Law Of Attraction
PENNY JORDAN
Judge and JuryWith both her professional and personal life in such a mess, Charlotte realized she was lucky to land a position with the prestigious law firm of Jefferson & Horwich even as a junior partner. But Daniel Jefferson was like salt in a wound. He was everything she'd dreamed of being acclaimed, honored. And very much in demand.Next to him Charlotte felt like a failure, and Daniel didn't help her confidence, commandeering her as his assistant and watching her closely. Her raw edge of resentment and anger kept her attraction to this very sexy man at bay…until Daniel voiced his very clear objections to the distance.
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PENNY JORDAN
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PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Law of Attraction
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
CHARLOTTE paused outside the block of offices, studying the plaque which read ‘Jefferson & Horwich, Solicitors’.
Her knees were trembling slightly and the skirt of her dark blue wool suit, which if anything had seemed rather prim in London, suddenly felt uncomfortably short.
She tugged at it a little self-consciously as she glanced around the busy market square.
It was only just gone eight in the morning, but it was market day and the stallholders were already hard at work preparing for their day’s trading.
Perhaps she ought to have bought herself a new suit, something more suitable for a very junior, albeit qualified solicitor, just starting work in a new practice, but the trouble was that new clothes were a luxury she simply could not afford at the moment.
‘Jefferson & Horwich’. She read the name again.
Well, Richard Horwich she had already met. He had interviewed her for the job. A comfortable middle-aged family man who epitomised everyone’s mental image of a solicitor with a country practice.
But as for the Jefferson…
Charlotte took a deep breath.
Face it, she told herself bitterly. You would rather be working for almost anyone than Daniel Jefferson. The new golden hope of the legal profession, the man who had single-handedly—well, almost, if you excluded the odd barrister or so, and the usual full complement of legal staff—championed the cause of the downtrodden, in this case the victims of the negligent and callous refusal of a large drugs company to accept that the side-effects of their drug had caused detrimental physical symptoms in some of those people prescribed it, never mind doing anything about it, and had won for them not only recognition of the drugs company’s negligence, but also one of the largest sums in compensation ever awarded by a British court.
As she stood staring at the polished brass nameplate on the front of the elegant Georgian building she couldn’t help contrasting her circumstances with those of Daniel Jefferson.
She too was a qualified solicitor. She too had once had her own premises with her name alongside the door, and she too had once championed the cause of those who sometimes seemed most to need legal advice and who nearly always could least afford it. But there the resemblance between them ended.
Where Daniel Jefferson was successful, feˆted, inundated no doubt with people wanting him to act for them, especially since the Vitalle case had made the headlines, she was now forced to seek work as an employee…forced to start again right at the foot of the ladder, her home, her business and even her fiancé gone, swallowed up by the recession which was slowly strangling and destroying so many businesses.
Perhaps she ought, as her parents and her friends kept telling her, to feel grateful that she had been able to get another job with such relative ease instead of still being so full of anger and resentment about all that she had lost.
But she was angry and she was resentful. She had worked so hard. First just when she was studying, and then in her first job as the only female newly qualified solicitor in the large London practice where she had been lucky enough to be employed.
She had even learned to bite on her tongue and not to retaliate when the men she worked with tried to demote and degrade her, giving her the dullest and most routine jobs, and even on one infuriating occasion actually asking her to make coffee for the rest of them. Yes, she had worked hard then, and always with one goal in mind. Her own practice…and before she was thirty.
She had been over the moon when by what had seemed to be the most amazingly fortuitous stroke of good luck she and Bevan, her fiancé, had happened to come across a small local single-partner practice for sale.
It had been just about the time that people were moving out of London in swarms, extolling the virtues of country living, and, as Bevan had told her, she would have been a fool not to have jumped on the bandwagon.
She had bought the practice with a mortgage the size of which had made her wince. And she had also bought herself a small elegant town house several streets away.
After all, as she and Bevan had agreed, once they were married the town house would be large enough for them both, and then later they could sell it at a decent profit and buy something larger.
Their part of the world was an up-and-coming area with property prices going through the roof, as Charlotte had discovered when she was gazumped both on the house and on the business. Fortunately she had been able to borrow enough to outbid the would-be gazumpers, but that had left her with no cash at all and a large overdraft as well as her huge mortgage.
She had been a little afraid then, but Bevan had laughed at her. What was wrong with her? he had demanded. She was only taking the same kind of risk that men had to take all the time. ‘What is it with you women?’ he had challenged her. ‘You want equality and then when you get it…’
He had shrugged without finishing his sentence, but she had known what he was implying.
Bevan was inclined to be irritable and quick to make judgements. He lived a very high-powered existence as a dealer working in the City.
Charlotte had met him through a colleague and at first she had been a little put off by his manner, but he had pursued her so determinedly that she had not been able to help being flattered.
Their engagement was an unofficial, casual arrangement, more a declaration of an intent to marry once they had both achieved a certain status in their lifestyles than a formal betrothal.
Charlotte knew that her parents, especially her mother, were a little perplexed with this arrangement. An engagement, to her mother, meant a diamond ring and a date fixed for the wedding.
Charlotte had had neither the ring nor the date for the wedding, and now she had no fiancé either.
Broodingly she looked at the immaculately painted shiny black door. Once she opened it and went in she would be walking into a completely new life. Taking a retrograde step to a stage in her career she had thought she had left behind her years ago.
She was thirty-two years old. Too old to be going back to the bottom of the heap. But then, it was her own fault. She was the one who was responsible for her failure. She knew that.
‘You failed because you took on too many charity cases,’ Bevan had told her brutally when she had broken down in tears as she had told him the news that her accountant had told her that she could no longer go on. That she must cease business and that if she was lucky—very lucky—she might just…just be able to sell both properties for sufficient to clear the outstanding mortgages.
Was that it? Was it because she had perhaps unwisely taken on too many cases which, while worthwhile, she had always known would never pay their way? Or was it because she was simply not a good enough solicitor, that she had not worked hard enough, that she did not have the drive…the skill…the ability to attract the kind of clients she had so desperately needed to build up her cash flow? The kind of clients that the Daniel Jeffersons of this world seemed to have in abundance, she reflected miserably.
