''We didn't agree to anything,' Mike reminded him stiffly. Why did he look so irritable and angry? Perhaps it was simply because she hadn't obeyed his orders to the letter.
'Well, it's too damn late to do anything about it now,' he muttered tersely, glancing at his wristwatch. He swung around on his heels and strode back towards the door. 'But for Pete's sake, think things through first in future before you give way to your democratic urges,' he barked over his shoulder as he vanished into the corridor.
'And what's that supposed to mean?' Mike demanded of the empty office, rising to her feet. Pondering on Luke's ambiguous remark, she made her way to the operations-room.
She'd just automatically taken it for granted that it would be Luke who conducted the meeting, Mike realised, as she sat listening to him outlining the changes that were about to take place within Kingston Air to his attentive audience.
She'd rather over-simplified the role of the handling agent when she'd explained it to Christina. Kingston Air wasn't simply going to be responsible for handling other airlines' passengers, but also for manning the airport information desk, collecting landing fees from private pilots, organising duty frees from the bonded store for the latter, keeping a record of all the freight placed in the transit shed to await Customs clearance. The list was endless and it was going to mean a lot of extra work for the staff and yet they greeted Luke's announcement with open enthusiasm. They were responding to Luke as they would have done to Matthew, Mike realised, wondering wryly what their reaction would have been if she'd been the one to impart the news.
She glanced around the crowded room. Despite the short notice, all the staff were in attendance, even those who had finished their shifts at two o'clock that afternoon for their precious weekend off.
Luke was now answering the barrage of eager questions being fired at him and as she listened to his calm, assured voice Mike suddenly felt a fierce rush of pride in him, which she instantly dismissed as absurd. She had no right to feel such an emotion—and neither did she want to!
Her gaze fell on Andrew Simpson, sitting alone at the back of the room, and she cringed inwardly as she witnessed the bitter curl of his mouth, the unconcealed resentment in his eyes. Oh, God, she should have done exactly as Luke had requested, called a meeting of senior staff only. How could she have been so utterly thoughtless as to allow Andrew to learn about the airline's new venture at exactly the same time as the most junior, temporary staff? No wonder he was angry and resentful.
She heard a ripple of laughter echo around the room and realised that Luke must have closed the meeting on a humorous note. Quickly, she leaped out of the room and escaped to her office. Sitting down at her desk, she rested her head in her hands, feeling sick with shame, appalled by her insensitivity towards Andrew.
'I don't normally reduce my audiences to quite such a level of despondency,' a voice drawled from the doorway.
Mike looked up. 'Did you see Andrew's face?' she asked abruptly.
'Yes,' he answered quietly.
'You were right, Luke,' she muttered miserably. 'We should have talked to the senior personnel first. I shouldn't have interfered.' Her eyes darkened. 'I've been so crass, so unbelievably stupid.'
She waited for him to endorse her statement, embellish it with a few well-chosen adjectives of his own, and was nonplussed when he merely studied her for a moment in silence, the expression on his face unreadable, and then gave an unexpected smile.
'You know, I don't think sackcloth and ashes suit you, Michaelia,' he murmured thoughtfully. 'Come on, I'll walk you to your car.'
Wondering if she'd ever be able to comprehend this unpredictable man, ever understand how his mind worked, Mike collected her jacket and handbag.
There were people milling about in the terminal as they walked through, waiting to meet arrivals off the last inbound flights of the day, and Mike observed the number of female heads that turned to appraise her companion. She flicked a sideways glance up at him, curious to see his reaction. But he gave no indication that he was even aware of the attention he was attracting. Perhaps he was so accustomed to drawing female eyes wherever he went that it no longer even registered with him, she mused. She wondered if he had any idea that, perversely, it was that very air of indifference and cool aloofness that made him even more compelling to women. Some women, she amended hastily, having no wish to include herself in that generalisation.
'Incidentally, I'm going to be up in London for the day again tomorrow,' Luke announced casually as they reached Mike's car.
