The Secretary's Scandalous Secret (5 page)

She hadn’t asked him to start interfering in her life. He had barely noticed her for the past eight months, but now that he had been forced to he had decided to give the project his full and complete attention. But he still couldn’t conceal the fact that he found her annoying and a nuisance. Everything
about her offended him, starting with the way she didn’t seem to know how to suck up to him sufficiently, and ending with the way she looked—and Luc, being Luc, he made no bones about hiding his reaction.

And now he needed to chat to her. It could only be about her job. He had gone away, added up all the reasons why she didn’t belong in his company and was going to break it to her that, however indebted he felt to her mother, having her as dead weight in his office was too steep a price to pay.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she burst out as soon as he had killed the engine. ‘And you can just tell me right here.’ She had unclasped her seat belt, and now she swivelled round to look at him.

‘You know what I’m going to say?’

‘Yes. I know what you think of me, and I know exactly what you’re going to say.’ The words tumbled out with feverish urgency.

‘I don’t think you have a clue what I think of you,’ Luc informed her huskily. ‘And you certainly don’t know what I’m going to say to you. And, no, we are not going to have this conversation in my car.’

‘I just want to get it over and done with,’ Agatha implored, but he was already out the car and she hurriedly followed suit, fumbling in her bag for the house key and feeling the tension escalate with every step up to her bedsit.

Stepping back into the room, she switched on the light and looked around it with new eyes, Luc’s eyes. She took in the discoloured walls, which she had tried to hide by sticking up two large, colourful posters, the sagging, tired furniture, the stained carpet peeping out from behind the thin Moroccan rug she had put over it and the seeping cold. He was right; who else would put up with all that?

‘I’m a failure, and you’ve come to terms with that, and you want to find a polite way of telling me to get lost,’ she
said in a rush, before she had even removed her coat. ‘I’m sacked, aren’t I?’

‘Sacked? Why would I want to sack you?’ Eyes as green as the deep ocean stared steadily at her. ‘I want to tell you that I know Stewart Dexter and I know what he wants from you.’

‘Y
OU
know Stewart?’ Agatha’s mouth fell open and she gaped at him in complete bewilderment. ‘I don’t understand. You’ve never met him before; I didn’t introduce you…’

‘Take your coat off and sit down.’

‘If you knew him, why didn’t you come across to say hello?’ While she hovered, frantically trying to unravel this unforeseen turn of events, she found herself being helped out of her coat. ‘Well, I guess it’s a good thing that I’m not being sacked,’ she breathed shakily, clutching the one thing he had said that had made sense.

His fabulous green eyes settled on her and suddenly she felt very exposed in her tight black dress and her silly, high black shoes. It was a relief to sink into the chair facing him. When she glanced down, she was accosted by the embarrassing sight of her deep cleavage and abundant breasts straining against the soft, elastic fabric of her dress. She resolved to shelve the outfit first thing in the morning.

‘But I don’t understand why it was so important for you to race over to the restaurant to tell me this.’

‘When you mentioned the name of the guy you were meeting, it rang a bell, but I didn’t think anything of it,’ Luc said carefully. ‘I have a finger in a lot of pies and so I meet people from a range of industries. And Dexter is a common
enough surname. But then I saw the guy at the restaurant and the alarm bells started ringing.’

‘Alarm bells? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You’re not going to like what I have to say.’ Never one to waste time beating about the bush, Luc now paused and considered his words carefully. Staring across the table at him, her eyes wide and perplexed, Agatha looked very, very young, and strangely enough the revealing nature of her dress only accentuated that impression.

‘How old are you?’ he asked roughly, finding himself momentarily sidetracked.

‘Sorry?’

‘Forget that. It’s not important. There’s no easy way to say this, but Dexter might not be the guy you think he is.’

‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean Stewart Dexter
isn’t
Stewart Dexter? Who is he, then?’

‘He’s someone who used to work for one my companies. When I thought I recognised him, I went back to the office and did a little research.’

‘You ran a background check on my date?’ Agatha trembled. ‘How could you
do
that?’ Her huge blue eyes, staring up at him, were full of reproach.

‘I’d advise any woman to run a background check on a man they’d picked up in a bar before they went out with him on a date, Agatha. This isn’t a small village in Yorkshire.’

‘I’m not ashamed that I trust people, Luc. I know
you
don’t, and I can understand why. Your father trusted George Satz and in return he had all his money stolen from him.’