And why not? When you had been feˆted by every heavyweight national paper there was, when every serious magazine had run articles on you, and every pseudo-current-affairs programme had promoted and praised you, you would be inundated with people who wanted to give you their business.
As the old saying had it, nothing succeeded like success.
Which was why, in the middle of the worst recession for decades, Jefferson & Horwich were taking on new staff…which was why she was here, standing numbly on the doorstep of these premises, knowing that she ought to be grateful to whatever streak of compassion it had been which had persuaded Richard Horwich to take her on.
She was grateful, of course. But she was also angry, bruised, hurt and most of all bitterly aware of the way in which her failure contrasted with Daniel Jefferson’s success.
And he was only thirty-seven, five years older than she was herself, unmarried, good-looking—at least if the Press photographs of him were to be believed. She hadn’t seen him on television. She had been too busy trying to clear up the financial mess which had once been her business, bargaining with the building society and the bank for more time, until she had managed to find buyers for her properties. Her properties…their properties more like. Thank goodness they were now off her hands and both her mortgages repaid. At least she no longer had that problem to keep her awake at night.
No…but she also had no home of her own, and the unwelcome knowledge that she was having to go back to the beginning and start all over again. She grimaced bitterly to herself. No doubt she would look wonderful in her expensive, silly designer suit, grovelling to the partners, and being asked to make tea by the junior clerks.
Stop it. Stop it, she warned herself. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
She took a deep breath and pushed open the door. Behind her, in the square, she heard a man wolf-whistle, probably at some passing young girl who had nothing more to worry her than which of her admirers she was going to go out with next, she reflected dejectedly.
As she disappeared inside the building, the man who had whistled turned and grinned at his companion.
‘Very tasty, Mr Jefferson. I don’t think I’ve seen that one before. New, is she?’
‘It looks like it,’ Daniel Jefferson agreed noncommittally as he waited for the stallholder to weigh out the cheese he had been buying.
He was going to see old Tom Smith this afternoon. Tom was still worrying about what would happen to his cottage and his bit of land when he died. He had no direct heirs, only several distant relatives on his wife’s side, and he was concerned because he wanted to make sure that young Larry Barker, the local teenager who had been so good about doing his shopping for him and calling round to give him a hand with his garden, should not go unrewarded for all his kindness.
Tom was very partial to their creamy local cheese, and so Daniel had stopped to buy him some.
So Charlotte French had actually turned up, had she? He had had his doubts when Richard had told him he had offered her the job.
He had read her CV, of course, and he was still not sure how well if at all she would settle down with them. That suit she had been wearing, for one thing…personally he didn’t mind how a woman or a man for that matter chose to dress, but unfortunately some of their clients did not hold the same views.
Despite all the publicity of the Vitalle court case, the majority of their business came from the same rather conservative and traditional segment of the population it always had come from. It was just that now they had a lot more of it, and extremely short-skirted, South Molton Street suits would not be the type of thing they would expect from a woman solicitor. At least not if they were to take her seriously.
He sighed a little as he crossed the square. He knew from her qualifications just how intelligent she was, but…
A PRETTY, smiling receptionist welcomed Charlotte when she walked in. She obviously remembered her from her interview and offered immediately to show her where she would be working and where the cloakroom was.
‘Oh, but is it all right for you to leave the front desk?’ Charlotte asked her uncertainly.
The girl smiled back at her.
‘Oh, yes, Mr Horwich said I was to show you where you’d be working when you arrived.
‘I’m Ginny, by the way,’ she introduced herself, stepping out from behind her desk.
‘That’s Mr Horwich’s room on the left,’ she told Charlotte, indicating one of the several closed doors off the corridor. ‘And this one is Mr Jefferson’s.’
Charlotte gave it a brief antagonistic glance. She had no doubt at all which of the partners had the most expensively equipped and luxurious office space.
‘And this is your office,’ Ginny told her, stopping so unexpectedly at a door immediately down the corridor from Daniel Jefferson’s that Charlotte almost bumped into her.
Her office. That puzzled her a little, since she had been expecting to be sharing an office with several other junior solicitors from the way the work had been described to her. It must just be Ginny’s way of describing things, she decided as Ginny opened the door for her, but as soon as she walked into the room she immediately recognised that it was equipped for only one person.
She hesitated uncertainly and looked at Ginny.
‘Are you sure…? I mean, I don’t think…I thought I’d be sharing an office with other people.’
‘Oh.’ Ginny looked confused. ‘Well, Mr Horwich said to show you in here. Oh, and he said to tell you that he wouldn’t be in this morning, but that Mr Jefferson would explain everything to you.’
Charlotte’s heart sank. She glanced round the surprisingly spacious and very comfortably furnished office with its window overlooking the town square, and suddenly her earlier anger deserted her, leaving her feeling frighteningly vulnerable and nervous.
‘I’d better get back to the main desk,’ Ginny told her. ‘Mitzi brings the coffee round at about tenthirty, but if you want a drink in the meantime there’s a machine in the staff-room. That’s up on the top floor. Mr Jefferson had it all kitted out so that we can eat our lunch there if we want. There’s a snooker table up there and a small kitchen.
‘Last year we made up two snooker teams. Men versus women, and the women won.’ She gave a small giggle, and then when Charlotte didn’t respond she flushed and said uncertainly, ‘Well, if you’re sure there’s nothing you need…’
Charlotte smiled automatically and shook her head, watching as the door closed behind her.
No, there was nothing she needed. If you discounted her own business, her own home, her self-respect, her pride, her future and her fiancé.
Idly she noticed the way she had put Bevan last. Had she always known that he would turn out to have feet of clay? That when it came to it he would not want to stand by her…that he had only wanted her while she was successful, while she enhanced his own image of himself? Had he ever loved her as he had claimed to do? And, even worse, had she really ever loved him—the way her father and her mother loved one another, for instance?
