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About the Author Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Copyright

“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

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.’

‘Stately home?’

‘I‘ll discuss it with you in my office.’ He stood up and raked his fingers through his hair. Alice looked at him and it flew through her mind—a thought so brief that it barely left an indentation—that she had yet to come across a man as compellingly attractive as Victor Temple. The angles of his face were hard, bordering on arrogant, but for all that there was a certain underlying sensuality about him. It was there in his mouth, in his dark-fringed eyes, in the supple grace of his body. He never worked out and probably wouldn’t recognise the inside of a gym if he saw it, but his body was sleek and well-toned. A lean, athletic body which was apparent beneath the cut of his suit.

Was that one of the reasons why they worked so well together? She could acknowledge, in a detached, clinical way, that he was almost frighteningly good-looking, but he did not appeal to her. Tall, dark-haired and handsome all added up to the sort of man she knew, instinctively, was best avoided. She had already made one mistake in that direction and it was a mistake she would never repeat.

In turn, she was quite simply not his type. He did not sport a line of ever-changing women. She had met them both, and they both slotted into the same category—sexy, blonde and, at least from the outside, highly undemanding on the intellectual front. They had both struck her as the sort of women who accessorised what they wore to match their lipstick and nail varnish, and in high winds would somehow still manage to hold onto an immaculate hairdo and impeccable make-up.

His last secretary, who had left six months before she had arrived, had been, according to some of the girls in the office, a fifty-something harridan with a penchant for tweed skirts, even in summer, and sensible shoes. Then had come a dizzying and unsatisfactory array of young girls, none of whom had stayed the pace.

Alice knew that what he appreciated in her were her mind and her lack of obvious sex appeal. It was either a flattering or alternatively depressing comment on her, depending from which side of the fence it was viewed. As for her, she welcomed it with relief.

When she went into his office, he was on the phone; he leaned back in his chair and motioned to her to sit down, watching her as she did so.

Alice was suddenly acutely conscious of her appearance. There had been nothing in the slightest way sexual about his look, but there had been a certain unexpected appreciation there—must a flicker, but enough to register in her subconscious. The applications of sun cream had done the trick, eventually. She had not developed a deep tan, but there was a pale bronze glow about her which was quite becoming.

She sat down now, smoothing her skirt with her fingers, and gazed straight ahead of her, out through the window to the oppressive blue-grey sky outside. Glow or not glow, she didn’t need a mirror to tell her what she lacked. Her straight dark hair, falling to her shoulders, was shiny enough and easy to look after, but, coupled with her fine-boned face, somehow managed to give her a background, girl-next-door look, and she lacked curves. She knew that and it didn’t bother her except, occasionally, when she happened to be in the company of someone blatantly sexy, at which times she would feel the smallest twinge of envy that there was an entire world of clinging, low-cut dresses that would for ever be out of her range.

‘Hello?’ She heard the deep timbre of his voice and refocused her attention back to the present.

‘Sorry. I was miles away.’

‘And not a particularly pleasant place, judging from the expression.’

Alice blushed and looked down at the notepad on her lap. Sometimes it was easy to forget just how shrewd Victor Temple could be when it came to reading other people’s minds. His own, he kept suitably under lock and key.

‘Just thinking what needs doing when I get back home,’ she improvised, and he raised his eyebrows with a certain amount of sarcastic amusement

‘Well, so sorry to drag you back to mundane office matters.’ He sat back with his arms folded and subjected her to a leisurely stare. ‘I can’t imagine your flat being anything other than scrupulously tidy,’ he drawled, which brought more colour to her cheeks and she returned his look with a Sash of sudden anger.

‘It’s a mess,’ she said flatly, defying him to contradict her. ‘Books everywhere, clothes everywhere, dishes not washed.’ She stared down to conceal the rebellious glint in her eyes. Did he think that she was prim and proper and precise? Did he think that, because she was efficient at work and well organised, she was exactly the same out of work? For all he knows, she thought, I could lead a scorching and raunchy life the minute I leave this office block.

‘I’m impressed,’ he told her, amused at her tone of voice. ‘Vanessa not pulling her weight?’

‘Post-holiday clutter,’ Alice said, stifling an inclination to scowl. ‘We’ve hardly had time to unpack our cases.’

‘Why don’t you get a cleaner?’

‘Because it’s an unnecessary luxury.’

‘Don’t I pay you enough?’

‘More than enough,’ she said, restlessly wondering where this conversation was leading. She glanced at him from under her lashes, trying to determine his mood. ‘I happen to rather enjoy cleaning,’ she murmured finally. ‘I find it relaxing.’

