But somehow the fact that her compassion, her enthusiasm for life, wasn’t an act disturbed him far more. He was more comfortable with guile. Understood it. Knew how to handle it.
He took a slow breath. He was stuck with her and they’d both have to live with it.
‘I may be a bastard,’ he said. ‘Although my mother might take issue with you on that. And I certainly don’t suffer fools in any shape or form in my organisation. But Heather calls me Jude and so will you.’ Then, in case she was under any misapprehension that he was being friendly—he was deeply regretting his uncharacteristic impulse to hold the lift for her— ‘That way I won’t be constantly reminded of her absence every time you speak.’
And, without waiting for her to reply, he opened the envelope and took out a single folded sheet of paper. The note was brief and to the point.
Jude, I know you’re going to be furious that I’ve had to miss this trip, but you know you’re going to have to get used to working without me in the near future. I gave you a year to find a replacement and time is running out. And, no, I didn’t do this deliberately. Even you must realise that I can’t control the arrival of an impatient baby.
Just don’t take it out on Talie. It’s not her fault. Mike raved about her. She takes shorthand verbatim, and I took the trouble to check out her story about the incident on the Underground last week. Unlikely as it may seem, your little blonde was telling the truth.
I know—she’s almost too good to be true. But I’m sure a week working for you will bring out any hidden flaws. If you behave yourself, you might even be able to persuade her to take you on full time. Heather.
He glanced down at the girl sitting beside him.’ Heather suggests you’re almost too good to be true. Shall we see if she’s right?’
‘What?’
It was just as well her eyes were blue or he’d be forced to compare them with a startled doe’s.
What an appallingly banal thought.
At least she’d made an effort to get her hair under control, stuffing it up into some kind of knot on the top of her head that was not so much a bun, more a cottage loaf. Even as he congratulated himself a curl sprang free, refusing to be confined by anything so feeble as a hairpin.
Realising that she was still staring up at him like a startled blue-eyed—and there really was no other word for it—doe, he said, ‘If you’d like to get out your notebook some time before we arrive in New York, maybe I can find out if you’re as good as Mike and Heather claim you are,’ he prompted.
‘But we haven’t even taken off…’ She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, presumably to prevent the rest of the sentence from escaping and thus provoking further sarcasm.
And that irritated him, too. He felt like being seriously—‘Would you fasten your seat-belts, please?’ a stewardess said as she walked through the cabin, checking that everything was properly stowed. ‘We’ll be taking off shortly.’
Talie, it seemed, had a firm grasp of the priorities and got out her notebook before she fastened her seat-belt, made a note of the time and date, wrote something else in shorthand—probably what she wanted to say out loud but thought it wiser not to—and then turned to him, her pencil poised and waiting.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ she said. ‘Jude.’
He dragged his attention from her hair, which was slowly unravelling, and began to dictate a series of notes on the ideas he’d had during his solitary days walking in the Scottish Highlands. The ones that didn’t involve the dimple that appeared for no reason at all every now and then at the corner of her mouth.
The plane backed slowly away from the gate before taxiing to the runway. There was a long pause as they waited for clearance and, glancing across to ensure that she was keeping up with him, he noticed that the knuckles of the hand gripping her pencil were bone-white.
She was nervous? This girl who, without a second thought, leapt to the aid of total strangers in distress?
As he hesitated, she glanced up at him. It wasn’t only her knuckles that were white, he realised, and as the engine noise grew and the plane began to speed down the runway he stepped up the speed at which he was dictating in an effort to distract her.
It might have worked, too, but when a day started out badly, it invariably kept going that way, and as they lifted off something crashed loose in the galley behind them. A woman in the aisle seat opposite them gave a startled scream and Talie jumped so violently that she would undoubtedly have left her seat if she hadn’t been strapped in. As it was, her notebook and pencil took off on a flight of their own, and the pins which had been struggling manfully with gravity to hold up her hair gave up the effort and the cottage loaf exploded.
‘Are we going to die?’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ he said, reaching out and taking her hand. ‘But not today.’
He really was a bastard, Talie decided, as her heart rate slowly returned to normal. How could she ever have imagined for one minute that he was friendly? Charming? Totally scrummy, actually.
She had practically haunted the lifts of the Radcliffe Tower in her lunchtimes, hoping to run into him again. Knowing that she was being stupid. Just how stupid she couldn’t possibly have imagined.
Okay. She’d give him the killer good looks—even if he was using those slate eyes to freeze her to her seat—and she was right about his hands. They were strong and capable and very good for holding on to when you thought your last moment had come.
Admittedly he’d lost the smooth, boyish look of the average pop idol, and settled into that look men achieved around their mid to late thirties and hung on to until the muscles started to sag a little around the jaw, when they were so old that it didn’t matter. When he smiled he didn’t look anywhere near old enough to be the ill-tempered tycoon described by her colleagues.
Unable to rescue her notebook until the seat-belt sign went off, Talie remained absolutely still, trying to ignore the warmth of his palm pressed against hers, the way his long fingers curled reassuringly around her hand. Instead she closed her eyes and re-ran their encounter in the lift, trying to work out how she could have got it so wrong.
He’d seemed friendly enough, but then she hadn’t given him much of a chance to be anything else, prattling on about being late. He probably wouldn’t have spoken to her at all under normal circumstances. Most of his staff probably wouldn’t have dared say anything beyond good morning.
None of them would have yelled at him to hold the lift. They’d rather have been late.
And he wasn’t being funny when he said she could talk her way out of anything, she realised belatedly. He was being sarcastic.
The seat-belt sign pinged off, but before she could move, reclaim her notepad, he had released her hand and picked it up for her.
‘Have you stopped shaking sufficiently to carry on?’ he asked, handing it to her. ‘Or do you require a medicinal brandy?’
‘If I had a medicinal brandy that would be the end of my working day,’ she said. ‘Not the beginning of it.’
She looked around for her pencil, but it had rolled away under a seat somewhere, and since she wasn’t about to crawl around on her hands and knees looking for it she took a new one from her bag. Then, suspecting that she might need more than one, she swiftly anchored her hair back into place and stuck some spares into the resulting bird’s nest, so that she wouldn’t have to cut him off in full flow.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ she said. Then, when he didn’t immediately begin, she glanced up at him and realised that he was staring at her hair. For just a moment she thought he was going to make some seriously cutting remark.
Maybe she was mistaken. Or maybe he’d wisely thought better of it. Because after a moment he sat back, closed his eyes and continued pouring his thoughts out at a rate that kept her