She moved over to the window and stood looking down into the square; a man was approaching the office door. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his thick dark brown hair glinting in the sunshine, and he moved energetically, lithely.
He was wearing an extremely conservative dark blue suit. She could see the crisp white edge of his cuff beneath the sleeve of his jacket. It was the kind of suit worn by a professional man. An accountant…a solicitor…Her heart gave a small fierce bound as he paused on the step and then looked up towards her window, almost as though he was aware of her scrutiny.
She recognised him immediately, of course, even though the only photographs she had seen of him had been grainy and flat. In the flesh she was much more physically aware of the strength of maleness, of his bone-structure, the strength and the power of him.
The suit he was wearing might be that of a traditional conservative man, but the body beneath it was unequivocally tough and male.
She took a hasty step back into the room, her face flushing as she pushed angry fingers into her hair, flipping it back off her face.
Her hair was the only thing she had refused to change when Bevan had insisted on helping her to update herself. It was straight and thick, with the glossy sheen of good health, its dark red colour completely natural, although people sometimes refused to believe it. She wore it in a shoulder-length bob, its silky richness in striking contrast to her pale skin and blue-green eyes.
Bevan had wanted her to have expensive courses of sunbed treatment to tan her skin, complaining that being so pale was unfashionable and unattractive, but she had always refused, pointing out to him the dangers that pale-skinned people like herself suffered from over-exposure to either natural or artificial tanning rays.
Perhaps she should have seen the warning signs then and recognised that Bevan wanted her for the image he believed she could project rather than for the person she actually was. She had certainly discovered very quickly that, once the image, the trappings of success, had gone, Bevan had gone as well.
All right, so maybe once she had recovered from the shock she had found that her pride was more hurt than her heart, but even so…It would be a long time before she trusted a member of the male sex romantically again.
What galled her the most was that Bevan had been the one to pursue her, showering her with flowers, flattering her with outrageous compliments. And at the same time trying to change her, she reminded herself wryly.
Her parents and her sister believed she was better off without him and she knew that they were right. Like the practice, her house, her expensive car, Bevan was a luxury she could no longer afford.
At least the only debt she had outstanding now was her bank overdraft. The only. Her mouth twisted a little, worry shadowing her face, her full lips tightening as she fought to control her feelings.
She had resisted fiercely at first when her parents had insisted on her living at home rent free; to have to return home to live in the first place at her age was galling, almost humiliating, despite the fact that she loved and got on well with her family, but, as they had gently pointed out, she had a large overdraft to repay and it was silly to have to spend money on rented accommodation while bank interest rates were so high.
Even the small second-hand car she was now using to travel the fifteen or so miles to this, her new job, had been provided by her father. Tears pricked her eyes briefly as she remembered how ashamed and miserable she had felt when he had given it to her. It wasn’t that she particularly regretted losing the bright red BMW sports model she had previously been driving. In point of fact she had come to find it too ostentatious and had felt acutely uncomfortable driving it. No, what hurt was knowing that she had failed; that she was as dependent on her parents as she had been as a student; perhaps even more so.
Not that either they or Sarah, her elder sister, had done anything to suggest that they felt anything but sympathy for her, but sometimes even sympathy was hard to bear.
She felt so guilty, she recognised, and so ashamed. She had allowed herself to be carried away by Bevan’s grand schemes without thinking them through properly. She had behaved foolishly and over-confidently and she had no one to blame for her present plight but herself.
But what hurt most of all was that anyone knowing what had happened to her must surely suspect her of being professionally incompetent in some way, and, even at the same time as she was fiercely grateful to Richard Horwich for giving her this job, she was almost resentful in some ways of what she suspected must have been a charitable impulse on his part.
With so many newly qualified solicitors looking for jobs, what had made him take on her, someone who had already shown how inefficient she was?
Her father had told her that she was too hard on herself; that she had simply, like others, ridden the crest of a financial wave which had retreated, leaving her high and dry. Maybe, but not everyone had been caught out by the roller-coaster of the sharp rise in the property market and its subsequent downturn.
Look at Daniel Jefferson, for instance. Her heart sank a little. She just hoped that she wouldn’t have to come into too much contact with him. It was perhaps illogical of her to feel so…so antagonistic towards him, so resentful almost, and it was also unlike her, but her normal good humour seemed to have become eroded over the last six months or so. She felt raw and vulnerable, unable to stop herself repeatedly going over and over what had happened, wishing she had seen what was coming and protected not just herself but those of her clients to whom she had given her services free of charge as well. Yes, it was a great pity she had not had the foresight that Daniel Jefferson seemed to exhibit to such spectacular effect. He obviously, unlike her, had an eye for a successful cause, she decided moodily.
Look at the way he had taken on the huge Vitalle conglomerate and achieved such a spectacular success…
She heard a door opening and the sound of someone moving about in the adjacent office, and quickly sat down at her own desk. Daniel Jefferson had obviously arrived to start on his day’s work.
What would it be today? she wondered bitterly. Some high-profile court case that would win him further acclaim; the preparation perhaps for a television interview? She had read in one of the papers how impressed the Press had been by the way he had handled his interviewers. Some people were like that, courting publicity, thriving on it. She remembered the small humiliating piece she had seen in the local paper describing the closing-down of her practice, pointing her out as one of the victims of the recession.
She had to put the past behind her, her father had told her gently, adding that there was no disgrace in having tried and failed; that he would rather she’d had the courage to do that and to admit her failure than had opted for the safety of a job in some large corporation.
But Charlotte couldn’t help remembering how proud her parents had been of her when she had first qualified. Somehow now she felt she had no right to their pride, and that she certainly had no right to the respect and trust of her colleagues.
While she was lost in these unhappy thoughts her office door opened. She tensed, blinking away the tears that had been threatening and struggling to stand up, cursing as she did so her straight, too short skirt.