'Are you?' she murmured vaguely, staring down at the ground. Did he have more business to attend to? She frowned. On a Saturday? Or was he simply going to see Christina again?
'If you come to work tomorrow, I'll cover on Sunday and you can have the day off,' he continued. 'If that suits you,' he added as an afterthought, as if belatedly remembering that she wasn't one of his employees.
Mike shrugged. 'I might as well come in on Sunday as well.' She'd hardly worked her full quota this week and she'd had quite sufficient leisure time over the past fortnight anyway.
'I should make the most of Sunday,' he retorted firmly. 'I doubt whether either of us are going to have much free time over the next couple of weeks. There's still a great deal of preparation to do before we take over the handling at the beginning of the month.'
'OK.' She couldn't be bothered to argue. And neither was she in the mood to stand here talking about business. In fact, she was becoming heartily sick of the handling contract. She unlocked the car door and slid into the driver's seat. 'See you on Monday, then.'
With a feeling of complete anticlimax, she watched Luke walk away. She'd been so convinced that he was going to ask her out to dinner again after the staff meeting! Wasn't that the real reason she'd taken so much trouble with her appearance, in anticipation of such an invitation? she asked herself mockingly.
She turned the ignition key. Why should Luke repeat his dinner invitation when she'd refused it point-blank last night? Some men, she knew from experience, might have regarded her professed disinterest as a direct challenge, but Luke was not apparently in that category.
Mechanically, she started on her homeward journey. She'd had a few boyfriends over the years and had always been completely honest and straightforward with them, never leading them to suppose that she wanted anything more from then than a light, casual friendship. She wasn't capricious by nature, wasn't prone to prevarication. When she'd refused an invitation in the past, she'd always meant it and had been profoundly irritated when the man who had extended it had persisted with his unwanted attentions, seeming to assume either that she was incapable of knowing her own mind, or alternatively that she was deliberately indulging in some devious game, all part of a feminine strategy to maintain his interest. So why did she now feel so deflated and disappointed that Luke had taken her at her word and made no effort to change her mind?
She changed into jeans and a sweatshirt the moment she arrived at Rakers' Moon, anxious to discard the cream dress that was a constant, pricking reminder of her own foolishness. No longer hungry, she heated up a tin of soup and then retreated to the drawing-room with a book by one of her favourite authors. She'd been planning to telephone Christina tonight, but was oddly reluctant to do so any more. Half of her wanted to know if her suspicions were correct and that Luke had arranged to see her half-sister tomorrow—and the other half preferred not to know.
Finding she couldn't concentrate on her novel, she flung it aside and on a sudden impulse leapt to her feet, rushed into the hall and tore up the stairs to the top of the house.
From one of the attic windows, she had an untrammelled view of the lane leading down to Oak Tree Cottage. Craning her neck, she rested her elbows oh the window-sill and gazed out. The cottage lay in complete darkness. So Luke hadn't gone straight home from the airport. Had he driven back down to London tonight? Or simply found another dinner companion?
A wave of self-disgust tore through her. She was acting
like an adolescent with a crush on the boy next door, standing here in the darkness, staring out at Luke's cottage. Abruptly, she turned away from the window and flicked on the light switch. Never in her life had she indulged in such humiliating behaviour. But then, she admitted, with a thud of her heart, this was the first time she'd ever encountered a man like Luke Duncan.
She walked over to a large wooden packing-crate and sat down. It was time she faced the truth, was honest at least with herself. Her mind might tell her that she was immune to Luke's blatant maleness, but she only had to be in the same room as he and her traitorous, wilful hormones would denounce her as a liar.
Absently, she traced a circle on the dusty floor with the toe of her shoe. This was a complication she could well do without, she thought wryly, and it was a problem she was going to have to resolve. Even if Luke's interest in her had been more than a brief, transitory physical one, even if he weren't the type of man with whom she long ago vowed never to become emotionally involved with, she would never contemplate a relationship of any sort with a man who was her business partner. It would be a recipe for disaster. The old adage about never mixing business with pleasure might be hackneyed but it was founded on common sense.
