by Penny Jordan
She answered the call on the fourth ring, and assured Susannah that there was no cause for concern. The river had risen, but not too dramatically and there was no immediate danger.
Speaking to her, Susannah could picture the old lady, with her tight bun and her shrewd blue eyes. Her childhood with Emily had not been an easy one, and certainly materially it had not been a rich one, but there were other forms of richness. All those long walks with Aunt Emily painstakingly pointing out the names of wild flowers and small animals; those long dark evenings spent learning to knit and sew, and then later to play the piano while the majority of her peers watched television. Then there had been expeditions in the autumn to pick berries, which were later turned into jams and preserves. Aunt Emily preferred to bake her own bread, and Susannah had been taught all the arts of a careful housewife from a very young age.
She was just replacing the receiver when Hazard walked in, and she knew without reading it in his face that she looked a picture of guilt. She had never ever been any good at deception, and as he watched her she felt herself flushing uncomfortably.
‘A personal call, I presume?’ he said softly, looking from her flushed face to the receiver she was just replacing.
‘Yes… Yes. It was…Richard…’
She knew the moment she said Richard’s name that she had made a mistake. It was an effort not to let herself flinch under the freezingly bitter look Hazard gave her.
‘God, you never stop, do you? Have you no conscience? No awareness of what you’re doing? Or is it just that you know, but you damn well don’t care?’
He was standing beside her desk, towering over her, and for one moment Susannah thought he was actually going to reach down and drag her to her feet.
As she trembled in fright and resentment, his telephone rang. For a moment she thought he was actually going to ignore it. Then, with a frown, he turned away and she was able to relax.
She couldn’t help help overhearing his conversation, or recognising the voice of the woman on the other end.
So Claire had been right, and Hazard did know Caroline and her father. Susannah had met Richard’s wife on several occasions and had quite liked her. In her middle thirties, she was a self-assured, rather brittle-looking brunette who was very much the dominant partner in the marriage.
Richard seemed to adore her, and that was one of the things Susannah had liked most about him.
‘Right,’ Hazard began again when he had finished his phone call. ‘I want…’
He frowned as the telephone rang again. Hers this time, and Susannah froze with fury and disbelief as he stopped her from answering it, picking up the receiver himself.
He listened for a few seconds, his frown deepening all the time, and then handed the receiver over to her. ‘It’s John Howard’s secretary for you. She wants to confirm a time and place for your interview.’
Her heart thumping uncomfortably, Susannah took the receiver from him. She realised the moment the ‘secretary’ spoke that it was Emma, but when it became clear that Emma wanted her to go to Yorkshire the following week to interview her on her home ground, Susannah had to back-pedal slightly.
‘The dates you’ve given me seem fine,’ she told her. ‘But I’ll have to check with my boss. Can I come back to you?’
‘John Howard?’ Hazard queried when she had finished her call. ‘Is that John Howard, the writer?’
‘Yes… An old friend of mine works for his publisher, and managed to set up a meeting for me… I… It’s something I’ve been working towards for a while.’
‘So why the delay in arranging an interview, or was that just to make the poor guy sweat a little? I suppose a woman like you can’t help but play with them, even in a work context.’
For once, she was immune to his contempt, temper making her eyes darken as the pupils enlarged with emotion.
‘You couldn’t be more wrong. What I said was the truth. I have to check with you before I can do the interview. You said that from now on I was working as your assistant, remember?’
‘Don’t try getting round me,’ came back the cynical retort. ‘It won’t work. I’ve seen the real you. It would be quite a scoop for us if we can pull the interview off,’ he continued, ‘although I must say I’m not convinced that you’re the right person to do it. This friend you mentioned…a man, no doubt?’
‘No, as a matter of fact, a woman,’ Susannah told him sweetly, with a great deal of satisfaction.
‘Give me John Howard’s number. I’ll give him a ring and sort something out. I could even do the interview myself at a pinch.’
How she managed to control her temper, Susannah didn’t know. How dared he calmly appropriate all her hard work, and then deny her the right to complete it? She thought about keeping the fact that John Howard was in fact Emma King to herself, and then thought better of it. Her loyalty to the magazine and the ethic she had been brought up with would not allow her to be so underhand. She might not get her name beneath the interview, but she would hate the magazine to lose it altogether because she hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to outwit Hazard Maine. And it was a temptation!
‘There’s just one thing you should know first.’ Reluctantly, she told him the whole story, outlining the basis on which the interview had been agreed.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked her when she had finished. There was a rather odd look in his eyes, and his mouth curled down, as though he had been forced to taste something unpleasant. As, no doubt, humble pie was to a man of his arrogant pride, Susannah thought angrily.
‘Because if I don’t, we, as a magazine, could possibly lose the whole interview,’ she told him succinctly.
His eyebrows rose. ‘My goodness! Altruism? Forgive me if I find it suspect.’
Her temper broke its bond. No one in her life had treated her like this, and it was fraying her nerves and wearing her down to the point where she was beyond heeding the warnings of caution.
