Free Spirit Part 3

She arrived promptly for her interview and was shown immediately to the executive lift and told that Silas Jeffreys' secretary would be waiting for her when the lift stopped.

She was, and she showed Hannah straight into his office, frowning a little as she realised it was empty.

'He said to show you straight in here. I'm sure he won't be a moment,' she apologised, her professionalism slipping a little as she allowed herself to frown, as though it was unusual for him not to be prompt.

The office, like the library, was entirely in keeping with the building, and having rea.s.sured her that she didn't mind waiting Hannah sat down in the comfortable armchair the woman had indicated, not opposite the handsome mahogany partners' desk, but in front of the elegant Adam fireplace, opposite a rather larger armchair, which Hannah suspected was the province of Silas Jeffreys himself.

The mouthwatering aroma of coffee filled the room. The secretary had left a tray of it next to her, but Hannah didn't touch it; if anything, she felt even more nervous now than she had done for her first interview.

The door opened, and despite all her training she couldn't prevent herself from turning round. The blood literally left her face, her poise deserting her completely as she stared into the familiar face of the man from the tax office.

'What are you doing here?' she challenged him.

Again she saw the now familiar glint of humour darken his eyes and curl his mouth.

'It does happen to be my office,' he told her drily.

His office? Hannah couldn't believe it. She looked wildly at him, but something in his eyes beyond the amus.e.m.e.nt suddenly struck a slight chill through her shock, and even though she couldn't stop herself from saying huskily, 'You're Silas Jeffreys? I don't believe it!' in some odd way she did.

To her utter chagrin she felt a hot tide of betraying colour sweep her skin as he inclined his head in acknowledgement and confirmation.

'But you were working as a tax inspector,' she protested.

He paused for a moment, closed the door, and then came over to her, saying calmly, 'Actually, no, I wasn't. In fact, I'd called at the tax office to pick up my G.o.dson. We were having dinner together; he wanted my advice on his career. The receptionist neglected to advise me that he had anyone with him, and when you mistakenly a.s.sumed that I was his superior . . . rather than embarra.s.s everyone concerned, I simply went along with your misconception.'

A hundred different thoughts swirled through Hannah's head. She wanted to tell him that he had no right to deceive her, that he could have told her in the library who he was, that surely it was illegal to pose as a tax official when one was no such thing, but, above all that, there was the humiliating and painful knowledge that she had made a complete and utter idiot of herself. For the first time since her early teens, she badly wanted to give vent to her emotions by bursting into tears.

'I apologise if you think I did the wrong thing,' the level male voice continued, making her grit her teeth and blink back the threatening storm, appalled with herself for giving in to such a stupid feminine weakness.

'It was not done with any malice. I had no idea who you were until you left, and by then it was too late. However, I must say one thing, and that is, if you allow those circ.u.mstances . . . that incident to prejudice you against taking the post with us, then I shan't try to dissuade you. It isn't often I make a error of judgement, and I don't think I've made one now. Granted,, we perhaps haven't had the most advantageous start to our business relationship, but of course it's in your hands whether you choose to accept that what happened was an unfortunate incident and put it in the past, or . . .' He shrugged, and Hannah knew what he was not saying. If she took umbrage, stood up and told him that she was not taking the job, he would let her go, because in doing so she would showing him that she wasn't the kind of person he wanted to employ.

Mirthlessly, Hannah mentally acknowledged his skill in both warning her and complimenting her at the same time.

And, after all, what had he actually done? Nothing . . . not really. An unfortunate chain of circ.u.mstances, stemming from one initial mistake. Logically there was no reason why her pride should smart so sorely because she hadn't been possessed with a sixth sense to tell her who he was.

There were a dozen things at least which she ought to have said, but instead she asked him boldly, 'Why was I chosen from all the applicants?'

He looked at her for a moment, and then said firmly, 'Several reasons. Your qualifications were excellent, but then so were those of others. Gordon liked your honesty and openness about your family background. He told me you embraced all the more positive aspects of your s.e.x's rightful liberation, without carrying any of its burdens. I'd given him a brief which specified that I didn't mind which s.e.x my a.s.sistant was, just as long as in business conditions they were capable of behaving non-s.e.xually.

'There is no room in this organisation for people who have hang-ups about working with members of the opposite s.e.x,' he added with quiet emphasis. He gave her a thoughtful look, and then added, 'You may as well hear this straight from the horse's mouth, since it's bound to reach you on the grapevine anyway. My parents were both keen climbers. They were killed in a bad fall when I was seven. My mother's sister, who had just left university, brought me up. She did a correspondence course to qualify as an accountant and then, once she had qualified, she worked from home at first, and then from an office in our local market town.