‘Oh, Mr Horwich—’ she began, and then stopped, because it wasn’t Richard Horwich who was standing there, Richard Horwich whom she had naturally expected—forgetting Ginny’s words, in her state of confusion—to seek her out to tell her exactly what her duties were going to be. It was Daniel Jefferson.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’MSORRY,’ Charlotte began to apologise, cursing herself for not looking at him properly before addressing him by the wrong name.
‘That’s all right,’ Daniel Jefferson told her easily. He was smiling at her, she noticed, a nice warm smile which for some reason increased her resentment of him, and her discomfort with herself.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. I was delayed on the way this morning, but Ginny will have shown you where everything is. I’ve arranged with Margaret Lewis, who’s in charge of our trainee solicitors, to come down from upstairs at half-past ten to take you up to the nursery to introduce you to them.’
‘The nursery?’
He smiled again.
‘Sorry. That’s what we call the room where the young trainees we have here work. Partially because they are trainees and partially because they’re housed on the top floor in what were at one time, when this was a private house, the actual nurseries.’
He stopped speaking and looked assessingly at her. Charlotte was immediately self-consciously aware of the almost brash Londonness of her appearance, and only just managed to resist tugging at the hem of her skirt. Was it her imagination or did a small smile really curl the corners of his mouth as he glanced at her? She could feel her skin beginning to burn.
It was all very well for him, she decided bitterly, with his expensive hand-tailored suit; she doubted that he had ever been so hard up that he couldn’t afford to buy himself clothes, even chain-store clothes, never mind the kind of things he was wearing right now. Well, let him deride her if he liked; she didn’t care. Only she knew that she did. Just as she cared that he was the one who was standing here instructing her rather than Richard Horwich…just as she cared that she had apparently been isolated from the rest of the staff and put in an office adjacent to his own.
Why? Was it because despite the apparent warmth of that smile he had really not wanted her here on the staff? Had he perhaps even objected to his partner’s hiring someone like her…a failure…a person who had not made the same resounding success of her career that he had so patently made of his?
Had she been put here in this solitary office on his instructions so that he could monitor her work…so that he could keep a check on her, because he did not trust her professionally? She suspected that she had.
Her pride, already lacerated by what she had endured, stung bitterly under this fresh assault.
‘Do you think you’ll be comfortable in here?’ he asked her now. ‘I know you’re used to working on your own, so hopefully you won’t find the isolation too much of a bugbear. Of course, normally the communicating door will be open.’
He nodded to a door set into the wall, which Charlotte belatedly realised must connect his office with hers.
Her bitterness and her resentment nearly choked her as she listened to him. Did he really think he actually needed to watch her while she worked?
She could feel her fingers curling into her palms, her nails digging into her hands as she fought the temptation to tell him what he could do with his job. She must not, could not, give way to that temptation. She tried to concentrate on that awful burdensome overdraft, on the kindness and generosity of her parents. She was not in a position where she could afford to turn her back on a job…any job…no matter how much she might detest its provider.
Not that he had actually given her the job. She could just imagine it now, she decided bitterly. She could just visualise what must have happened when Richard Horwich had announced that he had offered the job to her.
Richard would have had to show him her CV, of course, and it was all there…she had held nothing back, feeling that it would be dishonest to do so.
During the interview Richard had questioned her very closely about the failure of her practice, and she had answered him frankly and honestly.
She could well imagine how angry a man like Daniel Jefferson must have been when he had learned she had been offered and had accepted the job.
He was speaking to her again and she forced herself to concentrate, her face an icy mask of remoteness as she listened to him.
‘I’ve prepared a list of the cases I most urgently need your help with. I thought it might help if you spend a few days familiarising yourself with the files. They cover quite a wide spread of things.
‘I don’t know whether or not Richard explained it to you, but this was originally a small country practice. No one here has ever specialised in one particular field. We prefer to deal with whatever comes our way—rather like GPs. It’s my belief anyway that a good spread of work makes for a far more interesting work-load, and where we feel that something is beyond our scope we either refer the client on, or, if we feel we can do so, we take it on with the proviso that the client can seek other advice if he or she feels that we aren’t doing a good job for them. It may be old-fashioned but it suits us, and I’ve found I’m not too keen on specialising in one particular field.’
Charlotte could feel her face burning. Did he have to remind her of her own folly in concentrating on all that conveyancing? She wanted to tell him that she had had no alternative; that she had simply not had the time to expand her field of operations…not with the property market so active and then with all the work she had taken on without any payment because she had felt the cause to be worthwhile.
Bevan had been furious with her about that. They had argued about it constantly, but she had pointed out to him that it was her time and that she had the right to give it freely if she wished. And even if she had not made any money she had had the gratification of knowing that she had been able to help people who otherwise would have had no chance at all of getting justice. Going to law was an expensive business, and not everyone was eligible for legal aid.
‘This is a new departure for me,’ Daniel Jefferson was saying. ‘I’ve never worked in such close collaboration with anyone else before, apart from when I was newly qualified, when I worked for my father. He’s retired now, of course.
‘However, I have to admit with the work-load I have at the moment I do need a qualified assistant.’
An assistant! She had been employed as Daniel Jefferson’s assistant. Charlotte bit the inside of her mouth to prevent the sharp protest she could feel bubbling in her throat erupting vocally. Nothing had been said to her about working exclusively for Daniel Jefferson when she was offered the job. On the contrary, she had assumed that she would be one of a team of junior qualified solicitors working for the practice in much the same way as qualified solicitors worked for the legal departments of large companies. They would, she had imagined, do all the dirty work while Daniel Jefferson creamed off the glory.
To discover that she was going to be working exclusively for him and under his direct control had come as a very unpleasant shock.
The temptation to challenge him to reveal the truth instead of cloaking it with pseudo-flattery, and to admit that, far from believing she could be of any real help to him, his real purpose in having her installed here in the office next to his own was because he simply did not trust her almost overwhelmed her.
It galled her more than she could bear to admit to realise what had happened. If only she could afford to give in to the demands of her pride, to tell him that she had changed her mind and that she no longer wanted his job and to walk out of here with her head held high.
