‘No, I know. It’s——’ Maggie glanced over her shoulder as the office door opened and James walked in. Jenna’s eyes widened fractionally before hardening on his face. How dare he assume the right to walk into her office? She stood up to face him, her eyes and mouth cold.
‘James, I’m afraid I’m rather busy…’ she began, but he overruled her, making her blood boil with his masculinely arrogant assumption of command.
‘It won’t take long. I just called in to drop these photocopies off. You mentioned that you wanted them last night—at my flat,’ he goaded softly.
Jenna stiffened, conscious of Maggie’s curious scrutiny. Despite herself she felt her skin burn and cursed its betraying fairness. She had never learned to control her give-away tendency to blush—ridiculous in a woman of twenty-nine.
‘Yes, thank you, you’re very kind,’ she managed to say disjointedly.
The outer office phone rang and Maggie went to answer it before Jenna could ask her to show her uninvited guest out.
‘How about lunch?’ James asked.
‘Why?’ Jenna eyed him challengingly. ‘We don’t have anything to say to one another.’
‘You think not?’ He smiled, and then his bantering manner dropped from him as he said quietly, ‘Jenna, I’d like you to reconsider about selling the Hall to me. Don’t you think you might have bitten off more than you can chew?’ he asked her, watching her with eyes that registered every single fluctuating emotion that stormed her. ‘It’s no great secret in the city that financially your firm’s none too secure at the moment.’
Jenna felt herself sway. She wanted to deny his quiet, assertive comment, to demand to know how he had come by such information, but pride would not let her.
‘It’s just a temporary cashflow problem,’ she told him through gritted teeth, ‘and no, no way would I ever sell the Hall to you.’
Her eyes defied him to press her further. At that moment she felt all her original loathing and distrust of him come racing back. Was that why he had kissed her last night? Had he hoped to use his sexual mastery to get her to agree to sell him the old Hall? The mere thought drove her into a frenzied temper.
‘Never. Never will I sell the Hall to you, James Allingham,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Now, please leave my office.’
A little to her surprise, he did. When Maggie came in ten minutes later, Jenna could see that she was curious, but she was too well trained to pry. However, she did comment lightly, ‘That will be more fodder for the gossip press if he was seen. I take it there is nothing in the rumour currently circulating that the pair of you are an interesting item?’
‘Nothing whatsoever,’ Jenna told her shortly.
She was too wrought up and angry to worry about the gossip press. What did concern her was how James had found out about her financial position.
Stop being so naïve, she told herself grimly. Men like James always had ways of discovering what they wanted to know. And owning what they wanted to possess, a tiny inner voice warned her, but she shut it away refusing to listen to it. This time he would learn different. There was no way he was going to get the old Hall, no way at all.
His visit seemed to have set the seal on her week, and it went from bad to worse. Two prospective clients telephoned to cancel contracts she had thought secure and had proved strangely reluctant to tell her why. She also discovered that one of her clients had defaulted on payment and, according to his accountants, had left the country and could not be contacted.
All in all she was glad when Friday came, even though her daily paper did carry an item in the gossip column commenting on her visit to Yorkshire with James. It also mentioned James’s connection with the Hall and went on to suggest that marriage might be in the air. There was even allusion to a supposed long-ago romance between them, so ridiculously far-fetched that Jenna threw the paper down in disgust.
She was still uneasy about Lucy, who had been truculent and unforthcoming the night she rang her. Suddenly it seemed as though her life was becoming unravelled, falling apart around her, and it all seemed to date from the time she met James Allingham.
She could hardly blame him for Lucy’s behaviour, she told herself wryly. In fact, the only thing she could think of that pleased her was that she had had no more dreams featuring Regency rakes—or their modern-day equivalents—and her painter, after going up to Yorkshire, had reported to her that he would be delighted to take on the commission and had produced some initial sketches that looked extremely promising.
She was just about to clear her desk when Richard knocked on her half-open office door and walked in.
‘Jenna, I’ve got something to tell you,’ he announced, sitting down without waiting for her to invite him to do so.
When she looked at him, his eyes slid away from her own, and apprehension started to curl through her stomach. Whatever Richard had to say, it obviously was not going to be good. Please God, don’t let us have lost another contract, Jenna thought despairingly, enough things had gone wrong this week already.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m leaving,’ Richard said flatly. ‘I’ve had an offer from…from someone to set me up on my own.’
For a moment Jenna was too stunned to take in what he was saying. Richard was a good assistant, but he lacked individual flair, and as far as she knew had never had any ambition to set up in business on his own. And then, as she absorbed what he was saying to her, various things began to click into place.
‘And you’re taking with you some of our clients?’ she accused, getting up and walking over to her window.
She saw him colour uncomfortably, his voice faintly aggressive as he demanded, ‘Why shouldn’t I? They were contracts I got in the first place. If they choose to come with me…’