Sleeping With The Boss

Sleeping With The Boss
CATHY WILLIAMS

Seduction on the agenda! Victor Temple didn't want the complication of a lovesick secretary, so quiet, efficient Alice was the ideal assistant. He trusted her, paid her well, but was interested only in her performance between nine and five - not after hours! Then he discovered the stormy affair in her past, and saw behind her businesslike disguise to the real, passionate Alice.Suddenly Victor's interest changed from professional to personal. Alice couldn't ignore the chemistry between them, but would sleeping with the boss lead to disaster, or marriage? Getting down to business… in the boardroom and the bedroom!

“If you’re quite finished? Sir?” (#ud82e4bba-a7d3-551c-b3ce-55386ea233d7)About the Author (#u0a04c85a-e736-50c1-a504-de710aed77a6)Title Page (#u1e779e4d-9213-5af1-b51f-e15f79a1494d)CHAPTER ONE (#uc32e506b-2c6c-5130-8456-24a21b76a756)CHAPTER TWO (#u3d990078-d825-53be-8d21-fedd28432117)CHAPTER THREE (#u9e87ab30-9252-5ff4-9946-f7ca8d960aa6)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“If you’re quite finished? Sir?”

Victor shook his head impatiently and muttered, “Will you stop calling me sir?”

“Would you prefer boss?” Alice asked politely. “That way we can make sure we both know precisely who lays down the laws, whatever those might be.”

“I wouldn’t allow anyone else to speak to me like that....”

“Then,” she said, walking toward him and thrusting out her chin, “sack me.”

“Sack you? Right now, that’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

Part of her had known what he intended to do, but the thought had seemed so incredible that she’d dismissed it. So when he bent his head toward her, she was totally unprepared. She tasted his mouth as his lips crushed hers in a hungry, urgent exploration that sent an explosion of excitement through her body....

CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and went to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three small daughters.

Cathy Williams writes lively, sexy romances with heroes to die for! Look out for her next book in our Expecting miniseries, coming soon!

Sleeping With The Boss

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

ALICE pushed open the glass double doors to the office block, and at once had that comfortable feeling of coming home. She had just returned from a fortnight’s holiday in Portugal—two weeks of hot weather, blue skies, blue sea, cocktails round the pool every evening with the girl she shared a flat with. And at the end of it she had boarded the plane back to a grey, cold England that was emerging reluctantly from bitter winter to sulky spring, with a feeling of muted relief.

Most people dreaded the thought of their holiday ending.

‘I could stay here for ever,’ Vanessa had told her four days into the holiday, luxuriating at the side of the pool with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

‘You’d be bored stiff after a month,’ Alice had said, rubbing suntan cream evenly over her body in the hope that a golden tan might endow her with at least a glowing, healthy look. She had long abandoned any ambitions of glamour. She was simply too thin and too unremarkable for that.

‘Okay,’ Vanessa had conceded. ‘For ever might be a bit much, but I wouldn’t spit in the face of an extra two weeks.’

Alice had obligingly agreed, but by the end of two weeks she had had enough, was itching to get back behind her desk.

Now, she pushed through the double doors, headed towards the lift, and wondered whether it wasn’t rather sad that she had actually missed her work. What kind of statement was that about her personal life? She was thirty-one now, and it didn’t take a leap of imagination to see herself in ten years’ time, a quiet little spinster who pottered at home on weekends and looked forward to Mondays. Not a pretty scenario.

As usual when she started thinking along those lines, she pushed the thought to the back of her mind. There had been a time when she had been brimming over with enthusiasm, when she had made her plans and dreamed her dreams and had been young enough and naive enough to assume that most of them would fall in line. That was years ago, though, and she could hardly remember the girl she had been then.

She opened the door of her office to hear the sound of a telephone being slammed down from her boss’s office.

Was this what she had missed? She was hanging up her coat when he yanked open the connecting door and confronted her with his arms folded and a thunderous frown on his face.

Alice looked back at him, unflustered. Over the past year and a half she had become accustomed to Victor Temple’s aggression. He could be intimidating, but he had never intimidated her. Or at least he had initially, but she had refused to crack under the ferocious impact of his personality, and after three weeks’ temping she had been offered the job permanently.

‘Well, I needn’t ask whether you had a good time or not.’ He confronted her, arms still folded, as she made her way to her desk and switched on her computer.