But she couldn’t. She had no option but to grit her teeth and give him a frosty little smile.
She was, after all, a mere employee…and he was the mighty Daniel Jefferson, and if he dictated that she was to spend her working life making coffee and posting letters there was damn all she could do about it.
All at once the misery and the frustration of the last few humiliating months boiled up inside her in a fierce surge of emotion directed at the man standing opposite her.
It was all right for him. He, no doubt, had never put a foot wrong, never made a mistake, and he had certainly never suffered the humiliation of losing almost everything…career…home…lover…
Not that she and Bevan had actually been lovers in the physical sense, oddly enough. After his passionate and fervent pursuit of her he had become so engrossed in reorganising her career and her image that somehow there had never seemed to be any time for them to actually become lovers. Whenever they went out, it had always been with a crowd of Bevan’s friends, high-profile men and women from the same world he himself inhabited, who talked coolly of burn-out and ‘yuppie flu’ and who seemed to take the view that finding time to develop personal relationships was somehow something that did not fit into their plans for their lives.
Charlotte had gone along with it because…because Bevan had swept her off her feet, she admitted miserably.
She heard Daniel Jefferson asking if there was anything she needed.
If there was anything she needed…Yes, she needed her self-respect back, she thought bitterly. She needed to salve her pride, to feel that people believed in her, that they trusted her professional ability. She needed all those things and more, but she was not going to get them from this man.
She gave him another cold, tight smile.
‘No, there’s nothing I need,’ she told him carefully. She fully understood what he had said to her. If he would give her the list of files he wanted her to study…
She was damned if she was going to ask him where to find the files, she reflected ten minutes later.
The list had apparently been on his desk and when he had opened the communicating door so that he could go and collect it she had been surprised to discover that his office was not a bit as she had imagined. The furniture was slightly old-fashioned, comfortable easy chairs either side of a fireplace, a heavy partners’ desk in front of the window and, most incongruously, a large wooden box of children’s toys in one corner.
‘I find them useful when I’m dealing with divorce cases,’ he told her, seeing her look at them. ‘Very often if I’m acting for the woman she brings her children with her. It helps to distract them.’
What she hadn’t seen in his office, though, had been any evidence of any filing cabinets.
Perhaps she could ask this Margaret Lewis when she met her, or perhaps she could ask Ginny the receptionist.
The communicating door was still open. Charlotte longed to close it, to shut herself off from the man working in the adjacent room, the man who trusted her so little that he had had her placed here under his visual jurisdiction, but even such a small choice as closing a door was not hers to make, she fumed bitterly. She was an employee now, dependent on the whims and the commands of others.
At half-past ten she heard a knock on her outer office door. When she got up to answer it the woman standing outside introduced herself as Margaret Lewis.
She was in her fifties, tall with thick strong hair and a warm smile.
If she shared Daniel Jefferson’s lack of faith in Charlotte’s professional competence she certainly wasn’t betraying it, and as she accompanied her up the stairs Charlotte felt herself begin to relax slightly, for the first time that morning.
‘We’re quite a small, close-knit unit here,’ Margaret told her as they went upstairs. ‘I like to think that it comes from the firm’s originally being started by a woman.’
‘A woman!’
Charlotte paused on the stairs to stare at her.
Margaret smiled.
‘Yes. Lydia Jefferson started up in practice here just after she had qualified, when she was unable to get work with any established practice. A very adventurous step for a woman in those days.’
‘Lydia Jefferson?’ Charlotte questioned. ‘Then she must have been…Was she related to Daniel Jefferson in some way?’
‘His great-aunt,’ Margaret confirmed. ‘She had been retired for several years when I first came to work as an office junior, but she still took a very strong interest in the practice. In fact it was she who first encouraged me to take my own articles and to qualify. She and Daniel were very close. When he was quite small, still at junior school, she used to bring him down here with her sometimes.
‘She had very strong views on women’s rights to control their own lives and she was vehement in her support of the underdog. Daniel is very like her in that. Much more so than his father, who, although kind, was much more the traditional stereotype of the country solicitor.
‘Daniel was a brilliant student and many people thought he should have opted to become a barrister, but he was always determined that he wanted to work here, continuing the tradition established by his aunt.’
‘But surely now with all the publicity surrounding the Vitalle case he must at least be tempted to take advantage of his success and perhaps move the practice to London?’
Margaret shook her head.
‘Oh, no, Daniel would never do that,’ she told Charlotte calmly. She said it so positively and with such faith and affection that Charlotte felt her resentment against Daniel Jefferson surge rebelliously inside her. It was all right for him. He had had everything handed to him on a plate. All he had had to do was to qualify and then to step into the comfortable world waiting for him. A world laboured for by a woman…
A woman who had succeeded as she had not, and against far greater odds, Charlotte reminded herself miserably as they reached the top of the stairs and Margaret Lewis opened a door on the landing.
Inside the large sunny room eight people sat at desks working. The room buzzed with the hum of computers and electronic equipment. All along one of the shorter walls were racks containing the familiar packages of papers and legal briefs tied with pink ribbon.
It was obvious immediately that the people in the room were extremely busy and yet the atmosphere was one of relaxed happiness, a young woman leaning over the shoulder of a male colleague, teasing him about something as she helped him with a query.
There was, Charlotte recognised, a bright-eyed quality and an enthusiasm about the occupants of this room that said how much they enjoyed their work, and there was also an alertness about them, an eagerness that she recognised as the kind of enthusiasm possessed by those who were the best of their peer group.
Without knowing any of them, she immediately knew that these trainees were all of them high achievers, quick, intelligent, hard-working, much as she had once been herself, but they had something she recognised that she had never really had: they were free of the anxiety that had plagued her almost from the moment she had set up her own practice.
If they knew about her professional history they were certainly not showing it, as Margaret introduced them to her and they reacted with what appeared to be genuine warmth.
One or two of the boys eyed her short skirt appreciatively, but no one displayed any antagonism or unpleasantness towards her.
