old operations manager.
And, while she might well be single and childless, as stated on her CV, he imagined there would be some man around. She was too attractive to be on her own, but even if she was, there was no sign whatsoever that she was unhappy with her lot. Indeed, she seemed to be having a better time than anyone else, judging by the laughter that surrounded her wherever she was. There was nothing wrong with enjoying yourself, Ed had found himself thinking irritably in the bar the previous night, but there was no need to do it quite so loudly. She was just a bit too…much.