A Question of Pride (2 page)

'Switch me an outside line through,' he commanded, then disappeared into his own office, closing the door behind him.

She let out a long breath, unaware that she had been holding it until it came from her tensed lungs with a whoosh. Guilt and fear? Something like that, she realised heavily. She had been afraid Max would take one look at her and know, when in actual fact he hadn't even glanced at her.

Not that that was unusual, she acknowledged as she gave him his open line by flicking a switch on her communications console beside her elbow. Max was behaving as he always did here; it was she who had changed since they'd parted this morning. She sat back, eyes clouding, with an expression of sad indulgence. He had always been curt, demanding, full of ceaseless energy ...

He must have got the Stanwell contract. He would be ringing around now, warning his sub-contractors to expect large orders for components. He liked to do this initial sounding-out personally, because it made them sit up and take notice; then he would delegate around his minions to leave himself free to hunt for more work.

He buzzed her, and she jumped, startled out of her inactivity.

'Yes, Max?'

'Bring yourself in here, will you?' Snap, the line went dead.

Clea took a deep breath, hoped the tension she was experiencing inside didn't show too much on her pale face, picked up her pad and pencil and went into his office.

He had changed his clothes—as he had said he would have to do. Clea moved quietly across the room and sat down opposite him. The dark pin-striped suit looked good on him; it gave that lean, muscled frame of his some added impact. The white shirt made his skin look darker, his neat grooming a confirmation of the way he ran his life, all neat and tidy, all straight lines with the unforeseen catered for.

I'm carrying your child, Max, she told him silently. I'm going to have your baby.

Tears smarted the backs of her eyes and she had to blink them away. Shock, she realised, staring pale-faced down at her knees, where her notepad lay on the soft wool cloth of her black office suit.

'Did you meet your friend?'

'What—?' She had thought him engrossed in the sheaf of papers stacked in front of him, so his voice when he spoke startled her again. Steady! She warned herself, you're in danger of falling apart—just like the song on the cafe radio said she would. 'Yes. We went to that little bistro place off Regent Square.'

Max wasn't listening. She could tell by the way his eyes whipped over the closely typed print on the pages in front of him. He had only asked out of courtesy. He wasn't really interested in anything she did, unless it took place between the sheets ...

Cynicism, Clea, she accused herself bitterly. Not like you at all. Here you are, lying to him, loving him and hating him all at the same time, and the sad part about it is that Max has no idea!

'Ready now?' He looked up, his eyes narrowing suddenly as he caught her pained expression. Then he blinked to dismiss the vague idea that she wasn't the girl he was used to seeing at this time of the day. 'Six copies,' he murmured, sliding several documents over the desk towards her. 'To go to ...' And the afternoon began.

It was five o'clock before either of them came up for air. They had worked quietly and effectively together throughout the afternoon. The pace of work and Max's usual dynamism had helped Clea to forget her personal problems, but the paleness must still have been there in her soft ivory skin, because Max paused by her desk as he came out of his office. She guessed that he was seeing her clearly for the first time now that the hectic day was drawing to a close.

'Clea, are you feeling OK?' He leaned his knuckles on her desk, dipping his dark head a little to see her face better.

If she had been in the right frame of mind, she would have appreciated his concern. Instead, she pinned a smile on her face and lifted her head to show it to him. 'I'm fine,' she lied, and forced the smile wider to prove the point. 'Just one of those days, I think ... I'll be glad to get home tonight and put my feet up.'

He was frowning in usual 'Max' style, his blue eyes dark with the glimmer of affection, and her heart squeezed—going out to him, because she loved him, and this warmer Max was the one she couldn't help responding to.

'Beautiful Clea,' he murmured deeply, then took her by surprise by reaching out to gently touch her cheek. 'Beautiful—beautiful Clea, I think I'm ...' He stopped himself, fingertips tensing against her skin just before he snatched them away, straightening, his expression odd—shocked, almost.

