His Girl Monday To Friday. Linda Miles

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘NO,’ SAID BARBARA.

      She buried her nose ostentatiously in Colloquial Romanian. It was the fifth time she’d said it, and the fifth time she’d read that page on the compound perfect, and for the fifth time, as with all the other four, neither of the other two people in the room paid a blind bit of notice.

      Barbara was curled up in the window-seat of her parents’ sitting room. To her right were a pleasant view of a garden, rose bushes, a glimpse of Richmond; to her left squashy furniture in floral fabrics and a confusion of unfinished projects. Half-knitted jumpers, half-patched quilts, half-embroidered napkins trailed from baskets, bookshelves, the backs of chairs. Among the confusion were her mother Ruth, a woman incapable of thinking badly of anyone, and Charles Mallory, a man only a woman who couldn’t wouldn’t think badly of.

      ‘What a marvellous idea!’ Ruth exclaimed now, for the sixth or seventh time. ‘It’s wonderful that Barbara has so many interests, but I sometimes feel she has a tendency to pick things up and put them down. It would be good for her to see something through to the end—and what a chance to use all those languages!’

      Ruth had always thought of Charles as a son; it was wonderful the way he’d thought of Barbara when he could have had anyone. ‘It seems as if it was meant!’ She beamed at Charles over the ribbing of a sweater she’d just started from a pattern out of a magazine.

      Charles grinned—somehow Barbara managed to see this even though she wasn’t looking at him but at page 181 of Colloquial Romanian. It was the grin that had sent all the girls in his class weak at the knees that first year he’d come to stay with her parents fifteen years ago; she could just about remember the devastating effect it had had when she’d first seen it, age eleven.

      His face was harder now—the mouth ruthless in repose, the green eyes cold and penetrating as steel, the lines of jaw and nose and forehead almost brutal now that the black hair was cropped so close to the skull—but the grin still lit up his face in the way that had been so irresistible at seventeen. Now, of course—well, now was another matter.

      ‘She was the first person I thought of,’ he said.

      He thrust his hands in his pockets and began pacing up and down the room, his long legs tracing an awkward path through the clutter.

      “This is the biggest thing I’ve done,’ he said. ‘Eastern Europe is going to start taking off any day—we’ve got to get in now. I need someone with the right skills to back me up. Not easy to find, and I can’t afford to spend six months looking.’

      ‘No, indeed,’ Ruth said sympathetically, finishing a row.

      ‘And, anyway, the hell of it is you can’t give a recipe for the right package of skills—I need a quick study. It’s going to be a roller-coaster ride and I need someone who can cope with that.’

      ‘Barbara would be perfect!’

      ‘And I need someone I can count on.’

      That was the last straw. Barbara stopped pretending to read.

      ‘Well, you can’t count on me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to do it I’m not interested. I do not want to work for you.’

      At last she had their attention.

      ‘Barbara!’ her mother exclaimed reproachfully.

      Charles scowled—no smiles for the Perfect Secretary. ‘Why not?’

      ‘Because you’re a self-centred, bad-tempered, high-handed, arrogant swine,’ said Barbara.

      She lifted her chin defiantly, shook the glossy dark red fringe from her eyes and raised brilliant blue eyes to glare, furiously, at the only man she had ever loved.

      ‘Barbara!’

      ‘And that’s an understatement!’ she added unrepentantly.

      ‘It’s not a job for shrinking violets—’ he began.

      ‘It’s not a job for anyone who cares about common courtesy. There are people who think drill sergeants shouldn’t write books of etiquette because they’re too polite. I suggest you find the other one, and hire him.’

      ‘You only worked for me one day—’

      ‘It