From now on, Mike resolved determinedly, she would ensure that she never saw Luke socially, limit their contact to a working environment, and their conversation to business. Never again would she allow herself to get into a situation, as she had last night, that could so easily have become out of control. It wasn't Luke she feared, she admitted uncomfortably, but herself. It was becoming increasingly difficult to fight her instinctive response to him.
She stood up, wiping her dusty hands on her jeans, and heaved a despondent sigh. She'd been so looking forward to moving down to Rakers' Moon and working at the airport and now nothing seemed to be turning out the way she'd planned. The future that had once beckoned challengingly now loomed with bleak dreariness.
CHAPTER FIVE
'What the hell are you trying to do Michaelia? Put Kingston Air out of business?'
Mike didn't answer, watching Luke from under her thick eyelashes as he paced up and down the office, his face like thunder.
'Have you any idea of how much it costs to keep re-routeing passengers via Heathrow? Not to mention the damage that's being done to Kingston Air's reputation.'
Mike closed her mind to Luke's angry tirade, letting his words wash over her head. She was beginning to feel as if she were in a nightmare, a nightmare that had started on Monday when two regular business travellers had arrived at the check-in desk, holding valid tickets for the early morning departure to Manchester, to be courteously informed that their names weren't on the passenger list for the full flight. A check with the computer had revealed that although the two men had originally been booked on the flight their seats had subsequently been cancelled and re-booked for the following week, a change in itinerary both irate men had vehemently denied requesting.
Mike's eyes darkened. The same confusion had occurred later that day on a Jersey flight, yesterday on flights to Paris and Alderney, and now this morning there had been yet another false cancellation on the Glasgow flight. Mike's hands clenched into tight fists. And each time the computer had indicated that it was she who had been guilty of altering the passengers' itineraries. She was beginning to dread coming into work, to dread the moment when the office door opened and she heard Luke's frozen voice accusing her of committing yet another reservations blunder.
'What I fail to understand is what possessed you to go and help out in Res in the first place. Why the hell didn't you send someone in from Ops who at least had some idea of what they were doing?'
Mike's eyes flashed amber sparks. 'For the umpteenth time,' she said evenly, trying hard to keep the mounting anger and frustration from her voice, 'I did not make all these mistakes.' She saw the deep scepticism in his eyes. 'What exactly do you think I did on Friday?' she demanded caustically. 'Brought up passenger lists for every flight this week and methodically worked my way through them, modifying bookings just for the fun of it?' She took a gulp of air. 'Changing a whole itinerary involves a little more than simply pressing one key. It's not something you can do by accident, and I'd hardly to it deliberately!'
'You already know how I think the errors occurred,' Luke growled back. 'You admit yourself that you had a quick practice on the computer, experimenting with various bookings, before you --'
'I did that using the training sign,' Mike cut in exasperatedly. 'Nothing would have entered the system.' She sighed wearily. This was getting nowhere—they were just going round and round in circles, covering the same old ground. Luke wouldn't believe her assertions that she wasn't the culprit, and the trouble was that she had nothing with which to back up her defence. There was no getting away from the fact that all the false reservations had been made in her own personal sign-in code. She'd lain awake for the last two nights, trying to think of some logical explanation for it, but the only feasible answer was one she refused to even contemplate.
She saw Luke rake an impatient hand through his thick dark hair. He was probably wishing that she were an employee so he could fire her, she thought wryly.
'Well, let's hope that this is an end to it. Presumably there's a limit to the havoc you can have wrought to Kingston Air after just one day in the Res office.'
Mike compressed her lips together and gazed stonily ahead. How could she have ever been so idiotic as to have seriously imagined that she was in danger of becoming too attracted to this arrogant, condescending, hateful male?
