Lusty Billionaires Bundle(134)

‘Hence the fact that she has to come into the office. None of her friends live locally and my mother left the country a couple of days ago.’

Tessa couldn’t take her eyes off his face. She could picture him as just about anything apart from a father. He had too much personality to be a father! Then she thought what a ridiculous idea that was.

‘Are you following a word I’m saying?’

Tessa blinked. ‘I just find it a bit difficult to comprehend…how old is…Anna?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Fourteen. But you never talk about her…have pictures…’ Was he ashamed of being a father? Was that why she was at boarding-school? Because she cramped his eligible-bachelor lifestyle?

‘I have pictures in my wallet. Care to see them just to verify that I’m telling the truth and that she looks like a normal kid, no nasty side effects from my being her father?’ He raised his eyebrows and Tessa blushed.

‘No, of course not!’

‘Can I ask you something?’

She nodded, still furiously examining the scenario that had unfolded in front of her.

‘Did my mother know that you had raised a kid sister virtually on your own?’

‘Completely on my own,’ Tessa absent-mindedly amended. ‘Yes. Why?’

“‘A most suitable woman for the job.”’ He quoted his mother with a grin. ‘Not only did you come with a sackful of references, but you were single, with a sensible head on sensible shoulders, and you had firsthand experience of communicating with a teenager. No wonder she failed to mention the little technicality of my daughter. You were so ideal for the job that she probably didn’t want to jeopardise the chances of your accepting the offer.’

‘I feel manipulated.’

‘You’ll have to mention that to my darling mother the next time you see her.’ He pulled out slowly from the kerb, leaving her to her riotous thoughts for a while.

‘But what exactly am I supposed to do with your daughter?’ Tessa eventually ventured. If she had just one drop of his volatile blood in her, then she would be more than a handful cooped up in an office when she would rather be hanging out with teenagers. Tessa shuddered at the prospect lurking ahead of her.

‘Supervise her. Give her little jobs to do. I’ll be around for most of the week. When I’m not…’

‘She can’t possibly stay with me…!’

‘Her old babysitter will take over. Don’t worry. I have every faith in your abilities…’





CHAPTER THREE




ANNA was nothing like Tessa had expected. In her head, she had imagined her own sister at fourteen, but with Curtis’s dark good looks. Gregarious, smilingly wilful and utterly boy crazy. Thrown into this mental picture was the added bonus of being the only child of a millionaire father. The equation was terrifying, not least because she knew from firsthand experience that she would spend the week tearing her hair out just to make sure that her beady eyes never ceased their constant supervision.

She had arrived on the Monday a full hour and a half before she should have just to make sure that she did as much of her own workload as possible. Just in case.#p#分页标题#e#

Curtis and Anna had finally come in some time about ten, Curtis flamboyantly explaining that he had made an essential detour to take his daughter out for breakfast, while in his shadow a tall, awkward teenager with her hair pulled back into a pony tail had hovered with her eyes lowered, staring down at her curiously old-fashioned shoes.

That had been three days ago. The boy-crazy handful of hormone-driven teenager had turned out to be a studiously polite and excruciatingly shy girl who seemed to enjoy working in the office more than she did leaving it and who only really smiled when her father was around. Then, she lit up like a Christmas tree.

‘Anna?’ Tessa looked at her now, head bent over the mighty stack of files that she had been allocated to go through, making sure that the paperwork corresponded to what was on the computer. ‘Fancy you and I going out to lunch somewhere?’

Anna looked at her and smiled.

She had the prettiest face, Tessa thought, but the look was ruined by the hairdo and the clothes and the way she walked, slightly hunched as though ashamed of her height. Having gone through the wringer with Lucy, who had never believed in concealing her assets and who had been able to wield an eyeliner pencil at the age of fourteen like any professional make-up artist, Tessa knew that she should be vigorously counting her blessings that this one week was not turning out to be the nightmare she had expected.

However, it just didn’t seem natural that Anna should be fourteen going on middle-aged.