she took a deep calming breath before striding down the hallway to the room he’d vanished into.
Okay, she could do this. She could be impressive. Because she was impressive.
Right, Cara? Right?
The room she entered was just as spacious as the hall, but this time the walls were painted a soft duck-egg blue below the picture rail and a crisp, fresh white above it, which made the corniced ceiling feel as if it was a million miles above her and that she was very small indeed in comparison.
Max was standing in the middle of the polished parquet floor with a look of distracted impatience on his face. Despite her nerves, Cara couldn’t help but be aware of how dauntingly charismatic he was. The man seemed to give off waves of pure sexual energy.
‘My name’s Cara, by the way,’ she said, swallowing her apprehension and giving him a friendly smile.
He just nodded and held out a laptop. ‘This is a spare. You can use it today. Once you’ve set it up, you can get started on scanning and filing those documents over there,’ he said, pointing to a teetering pile of paper on a table by the window. ‘There’s the filing cabinet—’ he swung his finger to point at it ‘—there’s the scanner.’ Another swing of his finger. ‘The filing system should be self-explanatory,’ he concluded with barely concealed agitation in his voice.
So he wasn’t a people person then.
‘Okay, thank you,’ she said, taking the laptop from him and going to sit on a long, low sofa that was pushed up against the wall on the opposite side of the room to a large oak desk with a computer and huge monitor on top of it.
Tamping down on the nervous tension that had plagued her ever since she’d walked away from her last job, she booted up the laptop, opened the internet browser and set up her email account and a folder called ‘Firebrace Management Solutions’ in a remote file-saving app. Spotting a stack of business cards on the coffee table next to the sofa, she swiped one and programmed Max’s mobile number into her phone, then added his email address to her contacts.
Throughout all this, he sat at his desk with his back to her, deeply absorbed in writing the document she must have stopped him from working on when she’d knocked on his door.
Okay. The first thing she was going to do was make them both a hot drink, then she’d make a start on the mountain of paperwork to be digitally backed up and filed.
Not wanting to speak up and disturb him with questions at this point, she decided to do a bit of investigative work. Placing the laptop carefully onto the sofa, she stood up and made for the door, intent on searching out the kitchen.
He didn’t stir from his computer screen as she walked past him.
Well, if nothing else, at least this was going to be a very different experience to her last job. By the end of her time there she could barely move without feeling a set of judging eyes burning into her.
The kitchen was in the room directly opposite and she stood for a moment to survey the lie of it. There was a big glass-topped table in the middle with six chairs pushed in around it and an expanse of cream-coloured marble work surface, which ran the length of two sides of the room. The whole place was sleek and new-looking, with not a thing out of place.
Opening up the dishwasher, she peered inside and saw one mug and one cereal bowl sitting in the rack. Hmm. So it was just Max living here? Unless his partner was away at the moment. Glancing round, she scanned the place for photographs, but there weren’t any, not even one stuck to the enormous American fridge. In fact, this place was so devoid of personalised knick-knacks it could have been a kitchen in a show home.
Lifting the mug out of the dishwasher, she checked it for remnants of his last drink, noting from the smell that it was coffee, no sugar, and from the colour that he took it without milk. There was a technical-looking coffee maker on the counter which flummoxed her for a moment or two, but she soon figured out how to set it up and went about finding coffee grounds in the sparsely filled fridge and making them both a drink, adding plenty of milk to hers.
Walking back into the room, she saw that Max hadn’t budged a centimetre since she’d left and was still busy tapping away on the keyboard.
After placing his drink carefully onto the desk, which he acknowledged with a grunt, she took a look through the filing cabinet till she figured out which system he was using, then squared up to the mountain of paperwork on the sideboard, took a breath and dived in.
* * *
Well, she was certainly the most determined woman he’d met in a long time.
Max Firebrace watched Cara out of the corner of his eye as she manhandled the pile of documents over to the sofa and heard her put them down with a thump on the floor.
Glancing at the drink she’d brought him, he noticed she’d made him a black coffee without even asking what he wanted.
Huh. He wasn’t expecting that. The PAs he’d had in the past had asked a lot of questions when they’d first started working with him, but Cara seemed content to use her initiative and just get on with things.
Perhaps this wasn’t going to be as much of a trial as he’d assumed when he’d agreed to their bargain on the doorstep.
It was typical of Poppy to send someone over here without letting him know. His friend was a shrewd operator all right. She’d known he was blowing her off when he promised to get someone in to help him and had clearly taken it upon herself to make it happen anyway.
Irritation made his skin prickle.
He was busy, sure, but, as he’d told Poppy at the time, it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. He’d allow Cara to work her one-month trial period to placate his friend, but then he’d let her go. He wasn’t ready to hire someone else full-time yet; there wasn’t enough for her to do day-to-day, and he didn’t need someone hanging around, distracting him.
Leaning back into the leather swivel chair that had practically become his home in the past few months, he rubbed the heels of his hands across his eyes before picking up the drink and taking a sip.
He’d been working more and more at the weekends now that his management consultancy was starting to grow some roots, and he was beginning to feel it. It had been a slog since he’d set up on his own, but he’d been glad of the distraction and it was finally starting to pay dividends. If things carried on in the same vein, at some point in the future he’d be in a position to rent an office, hire some employees and start expanding. Then he could relax a little and things would get back to a more even keel.
The thought buoyed him. After working for other people since graduating from university, he was enjoying having full control over who he worked for and when; it seemed to bring about a modicum of peace—something that had eluded him for the past eighteen months. Ever since Jemima had gone.
No, died.
He really needed to allow the word into his interior monologue now. No one else had wanted to say it at the time, so he’d become used to employing all the gentler euphemisms himself, but there was no point pretending it was anything else. She’d died, so suddenly and unexpectedly it had left him reeling for months, and he still wasn’t used to living in this great big empty house without her. The house Jemima had inherited from her great-aunt. The home she’d wanted to fill with children—which he’d asked her to wait for—until he felt ready.
Pain twisted in his stomach as he thought about all that he’d lost—his beautiful, compassionate wife and their future family. Recently he’d been waking up at night in a cold sweat, reaching out to try and save a phantom child with Jemima’s eyes from a fall, or a fire—the shock and anguish of it often staying with him for the rest of the following day.
No wonder he was tired.
A movement in the corner of his eye broke his train of thought and he turned to watch Cara as she opened up the filing cabinet to the right of him and began to deftly slide documents into the manila folders inside.
Now