Liz Fielding – The Temp and the Tycoon (страница 3)

‘Heather? I’ve been trying to get you all morning. What’s this damn nonsense about you not coming to New York? I’m at the airport and the flight has already been called.’

‘I’m sorry, Jude. I did try and get you last night, but I could only get your answering machine and it ran out before I could explain—’

‘And then you switched off your phone.’

‘I can’t have it on in the hospital.’

‘Hospital! What hospital? What’s happened?’

‘Nothing to worry about. It’s just my daughter. She’s gone into labour early and she’s having a bit of a torrid time, poor darling. They’re considering a Caesar—’

‘And you’re a surgeon?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Stop fooling around and get to the airport. You can buy the baby something special at Tiffany’s—’

‘Talie can take shorthand as fast I can, and she’s fully briefed. I promise, you won’t even miss me.’

Talie? Who the devil was Talie?

‘Your daughter’s got a partner, hasn’t she? She doesn’t need you to hold her hand—’

‘Jude, I have to go.’

‘I refuse to cope with some stranger. I want you. Here. Now!’

‘She’s not a stranger!’ Then, ‘Isn’t she there? The car was supposed to have picked her up at nine-thirty.’

At that moment the automatic doors slid back, and as Jude Radcliffe caught sight of an unmistakable mop of blonde hair that even under restraint looked in danger of exploding he stopped listening. It was the pocket-sized blonde bombshell from the lift. She was pushing a trolley laden with a mountainous heap of luggage and talking to an elderly woman who was searching her handbag in a totally distracted manner.

‘Heather,’ he said, ‘you’re fired.’

And he cut the connection.

Talie, looking around desperately for someone in uniform to grab and ask for help, suddenly found herself confronted by her knight errant, freed from the armour of navy pinstripe and looking totally gorgeous in a grey cashmere sweater that exactly matched his eyes.

‘Good heavens, are you going to New York, too? How brilliant! I thought I was going to be on my own with Jude Radcliffe, and everyone says he’s a total…’

She stopped. The girls in the office might well be right, but it occurred to her that saying the first thing that came into her head might not be wise since, knight errant or not, he had to be one of Jude Radcliffe’s famously bright young men. And, ignoring that enticing left eyebrow, which was inviting her to continue, she turned quickly to the elderly lady she’d rescued as she’d struggled with her trolley.

‘This is Kitty,’ she said. ‘She’s going to visit her new grandson in New Zealand. At least she would be if she could find her ticket.’

‘It’s all right, dear. I’ve found it. It was stuck between my book and my box of tissues.’

Talie breathed a huge sigh of relief as the woman finally produced the folder from the depths of her bag. ‘I’ll just take her to find her queue and then I’ll be right back.’

‘You’re going nowhere. Our flight has already been called. You should have been here an hour ago.’

‘I know, but there was an accident in the tunnel,’ she said, a touch less brightly as it occurred to her that her knight might be dressed casually for travelling, but his expression was as unyielding as granite. Typical. Just when she could do with a smile or two to allay nerves that were stretched to breaking point, she finally got ‘serious.’

‘And you had to give first aid?’ he enquired.

‘Not this time,’ she said, and, assuming he was teasing her, began to relax and smiled up at him. She was on her own with the smiling, she discovered. Losing her own rapidly, she said, ‘I’ll only be a minute—’

‘You’re not listening to me, Talie,’ he said, in a tone that stopped her in her tracks.

‘Oh, you know my name?’

‘It’s not a name. It’s the word that goes in front of “ho.”’

‘It’s short for Natalie,’ she replied, refusing to allow him to rile her, furious with herself for being foolish enough to daydream for a whole week about riding in the lift again with him. ‘The alternative is Nat,’ she said. ‘Which would you choose?’

There was a pause that lasted a heartbeat, no more.

‘Talie what?’

‘Calhoun,’ she said, certain that she’d won a very small victory. But, refusing to fall into the trap of smiling again, she offered him her hand in her most businesslike manner. ‘I’m standing in for Heather on this trip. Her daughter has—’

‘I know what her daughter has done,’ he said, taking her hand and clasping it in his, holding it a touch more firmly than was quite comfortable. Rather more ‘You’re not going anywhere’ than ‘How d’you do?’ ‘And I hope they run out of gas and air.’

