The Millionaire Boss's Mistress
Auteur
Madeleine Ker
Lezers
15,9K
Hoofdstukken
14
CHAPTER ONE
SHE had never been so late in her life. And it wasn’t even her fault.
As the airliner banked over the bay, Amy got a good look at the city where she had been expected hours ago. Many hours ago. She checked her watch. Yesterday, in fact.
The rising sun was slanting low over Hong Kong, making the millions of windows in the skyscrapers glow like gold. It was a breathtaking sight. With the thoroughness that marked everything she did, she had already studied the city in detail from guidebooks, and now, from several thousand feet up, she could pick out some of the major landmarks.
She did not have much time to practise her geography. It all swept past her window in a few seconds, the harbour, the Peak, Kowloon, the dense grid of streets that, even at this early hour of the day, already twinkled with innumerable cars.
She hunted urgently for the glass tower that was her destination. The plane was going fast. There it was! She managed to catch a glimpse of the tower, its hundreds of blue glass windows glowing in the morning sun. Then it was gone. But at least she had seen it. She was supposed to have been there, ready for her interview, at lunchtime yesterday.
Amy Worthington felt her stomach swoop in unison with the airliner’s descent. She checked her watch. It was coming up for eight in the morning. Her interview with Anton Zell was history. So was the job it should have led to.
He would already be in another country. It had been made very clear to her that Mr Zell was only in Hong Kong for one day. And wherever he was, Anton Zell was not renowned as a man who accepted excuses. She had been given her great chance and had missed it. It had been up to her to make sure she was present for the interview on time. For various reasons, she had chosen a flight that would have got her to Hong Kong with four hours to spare. Instead it had got her there eighteen hours late.
Had there ever been an unluckier flight? The misery had begun in London, as one delay after another to the flight had been announced; infinitely worse had been the pilot’s laconic announcement that, due to engine trouble, they would be landing for repairs at an Asian airport whose name she couldn’t even pronounce.
Amy felt like bursting into tears. This job was vitally important to her. It represented a quantum leap upwards. She knew she was capable of doing it, and doing it very well. It offered wonderful things—a spectacular salary, company accommodation in Hong Kong, travel, excitement.
But it also represented a major challenge. Whatever her capabilities were, she had not worked at this level before. She had everything—the intelligence, the confidence, the training—everything except the experience.
She needed to convince Anton Zell, known as one of the most demanding and powerful men in business, to give her a chance. And that meant persuading him to take a risk on her, an unknown, young and relatively inexperienced person, when there were many others, with a lifetime in industry behind them, who would also be queuing for this post.
Exactly how she was going to do that was a subject that had occupied her thoughts almost every hour of the past two weeks. Technically, she felt she knew the answers to almost any question Zell might throw at her. She had studied every scrap of information that had been released about his current projects and she had researched every possibility diligently. She was adaptable and she felt ready to assimilate anything that might come her way.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem would be in persuading Anton Zell that someone of her youth was capable of standing up to the relentless pressures of the job.
The man who had helped to arrange this interview for her, her uncle Jeffrey Cookson, had put it succinctly: ‘Zell moves at a pace that would burn most human beings to ashes. The interview is going to be hell, my dear. But get through it, and you’ll be working in the next dimension.’
Nor was her physical appearance going to help. Her looks had often been described as ‘angelic’. That, presumably, referred to her soft blonde hair and soft grey eyes, matched by fair skin and a sweet face. That there was more than a bit of devilry in her make-up did not appear on the surface. Nor did she look a month older than her twenty-eight years. Though her life had been no bed of roses, the sorrows and struggles she had been through had left no mark on her beauty. But there were occasions—and this was one of them—when she would have liked to look a little sterner and older.
She recalled the other thing Jeffrey had said. ‘He’s based in Hong Kong and does a lot of work all over south-east Asia. He’ll have his pick of PAs who can speak the local languages. So you’ll have to offer him something special, Amy.’
The jet engines roared deafeningly as the plane came in for landing at Kai Tak Airport. Staring out of the window, Amy saw the rooftops hurtling past, apparently only a hand’s breadth beneath the wings. She had heard about this famously low landing approach, but she had never anticipated how stomach-churning it would be in real life!
She had no idea whether a Zell Corporation employee would be waiting to meet her. Perhaps they had given up on her. Her only hope—and it was a very faint one—was to see whether another interview could be arranged at short notice, somewhere else in the world. But it was a given that her failure had put her out of the running, and that Anton Zell had already appointed someone else to the job.