‘You’re the first woman I’ve ever heard say that.’

Perhaps you mix with the wrong sort, she felt like telling him. Not that he would have appreciated women who wanted to tidy his house for him. She thought that he would probably run a mile if he were ever to be confronted with a domestic type. Domesticity was not a characteristic he would find especially appealing in a member of the opposite sex. He didn’t want cosy nights in watching television, he didn’t want home-cooked meals, he didn’t want the little lady ever to wear an apron and attempt to tidy him up into a candidate for marriage.

‘You were telling me that you have a new client on board?’

‘I have a file here somewhere.’ He pulled open the drawer of his desk and rummaged briefly inside, frowning. ‘Now where did I put the damned thing? I was sure I stuck it in my drawer.’

‘Perhaps Rebecca filed it away,’ Alice said helpfully.

‘Why would she do that?’ Victor asked irritably.

‘Because she might consider it one of her duties? Filing tends to come into the job specification for a secretary. Even for those who don’t complete their secretarial courses.’

He slammed shut the drawer of his desk and favoured her with a narrowed look. ‘Sarcasm, Alice?’ He raised his eyebrows expressively. ‘Since when?’

Alice didn’t say anything. Normally, she bit back any retorts she might have fermenting in her head. Normally, she maintained an even, placid demeanour. She did her job and very rarely allowed herself the luxury of personal input. But two weeks in the sun had stirred something inside her. There had been a lot of young couples there, blissfully wrapped up in one another, oblivious to the outside world. The hotel specialised in honeymoon holidays, and from that point of view had not been chosen with a great deal of foresight, because for the first time Alice had been conscious of her own relentlessly single state. True, Vanessa was single as well, but her life was brimming over with men. She emanated a certain vivacious attractiveness that drew them in droves.

Her own situation was, she acknowledged realistically, slightly different. No men beating a path to her door, although she had a few male friends who occasionally asked her out to dinner, or the theatre, and it was only now, strangely, that she felt the lack of them. Perhaps, she thought, because she had crossed the thirty threshold. Time suddenly seemed to be moving faster. The gentle breeze that had flicked over the pages of the calendar was gathering momentum, flicking those pages faster and faster.

She smiled at Victor, meeting his speculative look with studied incomprehension, and decided that any restlessness was best left at home, or at least locked away in a compartment in her head that was inaccessible to anyone apart from herself.

‘What did you and that flatmate of yours get up to on holiday?’ he asked curiously, and Alice could have kicked herself. Victor Temple enjoyed getting his teeth into a challenge. For the past year and a half, she had shown him one face, and although at the beginning he had asked polite questions about her outside life he had quickly realised that answers would not be forthcoming, and he had soon lost interest.

Now, stupidly, she had afforded him a glimpse of someone else behind the efficient smile.

‘Oh, the usual things,’ Alice said vaguely.

‘Really? Like what?’

‘You said it yourself: we swanned around the pool and turned to leather.’ Most of the couples, she thought, had looked young enough to be her children. Or perhaps she just felt old enough to be their mother. A sudden, sour taste of dissatisfaction rose to her throat and subsided again. Whatever was the matter with her? she wondered irritably. She had never been prone to self-pity, and she hoped that she wasn’t about to become a victim of it now.

‘You couldn’t have spent a fortnight doing just that.’

‘We went to the beach a few times as well.’ She would have liked to somehow draw the subject back to the stately home, and the portfolio of other clients awaiting attention, but she knew that to have done that would only have succeeded in sharpening his curiosity still further. In a minute, he would become bored trying to extract information from her and he would give up.

‘Good bathing?’

‘Cold.’

‘And what about in the evenings? What do young single girls get up to when they go abroad on holiday?’ He grinned, amused at her discomfort, which annoyed her even more.

‘I would have thought that you knew the answer to that one,’ Alice said evenly. ‘After all, we do enough advertisements on the subject.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He sat back and gazed at her thoughtfully. ‘Nightclubs, bars.’ He paused. ‘Sex.’ He allowed the word to drop between them, like forbidden fruit, and she went bright red.

‘I’m not that young,’ was all she could think of saying by way of reply.

‘You mean that you’re too old for nightclubs? Bars? Or sex? Or all three?’

She snapped shut her notepad and glared at him openly. ‘What I do on holiday is none of your concern, Mr Temple. If you’re really that interested in finding out what the young single female gets up to on holiday, then I suggest you go along yourself and find out firsthand. I’m sure that you’d find no end of women willing to show you.’ She heard herself with dismay and confusion, alarmed that he had managed to provoke her into a response that was extraordinarily out of keeping with her normally unobtrusive work persona.