‘Bless ’em,’ Margaret commented after she had closed the office door and was standing on the landing with Charlotte. ‘They’re a hard-working lot, but inclined to get a little high-spirited at times. Daniel believes in giving them as much responsibility as they can handle without overburdening them, and I must admit it’s a recipe they seem to thrive on. What we prefer to do is to assign someone to a specific case, so that he or she can see the whole thing through rather than merely acting as a clearing house for the mundane background work.
‘When you come to start work on Daniel’s files you’ll find inside the cover the name of the trainee assigned to that case, and any work you want doing you can either instruct the trainee concerned direct or, if you prefer, you can route your instructions through me.
‘I realise that for the next few days, until you find your feet, you’re going to be tied to your desk and the files, but once you’re properly settled in it might be nice to have lunch together one day.’
‘Yes, I’d like that,’ Charlotte told her with genuine enthusiasm. ‘There is one thing you could help me with,’ she added. ‘Where exactly do I find the files?’
Margaret smiled at her.
‘Come with me.’
As she headed back downstairs she told Charlotte that when Lydia Jefferson had first decided to set up her own practice she had bought this house with a small legacy, and thanks in the main to Daniel’s insistence it had stayed much as it was rather than being converted into a modern soulless environment behind a classic faa¸de. ‘However, as we’ve expanded we’ve grown progressively short of space, and the files or at least Daniel’s files are now housed in what originally was a large walk-in airing-cupboard.
‘Here they are,’ she told Charlotte as they stopped on the next landing. She opened a door into a small oblong room, its walls lined with shelves filled with files.
‘Dead files are stored in the basement. These are only current cases.
‘We operate a simple system. They are kept here in alphabetical order, and if you find that one is missing chances are either that Daniel has it out or that one of the trainees is the culprit. I have tried to institute a system whereby everyone logs the files they take out, but I’m afraid so far it’s proving a little difficult to implement.
‘If there’s anything you want to know, or any help you need, just give me a ring, or pop up and see me. I’m on extension 241,’ she told Charlotte.
Thanking her, Charlotte headed back to her own office. At least Margaret wasn’t antagonistic towards her, but perhaps that was because as yet she did not know the truth about her.
As she stepped into her office Charlotte heard Daniel call out to her.
‘Could you come into my office for a moment, please, Charlotte?’
Reluctantly she did so.
He was seated behind his desk, and while she stood in front of him, seething with resentment and misery, she was painfully aware of the contrast between them.
He looked up, smiling at her; a smile he had no doubt used to good effect for the television screens, she reflected sourly. Surely his teeth were too white…too perfect…but then she noticed that one of his front ones was slightly chipped. Oddly that cheered her up a little. So Mr Perfect wasn’t entirely perfect after all.
‘Here’s an addition to the list of the files I’d like you to familiarise yourself with,’ he told her. In order to take the list from him she had to step closer to his desk, so close that she caught the faint clean scent of his skin. He wasn’t wearing after-shave; that was quite definitely merely soap she could smell. She scowled. One of the things she had never wholly cared for about Bevan was his addiction to a particularly strong male cologne. Nothing she had been able to say to him had ever convinced him that she found it more of a turn-off than a turn-on.
‘Help yourself to a cup of coffee,’ she heard Daniel telling her, ‘and then pull up a chair. I’ll give you a brief résumé of each of these cases, and then I’d like you to read through the files and give me your professional opinion of the strengths and weaknesses of each case.’
Fortunately she had her back to him as he spoke, having turned at his first words to see where she was supposed to get her coffee from. A coffee filter jug and heater stood discreetly to one side of the toy box, complete with china mugs and everything else, and as she focused on it she felt her backbone stiffen. What a mammoth ego the man had, she fumed as she poured herself some coffee. What was he trying to do—test her…as though she were a child sitting a spelling test? And then swiftly on the heels of this angry thought came another and more disturbing one. What if it was some kind of test? If she failed it…if her judgements on his cases did not exactly coincide with his, would he use that as further means of her incompetence and seek her dismissal?
She shivered a little as she added milk to her coffee, a mental image of her most recent bank statement reminding her of how important it was that she kept this job. The salary was excellent, and it was close enough for her to be able to live at home. And no matter how much such dependence on her parents hurt her pride, there was no getting away from the fact that until she had cleared that overdraft she simply could not afford to pay rent and she most certainly could not afford a mortgage.
The bank had been very understanding; they had offered her extra time to repay the overdraft, but her pride had jibbed at that. She wanted it reduced and repaid as quickly as possible. And besides, as her father had pointed out, there was the burden of the heavy interest payments.
Schooling her features into icy blankness, she turned round and walked back to the desk.
As she sat down she was briefly and uncomfortably aware of the way her skirt rode up along her thighs, but when she darted a brief glance at Daniel Jefferson he was looking at some papers on his desk, and he didn’t lift his head until she was sitting down.
As she listened to him describing each of the cases on the list she was reluctantly forced to admit that either he had a good memory for facile detail or he was deeply and genuinely involved with every case that he took on.
She preferred to think it was the former; it was after all the kind of showmanship she would have expected from someone made so much of by the media, but honesty compelled her to accept that it was probably the latter. But then, being a good solicitor did not necessarily make him a good human being, she told herself grimly.
At five to one, even though they were only halfway through the list, he stopped and told her, ‘I think that’s enough for one session. I have a business appointment this lunchtime and I doubt that I’ll be back before three, so I think it might be as well if we left the rest of the list until tomorrow.
‘I don’t know if you’ve made any arrangements for lunch, but if not we do have a staff-room upstairs.’
‘Yes, thank you. Ginny has already told me that.’
As she spoke, her voice curt and crisp, Charlotte was briefly conscious of the thoughtful look he gave her. To her intense irritation she could feel herself flushing slightly, and she knew that had her mother been present she would have chided her for her attitude.
She had brought some sandwiches for her lunch. The town was well known to her, small but busy with a very pleasant little park by the river, and she had planned originally to have lunch there.
However, it was a cool day with a grey sky and she had to admit that she would probably be more comfortable in the staff-room.