Getting from the plane to the terminal was a long shuffle along various claustrophobic, grey tunnels. It seemed interminable. Restlessly checking her watch, Amy saw that it was by now almost ten o’ clock. On top of everything, she had probably also lost her hotel booking in this furiously busy city. She longed for a meal, a quiet room, a shower, and perhaps even an hour or two of sleep.
At last she retrieved her suitcase, which looked a lot more battered than it had done when she’d last seen it in London, and trudged through Customs to the arrivals hall, pushing her trolley ahead of her. As she emerged through the sliding doors she scanned the crowd anxiously, hoping to find a hospitable figure, perhaps holding up a sign with her name on it.
She did not seem to be in luck. A sea of faces stared back at her incuriously. Signs were being held up, but, since they were in Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and languages she did not even recognise, they only confused her.
She came to a standstill, hunting through the jumble for a single welcoming note. Impatient passengers jostled past her. She heard an exasperated comment in Chinese. A heavy trolley rammed painfully into her calves, making her gasp.
‘You’re blocking the exit.’ The deep voice was accompanied by a strong hand which closed around her arm and pulled her inescapably forward. ‘Lao Tzu said, “Swim against the current, but do not be a boulder in the stream”.’
Amy looked up in bewilderment. The tall man who was hustling her away from the exit was wearing jeans and a dark blue silk shirt. But the lean, tanned face—the most handsome face in the world, according to a recent Vogue—was deeply familiar to her.
‘Mr Zell?’ she said in astonishment.
‘Miss Worthington, I presume,’ he replied laconically.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry to be so late,’ she panted, trying to keep up with his pace as he steered her through the crowds. ‘My flight was delayed and then—’
‘I know all about your flight,’ he cut in. ‘Take my advice and don’t use that particular airline again. Their planes are old and they don’t pay their ground crew enough.’
‘I didn’t expect you to meet me in person!’
‘There’s nobody but me, Worthington,’ he retorted.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s Sunday morning,’ he said. His strong hand was in the small of her back, pushing her relentlessly onward. ‘I expect my staff to work hard six days a week. I don’t ask anybody to work on a Sunday.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she babbled. ‘I really didn’t mean to cause you so much inconvenience—’
‘This is where we have to leave your trolley.’ With effortless strength, he scooped up her bag and abandoned the trolley in his wake. ‘Please don’t get your coat caught in the escalator.’
She snatched her trailing coat up hastily as they got onto the escalator. ‘Mr Zell, I do apologise for all this—’
He turned to her. His eyes were a deep cobalt blue. Their gaze hit her like a jolt of electricity. ‘You have apologised four times now,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think that’s enough?’
‘Yes, Mr Zell.’
‘Then stop.’
‘Yes, Mr Zell.’
She studied him covertly as the escalator rumbled upward. He looked formidably fit, broad-shouldered and flat-stomached in his casual silk shirt. And she thought she agreed with Vogue—he was probably the handsomest man in the world by a long way. His eyes and mouth were devastatingly sexy. He was in his early forties, and silver had appeared at his temples, but the rest of his hair, neatly cut—but not slicked back in approved zillionaire style—was black as jet.
Nor was there anything about his clothes that suggested he was fabulously wealthy and powerful. His watch was a steel sports model. No diamond glittered at his neat ears and his lean, tanned fingers were bare. The most expensive thing about him seemed to be his phone, a hi-tech titanium wafer into which he was now talking, telling his driver to meet them at the main entrance.
He snapped the phone shut, then turned to meet her eyes. ‘Something wrong?’
‘I—I understood you were only going to be in Hong Kong for a day. I hope you didn’t have to change your plans on my account.’
‘I’m planning to fly out to Sarawak this afternoon at two,’ he replied. ‘I’d like to get this interview over with.’
‘Of course.’
‘We’re going to go to the office to do it.’ He raked her with an up-and-down glance. She was suddenly acutely aware of the crumpled state of her clothes; her fawn trousers and jacket had been elegant when she’d set off, a lifetime ago. Now they proclaimed that she’d slept in them, woken in them, writhed in them, squirmed in them, wrestled a bear in them.
God alone knew what her hair looked like.
‘I’m sorry, I’m not very smart for an interview!’
‘I’ll make allowances. Do you insist on changing? Want to go to your hotel?’
‘Oh, I’m fine, thank you,’ she said quickly. Her heart was pounding hard. She could not believe her luck. She was going to do the interview after all! She was getting a second chance!
‘How about breakfast?’
‘No, thank you, Mr Zell.’
‘You’re not hungry?’
‘Breakfast is for wimps,’ she said bravely.
‘Many people consider me a monster,’ he said curtly. ‘Would you want to work for a monster, Worthington?’
‘No, Mr Zell.’
‘I am not a monster. If you are hungry or thirsty, please feel free to say so.’