Tension seemed to leap up from nowhere, and Clea felt puzzled. What had he been about to say that had brought him up short like that? She felt a burst of panic—he couldn't know, could he? He couldn't have guessed? No, of course he hadn't.

Max was giving himself a mental shake. She actually saw it happen, although he showed no physical signs of doing so, and his smile held its normal teasing quality. Gone was the look of intensity.

Clea's own lack of self-awareness meant she had no idea what Max actually saw when he looked at her.

The 'beautiful, exotic gypsy', as he liked to teasingly call her, was not far from the truth. Jet-black, curling hair pulled into soft, lively waves by the sheer weight and length of it meant that she had to keep it severely confined when at work and, though Max adored her hair when it was loose and wildly free, worn in its tight knot, it only helped to accentuate the perfect oval of her face and her ivory smooth skin.

Her eyes were large and dark, their colour a fascinating mixture of lavender and midnight-blue depending on her mood, and they tilted slightly at the outer corners to add a little mystery to the gypsy quality in her.

Her nose was small and straight, her mouth generous, sensually so. She was tall and slender, but beautifully curved. Clea had the ability to stir the male senses without even being aware of doing it. She did that to Max every time he looked at her, and that made him angry. He didn't like the vulnerability it revealed in his implacable character.

'Have you nearly finished?' He glanced at his watch, obviously eager to get off.

'Ten more minutes, that's all,' she assured him. Remembering his dinner date tonight, she gave him a reassuring smile—Max didn't like to think that she was working late when he wasn't. He was a conscientious enough boss to think it unfair to expect his staff to do more than he was prepared to do himself. 'Have a nice evening,' she added as a final push for him.

'I'll pick you up tomorrow night.' He seemed reluctant to go now, his stance hesitant—restless.

Tomorrow was a Saturday, and they were going to the theatre. Clea had booked the tickets herself earlier in the week, to see the latest Tim Rice musical. The song that had been haunting her all day came from it. 'We could go on to a club later if you wish ... have some supper—maybe dance a little?'

What was the matter with him? Clea felt confused by this unusual show of hesitance.

'Are you sure you're all right?' He must be feeling confused, too, to ask the same-question twice, she noted wryly. Max wasn't the type to repeat himself. Maybe some of her distress was showing, and Max was unconsciously picking up on it.

Nerves made her resort to mockery. 'What in heaven's name could be wrong with me, Max? You'll have me wondering if you're suffering from a guilty conscience if you keep this up!' They never shared this kind of conversation here in the office.

He didn't like that; it stiffened his spine, his face hardening. 'Anyone would think I'm cruel to you, to hear you,' he muttered and turned to stride angrily for the door.

Clea looked miserably down at her typewriter. 'Sometimes you are,' she replied heavily. 'As you and I both know.'

She went back to her typing, tapping away furiously, while Max stood by the open door, watching her.

He wanted to say something, defend himself. He was angry—taken aback by her sudden attack on him.

It happened so rarely that, when it did, he didn't know how to handle it. He glanced at his watch, then back at Clea's bowed head. The tension around them sharpened to an unbearable point, then Max sighed impatiently and left the room without saying another word.

Clea stopped typing and pulled the piece of paper out of the machine. She had written gibberish, unadulterated gibberish.

Cleasat for a full five minutes staring at the wall opposite, seeing nothing. Outside, the sounds of the usual mass evacuation that took place every evening around this time went on without her being conscious of it.

She felt cut off, isolated by the weight of her problems.

They began crowding in on her, dragging her down into a deep depression. Distress made a fluttering attempt at taking hold of her, and she stood up abruptly, her chair scraping on its castors, echoing shrilly in the too quiet office.

She then did something she had never done before. She went into Max's office, closed the door behind her, made for the walnut cabinet where he kept his private stock of spirits and poured herself a neat whisky. She took it with her over to the big window, sipping shakily at the drink, to look down on a busy London beneath her. The rush hour was in full swing and, though she was too high up to hear any of the noises that went with that Friday night rush, she could see the way traffic had already come to a near standstill, how the crush of human bodies rushed along like armies of busy ants.