‘Well, well, well.’ He linked his fingers together and inspected her. A long, deliberate and leisurely inspection that was as unwelcome as it was disconcerting. She could feel her nails biting into the notepad and for the life of her she couldn’t think of a way of wriggling out of her embarrassment.

‘Quite a show of temper,’ he said, in the voice of a scientist who suddenly discovered that his experimental mouse had unexpected talents.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said in as brisk a voice as she could manage. Now she felt like bursting into tears, which was ridiculous. She had obviously been doing too much thinking and Victor’s insinuations that she was a dull bore didn’t help matters. ‘Perhaps we could get on with...’

‘Oh, no, not so fast. I’m intrigued.’ He linked his fingers behind his head and continued to stare at her. ‘I was beginning to wonder whether there was anything behind that efficient veneer.’

‘Oh, thank you very much,’ Alice muttered.

‘Now I’ve offended you.’ He didn’t sound contrite. In fact, he sounded as though he was enjoying the situation enormously. The devil, she thought, works on idle hands. He had spent two weeks like a bear with a sore head and now he was catching up. He was relieved that she was back and relief had awakened some dormant desire to have a bit of a laugh at her expense.

‘Not at all,’ she said, gathering herself together.

‘You never told me what you did on that holiday of yours. Something obviously happened. You’re not your usual self. What was it? Did you meet a man?’ He smiled as though amused at the thought of that. ‘What was he like? Do you realise that I know very little about your private life? Considering the length of time you’ve been working for me?’

‘Yes.’ And that’s just the way I’d like it to stay, her voice implied.

‘I hope you’re not thinking of deserting me to get married and have babies.’

Alice winced. The prospect of that couldn’t have been further from reality. Marriage? Children? She had buried any such thoughts a long time ago. It seemed like decades ago.

‘You’ve never struck me as the sort of girl who wants to rush into all that,’ he continued musingly, not bothering to wait for her reply. His grey eyes held a question, one she refused to answer. None of this had anything to do with him.

She held her breath, not knowing whether to reply or maintain her silence in the hope that he would eventually shut up, and was saved a decision by the telephone.

It was a protracted conversation, and by the time he got off the phone he had obviously forgotten all about her and her private life. He opened one of the files on his desk, and Alice breathed a sigh of relief.

As he dictated letters to her, and her hand flew over the notepad, turning pages, she realised that she was writing, listening, following orders, but with her mind halfway to somewhere else.

She didn’t want Victor Temple showing any sort of interest in her, even interest of the most casual nature. She had become accustomed to their well-tuned, impersonal relationship. Now she could feel her eyes drifting to him, surreptitiously taking him in, just like all those women whose eyes travelled over him whenever he was in their company.

She woke from her semi-reverie to hear him talking to her about his latest project.

‘It’s a rather grand house.’ There were a series of photos which he began to extract from a folder, flicking through them, turning the pictures this way and that with a frown. ‘Handed down through the generations. The gardens have been landscaped by someone rather famous. The inside of the house itself is quite special, and apparently there are all manner of royal connections, albeit in the past.’

‘Why have the owners come to you?’

‘Owner. Just the one chap and I gather the cost of running the place is proving to be a strain on his bank balance. Reading between the lines, I’d say that the chap in question has eaten his way through quite a bit of the family money and now finds himself with a title and not much else to go with it.’

He looked up and tapped his fountain pen on his desk. ‘Usual story. Large family inheritance which has gradually been whittled down through the ages. Now there’s just the house and the upkeep is fabulously high. Our client figures that if the house is opened to the public he might be able to recover some of the costs of running it. Our job is to sell it, discreetly.’

‘Oh, right.’ She was almost back to normal now, thank heavens. Mind firmly anchored on the task at hand, and Victor back to his usual self. That brief moment had been unsettling to say the very least.

‘Have a look at the photos. Tell me what you think.’

He handed the large, glossy prints to her, and Alice felt a cold chill of horror spread through her. It started in the pit of her stomach and gradually spread through her body until she felt as though her limbs had frozen completely. She couldn’t move. She could hardly think straight. She sifted through the photographs with shaking hands and then placed them on the desk in front of her.

‘Well? What do you think?’ He looked up from the file, which he had been scanning.

