Dating Her Boss

Good grief—she might have chosen the girls for their looks and charm rather than their skills, but they hadn’t been that bad. ‘Nonsense. Admit it, Max, you’re the problem here. Why should my girls put up with your bad temper and your unreasonable working hours?’

‘For the money, sweet sister? Or have you simply been giving them the opportunity to have a crack at mending my broken heart?’

‘You don’t have a heart.’

‘You know that and I know that, but if you can find a girl who can manage a decent rate of shorthand I might be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.’ He paused. ‘At least until Laura’s mother has recovered sufficiently for her to come back to work. I don’t care what she looks like and I certainly don’t give a damn who she went to school with—’

‘Max Fleming, you have got to be the most impossible, infuriating—’

‘I know,’ he said, cutting her off in full flow. ‘My faults are legion. If I promise to try and reform will you send me someone competent? Just for a few days while I finish this report for the World Bank?’

‘I should leave you to type it yourself with two fingers, then you wouldn’t be so—’

‘Or are you going to admit defeat?’

‘It’ll take more than you to bring me to that, big brother. I’ll have someone with you tomorrow. But this is your last chance. If this one walks out on you, you’re on your own.’ Amanda Garland frowned as she hung up, then turned to her own secretary. ‘What on earth am I going to do with him, Beth?’

‘Stop playing matchmaker and offer the poor man a competent secretary?’ she said with a grin. ‘Although where you are going to find someone who can take shorthand at the speed of light by tomorrow could be harder than getting him back to the altar. We’re booked solid.’

‘Didn’t we have a CV the other day from a girl in Newcastle? She had some incredible speed.’

‘Mmm. Jilly Prescott. You said that she didn’t have the look to be a Garland Girl, Amanda,’ she said doubtfully, glancing at the photograph as she passed over the girl’s CV.

‘My brother has had his quota of Garland Girls for this year. He’s going to have to take what he can get.’

Beth looked unconvinced. ‘She’s awfully young. He’ll chew her up and spit her out before lunchtime.’

‘Maybe.’ Amanda Garland was thoughtful. ‘Maybe not. He thinks our girls are more concerned with image than effort—’

‘That’s because you will send him all the pretty ones—’

‘Well, he won’t be able to say that about Jilly Prescott.’ She regarded the photograph of a very ordinary-looking young woman with a mop of thick dark hair that would stuff a mattress. ‘He wants someone with grit in her character.’ She glanced at Beth. ‘Northern women are supposed to be gritty, aren’t they?’

‘If you think he’ll come to heel like a puppy, Amanda, you don’t know your brother as well as you think you do.’

‘It’s worth a try.’ And her mouth softened into a smile at the thought of what a little grit might do, cast into the smoothly oiled wheels of her brother’s life. She tossed the photograph back at her secretary. ‘Check out her references. If they hold up, call her and tell her to be here first thing tomorrow morning.’

Jilly Prescott dialled her cousin’s number. It rang three times before an answering machine cut in with, ‘Hi, this is Gemma. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number I’ll call you back.’

‘Bother!’ Jilly pushed back an untidy wedge of dark hair from her forehead.

‘Problems, pet?’ her mother enquired, hovering anxiously in the doorway, making sure Jilly didn’t chatter. She hated anyone making long distance calls.

‘No. I’ve got her answering machine, that’s all,’ she replied, waiting for the familiar beep. ‘Gemma, this is Jilly. If you’re there please pick up the phone, it’s urgent.’ She waited for a moment on the off chance that her cousin might just be at home—willing her to be at home. Why did Gemma have to be out tonight of all nights? She continued, ‘I’m just calling to tell you I’ve got a job in London and I’m catching the early morning train into King’s Cross. I’ll call you when I get to London.’ She hung up and turned to her mother. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, with more confidence than she was feeling. ‘She said I could stay any time.’

Her mother looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know, Jilly. What if she’s away?’

‘Of course she isn’t away—it’s January, where would she go in January? She’s out shopping, I expect. She’ll call back later and even if she doesn’t I’ve got her office number. It’ll be all right, honestly.’ The Garland Agency was the best in London and it wanted her. It wanted her tomorrow and who knew when she would get another chance like this? ‘I’d better get on with my packing.’

‘I’ll go and run an iron over your best blouse, then,’ Mrs Prescott said. Jilly knew her mother didn’t want her leaving home, certainly not to stay with Gemma, and keeping busy was her way of hiding it, which was why Jilly didn’t point out that she was more than capable of ironing her own blouse. ‘Heaven knows what you’ll look like when you have to take care of yourself.’