‘It was very pleasant. Thank you.’ She looked at him and was struck, as she always was, by the sheer force of his physical presence. Everything about him commanded immediate attention, but it went far beyond the mundane good looks of dark hair, grey eyes and a muscular physique. Victor Temple’s uniqueness came from a restless energy, a self-assurance and an unspoken assumption of power that defied description. When he spoke, people automatically stopped in their tracks and listened. When he walked into a room, heads swivelled around, eyes followed him.

In the beginning, Alice had been amazed at the reactions of perfect strangers towards him. He had taken her out for lunch a couple of times, with clients, and she had seen the way men frowned, as though trying to place him, simply because he seemed to be the sort of person who should be recognised, the way women stared surreptitiously from under their lashes.

‘Spent all day swanning around a pool, turning into leather?’

Alice looked at him and wondered, not for the first time, how she could possibly enjoy working for a man for whom common politeness was a concept to be blithely ignored, unless it suited him.

‘And very relaxing it was, too,’ she said, refusing to be provoked into a suitable retort. He had positioned himself directly in front of her desk and Alice sat down and pointedly began sifting through the mail she had brought from Reception, efficiently extracting the bits she knew she would be expected to deal with.

However infuriating and demanding Victor Temple could be, they somehow worked well together, and gradually, over time, he had delegated a sizeable workload to her. He trusted her. Advertising was a demanding business to be in; some of their clients could be sensitive and temperamental. Alice knew that he found her useful in dealing with them. She never allowed her attention to waver and was clever at soothing frayed tempers whenever he wasn’t around to deal with them personally.

In return, she was paid well. Far better, she knew, than she would be in any other job on the open market It was a blessing and a trap at the same time, because leaving would have meant a huge cut in pay and she had become accustomed to a certain level of comfort over time. She could afford her holidays abroad, the occasional meal out at an expensive restaurant. Could even run to the odd designer outfit, if she chose to; but she never did. Designer clothes, she acknowledged, called for designer-style bodies—on her they would hang sadly around her thin frame, tacitly admitting defeat.

‘Well, at least one of us had a relaxing fortnight’ He managed to make this sound as though she had deliberately connived to ensure that his fortnight had been a stressful nightmare.

‘Has it been very busy here?’ she asked, abandoning her inspection of the computer screen in front of her and looking up at him. He had perched on the edge of her desk and showed little inclination to move. ‘How did the Finner campaign go? Have they signed up?’

‘Just.’ His mouth twisted and he gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘No thanks to that airhead temp you employed to cover you.’

‘Rebecca came very highly recommended by the agency,’ Alice protested. ’I wouldn’t have taken her on otherwise!’ She paused and frowned at him, shrewdly working out in her mind what had happened. She had seen it before. Perfectly level-headed girls who somehow became flustered adolescents by the time Victor was through with them. He had the unnerving habit of issuing orders like bullets from a gun, and any signs of inefficiency were treated with scathing contempt. His patience was something he kept on a very short leash.

‘What agency? The agency specialising in idiots?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’d hardly take on someone I thought was incompetent, would I? That would just mean that I’d return from holiday with a two-week backlog of work to be done.’ She glanced at the stack of files on the desk out of the corner of her eye, and thought that they closely resembled a two-week backlog of work.

Victor followed her gaze and said triumphantly, ‘Point proved. The girl barely knew how to type.’

‘Her speeds were well above average.’

‘She went to pieces every time I attempted to dictate something to her.’

Alice looked at him with clear-eyed comprehension, mentally picturing the scene. Victor’s definition, she suspected, of going to pieces no doubt meant that the poor girl had asked questions along the way instead of following what he was saying, which would have been punctuated by frequent telephone interruptions and emerged as the basis of a letter which she would have been expected to translate into lucid, crystal-clear coherence with full background knowledge of the client. Poor girl. Next time, Alice thought, she would make sure that she employed someone older, with enough presence of mind to bounce back after a day of Victor Temple’s demands.

‘There’s no need to give me that look,’ Victor said irritably.

‘What look?’

“The look that implies that somehow it’s my fault if I end up with a temporary secretary who apparently hasn’t completed her course. I’m a perfectly reasonable man.’

Alice nearly laughed out loud at that one. ‘Oh, absolutely,’ she murmured, restraining herself. ‘Could I get you a cup of coffee?’

‘Bring it into my office. I want to go through some files with you. We’ve just got a new client on board. Some titled fool who wants us to do a discreet advertising campaign for his stately home. Refuses to let anyone deal with it but me.’