Man-Hater. PENNY JORDAN

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      SHE must be getting old, Kelly thought tiredly as she snapped on the office lights. Time was when she had worked well into the evening and had still left the office with her batteries fully charged and her brain working on overdrive, but that had been when she had first started the agency off. Now that it was successful she was missing the challenge of those early days.

      She sighed as she pressed the button for the lift. Her offices were in a prestigious block owned by one of the major insurance companies—clients of hers. The publicity work she had done for them had been so successful that she had been able to negotiate a very reasonable rent for the premises.

      One of the reasons she had had to work late was that she had spent the morning with her accountant going over the figures for the company’s current trading year. Ian Carlisle had been full of praise and admiration. The company looked set to turn in a record profit. ‘And with the sound capital base it’s had right from the start, you’re in a very good position, Kelly,’ he had told her.

      Ian worked for the firm who handled her grandfather’s affairs. He had been the one to shock her with the astounding news of her grandfather’s wealth, shortly after his death. To find herself an heiress at eighteen had come so totally out of the blue that it had taken her quite some time to come to terms with it. Kelly had never dreamed that the grandparents who had brought her up in the modest detached house just outside London had possessed such wealth, and with hindsight she doubted that even her grandmother had known of her husband’s predilection for the Stock Market, nor his astounding success.

      At first Kelly had been too overwhelmed by the money to cope with the responsibility of it. It was only later—after Colin—that she had become possessed by the need to make the money work, to prove that women could be just as successful and astute as men.

      So why was it that she felt so depressed? By rights she ought to be celebrating the company’s third birthday and its enviable success—not planning a lonely meal in her apartment followed by an early night after she had checked Sylvester’s figures for the Harding contract.

      That success often equalled loneliness was something she was only just beginning to realise; but that was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Far better the hard-won fruits of success than the perils of emotional commitment—of relying on another human being. Since Colin she had not relied on anyone other than herself—and that was the way she wanted it, she told herself firmly.

      Outside, the streets were empty of the rush hour traffic. Success meant that one could not work a mere nine-to-five day—but it had been worth it, Kelly assured herself, barely giving her reflection more than the merest fleeting glance as she glimpsed her slender trench-coated figure in the store window. Kelly’s was one of the most successful companies of its kind in the city, and Kelly herself had the reputation of being a genius where getting good publicity for her clients was concerned. Top-class advertising agencies vied with one another to work alongside her, and she knew without a trace of vanity that the company’s success was solely due to her own hard work and flair.

      So why, tonight of all nights, was she in this oddly introspective mood? Why on earth was she questioning the quality of her life? The cost of total commitment to her career? She had made the choice, no one had forced her. After Colin she could simply have continued as she had done before; she was a wealthy young woman with no need to work. A form of therapy, Ian had once called it, and she wasn’t sure if he wasn’t right. And it had worked. So why was she feeling so restless? She was twenty-six; wealthy in her own right; commercially successful. She was attractive, intelligent, and had a close if small circle of friends. What on earth had she to feel restless about?

      By the time she reached her apartment she had managed to throw off her earlier mood, and she unlocked her door with a small sigh of relief.

      The apartment had been carefully chosen and decorated to reflect the image of the agency. The walls and carpet of the large living-room merged in matching softly grey blues; two large settees covered in off-white silk facing one another across a glass and stained-wood coffee table that matched the décor exactly, as did the silk-covered cushions heaped artfully on the off-white settees, in colours ranging from soft blue-grey to a rich deep azure. Kelly had employed the same firm of interior designers for the apartment as she had done for the office, and the result was a classical, if somewhat cold perfection. The apartment, as always, was impeccable. Kelly was lucky enough to have a first-class cleaner who came every morning to restore the apartment to its pristine splendour. Normally she enjoyed the cool remoteness of the living room with its gracefully modern Italian furniture, its ‘touch me not’ air of impeccability, but tonight, for some reason, it repelled her, and she found herself thinking instead of the house in Hampstead she had shared with Colin; of the bliss that had been hers for those few short months she had spent planning the décor—a décor far removed from the elegance of her apartment.

      What was past was past, she told herself firmly as she shrugged off her trench coat in her bedroom, hanging it up as she had been taught to do by her grandmother, who had been a stickler for tidiness. She remembered that Colin had mocked her for this habit—as he had done for so many things, only at the time she had been too blind to recognise the truth for what it was, and had thought he was simply teasing her.

      The excellence of her plain navy pin-striped skirt and white silk blouse spoke for themselves. The silk clung treacherously to the curves of her breasts—too generous