'But for Pete's sake, steer clear of the computers in future until you know how to use them --Come in.' He broke off in response to the light tap at the door, and then smiled, raising his hands up in front of him. 'Sorry,' he quirked an eyebrow at Mike, 'your office..'
Still smarting from his words, Mike didn't smile back, but as her eyes rested briefly on his craggy face she was reminded all too vividly of what exactly had prompted those irrational fears on Friday night. Her feelings towards Luke were hardly consistent, she thought with self-disgust. One moment she was fervently wishing him at the bottom of the deepest lake, and the next moment she would look at him and the sheer force of his attraction would almost choke her. Her heart skipped a painful beat. What would it be like not to be at constant loggerheads with Luke, to feel relaxed and at ease in his company instead of perpetually on edge? Abruptly, she turned her head to greet the reservation supervisor who was approaching her desk.
'Morning,' the middle-aged woman murmured laconically and as usual came straight to the point. 'Captain Hammond says you've authorised two sub-load tickets for his grandchildren on this morning's Jersey.'
'That's correct,' Mike agreed. For one heart-stopping moment, she'd thought she was going to be informed of yet another reservations catastrophe.
'Right. If you'd just like to sign this form, please, I'll issue the tickets.'
Mike scrawled her name with a flourish and handed it back to the supervisor, conscious all the while of the frown on Luke's face as he stood watching.
She waited until the door had closed and then looked up at him. 'Before you say anything, yes, I do know that grandchildren aren't strictly speaking eligible for concessionary travel, but I can't see that it hurts to stretch the rules slightly for once.'
'Can't you?' he enquired tightly.
'For heaven's sake, grandchildren, children, what's the difference?' She couldn't cope with any more arguments this morning.
Luke folded his arms across his chest. 'And if some other member of staff comes in tomorrow and asks you to "stretch the rules" for their auntie, second cousin, neighbour, you'll agree to that too?'
Mike frowned. 'All right, I get the point. I admit giving Captain Hammond those tickets wasn't the most sensible thing to do, but it's done now.' She paused, looking down at her desk. 'Actually,' she said candidly, 'I had my doubts at the time.'
'So why did you do it?'
Mike raised her head and as
she encountered the thoughtful, perceptive grey eyes she jolted, convinced that Luke knew exactly what had prompted her to offer the discounted tickets against her better judgement. With searing shame, she acknowledged the uncomfortable truth. She'd been motivated by a childish desire to prove to the captain that she had just as much authority as Luke.
'Isn't that your telephone?' she muttered and, with relief, watched him stride towards the inner room.
The decorators had finished over the weekend and Mike had arrived at the airport on Monday to discover that Luke had vacated her office the day before and was installed in his own. At least she now had her small sanctuary back, she mused, although having a connecting door between the two rooms wasn't ideal. Luke never seemed to feel it necessary to knock before entering her domain. Depending on his mood, he either strode or sauntered in whenever he felt like doing so.
Like now, for instance. She glanced up as he stood framed in the doorway. As usual, he was wearing one of the formal dark grey suits he appeared to favour and a brilliant white shirt with a red silk tie, and she suddenly found herself wondering what he would look like in more casual clothes.
'That was Nicholas Harrison on the phone.'
'Who?' Mike murmured absently. Would Luke appear less formidable, more approachable clad in a pair of old denim jeans and a faded T-shirt?
'Nicholas Harrison,' he repeated impatiently. 'Remember him?' he added drily. 'Managing director of Link Travel, for whom Kingston Air just happen to operate charter flights to Palma and Corfu during the summer?'
'Of course I know who he is!' she returned tetchily. There was no need for him to be so sarcastic. 'I didn't happen to catch his name the first time, that's all,' she added lamely. She hadn't been paying attention, she admitted. She seemed to be suffering from these temporary lapses in concentration lately, her mind drifting off at tangents. She frowned uneasily. Surely that hadn't happened last Friday in the reservations office? No. She wasn't going to start doubting herself now, or her confidence, already severely battered, was going to be nil.
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