‘What sort of advertising campaign does he have in mind?’ Alice asked faintly. Her brain, which had been temporarily numbed, now began working in overdrive. There was no reason, she told herself, that this project should intrude on her life. There was no need for her to involve herself in it in any way whatsoever. She would remain calm, cool, collected.

Victor’s eyes narrowed. ‘A series of spreads in one of the more prestigious country magazines. He wants to open the house and grounds to visitors. In due course, he has plans to turn the place into a country hotel.’

‘I see.’

‘Where the hell are you this morning, Alice?’

‘What do you mean?’ She attempted a smile but the muscles in her face felt stiff.

‘I mean,’ Victor said very slowly, with exaggerated patience, ‘you look as though you’ve seen a ghost. You’re as white as a sheet. Don’t tell me that you’ve picked up some bug on holiday. I don’t think I can stand another fortnight with a temp.’

‘No. I’m fine.’ She swallowed, and rummaged around in her head for something intelligent to say about the campaign. ‘Yes! It doesn’t sound as though it should be a terribly difficult job. I mean, the house more or less speaks for itself.’

‘Right. That’s what I thought.’ He began explaining what he had in mind, while she half-listened and nodded—she hoped in all the right places. ‘I’ve made an appointment for us to visit in a week’s time.’ He snapped shut the file. ‘We should get more of a feel for the place when we see it.’

‘We!’

‘Naturally. I’ll want you there to observe and take notes.’ He scrutinised her face. ‘Why? Is there a problem with that?’

‘No!’ There wasn’t a problem with that, she thought wildly. There were several thousand problems with it. ‘It’s just that I’m not sure whether I shall be able to find the time... I mean, it looks as though Rebecca has left quite a backlog of work to be brought up to date. And then, some of the accounts are a bit behind. I shall have to devote some time to chasing them...’ Her voice drifted off into silence and he looked at her as though she had taken leave of her senses.

‘You can clear the backlog in a matter of a day or two,’ Victor said slowly, as though talking to someone mentally deficient. ‘And Sam’s handled some of the overdue accounts. I made sure that she brought them up to date. Any more excuses?’

‘I really would rather not be on this particular job,’ Alice confessed flatly, when she couldn’t think of another excuse to give him. It made no difference anyway. She recognised that glint in his eye. She could throw a million excuses at him and short of her taking to her bed with a broken leg he would simply demolish them one by one until he had got what he wanted. Namely, her presence there.

‘Why not?’

‘I’d rather not go into it, if you don’t mind. I’m only asking you to respect my request.’

‘And I’d rather you did go into it, if you don’t mind. When I hear what you’ve got to say, then I’ll tell you whether I shall respect your request or not.’

Typical, she thought with helpless, frustrated despair. Typical, typical, typical. Anyone else would have simply nodded and let the matter rest. Anyone else with even an ounce of sympathy would have trusted that her reasons were valid, and would have acquiesced to her request. But not Victor Temple, oh, no. If he saw a Keep Out sign, then his immediate response was to try and get in. And he wouldn’t be content to try and find the easiest entrance. He would simply take the quickest route and would use whatever methods he had at his disposal. The man was a shark.

How could this have happened? How could the one man in the world she wanted to have nothing to do with, with the one stately house in the world she would rather never have re-entered, have chosen the one advertising company in the country she worked at to promote his wretched place?

She knew how, of course. Victor Temple ran the tightest ship. His advertising firm was highly respected because it was highly successful.

But, she reasoned, she need not divulge any of her private affairs to him. She nodded, defeated. ‘All right. I’ll come with you. Perhaps you could give me the precise date so that I can enter it into the diary?’

‘Dates. We’ll be there for a total of three days.’

Could it get worse?

‘And do you mind telling me why,’ Victor said casually, before they moved on to other things, ‘you’ve changed your mind?’

‘Yes. Actually, I do.’

The shrewd grey eyes looked at her carefully, as though he was seeing her for the first time.

‘What a day of revelations this is turning out to be,’ he said dryly. ‘First your little display of temper, and now some deep, dark secret. I’m beginning to wonder what other surprises you have in store for me.’

‘It’s no deep, dark secret,’ Alice told him, and she punctuated the lie with a light laugh. ‘And I don’t have any surprises in store for you, or anyone else for that matter.’

‘Well. I suppose we shall just have to wait and see.’ He returned her laugh with one of his own, but she could tell from the expression in his eyes that his curiosity had been aroused, and she contemplated the prospect of three days at Highfield House with sick trepidation.

They said that you could never really leave your past behind. Sooner or later it caught up with you.

Now her past was catching up. All she could do was ensure that it didn’t sink its claws into her.

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