The Boss's Proposal. Cathy Williams
by no means abandoned.
He has a God complex, the bastard. He’s always felt that he could run my life, along with everyone else’s. She could hear Shaun’s voice, high and resentful as it always had been whenever he spoke about his brother. Vicky’s tightly controlled mind slowly began to unravel as her eyes locked with Max Hedley Forbes. Because that was his name. She’d heard it often enough from Shaun’s lips. A litany of bitterness and antagonism towards a brother whose mission in life, she’d been told often enough, had been to undermine as many people as he could in the minimum amount of time. He’d been a monster of selfishness, Shaun had said to her, a man who only knew how to take, a man who rode roughshod over the rest of the human race and most of all over his one and only brother, whose name he’d discredited so thoroughly that even his father had chosen to turn his back on his son.
It had never occurred to her when she applied for this job that fate would be waiting for her just around the corner. Max Forbes lived in New York and had done for years. She’d never thought that she would end up finding him in an office building in Warwick, of all places. The past squeezed her soul and she briefly closed her eyes, giving in to the vertigo threatening to overwhelm her.
Shaun might have turned out to be a nightmare, but nightmares were not born, they were made. The world and the people in it had shaped him, and the man coolly inspecting her now had been pivotal in the shaping of his brother. However awful Shaun had been, wasn’t this man opposite her worse?
‘So,’ the dark, velvety voice drawled, dragging her away from her painful trip down memory lane and back to the present, ‘you claim to be neurotic and highly strung, yet—’ he reached forward to a stack of papers on the desk and extracted one, from which he read ‘—you still managed to sustain a reasonably high-powered job in Australia from which you left with glowing recommendations. Odd, wouldn’t you agree? Or perhaps your neuroses were under control at that point in time?’
Vicky refrained from comment and instead contented herself with staring out of the window, which offered a view of sky and red-brick buildings.
‘Has Geraldine given you any indication as to why this post has become available?’ He moved around the desk and perched on it, so that he was directly facing Vicky, looking down at her.
‘Not in any great detail, no,’ Vicky told him, ‘but honestly, there’s no point launching into any explanations. The fact of the matter is…’ What was the fact of the matter? ‘The fact of the matter is that I had really set my heart on working in a typing pool…’
His lips twitched, but when he answered his voice was serious and considering.
‘Of course. I quite understand that you might not want to compromise your undoubted talents by getting a good job with career prospects…’
Vicky shot him a brief look from under thick, dark lashes, momentarily disconcerted by the suggestion of humour beneath the sarcasm. ‘I have an awful lot on my plate just now,’ she said vaguely. ‘I wouldn’t want to take on anything demanding because I don’t think that I would be able to do it justice.’
‘What?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘What have you got on your plate?’ His eyes scanned her CV then focused on her.
‘Well,’ Vicky stuttered, taken aback by the directness of the question, ‘I’ve only recently returned from Australia and I have a lot of things to do concerning…my house and generally settling in…’ This explanation skirted so broadly around the truth that she could feel the colour rise to her cheeks.
‘Why did you decide to go to Australia?’
‘My mother…passed away…I felt that the change would do me good…and I just happened to stay a great deal longer than I had anticipated. I landed a job in a very good company quite early on and I was promoted in the first six months. I…it was easier than coming back to England and dealing with…’
‘Your loss?’
Vicky stiffened at the perceptiveness behind the question. She’d once considered Shaun to be a perceptive, sensitive person. Perhaps illusions along those lines ran in the Forbes family.
‘I would appreciate it if we could terminate this interview now.’ She began getting to her feet, smoothing down the dark grey skirt, nervously brushing non-existent flecks of dust from it rather than face those amazing, unsettling grey eyes. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve wasted your time. I realise that you’re a very busy man, and time is money. Had I been aware of the situation, I would have telephoned to cancel the appointment. As I said, I’m not interested in a job that’s going to monopolise my free time.’
‘Your references,’ he said coolly, ignoring her pointed attempt to leave his office, ‘from the Houghton Corporation are glowing…’ He looked at her carefully while she remained in dithering uncertainty on her feet, unable to turn her back and walk out of the office but reluctant to sit back down and allow him to think that the job in question was open for debate. ‘Very impressive, and all the more so because I know James Houghton very well.’
‘You know him?’ Several potential catastrophes presented themselves to her when she heard this and she weakly sat back down. It wouldn’t do for Max Forbes to contact her old boss in Australia. There were too many secrets hidden away there, secrets she had no intention of disclosing.
‘We went to school together a million years ago.’ He pushed himself up from the desk and began prowling around the room, one minute within her line of vision, the next a disembodied voice somewhere behind her. If his tactic was to unsettle her, then he was going about it the right way. ‘He’s a good businessman. A recommendation from him counts for a hell of a lot.’ He paused and the silence from behind her made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. ‘Where in Australia did you live?’
‘In the city. My aunt has a house there.’ There was an element of danger in this line of questioning but Vicky had no idea how to retrieve the situation.
‘Did much socialising?’
‘With whom?’ she asked cautiously. It would help, she thought, if he would return within her line of vision so that she could see the expression on his face—but then, on reflection, perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing that she couldn’t. After all, he would be able to see hers, and she had a great deal more to hide than he would ever have imagined in a million years.
‘People from your work.’ She could sense him as he walked slowly round to the side of her. His presence made her feel clammy and claustrophobic. Out of the corner of her eye, she could make him out as he lounged against the wall, hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, head tilted slightly to one side as though carefully weighing up what she was saying. Weighing it up and, she thought with a flash of sudden foreboding, storing up every word to be used at a later date in evidence against her.
Not that there would be a later date, she reminded herself. Powerful though he was, he couldn’t compel her to work for his company. He might grill her now because she had been stupid enough to make him think that there was more to her than met the eye, but very shortly she would be gone and he would be nothing more than a freakish reminder of how eerie coincidence could be. The thought of imminent escape steadied her nerves and she even managed to force a smile to her face.
‘Off and on. I had a lot of friends in Sydney. The Australians are a very friendly lot.’ She risked a sideways glance at him.
‘So I’ve been told. My brother certainly thought so.’
‘You had a brother out there?’ A slow crawl of treacherous colour stole across her face and she could feel a fine perspiration begin to film above her lip.
‘Shaun Forbes.’ He allowed the name to register. ‘My twin.’
He had never told her. She’d known Shaun for nearly a year and a half and he’d never once mentioned that the brother whose name he reviled was his identical twin. She imagined now that it must have been deeply galling to have so spectacularly failed