‘No.’ Blue eyes did a frowning, absent-minded inspection of her and returned to her face, which had pinkened. ‘Just get the file and come into my office with it. There are one or two things I want to discuss with you. Oh, you might as well grab us both a cup of coffee while you’re about it, even though you’re not much use on the coffee-making front.’ That little jab seemed to do the trick of snapping him out of his mood because he grinned at her. ‘Now, I bet you’re going to tell me that a highly qualified PA isn’t responsible for making decent coffee for her boss.’
Tessa took a deep breath and counted to ten. He didn’t often tease her and, when he did, it always sent a tingle of unwanted emotion racing through her. The only way she knew how to handle that was to be as bland and literal as possible, so she gave him a perplexed look as though considering his criticism fully at face value.
‘You haven’t complained about my coffee-making skills before.’
‘Too weak. Weak coffee is for weak men.’
This time her finely arched eyebrows flew up in an expression of amused disbelief.
‘Oh, really? I never realised that before.’
‘Didn’t think so. Aren’t you glad that you’re learning such amazing things every day, thanks to me?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ she murmured, looking down and sliding away from her desk. ‘I really don’t know how I survived in my last job before.’
She could almost hear him grinning as she swept out of the room and headed to Richard’s office.
Three days after she had started, his mother had telephoned her at the office to find out how she was enjoying working for her son.
‘It’s a unique experience,’ Tessa had confided truthfully. ‘I’ve never worked for anyone like your son before.’
‘I hope you’re managing to keep him in order,’ Mrs Diaz had said. ‘He can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated. Runs rings around people.’
‘Well, he doesn’t intimidate me,’ she had replied without pausing for breath.
Well, he did, though not in the way his mother had implied. She was confident in her abilities to do her job to the highest standard, thereby giving him no chance to slam into her for inefficiency, but on the personal level it was a different question altogether. He had a certain magnetism that made her quail inside and it was a source of abundant relief to her that she could school her expressions so that that particular weakness was never exposed.
He was waiting for her in his office when she returned ten minutes later with the file and a cup of coffee that was so strong that she could almost have stood the teaspoon upright in it.
He had pushed his chair back and pulled out the bottom drawer of the desk, which he was using as an impromptu footrest.
‘Pull up a chair,’ he said, ‘and close the door behind you.’
‘Close the door?’
‘That’s right. No need to repeat everything I say parrot-style.’
Tessa didn’t say anything. She shut his door, handed him the file and then sat down with her notepad on her lap and her hand poised to take down whatever he was about to dictate.
‘So,’ he began, ‘how are you enjoying it here?’
Tessa looked up at him in surprise. ‘Fine, thank you.’
‘Fine. Hmm.’ What he had intended to discuss, amongst other things, were the costings of extending IT operations somewhere in the Far East. She might not, he had realised, be the eye candy he had previously employed, but she hadn’t been kidding when she had told him that she was good at what she did. Not only were his thoughts channelled into expert documentation, but she could involve herself in more complex debates, which he had discovered was quite a useful talent.
Her persona, though, was a more difficult nut to crack. She greeted everything he said with the same unshakeable composure, which was beginning to prick his curiosity. His method of management was an open-door policy, whereby all his employees were free to voice whatever was on their minds, and they did. Moreover, he had become accustomed to a fast turnover of secretaries who wore their feelings on their sleeves. He liked the people who worked for him to be three-dimensional; he enjoyed the fact that he knew about their personal lives as well as their professional ones. It made for a tightly knit team of people who were secure enough in their abilities to take criticism and felt valued enough to dish it out should they see fit.
Tessa, thrown into this volatile, verbal bunch, was an enigma and it was beginning to bother him.
‘I’m concerned that you might be finding the pace of this industry a little too swift for you.’
‘Would you mind explaining that?’ She looked at him with unreadable brown eyes.