CATHY WILLIAMS - The Secretary's Scandalous Secret

‘Is there a sting in the tail with that remark?’ Luc looked at her wonderingly before easing his car out of its parking space to head back towards the centre.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘No,’ he said shortly, still unnerved by the underhand trick his body had played on him back there. ‘I don’t suppose you do.’

‘What do you mean, then? ‘

‘I mean that honesty is all well and good, but in London it might pay to be a bit more streetwise.’ No wonder Edith worried about her. ‘For one thing, you’re being ripped off by your landlord. How much are you paying for that dump? ‘

‘It’s not a dump!’ But she told him, and her heart sank when he gave a bark of cynical laughter.

‘The man must have seen you coming a mile off. Green round the ears, no clue as to what sort of questions to ask, waving a stash of money. So what does he do? Overcharge for a disgusting hole with erratic heating and not enough space to swing a cat. Fifteen minutes in that place and I could spot enough signs of damp and rot to get the whole house condemned.’

‘It’s more comfortable when the weather’s warm.’

‘I bet it is.’ Luc’s lips curled with derision. ‘You don’t have to spend your nights praying that the place will be warm when you wake up in the morning! It’s a disgrace.’

‘I suppose,’ Agatha admitted on a sigh. ‘But when I looked around, Mr Travis promised that he would put right loads of things. I keep asking him, but his mother’s been taken into hospital and the poor man’s hardly been around.’

At this Luc burst out laughing before glancing across at her with rampant disbelief at her gullibility. ‘So Poor Mr Travis has a sick mother in hospital which means that he just can’t find the time to make sure that the damp problem in the bedsit gets seen to—or the rotting window frames get fixed, or the rancid carpet gets taken up? I wonder how poor Mr Travis would feel if a letter from my lawyer landed on his desk tomorrow morning.’

‘You wouldn’t! ‘

‘Oh, I would, believe me. The man’s a crook who’s decided to take advantage of you. I’m not a superstitious guy, but I’m beginning to think that my mother’s phone call was the hand of fate, because another month in that place in the middle of January and you would have been the one occupying the hospital bed—with pneumonia! No wonder you wear ten layers of clothing when you come to work. You’ve probably become accustomed to that!’

‘I don’t wear ten layers of clothes when I come to work.’ The words ‘charity case’ were swimming in her head, making her feel nauseous.

‘You weren’t equipped for life in London.’ Luc steamrollered over her interruption. ‘You grew up in a vicarage and spent your short working life in a garden centre watering plants. I can’t say that I enjoy being anybody’s caretaker, but I’m beginning to see why my mother wanted me to get involved.’

‘That’s the most horrible thing you could ever say to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because…’ Because, a little voice said nastily, she didn’t want Luc Laughton to think of her as a hapless country bumpkin who needed looking after. She wanted him to think of her as a sexy young woman—or even just as a woman. Fat chance! He hadn’t even noticed her outfit. At least in any way that could be interpreted as complimentary.

‘Well? I’m not in the habit of doing good deeds, but I’m willing to change my life rules for you. You should be flattered.’

‘No one’s ever flattered to think that they’re too stupid to take care of themselves,’ Agatha told him stiffly. Her eyes stung but she wasn’t going to feel sorry for herself. She was going to remember that she was about to have dinner with a dishy, eligible man who would never have asked her out if he had thought that she was as pathetic as Luc made her out to be.

‘I’ve always found that it pays to be realistic,’ Luc responded bracingly. ‘When my father died and I came home to that financial mess, I realised very quickly that I could do one of two things: I could sit around, get depressed and become bitter or I could just go out and begin to rebuild everything that was lost.’

‘I find it hard to think of you getting depressed or feeling bitter.’

‘I don’t allow those negative feelings to influence what I do in life.’

‘I wish I could be as strong minded as you,’ Agatha was forced to concede, thinking of all the doubts she had nurtured over the years despite her very happy background.

When her friends had all started experimenting with make-up and going on diets so that they could look like the models in magazines, she had taken a back seat, knowing that inner beauty was all that mattered, and that wanting to look like someone else or aspire to someone else’s life was a waste of time. Of course, in London, the whole inner-beauty conviction had taken a bit of a knocking. She had largely felt like a fish out of water when she had gone out with her girlfriends from work, who had developed amazing skills of transformation, morphing from office workers to vamps with a change of clothes and bold make-up. Her stretchy black dress which made her feel horrendously exposed because it was fairly short with a fairly revealing neckline was still conservative compared to the stuff some of her friends wore, and she was so unaccustomed to wearing jewellery that she had to stop herself from twiddling with the strands of chunky copper round her neck.

‘I mean,’ she continued, musing, ‘You’re so sure of yourself. You set your goals and you just go after them. Like a bloodhound.’

‘Nice comparison,’ Luc muttered under his breath.

‘Don’t you ever sit back and wonder if you’re doing the right thing?’

‘Never.’ With more than half the journey completed, Luc thought that it was time he got down to the business of quizzing her about her date. More and more, he got the feeling that she was a loose cannon, an innocent released to the mercy of any passing opportunist. ‘So this Stewart character…?’ he prompted.

Brought back down to earth with a bump, Agatha blinked. Her mind had been wandering. She had almost forgotten about Stewart.

‘Yes…?’

‘How did you meet him? ‘

‘Oh, usual way,’ she said with a casual, studied shrug; this was the perfect opportunity to prove to him that she wasn’t as abnormal as he seemed to think she was. ‘At a bar. You know…’

‘At a bar? You go bar hopping?’

‘When you say “bar hopping”…’

‘Moving from bar to bar,’ Luc intoned very slowly, emphasising each word. ‘Getting more and more drunk before finally landing up somewhere, barely able to stand.’

Agatha bid a fond farewell to nurturing that misconception for him. The whole idea sounded pretty disgusting. She had heard ample stories of girls who had got themselves in trouble by doing just that sort of thing. Her father had counselled at least three that she could remember.

‘When you told me that you were worried about me getting into trouble, that’s not what you were talking about, was it? You didn’t really think that I might end up pregnant by some guy whose name I never found out because I had gone out and had too much to drink, did you?’

‘Calm down. I don’t think you’re the kind of girl.’

Insult or compliment? she wondered. Compliment, she decided. ‘I met him at a wine bar. Near the office, actually. I went there with a couple of girls from work. We were having a drink and the bar tender brought over a bottle of champagne and told us that Stewart had sent it for me. When I looked over, he waved and then he came across to join us, and he and I ended talking for quite a while.’