by Lucy Keane
She became aware that he had been standing looking down at her as she lay on the bed. She stared up at him, her eyes meeting his, but she couldn’t read any of the thoughts behind that extraordinary lucid gaze. Then his expression became shuttered, and with a deft twitch he pulled the duvet over her.
‘Are you going to be all right on your own—is there anyone I can ring? Your friend Jess?’
‘I’m OK,’ she managed to say. ‘There’s Charlie.’
‘Ah. Charlie.’
That sounded somehow significant, but she couldn’t guess what it meant. She was too ill to care. Under the comforting warmth of the duvet, she was grateful to be allowed to slip into a semi-conscious doze.
It could have been minutes or hours later when she became aware of her brother standing at her bedside, a glass of something in his hand. ‘He says to drink this.’
‘Who?’ It was an effort to pull her thoughts together.
‘Julius. Your boss. He took me to the chemist’s in the village. He says you’ve probably got flu and if you’re any worse tomorrow I’ve got to ring the doctor.’
She thought about the information. The facts kept sliding apart so that they didn’t make any real sense to her. ‘Where is he?’
‘Gone to a meeting, he said.’
It was silly to wish it, but she wanted him to come back. She felt very much alone. There was something she had to remember, something she had to say to Charlie. She drank the stuff in the glass. It had a bitter taste like aspirin. Perhaps she’d think of what she wanted to say later.
Later. Much later, she woke up. She didn’t feel any better, but her mind was a bit clearer, with one extraordinary thought in it—Julius had brought her home!
It seemed like a dream now, but he had actually carried her upstairs and undressed her…
‘Charlie?’
Spiked ginger hair and a freckled face appeared round the door.
‘Ring Jess for me and tell her I’ve got flu? If you speak to her nicely she might even be persuaded to come round and open a can of baked beans for you.’
‘It’s OK,’ he replied offhandedly. ‘I can do that.’
‘Well, ring her anyway.’ She hesitated, and then asked, ‘Did Julius drive you back from the chemist’s?’
‘Yeah.’
He really had gone out of his way to help her. She remembered Maxine’s comment about his kindness. But with so many conflicting impressions it was hard to know what she should really think of him. She shut her eyes. ‘You were a lot of use when he brought me in here.’ She tried to sound sarcastic. ‘He could have been a total stranger who’d picked me up on the way home for all the trouble you took to find out about him. Supposing he’d decided to rape me? I like the way you ran away the minute he suggested taking my clothes off!’
‘He looked as though he might have had practice at it,’ her brother suggested awkwardly. ‘Anyway, I’d have been around. He knew who I was and he wanted to know what I was doing home from school.’
She waited. ‘And…?’
‘I just didn’t feel too well. I didn’t want to bother you at the office.’
She looked at him. She could tell when Charlie was lying. His eyes, a paler blue than her own, always took on a particularly glassy expression. Just like now. She was surprised he’d brought up the topic at all—perhaps he wanted to get the subject out of the way when he knew she didn’t have strength to pursue it.
Then her heart sank. She still hadn’t fully taken in yet the fact that Julius had brought her home, and she certainly hadn’t had time to work out all the implications of it, but one thing was clear—it was a pity he’d ever had to meet Charlie. He was far too astute to be taken in by any of her brother’s prevarications. And if there was one thing she couldn’t afford to let him know about it was home problems. He had once asked her to confide in him, but that was before the disastrous events at his flat after the dinner party. To let him know there were any difficulties with Charlie now would be like handing him on a plate the perfect excuse to get rid of her! Whatever her private and very mixed feelings about her boss, she couldn’t afford to jeopardise her job, for any reason.
‘Ring Jess, there’s a good brother,’ she said weakly.
CHAPTER SIX
Amy was in bed for two days. Charlie’s call to the Baileys brought both Jess and her mother round to see her separately, twice, and she felt an overwhelming relief at the sight of Celia. Jess’s mother was someone towards whom she could feel uncomplicated gratitude, whereas in the case of Julius the situation was far from being so straightforward. Would he have done as much for Zoe or Jacquie? No, she had to admit it to herself, he would not. So why exactly, when he seemed to have made it clear she was just an office girl once more, had he gone out of his way to help her?
Common sense warned her not to indulge any further in idle fantasies. Julius was engaged to Fiona. Nothing changed that.
Sunday was cold and wet, but she got up anyway. The prospect of staying at home alone once Charlie was at school on Monday was dismal. She decided to go back to work despite mixed feelings about her next confrontation with Julius. All her determination to keep her worlds separate had come to nothing now her boss had had such a detailed view of her own private affairs— and just how detailed emerged from a conversation with Charlie.
‘He had a pretty good look round the house,’ he told her, after an attempt to elicit from him exactly how far Julius had put himself out for her when he had brought her home. ‘He seemed to think the whole place needed rewiring!’
She looked at him aghast. ‘How did he find that out?’ Perhaps she’d been delirious, and time had passed very differently from the way she’d imagined?
Her brother gave a dismissive shrug. ‘The electric fire wasn’t working. He went on a hunt for the spare fuses.’