‘Why are you treating me like this? What have I done to…’
‘What have you done? My God, how can you dare to ask me that? Do you really want me to spell it out for you? All right then I will. You looked at me like a lonely lost soul. You let me kiss you, touch you like you’d been waiting for me all your life, and then you turn round and tell me that it’s all an act. That you don’t want me at all…that I’m just filling in for someone else. A woman who can do that to a man, any man, is capable of anything.’
And there was no way she was going to be able to change his mind. Not without letting him know far more about her life than she wanted him to know.
‘Just what kind of woman are you?’ he continued fiercely. ‘You break up someone’s marriage, not caring what you’re doing, and then; when your lover neglects you to be with his wife, you coldly and callously…’ He shook his head, not finishing the sentence. ‘There’s no one I despise more than a marriage breaker, of either sex.’
‘You think we can all choose with whom we become emotionally involved?’ Susannah demanded. ‘You must have very strong will-power, never to have been tempted yourself.’
Later she would be shocked at her folly in challenging him like this, but right now nothing mattered other than not allowing him to trample all over her.
‘Oh, I’ve been tempted.’ The explicit look he gave her made her skin burn and her heart beat in shallow, nervy little thuds. ‘I’ve just made sure that I’ve never given in to that temptation. I try to take a longer view of the situation. A woman who’ll leave her husband for me, sooner or later might, potentially, leave me for someone else.’
‘Lucky you, you can control who you are and aren’t attracted to,’ Susannah came back acidly.
‘I didn’t say that. Perhaps I am just lucky. Quite frankly, the thought of a married woman going behind her husband’s back to sleep with me turns me off.’
‘Lucky or cold-blooded,’ Susannah muttered as she bent her head over her work, unwilling to admit that he had got the best of her
, and the worst thing was that really she agreed with every single word he had said.
How on earth had she got herself into this muddle? It was too late now to back down and plead for a second chance. And, besides, why should she care what he thought of her?
She had to leave the office to check on some information, and when she came back Hazard was just putting down the telephone receiver.
‘We’re going to Yorkshire a week on Friday to do the Howard interview,’ he told her coolly.
‘Both of us?’
His mouth thinned.
‘It seems John Howard won’t hear of it being done without you.’
It was plain that he wasn’t pleased, but neither was she. The last thing she wanted to do was to be thrust into his company for an entire day.
‘We’ll need to get an early start. I’ll pick you up at half-past seven. Where do you live?’
Reluctantly she told him and then comforted herself with the reflection that the drive would be purgatory for him just as it would for her.
The phone rang again and, listening to Hazard as he dealt with one of their advertisers who should more properly have asked to speak to the head of the advertising department, Susannah felt grudging respect for him colouring her resentment.
It was no sinecure being the managing editor of a magazine like Tomorrow, where they carried no excess staff and where the pressure on whoever was at the helm was the greatest. Mac, as Tom MacFarlane was known irreverently by most of his employees, had no brief for time-wasters, and Richard had once confessed to her that he found his autocratic father-in-law hard work on occasions.
Another phone call at five past five took Hazard down to the art department. Half-way to the door, he called out to Susannah, ‘You’d better come with me—oh, and bring a notebook.’
Her unruly tongue longed to remind him that she wasn’t his secretary. In point of fact, Lizzie had already gone home, but caution prevailed.
She had had a hard time over lunch, ignoring her colleagues’ curious questions about her new role. Pride would not allow her to admit that it was a demotion, and she had been astonished to discover how many of them envied her, thinking she had been picked out for special on-the-spot training.
‘You’d better watch out,’ Claire had remarked acidly. ‘The next thing you know, you’ll be sent out to Beirut.’
General laughter had greeted this sally, but privately Susannah had acknowledged that Beirut, or somewhere like it, probably was exactly where Hazard would like to send her, in the knowledge that she was extremely unlikely to survive!
* * *
Day succeeded day, and Susannah found that she was working harder than she had ever worked in her life. That did not surprise her; what did was her own reaction to the pressure Hazard put on her. There were times when she actually found she was enjoying her new role.
Hazard, it quickly became clear, took the ‘managing’ part of his title extremely seriously indeed, and now and again, on those rare occasions when she glimpsed grudging respect in his eyes, she felt as intoxicated as though she had drunk a whole bottle of champagne.
The others teased her unmercifully, accusing her of becoming a workaholic.
Her private life, never particularly hectic, had dwindled to nothing—there wasn’t time. When she eventually got home from the magazine at night, she made copious notes of what she was learning, nearly always eating her supper while doing so. After that, she either read or listened to music for a couple of hours, and then she was in bed, ready for an early start the next day.
And yet, against all the odds, she found she was enjoying it. She had actually grown to relish her clashes with Hazard; just as long as she clung on to the memory of that hot, fierce flash of desire in his eyes the night they had met, she was immune to his sarcasm. It was like a charm protecting her.