'She sacrificed a great deal to be both mother and provider for me, and it was very, very hard for her. In those days women accountants were few and far between, especially those running their own practices.

'The month after I sat my A levels, she told me she had cancer and that it was inoperable. She'd always wanted to visit Egypt, and so we spent the last three months of her life travelling . . . until she became too ill...' He paused, and Hannah found there was an enormous lump in her throat; visualising how hard it must have been both for his aunt as a young girl faced with the task of bringing up and supporting a small child, and then for Silas himself when he knew he was going to lose her.

'When she died, I made myself a promise that I would never differentiate between the mental abilities of men and women. My aunt had proved to me that women are more than equal to men.' He looked at her and said directly, 'Perhaps what I'm trying to tell you is that maybe I was guilty of a small bias towards you because of your s.e.x, but without your own qualifications for the job your s.e.x would not have helped you.'

Hannah understood, and she felt an overwhelming sense of grat.i.tude to that other woman whom she would never meet. How could she allow pride and a sense of having made a fool of herself stand in her way of accepting the job?

'You could have told me who you were when I came for the interview,' she said quietly.

'Yes,' he admitted. 'I hadn't expected anyone to be in the library. I knew you were being interviewed, but I hadn't realised Gordon was running a few minutes late. I thought if I corrected your misapprehension, then it might affect your performance during the interview.'

'I must have seemed very obtuse,' Hannah said ruefully.

'Not obtuse,' he contradicted her, shaking his head. 'A little . . .

aggressive, perhaps.' He gave her a smile that took the sting from the words.

'I'd like to accept the job,' she told him.

The expression in his eyes rewarded her decision.

'Good. When can you start?'

Because of holidays due to her but not yet taken, Hannah felt pretty sure she could be free within a fortnight, and told him so.

'That is good. During your first week you'll want to familiarise yourself with my routine and work schedules. As Gordon told you, I try to spend two days a week at least at Padley.'

Hannah gave a small start which he immediately noticed.

'Is something wrong?'

'No. It's just. . . Padley . . . Would that be Padley Court?'

'Yes. Do you know it?'

Hannah nodded. Her mother had mentioned the house to her earlier in the summer, commenting wistfully on the beauty of its garden, which was open to the public on certain days of the year. It was only fifty miles or so from her own home, and she said as much, explaining briefly where her parents lived.

'Yes. Of course. Gordon mentioned to me that your father is a vicar.'

'Yes,' Hannah agreed repressively, not seeing the humour in his smile as she looked away from him. Tilting her chin very firmly, she asked, 'Does my father's calling have any bearing on your job offer?'

'None at all,' he told her gravely, but for once Hannah refused to be appeased. She was still feeling exposed and on edge, after discovering just who he was, and her self-control slipped as she caught the tail end of his smile and burst out crossly, 'And just what is so amusing about my father being a vicar?'

There were still sensitive places in her make-up, left there by the teasing of her peers while she was growing up, some of it kind and some of it cruel. She had been too sensitive in those days.

Thankfully she had now learned better ... or had she, if all it took to set her seething with temper was the mere hint of amus.e.m.e.nt in silver-grey eyes?

'Nothing,' he told her equably, but his mouth still twitched and he explained drily, it's just that somehow I can't quite see you as the dutiful daughter of the manse, visiting the sick with gifts of homemade jam.'

Hannah studied him for a moment, sensing that he was deliberately teasing her, testing her ability to control her emotional reactions to provocation.

'You're rather out of date,' she told him wryly. These days the boot is on the other foot, and it's the parishioners who tend to make such donations. Vicars aren't exactly well-paid, and with five children to bring up . . .'

'Five?' His eyebrows lifted, and Hannah repressed the impulse to tell him that he could have read all this on her CV, not realising how skilfully he was drawing her out, gaining her confidence, winning her away from her stance of cool detachment, so that it was easy for him to see the woman beneath the mask of cold professionalism.

'I've got four brothers,' she explained. And as though he could read her mind and see how much those four older and more domineering males had sometimes driven her to despair as she was growing up, and very certainly to resentment as she 1 kicked against their bossiness, he said quietly, 'You're lucky. I envy you. A family is something to be cherished.'

But Hannah wasn't easily convinced.

'If that's what you feel, why are you still single?' she asked him cynically, immediately regretting the words, as she saw too late the trap laid for her by his air of easy camaraderie. This man was her boss, and he would expect some deference to be shown to him, some acknowledgement made of his superiority. She veiled her eyes, cursing her impulsiveness, waiting for him to make some cold and cutting remark about his personal life being his own concern, but to her astonishment he didn't. When the silence had stretched on for so long that she just had to look at him, she saw that he was frowning thoughtfully, as though her question had been one of weighty import.