She was touched when she walked back into her office to find Ginny waiting there for her.
‘It can sometimes be awkward when you’re new,’ Ginny told her with a friendly smile. ‘So I thought I’d come and see if you wanted to go upstairs for lunch.’
‘Thank you. I’ve brought some sandwiches with me because I wasn’t sure. I had planned to eat them by the river, but it is rather cold.’
As they walked out into the corridor a woman was coming the other way.
She was taller, much taller than Charlotte, who was barely five foot three, with glossy black hair cut and permed in a dramatic style that suggested she made frequent visits to a hairdresser’s. Her make-up too was immaculate, if rather overdone for Charlotte’s taste. She was wearing a suit which Charlotte recognised as this season’s Chanel and there was a large and very ostentatious diamond ring on her ring hand.
She gave the two women a cold sharp glance and said icily to Ginny, ‘The reception desk is unattended. I’m sure Daniel won’t be pleased about that.’ And then she looked at Charlotte, her eyes hardening a little as her glance lingered just a little too long on Charlotte’s suit. Her mouth compressed and, although she said nothing, Charlotte was left very much aware of what she thought of her appearance.
As soon as she had disappeared into Daniel’s office Ginny whispered, ‘That’s Mrs Patricia Winters. The Mrs Patricia Winters…widow of the late Paul Winters.’ She grinned as Charlotte looked mystified. ‘He was a local man—a property millionaire. She married him when he was sixty-odd and she was twenty-three. Now he’s dead and rumour has it that she’s looking for a second husband and that this time she’s going for the jackpot. Looks as well as wealth.’ She rolled her eyes.
‘Poor Daniel. They’re saying upstairs in the nursery that it’s a pity that solicitors aren’t protected from their clients in the same way that doctors are from their patients.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t want to be protected,’ Charlotte suggested. In fact it seemed to her that Patricia Winters would be the ideal mate for a man like Daniel Jefferson.
‘Oh, no, he couldn’t possibly want to marry her. He’s much too nice,’ Ginny protested.
What was the man running here, a practice or a fan club? Charlotte wondered sourly. Well, she certainly wasn’t going to join. Everyone else might think he was wonderful, but she certainly did not.
‘Mrs Winters is a client, then?’ she commented as she and Ginny went upstairs.
‘Mm, although since her husband died she seems to need Daniel’s advice far more than Paul Winters ever did when he was alive.’
As she glanced out of the window Charlotte saw that there was a large Rolls-Royce parked outside. A chauffeur was opening the door and Patricia Winters was stepping inside it. Daniel was standing beside her. So that was his business appointment. Nice work if you can get it, Charlotte reflected acidly.
Wherever they were going, she doubted that they would be eating sandwiches, unless they were the smoked salmon and caviare variety, combined with a bottle of champagne and consumed in the privacy of Mrs Winters’s undoubtedly luxurious and very glamorous bedroom.
Abruptly Charlotte frowned, her face flushing a little as she recognised with some distaste the direction of her thoughts. Whatever she might think of Daniel Jefferson, she had no right to allow her imagination that particular kind of inventive licence.
CHAPTER THREE
ONE of the files she had been instructed to study would of course have to come under ‘A’, Charlotte reflected wryly as she glanced up towards the topmost shelf, several feet above her head, but as she chewed on her bottom lip and wondered how on earth she was supposed to get to the file she suddenly saw the step-ladders carefully stowed away in a corner.
They were the lightweight aluminium kind and easy for her to pick up and carry and open out. Anxious to collect the files and start work on reading them, she hurried up the steps, cursing under her breath as she recognised the folly of doing so in high heels and a straight skirt. She had never particularly liked heights and she realised a little queasily that in order to reach the file she wanted she was going to have to stand on the topmost step and that she would have nothing to hold on to other than the shelf itself.
Her mind filled with the horrendous mental vision of the metal rack, steps, files and all toppling over completely as she clung to it, causing her to balance herself as carefully as she could without relying on it for support.
As she looked quickly along the rack for the file she wanted she realised that she had positioned the ladders too close to the ‘AM’s rather than the ‘AN’ section that she needed.
Trust her. Now she couldn’t even do a simple job like collecting a few files efficiently. Irritated with herself and frustrated with impatience, she leaned over as far as she could, cursing under her breath as she felt her skirt pull tightly against her legs, impeding her. The file was tantalisingly close. If she could just stretch out a few more centimetres she would be able to reach it without having to go to all the bother of climbing down the steps, repositioning them and then climbing up them again.
She held her breath, stretching her body as far as she could as she reached for the file.
‘What the…?’
The shock of hearing Daniel Jefferson’s sharp exclamation made her turn defensively to face him, but she had forgotten her precarious position on the ladders, and as she turned she felt them rock beneath her with the unsteadiness of her own movements, and she knew that she was going to fall.
Only she didn’t; instead of finding herself in an ignominious heap on the floor at Daniel Jefferson’s feet, she found herself in the equally ignominious position of being held against his body as he reached out and grabbed her before she could fall.
Several equally unpalatable facts hit her at the same time: firstly that she had made a complete and absolute fool of herself and no doubt further confirmed his belief that she was not the kind of employee he wanted; secondly that as she fell she must have dislodged some of the files and that they and their contents were now lying in a puddle of papers and tape on the floor while the ladders leaned drunkenly against the shelves; and, thirdly, and most unpalatable of all, Daniel was holding her so that her breasts were virtually on a level with his eyes and, even worse, she was horribly aware of the length of dark-tight-covered thigh she was now exposing.
‘It’s OK, I’ve got you,’ she heard him telling her, as if she needed telling. She had a perfectly good set of senses and they were fast relaying to her that not only had he ‘got her’, as he had put it, but that for some extraordinary reason her body actually seemed to rather like the sensation of his solid male warmth against it.
Impossible. She didn’t even like the man, much less…She closed her eyes against the attack of vertigo that hit her as Daniel started to lower her to the ground, instinctively grabbing hold of his jacket-covered arms to combat her dizziness.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ she heard him asking her as her feet finally touched the floor. ‘That could have been quite a nasty accident. What on earth were you doing, anyway?’
