with this mission came back to her, however.
‘How am I going to explain the way I’m dressed?’
Simon glanced at her. ‘Tell ’em the truth. You’ve just arrived back from a skiing holiday. We’ll be dealing with a Margaret Winston, by the way. She’s Max Goodwin’s principal private secretary.’
‘Max Goodwin?’
‘The driving force behind Goodwin Minerals—don’t tell me you haven’t heard of him either?’
‘Well, I haven’t. Simon—’ Alex clutched the arm rest as he wove his way through the city traffic ‘—do you have to drive so fast?’
‘I don’t want to be late. He’s a very powerful man, Max Goodwin, and—’
‘Simon!’ Alex interrupted urgently, but it was too late. A delivery truck pulled out unexpectedly in front of them and, despite a liberal application of the brakes, they bumped into the back of it.
Simon Wellford clutched the steering wheel and groaned heavily as he stared at the crumpled tip of his bonnet. Then he turned his head to Alex. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine, slightly jolted, that’s all. How about you?’
‘The same.’ He flinched as the driver of the truck, a burly annoyed-looking man, hove into view. ‘But this just about wrecks it all.’
‘How far away are we?’ Alex asked.
‘Only a block but—’
‘Why can’t I go on my own? You won’t be able to leave the scene for a while but I can go, can’t I? What’s her name again?’
Simon sat up. ‘Margaret Winston, and it’s Goodwin House, next block on the left, fifteenth floor. Alex, I’ll really owe you if we get this,’ he said intensely.
‘I’ll do my best!’ She got out of the car, but before she closed the door Simon said, ‘If all else fails, dazzle ’em with your Mandarin!’
She laughed.
In the event it wasn’t only Margaret Winston Alex found herself confronting, it was Max Goodwin as well, and a Chinese gentleman, Mr Li, all of which contributed to her rather breathless disarray on top of having run the last block to Goodwin House.
But it was Margaret Winston, middle-aged, her brown hair exquisitely coiffured and wearing a tailored olive-green suit, who showed Alex into Max Goodwin’s impressive office.
A wall of windows looked down on the Brisbane River as it flowed around leafy Kangaroo Point beneath the Storey Bridge. A sea of royal-blue carpet covered the floor. There was a vast desk at one end and some fascinating etchings of Brisbane, in its early days, framed in gold on the walls. At the other end there was a brown leather buttoned three-piece lounge suite set about a coffee table.
And Max Goodwin himself was impressive.
For some reason Simon’s brief summing-up had led Alex to expect a tough, rugged man, even perhaps leathery, as the billionaire mining magnate who headed the company.
Max Goodwin was anything but that. In his middle thirties, she judged, he was the most intriguing-looking man she’d seen for years. Not only was he a fine physical specimen beneath the faultless tailoring of his navy-blue suit, he also had rather remarkable dense blue eyes. His hair was dark and the planes and angles of his face were sculpted finely and his mouth was thin and chiselled.
There was absolutely nothing gnarled and leathery about him, although he could well be mentally tough, she thought, even downright dangerous. There was a kind of eagle intensity to those dark blue eyes that gave every intimation of a man who knew what he wanted—and got it.
Her next thought was that she wasn’t what he wanted at all…
It was a feeling he confirmed when, following the introductions and after a lingering assessment of her, he rubbed his jaw irritably and said, ‘Oh, for crying out loud! Margaret—’
‘Mr Goodwin,’ Margaret Winston broke in purposefully, ‘I have not been able to get anyone else, tomorrow afternoon is approaching fast and Mr Wellford assured me Ms Hill here is extremely competent and has a comprehensive command of the language.’
‘That may be so,’ Max Goodwin stated, ‘but she looks about eighteen and as if she’s run away from her convent school.’
Alex cleared her throat. ‘I can assure you I’m twenty-one, sir. And forgive me for suggesting this but is it wise to judge a book by its cover?’ She paused, then bowed and said it all over again, in Mandarin.
Mr Li stepped forward at this point and introduced himself as one of the interpreting team. He engaged Alex in a detailed conversation, then bowed to her and said to Max Goodwin, ‘Very fluent, Mr Goodwin, very correct and respectful.’
The silence that followed was filled with tension as Max Goodwin locked gazes with her, and then he studied her comprehensively from head to toe again.
Maybe not eighteen, he decided. But without any trace of make-up, with her slippery, shiny mass of mousey hair coming loose in all directions from the knot she’d tied it in, with her steel-rimmed spectacles, her tracksuit and sheepskin boots—she’d taken off a bulky jacket on arrival but there was still hardly any shape to her—she did not look soignée and that was what he needed!
Unless—he had another look at Ms Hill—well, it mightn’t be impossible. She was fairly tall, always a plus when you were a little on the dumpy side, figure-wise. Her hands were actually slim and elegant, her skin was actually rather creamy, and her eyes…
He narrowed his own and made a request. ‘Would you take your glasses off for a moment?’
Alex blinked, then did as requested and Max Goodwin nodded. Her eyes were a clear, fascinating tawny hazel.
‘Uh,’ he said, ‘thanks, Margaret, I’ll handle this for the moment. Thank you, Mr Li. Please sit down, Miss Hill.’ He gestured to a brown leather armchair.
Alex took a seat and he sat down opposite and laid his arm along the back of the settee. ‘Tell me about your background,’ he went on, ‘and how you come to speak Mandarin.’
‘My father was in the Diplomatic Corps. I had—’ she smiled ‘—what you could call a globe-trotting childhood and languages seem to come easily to me. I picked up Mandarin when we lived in Beijing for five years.’
‘A diplomatic background,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘So, do you see yourself working as an interpreter as your career?’
‘Not really, but it is a good way of keeping up my skills, and keeping the wolf from the door,’ she added humorously. ‘But I’m thinking of aiming for the Diplomatic Corps myself. I haven’t long been out of university, where I majored in languages.’
He ruffled his dark hair. Then he said abruptly, ‘Would you object to a makeover?’
She stared at him and the silence lengthened during which she, quite ridiculously, noted his pale grey tie with navy polka dots and the fact that he had a small scar at the outward end of his left eyebrow.
She cleared her throat. ‘You obviously don’t think I look the part. I—’
‘Do you think you’d feel the part?’ he broke in. And he reeled off a list of functions that made Alex blink: cocktail parties, a luncheon, a golf day, a river cruise, a dinner dance amongst them.
‘Look,’ she interrupted in turn, ‘I think we may be wasting each other’s time, Mr Goodwin. I simply don’t have the wardrobe to cater for all that and I may not have the—what’s the word?—elan for it either. Straight interpreting is one thing, this is quite another.’
‘I’d provide the wardrobe. You could keep it.’
‘Oh. No. I couldn’t,’ she said awkwardly. ‘It’s kind of you but, no, thank you.’