'The easiest answer would be to say because I haven't yet met the right woman, but that wouldn't strictly be the truth. I have met any number of delightful and eligible women, so I suspect the responsibility for my unmarried state lies within myself. During the years I've been building up the company, any other permanent commitment has been out of the question. The kind of woman who is content to marry, have children and take a back seat in her husband's life is not for me. I want a wife who is my partner in everything I do, who wants to share every single aspect of my life.'

As she listened to him, Hannah felt her stomach give a sudden kick of nervousness, as though suddenly she had stepped into danger.

She felt it in the apprehensive sharpening of her senses, the fine lifting of the tiny soft hairs in her nape, the alertness of her body, her muscles tensing so that she trembled slightly inside, outwardly immobile, like a hare catching the scent of the hunter.

'And what about you, Hannah?' he asked her, dexterously altering the axis of their conversation so that it focused on her and not him. 'I know there is no one in your life at the moment, but would you eventually like to marry . . . have a family?'

'No,' she told him shortly, not really sure why she was so quick to give him such an unequivocal denial, why she felt so pressed and endangered, why her senses should leap so convulsively and betrayingly simply because he had closed the gap between them by a few inches as he leaned forward to pick up some papers.

'I intend to dedicate myself fully to my career,' she added in what she had intended to be a firmly dismissive tone, but what, when she heard her own words, sounded fragilely breathless and husky.

He gave her a direct look, his eyes almost silver as they picked up and reflected the light. She wouldn't want to be his antagonist in business or anything else, she acknowledged, while at the same time resenting the knowledge, resenting the purpose and strength she sensed within him, even while she couldn't understand why she should resent them.

'Dedicate? That's a rather strong word to choose. Rather more evocative of a novice about to take her final vows than a modern woman opting for a career.'

He was making a seemingly casual statement, but beneath it lurked a question . . . one that Hannah didn't want to answer. Her facial muscles felt stiff and sore. She was beginning to panic, she acknowledged shakily. She was beginning to feel defensive and vulnerable. She was beginning to adopt all the cla.s.sic responses of a woman pushed into an inferior position by a man.

Summoning all her strength of will, she managed to force herself to relax and smile, even though doing so made her feel as though her tense flesh was splitting.

'Perhaps dedicate was the wrong word to use,' she allowed. 'but certainly my career is the main focus of my life.'

'And if that changed ... if you met someone and found that he was more important to you . . .'

Once again panic attacked her; a familiar panic this time, the one she always experienced whenever she thought of committing herself completely to another human being. But this was a panic she was used to . . . one which she could and did control.

'That won't happen,' she told him with calm a.s.surance, lifting her eyes to his face, and surprising there a look of such curious concentration that it was seconds before she could bring herself to look away, and then only because someone knocked hesitantly on the door.

'That will be my secretary. I have a board meeting in fifteen minutes. We'll be in touch with you regarding everything we've discussed today.'

He got up and stretched out his hand, and Hannah followed suit. His skin felt cool and firm against her own, the faint callouses on his palms abrasive against her skin, their presence surprising her into a faint frown, as she wondered how he had got them. Certainly not running the Jeffreys Group.

CHAPTER FOUR.

ON AN impulse even she herself couldn't entirely understand, Hannah decided to go home for the weekend.

Her mother sounded surprised, but pleased when Hannah rang to ask her if it would be all right, quickly a.s.suring her that they would be delighted to see her.

'Matt will be home as well,' her mother informed her. Matt, a highly qualified mineral engineer, had set up in business as a consultant six months ago, and the business was doing very well, but kept him extremely busy. 'He's bringing a friend with him. They're both en route for Australia.

'He used to work with Matt, apparently, and since they're travelling to Australia together and only here for a couple of days, Matt asked if it would be all right if he brought him home with him.'

Matt and one of his mining engineer colleagues . . . Hannah pulled a face into the receiver, but it was too late to change her mind now.

Her mother would be hurt. As she replaced it, Hannah grimaced ruefully to herself. Matt would no doubt spend the entire weekend teasing her, and his Australian colleague would probably follow suit. In her older brothers' eyes, she would never be allowed to grow up. She would .always remain their little sister, and she would always have to suffer their good-natured but sometimes irritating teasing. It was no wonder none of them was married yet, she reflected darkly as she packed her weekend bag. Her mother had spoiled them and they were too chauvinistic. Their chosen careers in fields which were almost entirely masculine didn't help, either.