‘I’ll manage.’

‘Will you?’

‘I’ve been ironing my own clothes since I was ten, Mum.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ She paused. ‘Just promise me that if anything goes wrong, if Gemma can’t put you up, you’ll come straight home.’

‘But—’

‘There are always other jobs, Jilly,’ she said, and waited. A promise given to her mother was not something to be undertaken lightly. If she promised to come home, she would have to do just that. But, after all, what could possibly go wrong?

‘I promise, Mum.’

There was an awkward little silence. Then, ‘I suppose you’ll be looking up Richie Blake?’

‘I expect so.’ As if they didn’t both know that it was the one reason she wanted to go to London.

‘Yes, well, he’s a big man now. He might not want to be reminded of home.’

‘We were friends, Mum. Good friends.’ She still remembered the moment she had first set eyes on him, a pathetic new boy, small for his age, with white-blond hair and glasses held together with sticky tape. A bunch of bigger lads had been giving him a hard time and, despite the fact that she was a year or so younger than him, she’d rounded on them, given them a piece of her mind, standing over him like a mother hen with its feathers all ruffled.

After that she’d been stuck with him. Maybe that was why she’d seen more in him than most. Something special.

She’d been the one who had persuaded the PTA to hire him as a DJ for the Christmas dance; she’d sent photos of him to the local papers so he’d get some free publicity; she’d got her brothers to make posters on their computer, made recordings of the crazy patter with which he linked his shows and bombarded the local radio station with them until they’d given him a spot on a youth programme for little more than pocket money.

And she’d loaned him the money for his fare to London when he’d had a phone call offering him a ‘jock’ spot on one of the capital’s commercial stations.

‘You’re a great kid, Jilly,’ he’d said, as she’d stood by the train, waiting for it to pull out of the station, wishing she were going with him. ‘You’re the only one who’s ever believed in me. My best girl. I won’t forget you, I promise.’

‘You are extremely lucky to get a chance like this, Jilly.’ Amanda Garland sounded doubtful.

She wasn’t the only one having doubts, but Jilly’s had nothing to do with her ability to do the job. That wasn’t worrying her at all. What worried her was that Gemma hadn’t been in touch. And although Jilly had called her cousin from the station when she’d arrived in London she’d still only got the answering machine despite the fact that it had been the time of day when a working girl, no matter how late she’d been out the night before, should have been hauling herself out of bed.

And now, as if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, she was faced by a woman who, having brought her post-haste all the way from Newcastle, appeared to be having second thoughts about giving her the promised job. Clearly her beautifully ironed blouse—she’d changed at the station from the jeans and sweatshirt she’d travelled in—was not making the kind of impression her mother had imagined it would. But in this sharp, glossy world anything she was wearing would look shabby.

She had done her best to portray the image of a smart, efficient, well-groomed secretary—as well groomed as a mop of hair that hadn’t really been cut since she was ten years old would allow. She’d screwed it into a French pleat and anchored the loose strands with combs, but she could feel it threatening to burst loose even as she sat there.

It had worked well enough back home—certainly impressed the solicitor she had been working for until he’d retired a few weeks earlier—but in the glamorous world of Knightsbridge she looked exactly what she was: an ordinary girl from an ordinary little town in the industrial north-east. It would take more than a neatly pressed cotton blouse and chain store suit to disguise the fact.

She might have done better to have worn a pair of jeans and a plain white T-shirt, her hair in a pigtail—that at least was a classic any girl could aspire to. Except the woman who faced her across a vast acreage of immaculately tidy desk, her jet hair glossy, small white hands the perfect setting for the king’s ransom of diamonds she was wearing on her fingers, undoubtedly wore designer jeans—the ones with the label stitched on the outside so you’d know how expensive they were. Jilly’s, on the other hand, came from the sort of shops where, if you wanted to preserve any kind of street cred, you cut out the labels before you wore them.

Nobody was fooled but it avoided catty put-downs such as, ‘I only buy my knickers from that place’ and you just knew the cat in question meant her everyday knickers—not the sort she’d wear on a really hot date. Or, even worse, the teeth-curlingly awful, ‘Good grief, my mother shops there…’

And now Amanda Garland of the Garland Agency was looking down her long, straight nose in a way that suggested she couldn’t quite believe that she had offered Jilly Prescott a job of any kind—no matter how brilliant she might be on paper.

Actually, now she was sitting in a thick-carpeted, soft-focus office opposite the kind of high-powered woman she associated with glossy American soaps, Jilly couldn’t quite believe it either.