It was true, there had been rather a long wait before they had brought up the fire to her bedroom. But the thought of Julius inspecting her shabby sitting-room and spartan kitchen, making a mental inventory of her inadequate housekeeping, was humiliating in the extreme!
Julius wasn’t in when she arrived at the office on Monday, and she was on edge the whole morning, wondering when he would appear. She willingly agreed to hold the fort while the other two secretaries went out for lunch together—it would be easier to see him without an audience. Any reference, however cryptic, to events at Number 5 Estate Cottages could fuel office gossip for weeks.
Poring over her word processor in the reception area, she was unaware of his arrival, and his brisk greeting nearly made her jump out of her skin.
‘Well, Amy. How do you feel now? You were like a limp rag when I took you home the other day!’
Faced very suddenly with nearly six feet of Julius’s particular brand of dynamic attraction and only the width of her desk between them, she was acutely conscious that the last time they had been together he had been undressing her in her own bedroom—and he’d seen her awful underwear… She pushed an untidy strand of hair behind her ear in an awkward gesture.
‘I’m fine—much better—’ She wasn’t quite sure how to go on.
His eyes caught hers for a moment, and from the spark in them she just knew he was thinking about that safety pin. Her heart seemed to be jumping up and down far too fast.
‘Judging by today’s picture of blooming health, I don’t have to feel too bad about not getting round to see you with the grapes, then?’
She gave a grin, meeting his eyes again. ‘I like them better as wine anyway!’
His expression gave nothing away, except a kind of superficial amusement, but somehow she felt sure that underneath he was wound up for something. Was he busy collating computer-fashion all the information he’d got in that brief visit to the cottage, and preparing to announce the end of her very short spell of employment at Prior’s? Home problems. Surely he must have enough evidence by now that she was in no way the secretary he wanted?
‘Charlie been looking after you properly?’
>
‘He was very helpful.’ It sounded a bit weak, but she didn’t want to explore that particular subject.
‘Did you find out what he was doing at home the day I brought you back from the office?’
Again she hedged. ‘He—he didn’t feel too well. He didn’t want to worry me at work.’
She definitely didn’t like the look he gave her at that— the ‘laser look’, as Jacquie called it.
‘Really? That’s not what he told me.’
Help! They were into the danger zone already. Trust Julius—probing for the weak spot before going in for the kill! She was forced to ask, ‘What did he tell you?’
‘That he’d forgotten a physics book, and had a lift home from one of the teachers on her half-day so that he could get it in his lunch-hour.’
Oh, Charlie! ‘I’m sure it was perfectly innocent,’ she lied quickly.
Julius was still looking at her. ‘I’m not. You’re not a fool, Amy,’ he said shortly. ‘You must have guessed he’s skiving off somewhere. You can’t afford to ignore it— he could get into serious trouble. You’ll be getting a call from the school if it goes on.’
She lifted her chin and stared at him defiantly this time. ‘It’s nothing I can’t handle!’ Now sack me! she thought. You’re the one who’s saying I’ve got problems, not me!
There was an unexpected pause before the laser look took on a different glint. Perhaps he’d remembered she’d just been ill. ‘Amy the mother,’ he commented. ‘A long way from the Amys I know.’
She was on the defensive again. ‘What do you mean— Amys?’
His eyes held hers. ‘Amy the secretary and Amy the siren.’
There was another loaded silence. Was this it at last, what he’d been getting round to, and all because of that wretched dinner party he was going to tell her he no longer thought it was a good idea for her to go on working at Prior’s?
Nervousness made her reply unintentionally aggressive. ‘I wasn’t trying to seduce you that night!’
‘I know that,’ he said shortly. ‘I didn’t think I was trying to seduce you either. I never meant it to happen like that. Life has a way of taking you by surprise. Sometimes when you think you’ve got everything nicely worked out you find you haven’t.’
His eyes held hers again briefly, but he obviously didn’t intend to clarify that statement, turning on his heel towards his office. Then the phone rang.
‘Switch it through, will you?’ It was boss to secretary again. She let out a long, controlled sigh. He hadn’t sacked her yet, anyway!
It was the last she saw of him for the rest of the day. She felt she’d had a lucky escape from a discussion she wasn’t sure she’d fully understood. She pondered Maxine’s words, about computer programs, and the way Julius ran his life. The gist of the message he’d just given her seemed to be that even though the after-dinner episode hadn’t featured in his program he had now filed it away as simply that: an episode.
But what it didn’t explain very satisfactorily was the highly charged atmosphere that still remained between them. His ‘filing away’ the subject should have defused the situation once and for all, but it hadn’t. She couldn’t define what it was precisely, though some sixth sense told her that her increasing awareness of him was far from one-sided.
Then it was only a couple of days later that the curious tension that seemed to be winding itself up between them tightened again.
She was in his office, taking down instructions about a client, when Zoe buzzed on the telephone. Halfway into a sentence, Julius snatched up the receiver. She glanced up under her eyelashes, and found him looking directly at her. It wasn’t difficult to deduce from the audible snatches of Zoe’s message—and from his expression—that the call must be for her.