‘Well, actually—’
‘Come.’
That powerful hand in the small of her back drove her out through the doors into the full, humid heat of a Hong Kong morning. A sleek black limousine nosed through the traffic and headed purposefully towards them. A chauffeur in a green uniform jumped out and hefted Amy’s suitcase into the boot. Anton Zell propelled Amy into the interior.
The door thumped shut, cocooning her in a world of opulent luxury. Every surface was upholstered in cream leather and smelled delicious. She sank into her seat, blissfully feeling the air-conditioning starting to soak away the muggy heat.
Opposite her, Anton Zell was talking into his phone again. ‘I’m running late, Lavinia,’ he said in a clipped voice. ‘A small but unavoidable calamity. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.’
The limo oozed out of the parking bay. ‘To the office, Mr Zell?’ the driver asked over his shoulder.
‘Yes, Freddie. Stop at Choy Fat on the way.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The partition slid shut, sealing them in privacy.
Zell snapped his phone shut. His hands were strong and fine, she noticed. ‘So what brings you to Hong Kong?’ he demanded of Amy.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Why do you want this job?’ His deep blue eyes were piercing hers. The abrupt questions were unsettling her. She tried not to stare at him like a hypnotised rabbit.
‘Is the interview starting now?’ she asked.
‘It started yesterday at noon,’ he retorted. ‘Aren’t you happy at McCallum and Roe? Do you have some trouble there?’
‘No, of course not.’
“‘Of course not”? Then why have you flown all the way to Hong Kong to look for another job?’
‘Because I’m capable of very much more than McCallum and Roe ask of me,’ she replied.
‘Does that mean you expect me to pay you very much more than McCallum and Roe pay you?’
‘It means that I need a greater challenge in my work,’ she rejoined. ‘I’m not the sort of person who likes to coast along, doing the minimum. I like to be stretched. I need to feel that I’m always giving of my best. At the end of each week I want to look back and see that I’ve broken new ground, achieved things of substance—not just kept a chair warm.’
He watched her carefully as she spoke. ‘Are you a risk-taker?’
The question flummoxed her for a moment. ‘I am not a reckless person,’ she replied slowly. ‘But I am prepared to take risks when the reward seems worthwhile. And where what is risked is mine, and not someone else’s.’
‘You enjoy responsibility?’
‘Yes,’ she said candidly, ‘I do.’
‘Can you deliver projects on time?’
‘Yes,’ she said decisively.
‘But you couldn’t deliver yourself to this interview on time,’ he pointed out silkily. ‘You’ve arrived—’ he checked his watch ‘—exactly nineteen hours late. You chose a flight that gave you too little margin for delays, Worthington. You took a risk. But what has been lost is mine, not yours. My time. People who take risks with my time do not last very long in my employment.’
‘I understand,’ she said in a low voice, stinging from the rebuke.
‘Do you know why I need a new PA?’
‘I have heard that your old PA had a sudden illness.’
‘Marcie developed a heart murmur. She didn’t tell me the full truth. She was trying to keep going until I found a replacement, but she collapsed,’ he said. ‘She only got out of hospital yesterday. Right now, I need someone urgently.’
Amy tried to smile. ‘Well, here I am, Mr Zell.’
His answer was a grunt.
They had been driving along a freeway towards the stupendous collection of towers that was Kowloon. The driver now took an exit and entered a road that ran alongside the harbour. The blue water was crowded with boats, from huge cargo vessels to small shabby junks with their characteristic bat-wing sails. The quayside was strewn with piles of crates, coils of ropes, huge mountains of rusty chain and forests of multicoloured barrels. It was an exotic, chaotic world.
The limo pulled up at the kerb opposite a mooring where a large, dun-coloured houseboat was crowded in among smaller craft. On the congested deck, a family had set up a food stall and were serving a group of longshoremen. A smiling boy ran up to the car. Anton Zell slid the window down, letting in a fragrant smell of cooking.
‘Boiled or crispy?’ he asked Amy.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You wanted breakfast,’ he replied patiently. ‘In Hong Kong that means noodles. Do you like them slippery or fried?’
‘Crispy,’ she said determinedly, trying not to notice just how shabby-looking the junk was. It was probably unwise to look surprised at anything Mr Zell came up with, no matter how freakish. He gave the order to the boy, who scampered back to the boat.
‘You come highly recommended by Jeffrey Cookson,’ Anton Zell went on, studying her with his penetrating gaze. ‘But then, he is your uncle.’
‘He’s been very kind to me,’ she replied.
‘So it seems. Apparently he brought you up after your parents died.’
‘More or less.’