The story had run in the local newspaper for weeks, with each new revelation of embezzlement producing a fresh torrent of speculation. With Elliot Laughton no longer around to defend himself, details went uncontested. Members of staff were interviewed and their bafflement at the scale of the financial losses only added to the scandal. At the time,
Agatha had felt deeply sorry for Luc, although that was something she would never have shared with him. He had returned from university with a protective barrier around him that repelled words of sympathy. The whole business would surely have accounted for the man he was later to become—a man who would never know how to give anyone else the benefit of the doubt.

Her meandering mind returned to the present and she cleared her throat. ‘Well, almost all his money. So I can see why you’re so suspicious of other people—but I’m not. It would never occur to me to do a background check on anyone! Anyway, we were meeting in a public place, and there was no way that I was going to go anywhere afterwards with him.’ Her angry eyes locked with his and she leaned forward, her hands balled into fists.

‘Like I told you,’ Luc’s voice was cool and even and controlled, ‘You’re not savvy about the kind of guy a girl can get mixed up with in London. Dexter was sacked from the company a year and a half ago. He was a minor cog in one of the IT companies I took over. He was caught trying to hack into confidential programs to do with software. He was kicked out the second the breach was discovered by one of my people.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You don’t
want
to believe me. And I don’t
want
to be sitting here telling you this. But some good Samaritan’s got to fill you in on the man. Naturally, in the case of a dismissal of that nature, no references were forthcoming. He disappeared and, as far as I know, he isn’t working for any of the major players in the country. Did he mention the name of his employer?’

‘No.’ Agatha was beginning to feel giddy. ‘Are you sure about all this? I mean, it’s easy to confuse people…to
think you recognise someone when you don’t know them really…’

‘I don’t make those kinds of mistakes.’

Agatha was immediately silenced.

‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ she muttered eventually.

Luc ignored that. ‘I could find out what outfit Dexter managed to inveigle his way into and get him fired, not least because he would have had to forge his references from my company.’

‘I’m not a child! If Stewart is really the person you think he is, then I can just ask him outright.’

‘And I’m sure he would come up with a very convincing story.’

‘And I would be so easy to convince, wouldn’t I? Because I’m green round the ears.’

‘How is it that you are so good at making me feel like a monster?’ he murmured softly. An unnatural urge to put his arms around her was squashed before it could take form. ‘I’m actually doing you a favour by telling you this.’

‘It doesn’t feel like a favour. Even if Stewart is who you say he is—and I’m still not certain that you haven’t got it wrong; people do get things wrong, even people like you—well, what does that have to do with
me?’

‘I think Dexter sought you out.’

‘Sought me out? That sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory.’ Agatha’s head was in a whirl.

‘Course, it all could be pure coincidence, but my gut feel is that he decided to set up in competition. Have you any idea of the value of gaming software? Which is why it’s one of the most highly confidential areas of all my companies. I have computer-game designers working to create games that could outrun some of the biggest sellers. After Dexter’s hacking attempts, I made sure that all entries were closed down. If he really wanted to get his hands on some of my
developing ideas, he might have thought that he needed to go down a different route.’

Realisation was beginning to dawn for Agatha. Naturally, Luc could be off target with his assumptions, but would he really ever make a mistake like that? When it came to business, his acumen was legendary. Everyone in the company reverently believed that everything he touched turned to gold; only someone blessed with an ability to make sound decisions would ever have possessed that Midas touch.

‘Question: has Dexter been asking you all sorts of questions about the company?’

Agatha twisted in her chair so that she could look at him. ‘Of course he’s been interested in what I have to say.’

‘I’ll bet.’

If only there had been a part of her that could really and truly believe that she hadn’t been used, she would have run with it. Instead, all she could volunteer feebly, was, ‘Everyone deserves a second chance. Even people who come out of prison get second chances.’

She belatedly realised how often the subject of her work had cropped up in the conversation. She had been flattered at the interest and had downplayed her role in the company. In fact, she hadn’t mentioned the broom cupboard once.

‘I think Dexter is manipulating you to access information,’ Luc told her bluntly.

‘What sort of information? This is too much. My head’s beginning to spin.’

Feeling disadvantaged on the chair, Agatha stood up and weaved a wobbly path to the kitchen so that she could pour herself a glass of water. She returned to find Luc standing by the window and idly peering out. He turned when he heard her but remained where he was, six foot two of towering alpha male with the subtlety of a sledge hammer.

Suddenly she was really angry that Luc was the one who
had taken it upon himself to point her in the right direction by humiliating her and then calling it doing her a favour.

She realised how much she preferred the comfort of lusting from afar. Having her heart flutter whenever she glimpsed him at a distance had been a little inconvenient but it had never threatened her peace of mind. She could remember sitting in the snug at the vicarage, curled up with a book, half-reading it, half-pleasantly day dreaming about Luc suddenly noticing her and sweeping her off her feet. At seventeen, it had been a very nice day-dream.