‘Staff don’t have time to take personal calls in working hours. Find out who it is, will you?’ The cutting edge in his voice told her she’d just notched up another indelibly black mark, and she was wondering whether it was worth making general apologies to soften him a bit, or whether it was Jess with an emergency and she should just insist on taking it, when Zoe buzzed back and the words ‘headmaster’ and ‘school’ were all too clear.
Julius gave her one of those piercing looks, and her heart dropped like a stone. Truancy—it had to be. The very last thing she wanted to hear. And he couldn’t say he hadn’t warned her.
‘She can take it in here,’ he instructed curtly, then he held out the receiver to her.
She stood up hastily. ‘It’s OK—I’ll go through to Recep—’
He didn’t give her a chance to finish, thrusting the receiver into her hand. ‘You’d better talk to him.’
She wondered even while they talked whether Julius could hear Mr. Parry’s contribution to the conversation. She tried to keep her replies to an enigmatic minimum, conscious all the time of Julius busily scribbling a memo at the other side of the desk. He didn’t appear to be paying the slightest attention—but she’d learned to mistrust that. When she finally put the receiver down carefully, she stared at her notepad, hoping he would resume where he’d left off. She knew he wouldn’t.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at her very directly. ‘So what did Mr. Parry have to say?’
‘It was nothing,’ she said airily. ‘Just a call to find out if Charlie was all right, so I said it was he who had been ill and not me—I didn’t know how they’d react to the idea of one of their pupils staying at home to look after his sister.’
He gave her one long, mind-numbing look. ‘Don’t take me for an idiot, Amy! No headmaster of a school the size of Charlie’s has time to make polite calls in the middle of the day. Charlie’s cut school again today— and yesterday?’
‘If you heard so much of the conversation, why are you asking me?’ she said defensively. It was bad enough to be rung up in the first place, without Julius becoming involved.
‘I’d like to hear your version of it, that’s all.’
‘I’m not accountable to you!’ she flashed, unguardedly, her eyes suddenly very blue. ‘You’re making it sound as though I’m the one playing truant— not Charlie! My job here shouldn’t have to depend on my brother’s good behaviour in my private life—you’re not being fair!’
Julius’s own eyes took on a dangerous glint. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Of course you’re not accountable to me— it’s your business and you can keep it that way if you want to, but I’m trying to help you. With advice if nothing else. I have a nephew Charlie’s age who’s not getting on too well at school either—maybe some joint action would be effective here.’
Oh, no, it wouldn’t! That was a disastrous idea! Again it wasn’t treating her as just an employee and she made up her mind on the spot that she couldn’t afford to have her emotions shredded by him any further. But if she wasn’t careful they would be having a blazing row, and then he probably would sack her.
She tried a different tack, running through a downbeat and highly edited version of the battle over school. The actual frequency of her brother’s absences—not discussed openly with Mr. Parry—and his suspected alternative amusements were left out.
‘I can’t blame Charlie,’ she finished dismissively. ‘He was at a private school until the end of last summer term. There was no more money to pay the fees, so he’s had to go to this local comprehensive. It’s good, but he’s lost all his old friends, and I don’t think he’s really come to terms with what happened to Mum and Dad.’ Then she added for good measure, ‘There’s no real problem.’
Julius leaned back in his chair abruptly. ‘Of course there’s a problem!’ he retorted. ‘And your behaving like an ostrich isn’t going to solve anything ’
What could she say to that except, yet again, It’s none of your business? Irritated, she bit her lip. He was making her out to look a fool.
‘Your brother’s at the very worst age now. He could go off the rails completely. You need someone with a bit of authority to deal with him.’
‘And I’ve got no
ne, you mean?’
He gave an impatient shrug. ‘With the best will in the world, you can’t take the place of his father. Look at the facts sensibly and don’t get so touchy about it.’
He was telling her nothing new, but it was hard to swallow coming from him. He didn’t wait for her comment, though. ‘My sister’s family are living in my house down in Wiltshire at the moment—they’re in the process of moving, and they haven’t got full possession of the new property yet. My nephew Ben and Charlie might get on very well.’
‘So what? There’s no guarantee it’ll turn them both into models of virtue at school!’ She couldn’t help feeling piqued at the idea that Julius only had to step in and Charlie would be a reformed character, whereas she’d got no thanks for struggling with an impossible situation for months.
He gave her a piercing look. ‘If you sit back and do nothing, the only thing you can guarantee is disaster! This way, it’d be good for Ben too—he’s another one at a bit of a loose end at the moment.’
‘There isn’t an easy solution to this.’
‘No, there isn’t,’ he agreed unexpectedly. ‘And if there’s one thing I’m beginning to learn it’s that you can’t count on nice neat businesslike plans when it comes to people. Life has a way of messing up all the most logical and sensible arrangements one makes.’ From the way he was looking at her, she had a feeling there was more to that statement than was obvious from the context, but he went on, ‘In the case of your brother, it’s not going to do any harm to try.’
It was a statement, not even a pretence at seeking her agreement, and the finality of his tone signalled the end of the discussion. It left her feeling resentful; she was trapped. If she ignored his advice again and things went badly wrong, she couldn’t expect much tolerance over the subsequent difficulties at work. He would sack her then—no question of it!