‘That’s not very nice. I’m sure she didn’t do it deliberately.’ Then, seeing from his expression that she wasn’t doing herself any favours, she said, ‘I’m sorry, you have me at a disadvantage. You know my name, but I don’t know yours.’

He didn’t immediately fill the void, but instead gave her a look that took in her entire appearance, from the top of her embarrassing hair, via the comfortable trouser suit—it had been a toss-up between style and comfort and, taking into consideration the fact that she’d be sitting in it for seven hours, she’d gone for comfort—to her lowest heels. Right now she wished she’d gone for style, four-inch heels and to hell with practicality…

At that moment Kitty stopped fussing with her bag and looked up. ‘Good Lord, aren’t you Jude Radcliffe?’ she said. ‘I bought shares in your company after I saw you on TV. You were so charming when that nasty interviewer was rude to you…’

‘Charm is all a matter of perspective. From Miss Calhoun’s point of view I’m a total…’ And that enticing left eyebrow invited her to fill in the blank.

The word that slipped from her lips wasn’t the one she’d heard applied to him. But it was near enough.

CHAPTER TWO

‘WELL,’ Talie said, since she had to say something. ‘Now we both know that I’m just as good at talking myself into trouble as out of it.’

It earned her a smile of sorts. The kind that said ‘Now I’ve got you…’ And she began to see how, while the ‘sex-on-legs’tag fitted him to a T, he might not be the kind of man you’d want to work for.

Not that she anticipated having that particular problem for very long.

‘Can you wait until I find out where Kitty needs to go before you sack me?’ she asked.

‘You’re not getting off that lightly.’ He snagged a passing female in a uniform with a glance—something she had signally failed to do with any number of glances—and said, ‘Lady Milward is having trouble finding her check-in desk. Will you please take care of her?’

And then he really smiled. The full-scale, hundred-and-fifty-watt variety. The girl was putty by the time he’d reached sixty watts—if he’d looked at her like that Talie would have been putty—and she briefly considered a lecture on energy saving. Then decided she was in enough trouble…

‘Have a good trip, Kitty,’ he said, turning to the old lady and offering his hand. ‘I hope to see you at the next shareholders’ meeting.’

‘You know her?’ Talie demanded, having rescued her own luggage from Kitty’s trolley before it was whisked away.

‘When she said she was a shareholder I looked at her luggage label. You were suckered, Talie Calhoun. But I don’t suppose you’re the first person she’s fooled with that helpless dithering act. It’s by getting other people to do their dirty work for them for nothing that her kind got rich in the first place.’

‘I don’t care how much money she has,’ Talie said, outraged. ‘She needed help; I gave it.’ And, since she had nothing to lose, ‘What’s made you so cynical?’

‘Experience. Make a note to send her an invitation to the cocktail party.’

A note? As in, like his personal assistant? And suddenly his ‘You’re not getting off that lightly,’ made sense. Sacking her would be too kind. She was going to have to work for him and suffer.

In New York, she reminded herself. In New York.

‘Which cocktail party?’ she asked.

‘The one we hold for shareholders after the Annual General Meeting.’

‘Right.’ She made a move to dig out her notebook.

‘A mental note. We have to check in before they close the flight.’

He picked up the cheap-and-cheerful holdall that had seen her through her student days but which looked embarrassingly scruffy next to the wheel-on laptop bag that Heather had sent with the car, and placed it beside his own equally worn leather holdall.

The thing about buying quality, she thought, was that it matured with age. The scuffs lent it character. Unlike cheap-and-cheerful which, once past its cheerful stage, just looked—well, cheap.

‘Passport.’ He held out his hand for it as they reached the first-class check-in desk.

He had good hands. Large enough to be comforting, with long fingers and the kind of broad-tipped thumb that… Well, never mind what the thumb suggested to her overheated imagination.

But you could tell a lot from a man by looking at his hands.

His lied.

She handed over her passport and tickets. The clerk already had all the details of the change of passenger in her computer, so there was no delay, and it occurred to her that, for a woman distracted by the difficulties of her daughter’s labour, Heather had done an amazing job of handling the details so that Jude Radcliffe’s life would proceed as smoothly as if she was there herself.