Miranda Lee – The Billionaire Boss's Forbidden Mistress (страница 2)

Joachim’s heart lurched as his daughter raced into the morning room. How like her mother she was! It was like looking at Isabel in her twenties.

‘If you think you’re going to sell this house, Daddy,’ Leah tossed at him with a feisty look as she sat down at the breakfast table, ‘then you can think again.’

Joachim sighed. Like her mother in looks, but not in personality. Isabel had been a soft sweet woman, always deferring to him. Never making waves.

Leah looked soft and sweet. When she’d been younger, she’d even been soft and sweet. But over the past eighteen months, she’d become much more assertive, and very independent. Not hard, exactly. But quite formidable and forthright.

But who could blame her for turning tough, came a more sympathetic train of thought. Carl had a lot to answer for. Fancy leaving Leah when she needed him the most. The man was a weasel and a coward. Joachim wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire.

His daughter had had two alternatives during that awful time in her life. Go to pieces, or develop a thicker skin.

For a while it had been touch and go. Joachim was very proud that Leah had eventually pulled herself together and moved on.

‘No, Leah,’ he told her with a reassuring smile. ‘I’m not selling the house. I know how much you love it.’

Leah’s relief was only temporary. Then what did Daddy want to talk to her about?

‘What’s up, then?’ she asked as she reached for a slice of toast from the silver toast rack. ‘You’re not going to make a fuss about my working, are you? I thought you were proud of my getting a job.’

Perhaps surprised would have been a better description of her father’s reaction. When Leah had first mentioned a year ago that she was going to find a job, her stunned father had asked her what on earth she thought she could do.

‘Even waitresses have to have experience these days!’ he’d told her.

Leah understood his scepticism after she went to have her resumé done. Because there was nothing much she could put on it, except a very average pass in her Higher School certificate—studying had not been high on Leah’s society princess agenda—plus that very brief creative writing course. She had absolutely no qualifications for employment other than her social skills and her looks and a limited ability to use a computer.

Which was why the only job she’d been able to find after attending endless interviews was as a receptionist. Not at some flashy establishment in the city, either. She currently worked for a company that manufactured beauty products, and had their factory and head office at Ermington, a mainly industrial suburb in western Sydney.

‘I am proud of your getting that job,’ her father insisted. ‘Extremely.’

Mrs B., coming in with a plate piled high with scrambled eggs, hash browns, fried tomato and bacon, interrupted their conversation for a moment.

‘This looks delicious, Mrs B.,’ Leah complimented her father’s housekeeper as she placed the plate in front of her.

Leah was privately thankful that she only had to eat Mrs B.’s breakfast one day a week, or she’d have a backside as big as a bus.

‘Just make sure you eat it all,’ Mrs B. said with a sharp glance at Leah. ‘You’re getting way too thin, missie.’

‘You won’t catch yourself another husband with that waif look, you know,’ her father agreed.

Leah could have pointed out that she turned down several offers of dates every week. Instead, she smiled sweetly and tucked into the food till Mrs B. left the room. Then she put down her knife and fork and looked straight at her father.

‘I have no intention of getting married again, Daddy.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘You know why not.’

‘Not every man is as weak as Carl,’ he grumbled. ‘You’re a beautiful young woman, Leah. You should have a husband. And babies.’

‘I don’t want to argue about this, Daddy. I just want you to know my feelings on the matter so that I don’t have to put up with that kind of comment any more.’

‘You’ll change your mind,’ he said. ‘One day, you’ll meet the right man and fall in love and that will be that. Nature will have her way with you. You mark my words.’

Leah suppressed a sigh. She’d been marking her father’s words all her life. She loved him to death, but over the past two years she’d come to realise he was an incredible bossy-boots who thought he knew what was best for everyone.

‘Can we move on, please?’ she said, picking up a piece of crispy bacon with her fingers, and munching into it. ‘You wanted to discuss something with me?’ she asked between swallows. ‘I presume it didn’t have anything to do with my remarrying. It sounded like it was about money. Which reminds me. Don’t start telling me what I can and cannot do with the income from my trust fund, either. It is my money to do with as I please. Mum made no conditions on her legacy in her will. If I want to give it all away, I can. Not that I am. Yet. At the moment, I have to keep some back each month to make ends meet.’