A living, fire-breathing Luc with a mission to save her from herself was more than she could bear. He was just
too much.
She felt like a moth helplessly drawn to the blinding brightness of a fire, knowing that the nearer she got the more dangerous her situation became.

She didn’t want him to turn his attention to her; she didn’t want him to think that he had to look after her because she was incapable of looking after herself. She wanted him back at arm’s length and she knew that, if she could only put him there, then she would be able to get on with her life.

Agatha blinked and snapped back to the present. ‘You were saying… Um, you were going to tell me what information you think Stewart wants to drag out of me. I don’t know anything about computer software. I have a laptop in my bedroom, but I hardly ever use it. When I do, it’s just to email.’

Luc looked at her flushed face: her half-parted mouth, her wide, incredulous eyes and that cloud of tousled fair hair that made her resemble a naughty, slightly dishevelled angel. A very sexy angel. He found that it was a struggle not to let his eyes dip to the generous curve of her breasts.

He pushed himself away from the window, suddenly restless, but it was a very small room. From whatever angle, he seemed to be confronted with the sight of her smooth skin,
the shadow of her cleavage, the slope of her shoulders and her hair tumbling over them.

‘You’re mistaken if you think that Stewart has hunted me down so that he could use me to pick my brain about your state secrets.’

‘You
know that you wouldn’t recognise one of those state secrets if it lay down in front of you waving a white flag and begging to be discovered. And I know that. But
he
doesn’t, does he?’

‘Oh, this is hopeless.’ She had been so optimistic that life as a single girl in the dating game would begin with Stewart. But the date had failed to live up to its promise, and now this.

‘The man is using you, and you have to get rid of him. Never mind the personal angle. From my point of view, you become a liability the minute your trustworthiness is in question.’ He had tough lines on company security. There were no loops through which anyone could wriggle.

Agatha gaped at him. ‘Even though you
know
that I would never do anything? Even though I’ve just told you how hopeless I am when it comes to understanding all that computer jargon? Are you saying that you don’t
trust
me?’

Luc shrugged and lowered his eyes. ‘Sex and pillow talk can work the strangest magic. Who’s to say that he wouldn’t talk you into a little hanky panky at the office when everyone else has left for the evening? He knows the layout of the building. There’s virtually no chance that he could hack into anything important but I’m not willing to risk a situation that could cost me millions.’

Agatha wasn’t even sure that she would have continued seeing Stewart. She had felt no real connection there. But this was about principles.

‘I’ll…I’ll think about what you said.’

‘You’ll have to do a bit more than that, I’m afraid.’

‘Or else I’m out of a job?’

‘Regrettably.’

Agatha didn’t think that he looked like a man wracked with remorse at the situation—but then dispatching a charity case wouldn’t exactly bring him out in a bout of cold sweat and panic, would it? She was utterly disposable. Always one to see the silver lining in the cloud, she slumped into the chair, battered and dismayed.

Luc steeled himself and let the silence stretch between them, then he left quietly, shutting the door with a click that resonated in the room like a time bomb.

Having dug deep and uncovered Dexter for the manipulative and possibly dangerous charmer that he was, Luc had expected a positive response from Agatha. If, for instance, someone had offered him concrete proof that a woman he was dating was in it solely for the money, he knew that he would be only too quick to shed the offending gold-digger. But, then again, he was a realist through and through. Agatha was not; he had to face it.

Instead of falling on his neck with relief that he had spared her the misery of dating a guy who wanted to use her, she had been disbelieving, argumentative and had eventually put him in the position of having to issue her with an ultimatum.

What was it they said about no good deed going unpunished?

Famed for an ability to jettison pointless aggravation, Luc found himself spending the weekend in an unsettled frame of mind. He couldn’t believe that she would choose a man she barely knew over his impeccable advice, not to mention over a job that was extravagantly well paid for what it was. And the prospect of firing her—whilst he would have no option if she didn’t dump Dexter—wasn’t something that
filled him with enthusiasm. His mother had rarely asked anything of him; she was stoic by nature. Even when she had found herself at the mercy of the unforeseen, when the full story of the company collapse had emerged, she had not once looked to him for the solution; her only instinct had been to protect him from the cruelty of the press. So the thought of letting her down now was not a pleasant one.

By six on Sunday evening he was primed to do the unthinkable and he didn’t waste time debating the pros and cons.

The conference call he had scheduled was cancelled with the minimum of excuses, and by seven Luc was parked outside Agatha’s house in his Aston Martin. Looking up to her floor, he could see that it was in darkness. Having rung the doorbell twice to no avail, and telephoned her landline three times, he was confident that she wasn’t in. He would wait—no big deal.