Of course, he didn’t desire her now, but that memory of his momentary weakness was like the sweetest painkiller administered to her hurts.
And there were hurts: barbs flung with deadly accuracy that stung and stuck. But oddly enough they were never delivered in anyone else’s presence, and to her surprise the rest of the staff continued to think that she was lucky in being singled out for special attention from their new boss.
‘You’d better watch out,’ one of them had told her. ‘The next thing you know, he’ll be trying to get you into his bed.’
‘Susannah isn’t Hazard’s type,’ Claire had interrupted.
‘Then what is?’ one of the junior receptionists, a pretty fluffy blonde, had quizzed her expectantly.
‘Unmarried, or well divorced, round about thirty, intelligent, attractive, but most of all the type of woman who isn’t looking for a husband,’ Claire had told them. ‘While he’s involved with someone he’s faithful to her, but his affairs are always pretty short-lived.’
‘Nice work if you can get it,’ one of them commented enviously, and the little blonde pouted and looked rather put out.
It was eight o’clock on Thursday evening when Hazard eventually announced that she could leave. With their early morning start for Yorkshire very much to the forefront of her mind, Susannah gritted her teeth and tried to conceal her irritation. She had to go home, wash her hair, lay her things out for the morning, then read up on her file one last time…
With her mind full of these and half a dozen other things, she was stunned to hear Hazard saying almost conversationally, ‘You know, you’re a very irritating contradiction, Susannah. These past few days, you’ve taken everything I’ve thrown at you without a murmur. You’ve worked hard and well.’
He was perched on the edge of his desk, and unwillingly her attention was caught by the taut muscles of his thighs. A curious sensation, not unlike a minor electric shock, galvanised her, an uncomfortable prickly awareness of him as a man. And it wasn’t the first time since she’d started working for him that she had felt that awareness.
‘Is there any rule that says I shouldn’t?’ she asked him flippantly, anxious to dispel the creeping sense of intimacy invading the room.
They were alone in his office, and the rest of the staff had long since gone home. Hazard had wanted to acquaint himself with all the personnel files and she had stayed behind to help him. Not strictly her job, but she had quickly learned that the more she protested the more he enjoyed her torment.
‘No, but it seems out of character. Or are you trying to disarm me?’
‘Why should I?’
‘So that I’ll stop keeping you late after work and you can go and meet your married lover,’ he told her cynically. ‘Five to seven is the favourite time for such meetings, isn’t it? Before he has to go home to the country to join his wife and family.’
His cynicism infuriated her. She longed to hurl the truth at his arrogant head, but pride kept her silent. Pride and an increasingly intense feeling of self-preservation. It wouldn’t do to have him probing too deeply into her motives for rejecting him the night they had met. She had lied to him then, and by keeping silent she had virtually lied to him ever since; she doubted that he would be very gentle with her if she admitted as much now. Her supposed married lover created a barrier between them; a barrier behind which she could hide…
The direction her errant thoughts moved in disturbed her. Why should she need such a barrier?
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hazard frown and look at his watch.
‘Time to call it a day. I want to get home in time to catch the mid-evening news. That kidnap in Beirut…’
A war correspondent had been captured by one of the warring factions and was being held as a bargaining counter.
‘Do you know him?’
She wasn’t sure what had made her ask the quiet question. His compliment on her work must have weakened her defences, or perhaps it was because of the tiredness she could see in his eyes and the faint shadow that darkened them.
‘Yes. We worked together some years back. He’s a married man with two small kids. I’m godfather t
o one of them.’ As she watched, he rubbed his temple as though it ached. ‘I’ll have to ring Jenny…’
Susannah had the impression that he had almost forgotten that she was there, and she wished she could just go quietly away without disturbing him. She felt like an intruder, the sensitive core of her personality touched by his concern for his friend’s wife, and his friend’s family, but instead she asked abruptly, ‘Jenny?’
It was a mistake. He frowned and then focused on her as though he had forgotten for a moment that she was there. Immediately, the vulnerability vanished from his eyes, to be replaced by the hard glitter she had come to know and distrust. It was a warning to her that he was going to be at his most sardonically unkind.
‘Ian’s wife. The sort of wife any man would be proud of. A true woman in every sense of the word. Rather like Richard’s wife, in fact. You do know Richard’s wife, don’t you?’
His tone was slightly hectoring, ugly almost, and Susannah was at a loss to understand why.
She stammered slightly as she responded uncertainly, ‘Yes… Yes, I have met her. She seems very nice.’
She couldn’t think of anything else to say, but his whole stance was so obviously that of a man awaiting a response that she felt obliged to say something.
His mouth twisted as though it were full of bitter aloes.
‘Nice!’ He gave a harsh laugh. ‘I’m sure she’d be very pleased to hear that you think so.’
Susannah couldn’t understand what they were doing talking about Richard’s wife, but she had learned now to be wary when Hazard got into one of these bitter, angry moods. Sometimes she could almost see him checking himself, as though he was as astonished at the intensity of his anger towards her as she was herself.