CHAPTER ONE
IT was quite a long way from the canteen to the office of the Editor of the Daily Globe, especially when one was carrying a tray holding two tea cups, a pot of tea, milk and sugar, but Briony Winters was used to it. Her small, slight frame belied her strength just as her soft, feminine features belied her nature.
She pushed open the door of the outer office, which was hers, noticing with a frown the heavy masculine topcoat flung carelessly over the spare chair. Doug Simons, her boss, often had visitors, but very few of them wore coats like that. It was wool, and expensive, meticulously tailored and lined in silk. Briony put down the tray, wondering about whether to give up her own cup for the visitor, when she realised that the inner door was not quite closed.
‘Well, you’ll have no problems with the job, of course,’ Doug was saying. ‘Not after working on the Telegraph.’
‘Which, I take it, means I could have in other areas.’
Although the man’s voice was faintly muffled, there was no mistaking its hard inflexibility, and Briony frowned, her lips drawing together in a cold line.
‘Well, it’s just Briony…’
The very mention of her own name should have been sufficient to send her out of earshot, but despite allegations among the male staff of the paper to the contrary, Briony was only human.
‘Briony?’
Again that note of sharp query.
‘Briony Winters, my secretary,’ Doug supplied. ‘Well, your secretary now. She might give you a hard time at first… until she gets used to you.’
‘She might…? My God, no wonder your sales are slipping if you allow your secretary to dictate to you, Doug!’
The coolly insolent words made Briony’s fingers curl angrily into her palms. For two pins she’d march right into Doug’s office and demand to know exactly why he thought it necessary to explain to his replacement that he might have ‘problems’. Didn’t she fulfil her secretarial duties with a good deal more efficiency and effectiveness than any of the other secretaries?
She had been away on a fortnight’s holiday when the news of Doug’s promotion broke and had come back to find the paper in an uproar, with Doug due to leave for New York only three days after his replacement arrived. Since the Globe had been taken over by an American newspaper group, such transatlantic moves had become commonplace, and Briony hadn’t been unduly surprised to hear that Doug’s replacement was from the States. She herself didn’t particularly like American men. They were inclined to be brash and noisy. And worse, they didn’t know when to take ‘no’ for an answer. She stared angrily at the door. Doug had no right… no right at all to discuss her like this.
‘What is she?’ she heard the other man say sardonically. ‘Some sort of female dragon? A Women’s Libber with her hair in a bun and thick ankles?’
‘No way,’ Doug said dryly. ‘As it happens, she’s got one of the sexiest bodies I’ve ever seen.’
Outside the door Briony writhed in furious resentment. Doug had never given the slightest inkling that he had even noticed her body, and if he had she wouldn’t have continued to work for him.
‘Woe betide you if you try to touch it, though,’ Doug was warning his companion. ‘Briony has a hang-up where men are concerned. She can’t stand them, and it isn’t a sham. Something to do with something that happened in her teens.’
‘A teenage romance goes wrong and turns her into a man-hater? Come on, Doug. These are the nineteen-eighties!’
‘Well, some people take things harder than others. I’m just warning you to take things easy. She’s the best secretary I’ve ever had—works hard and is meticulously efficient.’
‘Maybe so,’ the hard voice said curtly. ‘But if she wants the kid glove treatment she shouldn’t be working on a paper. Secretaries are expendable, Doug,’ the man added in a bored voice, ‘even the best of them.’
Briony gripped her desk, her voice white with fear and shock. There had been redundancies on the paper the summer before and she had been terrified, then, that she might lose her job. It was something she daren’t even contemplate. She depended on it too heavily. It paid well, and Doug had always been flexible about hours, which had been an added bonus. But now Doug was leaving and she would be working for a man she had already decided she hated, without even meeting him. He was still talking to Doug, and she moved away from the door on legs suddenly weak and trembling. Whoever he was, he was no American. His accent was English. She could tell that even though his voice was muffled by the door.