‘I don’t wonder,’ her father said. ‘From what I recall, you only earn a pittance.’

‘The women in the factory earn even less,’ Leah pointed out. ‘Yet some of them bring up a family on their salary. My aim is to support myself on my salary alone. It will do my character good to see how the other half lives. It’s just taking a while for my champagne taste to catch up with my beer income. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?’ she asked, and munched into the bacon again.

‘Eat your breakfast first. I see you’re enjoying it. We’ll talk over coffee afterwards.’

Leah’s curiosity was intense by the time she cleared her plate and picked up her coffee cup. ‘Well?’ she said after a couple of sips. ‘Out with it.’

‘What do you know about the takeover of Beville Holdings?’

‘What? You mean it’s a done deal?’ Leah asked with alarm in her voice. So far there had only been rumours at work of a possible takeover. But lots of Leah’s fellow employees were genuinely worried.

Leah had heard from more than one source that when companies were taken over, they were invariably subjected to ‘restructuring’. Leah had been chatting to one of their newest reps on Friday, a really nice man with a wife and young family. He told Leah that new management always pruned staff and usually adopted a policy of last-in-first-out, regardless of ability. Apparently, Peter had lost his previous job that way and was worried sick about the same thing happening again.

‘Yes, it’s a done deal,’ her father confirmed. ‘There’s an article about it in the business section of the Sunday paper here. Plus a photo of your new boss, Jason Pollack.’

‘Jason Pollack,’ Leah repeated, the name not ringing a bell. ‘Never heard of him.’ Leah might not have joined the workforce till late in her life, but she’d been brought up on dinner table discussions about the wheeler dealers of this world whose faces and names often graced the dailies.

‘Not all that many people have,’ her father informed her. ‘He keeps a very low media profile.’

‘Show me,’ she said, and her father passed across the relevant pages.

‘Goodness!’ Leah exclaimed, having expected to see a photo of a man who was at least middle-aged. And a good deal fatter.

Takeover tycoons were rarely this young. Or this slim.

Or this handsome.

Something inside Leah tightened when her eyes met those of Jason Pollack’s. Dark brown, they were. And deeply set, hooded by eyebrows that were as straight and uncompromising as his mouth. His hair was black. And wavy. Brushed neatly back from his high forehead with no part. His nose was straight, with widely flared nostrils, his jawline squared off, with a small dimple in its centre.

‘Is this an old photo?’ she asked brusquely.

‘Nope,’ her father said. ‘If you read the article, you’ll see he’s only thirty-six. He’s very good looking, isn’t he?’

‘I suppose so,’ Leah said. ‘If you like the type.’ Which she obviously did. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

Yet he was nothing like Carl, who’d been big and blond, a Nordic giant of a man with a raw-boned handsomeness.

Jason Pollack’s face had a model-like quality, probably because of the perfect symmetry of his finely sculptured features.

Yet no one would mistake him for a male model. There was an air about him that was unmistakably magnate material. A maturity in his eyes—and an intelligence—that Leah found both attractive and irritating.

Irritating because she didn’t want to find the new boss of Beville Holdings in any way attractive. She didn’t want to find any man attractive for a long, long time.

‘How on earth did he get to be so rich and successful so young?’ she queried sharply. ‘I know he’s not old money. I would have met him before, if he was.’

‘Nope. He was an immigrant from Poland, brought over here by his father after his mother died in childbirth. He grew up in the Western suburbs and never even went to university. Started in sales straight out of school.’

‘Must have been a very good salesman to acquire so much in such a short time,’ Leah said.

‘Seems so. But he also married into money when he was in his late twenties. His wife was his first employer’s widow. Her husband owned the WhizzBiz Electronics chain of shops. Jason Pollack sold himself to his new lady boss within a year of her husband’s demise. She herself died of cancer a couple of years later, leaving her adored young husband everything. Admittedly, by then, he had reversed WhizzBiz’s dwindling sales. After his wife’s death, he sold the whole chain for an enormous price. That’s become Pollack’s trademark. He buys ailing companies, fixes them up, then sells them.