A couple of hours later, as she drove homewards, she decided that she would keep the good news about her company car until she and her parents were alone. She wondered what time Matt would be arriving; not until she herself was settled in, she hoped. She loved her brothers, but she would have appreciated having her parents to herself for the weekend.

As she turned into the vicarage drive and saw the hire car parked there, she realised that she was out of luck. It was too late now to wish that she had not already told her parents about her new job.

They would want to talk about it, and she was not sure she wanted to go into all the details in front of a stranger.

Although the vicarage possessed a very handsome, if somewhat shabby Georgian front door, no one used it; partly because the bell didn't work, and partly because the majority of his parishioners knew that her father's study overlooked the rear of the garden and was closer to the back door.

This being the case, Hannah was astounded to see the front door opening as she got out of her car and retrieved her weekend case from the boot.

As the door opened, she saw two men standing in the hallway, deep in conversation. One of them was Matt, her brother, and the other obviously his colleague.

Neither of them had noticed her arrival, and so Hannah was at liberty to study them. It was over twelve months since she had last seen her brother, but he hadn't changed, apart from a deepening in the richness of his tan. His companion lacked Matt's lean height, but was just as broad-shouldered and burned by the sun. He saw her first, his eyes widening a little as he looked at her, his male appreciation of her in direct contrast to her brother's casual, 'Oh, there you are, brat. Malcolm here reckons he can fix the bell.

Malcolm, meet my kid sister.' He saw Hannah's glower and grinned at her.

'Sorry, brat,' he added affectionately. 'I tend to forget you're a real high-flyer these days. Got yourself a new job, I hear . . . working for Silas Jeffreys.'

'That's right,' Hannah agreed calmly, refusing to respond to the bait being laid so tantalisingly and so obviously, turning from her brother to his colleague and saying quietly, 'I doubt if you'll be able to do much with the bell. It's original, you see, and some of the parts -'.

'If anyone can fix it, Male can,' Matt interrupted her. 'He's a whiz with anything electrical. If you've got anything you need plugs putting on .'.'.' He grinned infuriatingly at her while Hannah suppressed the urge to stick her tongue out at him. It was still very much an 'in' joke among her brothers how, as a very young teenager, and determined to show them that there was nothing they could do that she could not, she had wired up a plug for her new hairdryer wrongly, and had consequently fused every plug socket in the vicarage.

She had learned better since then, but they refused to let the old story die. Giving Matt an exasperated glance, she smiled at Malcolm and walked past them both into the kitchen.

Her mother welcomed her fondly, insisting that she sit down while she made her a cup of tea.

'I won't ask you about your job yet. You can fell us all about it over dinner. Isn't it marvellous, Matt being home? And Malcolm is so nice...'

Recognising the matchmaking glint in her mother's eyes, Hannah hastily announced that she ought to unpack, sidetracking her mother by offering cleverly to help pick the last of the soft fruit, and asking so many questions about the garden that there was no room in the conversation for Malcolm.

'Oh, you'll never guess what . . .' she added, on the point of leaving the kitchen. 'Silas Jeffreys, my new boss, is the owner of Padley Court. Apparently he spends a certain portion of each week working from the Court. I don't know how much free time I'll have while we're there . . . not much at first, I don't suppose, but perhaps later when I'm more on top of the job, I might be able to pop over in the evening.'

'Padley Court? Surely he isn't living there?' her mother interrupted, frowning at her. 'From what I've heard the house is practically derelict. Lord and Lady Padley were only living in a handful of the rooms you know. Every penny they had to spare went on the garden.

And when Lady Padley died -' She broke off as the telephone rang, and Hannah made her escape.

Her room was on the third floor of the vicarage. As children, all of them had had these attic rooms with their sloping ceilings and small windows, and then, as the boys graduated to the larger second-floor rooms, Hannah had found that she enjoyed the privacy of having the entire third floor to herself and so she had retained her childhood bedroom.

Her bedroom had a small window-seat, barely large enough for her now, but still one of her favourite places. From the window she could see for miles, right across to the purple blue line of hills in the distance. The room got the evening sun, mellowing and softening the unevenness of the plastered walls and their faded wallpaper, picking out motes of dust that danced on the air, warming the room with the scent of the old-fashioned Bourbon rose that climbed the wall outside.

As she watched, she saw a fox streak across the field beyond the house and heard the harsh cry of a pair of geese winging their way overhead. There was a wildfowl sanctuary not many miles away, not entirely popular with all the local residents, who claimed that the herons decimated the populations of their fishponds.