The Billionaire Boss's Bride(18)

Cool-headed composure shot through the window at a rate of knots, and in its place came a surge of panicky agitation. She wanted to push him back, but just the thought of her hand making contact with his hard chest made her quail.

‘Maybe overreacting’s a bit strong…’ she retreated weakly. ‘You’re her father…’

‘Damn right I am!’ Curtis growled. ‘I’m her father and there’s no way I’m going to see my baby dressed like a tart!’

Tessa’s eyes opened wide at this blatant display of double standards.

‘A tart?’ she spluttered. ‘Did you actually look at the stuff Anna bought?’

‘Sure I looked at it!’

‘Those happened to be very expensive designer clothes!’ Which was hardly an overstatement. At the time, Tessa had baulked at the price tags merrily dangling from the clothes, but she had swallowed back the temptation to hurry her charge along in the direction of more affordable places. This was a world she had never seen before. A world in which a fourteen-year-old girl had all the money she wanted at her disposal and was innocently ignorant of any need to go cheaper.

‘I don’t care if they were hand-finished by the Great Man up There himself!’ he bellowed. ‘I don’t want my daughter wearing any of it! She was perfectly happy in clothes that covered her up!’

‘How do you know that?’ A delicate matter. Anna had confided in her that her father had always seen her as his little girl. He brought her back lavish gifts of coats and jackets that were beautifully tailored and cost the earth, but were not exactly the height of fashion, and she had never thought to rebel because she adored him.

‘Because she’s never complained!’ He strode away from her and settled himself behind his desk.

Tessa released a long sigh of relief. Her legs were going stiff from sitting in the chair, rigid with tension, but a well-honed sense of survival told her that any mention of actually getting down to the business of work would be a big mistake. Curtis was still chewing on his thoughts and her options were basically reduced to staying put and trying to dodge the verbal missiles or else feigning a sudden, extreme illness.

‘Well?’ he prompted. ‘What have you got to say to that? Hmm?’

‘You’re right.’

He looked at her suspiciously. ‘Are you trying to calm me down?’

‘No!’ Tessa lied, protesting.

‘Because if you are, I can tell you from now that that’s one sure-fire way to get me enraged.’

At least he was no longer breathing fire and brimstone, though. Having the full force of his anger directed at her had been scary. Had that been yet another one of those elements of his interesting personality that his mother had casually mentioned? An ability to make other people aware of just how high their adrenaline levels could go? Working for a firm of accountants was beginning to seem like a stroll in the park!

‘Look,’ she ventured tentatively, ‘Don’t you think you’re a little guilty of double standards?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Curtis informed her with sweeping arrogance.

‘You go out with beautiful women who wear provocative clothes. You employ beautiful women whom you expect to wear provocative clothes! Well, with the exception of me, obviously. You like attractive, glamorous women. I just don’t see anything wrong with your daughter making the most of her youth. She’s way too sensible to want to dress like a tart but she’s not a kid, whatever you want to think! She can’t go straight from frilly petticoats into slacks and jumpers a middle-aged woman would wear!’

‘Said your piece?’

‘I most certainly have not!’ Lord, but how this man had the talent to get under her skin! ‘How can you be so…so authoritarian when it comes to your daughter and so relaxed with everyone else?’

‘Because she’s my daughter. Believe me, I’ve seen firsthand how boys grow up looking at girls dressed in next to nothing…’

‘Oh. Right.’

Black brows met in an irritable frown at her capitulation. But she didn’t quite know what to say. They could keep going round in circles for hours because the plain truth was that Curtis wanted to protect his daughter and his version of protection was to insulate her behind a severely grown up image that would guarantee that no boys would be pounding at her door. While Anna was not unhappy with it, Tessa wondered whether she might be in time, whether her rebellion would take place later on and be all the more disastrous for that.

‘Let me show you something.’ He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, rummaged around, keeping his eyes firmly glued to her face, and eventually pulled out a photograph, which he slapped down on the desk in front of her. ‘Have a look. Go on. It won’t bite.’