‘So we should not be surprised that he thinks the world of you,’ he concluded drily. ‘But he is not the only one. Your first employers, Charteris Industries, gave you a glowing commendation, too.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ she said stolidly.
‘So did McCallum and Roe. But people with glowing commendations are sometimes being hurried from job to job because they’re unemployable.’
‘That isn’t the case with me,’ she said.
The boy returned to the limo with two china bowls of noodles and two sets of chopsticks. Amy took the bowl gingerly. It was scaldingly hot. Praying she would not end up with strands of fried noodle hanging off her buttons, Amy dug the chopsticks into the food. It was surprisingly delicious.
‘This is wonderful!’ she exclaimed.
‘These people are Hakka—boat people. They’re good cooks. You looked as though you thought I was trying to poison you.’
‘I thought it might be part of the stamina test,’ she said innocently. ‘Make the interviewee eat street food and see if she dies of dysentery.’
‘You think you’re too good to eat street food?’ he asked, lifting one black eyebrow.
‘Not at all,’ she replied hastily. ‘But in my experience it’s unusual for multimillionaires to eat breakfast with stevedores.’
‘Nothing in life is free,’ he replied calmly. She studied his face as he ate. All faces, in her experience, no matter how beautiful, had their weak points, angles from which they lost their beauty. But not Anton Zell’s. No matter what angle you took, he was perfect. And the photographs had not even begun to show the vivid life that animated his expressions. ‘But some of the best things are very cheap,’ he went on. ‘The food is good here and the view is wonderful.’
She had to agree. The view across the bay to the sky-scraperscape on the opposite shore was magnificent. ‘I’ll remember that.’
‘So you have already left McCallum and Roe?’
‘I’ve been with them for four years. I never took any leave in that time. I had twelve weeks’ accumulated leave built up. I asked if I could take that. It seemed an ideal way to go job-hunting.’
‘Young Martin McCallum has something of a reputation with female colleagues.’
Amy felt her face flush. She swallowed a mouthful of crisp fried noodles. ‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘Is that why you’re so eager to leave?’
‘No, it isn’t, Mr Zell. And I resent that implication,’ she added angrily.
His eyelids drooped slightly. ‘You’re a beautiful woman, young and single. Are you telling me that Martin McCallum failed to notice these things?’
‘He noticed,’ she said shortly. She had had her share of that particular problem. Female employees who had affairs with the boss’s son and heir were not unknown. ‘I have no problem keeping my private life and my job separate.’
‘Did he make a pass at you?’
She was on the point of telling him that was none of his business; but a glance at those dangerous eyes warned her not to avoid the issue. ‘Yes, he did.’
‘And how did you deal with it?’
‘I told him I wasn’t interested.’
‘I hear that’s not so easy.’
‘I managed.’
‘What would you do if I made a pass at you?’
She felt her stomach swoop, the way it had done in the plane coming in to land. His eyes were holding hers inexorably and she would have given anything to know the thoughts that lay behind them.
‘I would turn you down, too,’ she heard herself say.
For a moment there seemed to be a gleam of amusement in his eyes, but the passionate, deeply chiselled mouth did not smile. ‘Why?’
‘I told you, Mr Zell. Because I know how to keep my private life and my work separate.’
‘What if the two were the same?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Ever heard the expression “Sleeping your way to the top”?’
‘If I thought you were that kind of man,’ she said coldly, ‘I would not have come all the way to Hong Kong for this job.’
‘So what kind of man do you think I am?’ he asked.
‘I only know what I’ve heard.’
‘And what is that?’
‘That you’re one of the most dynamic, creative men in your business. That working for you is an unparallelled opportunity to learn and grow. I know nothing about your private life, Mr Zell. That doesn’t interest me.’
At last he broke the eye contact and finished off his noodles deftly. ‘People on my personal team don’t have a private life, Worthington. There isn’t time or space for one. As my personal assistant, you’d be at my side for days at a time, weeks at a time, sometimes in very remote places. If you have a family, they will suffer. If you have a boyfriend, he will leave you. You will certainly learn and grow. But you won’t have a private life.’
‘Not even on Sundays?’ she asked bravely.
‘What?’
‘At the airport you said you didn’t expect your employees to work on Sundays.’
‘You are not applying to become an employee,’ he said. ‘A personal assistant is not an employee.’
‘What is she, then?’
He laughed softly and she saw that his white teeth were like everything about him—beautiful. ‘You ought to know. You’re applying for the job.’
‘Well, I know that I’m to have no private life and no Sundays off. And your previous secretary was driven into the ground by overwork.’
‘You’re getting the picture. Now, let’s see if we can build up a picture of you.’ He rapped on the partition. ‘To the office, Freddie.’