Now that he had released her and stepped back from her so that he could look at her, Charlotte pushed the feelings she had experienced when he had held her to the back of her mind. Quite naturally, as well as shock, she was now also suffering from embarrassment and temper.
‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ she told him, ignoring the first part of his question. ‘I was trying to reach a file.’
She flushed as he looked from her to the ladders leaning against the shelves.
‘Mm…but surely not on those? Why didn’t you use the other ladders? We had them specially designed for the top shelves.’
The other ladders. Charlotte swallowed, and felt her face flame as Daniel walked past her and then closed the door to the room, so that she could see in the wall space alongside the door a pair of tall aluminium ladders.
‘As you can see, these have a guide rail on them, specifically to prevent the kind of accident you so nearly sustained.’
As she swallowed her humiliation and fury Charlotte ached to tell him that if he hadn’t startled her she would not have fallen off the ladders in the first place.
‘After all, this is a solicitors’ practice,’ he told her wryly. ‘Don’t you think we’re well aware of the dangers of litigation should our employees damage themselves in the execution of their work?’
The room was so small and he was so tall, so…so big that suddenly there didn’t seem to be enough air. Charlotte found that she was having difficulty in breathing somehow. She was aware that Daniel was watching her…that he was, in fact, she realised after one quick startled look at him, looking at her mouth.
Immediately she was filled with an irresistible need to touch her lips with her tongue-tip. Why, she asked herself savagely, to see if they’re still there? Of course they are, and what you’re doing is one of the oldest and most provocative come-ons there is. The kind of trick some third-rate film director might pull. Maybe so, but she still couldn’t stop herself from doing it, a quick reflex action, instinctive and unstoppable.
She must be going crazy, she decided lightheadedly. It must be the lack of air in the room, the shock of her near-accident. She swayed slightly on her feet and heard Daniel asking her again, ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
She parted her lips to speak and then froze as he made a small, almost inaudible sound. When she looked at him his eyes were a dark glittering grey. He must have some special mesmeric powers, she thought dizzily as she tried to look away and could not. No wonder he was the darling of the media. He probably mesmerised his TV audiences in the same way that he was mesmerising her.
Angry with herself for her weakness, she closed her eyes and turned her head away, taking a deep calming breath.
When she opened her eyes again she felt no better, but at least she was no longer looking directly at him.
‘I’m fine,’ she told him shortly, and then, as she headed for the door, she found the will-power to say grittily, ‘What a pity you managed to catch me. If you hadn’t done and I’d fallen on you, injuring you, you could have sued me.’
To her surprise he laughed, and then surprised her even further by telling her, ‘Lydia would have loved you.’
She had her hand on the door-handle when he stopped her, taking hold of her so gently but so powerfully that she could only stare up at him. She gave him a suspicious angry look, her muscles resisting him as she glared at him.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing.’
He was still smiling at her, but now his smile chilled a little and his voice was crisply cool as he told her, ‘I think you might want to—er—adjust your skirt before you leave.’
With that he stepped past her and opened the door, firmly closing it and leaving her shut in the small room, her face on fire as she glanced down and saw the ruched, untidy state of her skirt, and the length of thigh it exposed.
She was perilously close to angry tears as she dragged the fabric back down, and then set about tidying up the mess on the floor.
Damn him. Damn him. It was all his fault…if he hadn’t startled her…
It was a further half an hour or so before she had collected the rest of the files. When she went back to her office her heart sank as she saw that the communicating door to Daniel’s office was open.
He was on the telephone when she went in, and as she walked to her own desk she saw a packet of sandwiches open on his.
He had finished his call and replaced the receiver, turning towards her as he asked, ‘You got the rest of the files without any problems, then?’
Her stiff, ‘Yes, thank you,’ should have made it plain that any kind of conversation with him was the last thing she wanted, but he seemed unaware of her coldness, adding,
‘I’m just trying to snatch some lunch. I didn’t get time for anything to eat earlier.’
As Charlotte turned her back on him her face burned with indignation. Did he really think she was remotely interested in the way he and his…his client had spent their lunch-hour? She was tempted to make some derisory comment, but she reminded herself just in time that she was a mere employee, and one whose grip on her job was tenuous in the extreme.
She spent the rest of the afternoon reading through the first of the files and she was relieved when at half-past three Daniel closed the door between them, saying that he had a client interview.
‘Later, once you’ve acquainted yourself with the contents of the files, I shall of course expect you to sit in on any relevant interviews.’
To sit in on his interviews, but not to conduct any of her own, Charlotte thought balefully once the door was closed. Another indication of how little he trusted her professional judgement.
At four o’clock her office door opened and Richard Horwich came in.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here to welcome you this morning,’ he told her with a fatherly smile. ‘Unfortunately I was in court. I’m sure you’re settling in very well, though.’
‘Yes…Yes, thank you. I…I didn’t realise I would be working solely for Mr Jefferson.’
Richard raised his eyebrows a little at her formal ‘Mr’ but Charlotte noticed that he looked a little uncomfortable as he told her, ‘Yes, well…I…that is…With his increased work-load, we both felt that Daniel needed his own qualified assistant.’
It was just as she had suspected, Charlotte decided. The decision to make her Daniel Jefferson’s assistant had only been taken once Daniel had seen her CV and decided that she was not to be trusted to work on her own.
She wanted to protest that she was a qualified solicitor, not a child needing constant supervision, but she struggled to suppress the bitterness and resentment churning inside her, reminding herself of how much she needed to keep this job.
Richard had barely been gone for ten minutes when someone else knocked on Charlotte’s door.
The girl who came in was pretty and very pregnant. She smiled at Charlotte and introduced herself.
‘I’m Anne, Daniel’s secretary, and yours of course. I had a clinic appointment this morning.’ She patted her stomach and grimaced. ‘I’ll be glad when he or she eventually decides to arrive, I can tell you.’
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