‘Trishdidmention that there was something of...er...an incident with...your girlfriend,’ Ellie admitted.
‘An incident?’
‘It’s none of my business,’ Ellie said diplomatically in an attempt to divert her boss from the looming onslaught of thunderous rage.
Darling of the gossip pages as he was, and photographed on practically a weekly basis with one of his women glued to his side, he was fiercely protective of his space in the office. Girlfriends were not allowed within the hallowed walls of the converted factory in Shoreditch which housed some of the sharpest computer brains in the country, and their counterparts with business acumen.
Ellie shuddered to think of the reception Naomi would have had, and knew the ensuing drama would have made his blood boil.
His staff all knew that he was a guy who didn’t believe in longevity when it came to relationships with women. Although nearly every member of staff felt free to quiz him about whatever latest hot model happened to be gracing his bed, he was actually remarkably tight-lipped when it came to discussing his private life. He threw out just enough by way of answers to satisfy curiosity, but who really knew what motivated a man who seemed so averse to settling down?
Ellie, who never asked questions, wondered whether she was the only one to notice that reticence—the way he never really shared anything meaningful about himself.
Did he do so with anyone?
She realised that she was bursting with curiosity about the blow-up with Naomi but she impatiently put a lid on it. Curiosity about her boss would end up being ruinous for their working relationship, and way too challenging for her peace of mind.
‘The whole thing could have been avoided,’ he growled, ignoring her lack of input with the sweeping nonchalance of someone accustomed to a rapt audience. ‘Naomi should have known better than to show up where I work. I’ve always made it very clear to the women I date that play is one thing, but work is quite another, and the two don’t overlap. Stop staring at that tablet as though it’s going to rescue you from sitting here.’
Ellie looked up. ‘I thought you wanted the business with Neco Systems sorted at the speed of light in case someone else came along and snapped them up. I spent the morning compiling the contract. I thought we could run through it before I emailed it to you.’
‘If you’d been at your desk, you could have escorted her out. Tactfully.’
‘It’s not my job to deal with your girlfriends, and why would I have escorted her out?’
‘Because you know I don’t indulge women here unless they work for me.’
Ellie gave up on any prospect of her tablet rescuing her from a conversation she both did and didn’t want to have. Somehow indulging in any kind of personal conversation with her boss felt all wrong. It almost feltthreatening. But what really scared her was the element ofexcitementthat went hand in hand with that. He was so clever, so restless, so intrinsically edge-of-seat,addictively commanding.
Part of her wondered what would happen if she allowed herself to be sucked into the vortex of his overpowering personality but somewhere deep inside she had always known that nothing good would come of it.
She didn’t want to talk about his women. She wanted to keep things strictly on a polite, harmonious surface level. She didn’t want anything confusing to disrupt the calm surface of her life. She’d spent far too many years dealing with chaos and confusion in her own personal life to court yet more of it from another source. She knew that, when it came to James, it would be very easy for the lines between boss and secretary to blur at the edges. He wouldn’t notice, butshewould.
She enjoyed and needed this job. She certainly needed the money and she wasn’t about to jeopardise any of that by crossing her own self-imposed boundaries.
‘Perhaps you didn’t make that clear enough,’ Ellie said vaguely.
Naomi had been on the scene for nearly five months, which was something of a record for him. Maybe the poor woman thought that that had constituted the sort of commitment most women sought in a relationship, and therefore that showing up at his workplace wouldn’t have resulted in the Spanish Inquisition.
‘Of course I made it crystal-clear.’ He looked at her with incredulity, as though she’d suddenly started speaking a foreign language, and she returned his gaze coolly, as always. ‘Say what you’re thinking, Ellie. I can see the cogs whirring, so why don’t you spit it out instead of sitting there in fulminating silence?’
Ellie gave up. He could be volatile...energetic in a way that left most people feeling that they were stuck in the slow lane even though they were going as fast as they could. And there were times when she’d had to fade into the background when he had blown a fuse at some hapless person’s incompetence.
That said, his moods had always swept past her, leaving her unscathed. He tiptoed around her, respecting the lines between them, and she suspected that, after a string of unsatisfactory secretaries before her, he did his utmost to protect their working relationship. He had curbed his inclination to engage her in discussing her private life. His natural tendency to be provocative and push the barriers had taken a back seat in the face of her quiet resistance.
By nature, Ellie was reserved. It was ironic that she had managed to find herself working in an environment that nurtured exuberance. When it came to recruitment James had chosen carefully, compiling a team of thirty-strong employees who would all coalesce perfectly. Nerdy, yet confident, cutting-edge-clever and not afraid of waging a war to be heard, competitive, yet smart enough to know when to back down. And, of course, however rowdy they became they were all intensely loyal to their brilliant leader. Since she’d been working there, not a single one had come close to quitting.
Amongst this hand-picked crowd, Ellie was the only one who kept herself to herself. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d had their free-spirited exuberance. As an only child, she had been loved but cossetted. Her parents had had her late in their lives, after many years of trying for a baby, and she had become the recipient of their reluctance to allow her to do anything that might possibly put her in harm’s way.
They had been a unit of three until her father had died when she’d been sixteen, and after that the placid, comfortingly predictable life she had led had come to a crashing halt. Gone were the family days and the quiet holidays to Wales. Gone were the board games in winter and her parents both anxiously waiting up for her to return on the occasional evening out with friends.
Instead, her mother had gone to pieces, and Ellie had had to grow up fast to deal with that. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, her life had been put on hold. University dreams had been shelved. She had made it through the rest of school, but all her spare time had been taken up saving her mother from herself.
As a couple, her parents had been unbreakable, but when one half of that couple had been removed—in her father’s case a mere four months after having been diagnosed with cancer—the structure had catastrophically collapsed. Without Robbie Thompson, her mother had been cast adrift, first retreating into herself and then becoming dependent on alcohol to help herself cope.
Looking back, Ellie marvelled that she had managed to get through school at all, but she had. She had said goodbye to her dream of being an architect, and instead had thrown her energy and talent into absorbing everything there was to know about computer systems. Through it all, she had continued to look after her mother, coaxing her out of her alcohol dependency. They were now at a point where her mother was relatively stable, although after two minor heart attacks she was a shadow of the woman she had once been.
The house had been sold and enough money scraped together to find her somewhere small by the coast, but depression dogged her, and when Ellie thought about it she wanted to burst into tears.
