Marriage Without Love & More Than a Convenient Marriage(2)

The intercom buzzed and she flicked it down, her voice coolly remote as she answered Doug.

‘Come into my office for a moment, would you, Briony?’ he requested. ‘There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.’

There was a small mirror on the wall behind her, but she didn’t bother to look in it. She stood up picking up her notebook and pencil through sheer force of habit, a small girl, with a mane of dark red hair that curled thickly round a perfectly oval face. Her skin was pale and creamy; almost translucent. She had delicate features and large green eyes which looked as though they might once have been vulnerable but which now reflected only the image of whoever looked into them. Looking into Briony’s eyes was like looking at a one-way mirror, from the wrong side, one of her infuriated male colleagues had once said. The only time anyone saw any expression in them was if some man tried to sexually belittle her. Then they filled with bitterness and contempt. Slender to the point of fragility, there was a steel-like quality about her, a coldness which allowed no one to trespass close enough to discover the woman she might be beneath the layers of ice in which she was encased. She was twenty-three and as composed as a woman ten years older. ‘Frigid’ and ‘incapable of feeling were just two of the many insults frustrated males had hurled at her, but they pleased rather than offended. Where men were concerned her emotions were completely burnt out, leaving nothing but bitter hatred.

Despite that, Doug was envied his secretary. She was cool, and calm, and could be relied on completely in an emergency. Her job was no sinecure. She was on the go from nine until six every day, working late quite often, and always ready to work through a lunch-hour or give up free time if it was necessary. The other girls joked that she didn’t have a private life, and that the paper was her family; and although they were reluctant to admit it, most of them felt slightly in awe of her.

As she pushed open the door Doug smiled at her. Doug Simons was in his mid-fifties, a power-house of human energy, who had worked in newspapers since he left school. He and Briony got on very well—or at least she had thought they had until she heard him discussing her so freely. Happily married with a grown up family and a wife on whom he doted, he represented no threat to her defence systems. Neither did he constantly annoy her with unwanted sexually based conversation or false flattery of a type insulting to both her intelligence and her taste. Men thought they only had to smile and wheedle and girls would gladly jump into bed with them. Well, not her!

Doug smiled warmly at her, his expression faintly ingratiating as though he was half afraid of what she might do or how she would react.

She smiled back—a slight widening of warmly curved lips to show even white teeth, the smile not reaching her eyes, which remained as clear and cold as glass.

Doug’s companion had his back to her. He didn’t turn to look up at her, nor did he betray any other awareness of her presence, and she prickled with animosity. His hair was dark and thick, brushing the collar of the expensive suit he was wearing, and she stiffened as warily and antagonistically as a cat faced with a large, threatening dog.

‘Kieron, meet your new secretary, Briony. Briony—Kieron Blake.’

She at least had had the advantage of hearing his name, and thus the precious gift of a few seconds to prepare herself. He had had nothing, and she observed the shocked incredulity of his expression with grim satisfaction. Navy-blue eyes swept slowly and disbelievingly over her; looking for the scars? she asked herself bitterly. He wouldn’t find any. She had concealed them all too well.

‘Briony?’ His eyebrows rose in contemptuous accusation, and although inwardly terrified, Briony refused to be drawn. Let him think what he liked. He hadn’t changed. The long-boned Celtic face was still as physically compelling; the high cheekbones and harsh male features still as disturbing. His skin was tanned, the thick dark hair worn slightly longer than she remembered, and the suit more formal. He had himself under control now, the shock carefully masked, only the faint clenching of his jawbone revealing the control he was having to exert.

‘Kieron’s going to need all the help you can give him until he settles in, Briony,’ Doug told her, sublimely unaware of the undercurrents eddying fiercely around him. ‘I’m going to take him round and introduce him to the other editors and then we’re going out to lunch. Anything urgent, get Phil to deal with it, will you?’

Phil Masters was Doug’s assistant, a tall gangly Scot with a shock of red hair and a temper to match.

Doug and Kieron were standing up, Kieron extending his hand to her, his expression a mingling of contempt and indifference, which changed to anger as she withdrew automatically from him.