The executive offices of the Computer Electronics Company took up the whole of the top floor of the six-storey building. Max owned the lot. Each floor was taken up with some specialised computer process or another, design, electronics, data process. The huge typing pool, where she had originated from before ending up up here as his secretary. It all went on beneath them, the finished product being belched out on the ground floor where Max would go to inspect, run and re-run his latest creation until he could use it as well as his highly paid experts. Then his garrison of salesmen would go out to sell the product, while Max concentrated on bigger things. It was he who landed the more lucrative contracts—the computers designed for tailor-made functions. It was he who kept the company moving for ever upwards. He was its jugular, its heart, its life and soul. Without his driving force behind it, the company would collapse ... as she felt
she
was about to do now.

It had all begun so innocently. She had been nothing but a very junior secretary, working on the second floor as a 'floater' for the troop of salesmen to use when they needed her. She had only ever seen Max once in those first six months that she worked for him, and then it had been from a distance, when he'd made one of his very rare visits to the typing pool. He had paused by the glass partition, outside in the corridor, his dark face peering in at the two long lines of busy word processors where girls of all ages, shapes and sizes sat working. She had noticed him looking in, because at that moment she had been walking towards the paned glass that partitioned the main corridor from the large typing pool. Their eyes had caught and held for a split second—a second in which she learned the meaning of all the drooling the other girls did over their elusive boss. She'd received an impression of black hair, black frowning brows and a pair of piercing blue eyes that had rendered her breathless. They had also stopped her in her tracks, pinning her to the spot while he, in his arrogance, had inspected her from head to tingling toes.

She'd been so young, she realised now when it was too late. Too young for a man as worldly-wise as Max. He'd packed too much living into the fourteen years separating them for it to be a sensible thing for her to get involved with him.

It had been he who had broken the eye-to-eye contact that day, he who had lifted the corner of his mouth in that mocking smile he liked to use to make people feel ill at ease, and it had been
she
who had been left there feeling foolish, her face hot with colour. The rest of the girls had stared at her as though she'd just physically attacked their beloved boss. They had teased her about the incident for days afterwards. But, as the weeks went by, and they were not treated to any more visitations from the revered employer, life settled back to its normal humdrum calm and all was forgotten. Until Max's secretary left to emigrate to Canada with her new husband, and Clea was offered the job.

She had been barely twenty, and as naive as they came then. Not so now, she realised wryly. It was amazing what one could learn within a few months of Max's influence. She had gone from a girl—who saw a man only as someone to enjoy a pleasant evening with before she left him at her flat door with a thank-you peck on the cheek—to a woman, in every sense of the word. A cool, very controlled, sophisticated lady who had learned how to temper her emotions to suit the man she loved.

She had worked for him for a month before Max asked her out. And then it had been a classic case of the boss asking the secretary to work late, then offering her dinner to recompense. The next time, the dinner was offered without any back-up excuse.

He was attractive, breathtakingly sophisticated, and possessed a charm—when he decided to turn it on—that was all but impossible to combat. In fact, she thought now as she looked back on that time, Max had turned her head without even having to work at it much. He didn't even bother to wrap his proposition up in fancy words. He just told her, over dinner one evening, that he wanted to be her lover, then waited casually for her reply.

She found some comfort now in remembering that she'd had the strength to turn him down that first time.

But his answering laugh had been mocking, as if he had been sure of his own power over her. He had known, even while she was refusing him in her cool, off-handed way, that he would win in the end.

He'd discovered her innocence only when it was too late to draw back. She had been too shy to tell him, and yes, too afraid of losing him if she did tell him. He had been furious at first, then rather pleased; then so smug that it had been aggravating.

'I've never made love to a virgin before,' he'd whispered, then set about teaching her all he knew, making her into the woman he'd wanted her to be, conditioning her until the shy young girl was gone for ever.