The Girl He'd Overlooked by Cathy Williams Page B

Drink?’
    ‘No, but you can sit and talk to me.’ He gave up the chair in favour of the sofa and lay down with a sigh of intense relief.
    ‘Your secretary must have a nightmarish time working for you,’ Jennifer commented, moving to the comfy chair by the fire and tucking her legs under her.
    She marvelled at how easy it was to slide back into this easy companionship and how much she was appreciating it, having feared it to be lost and gone for good. She tried not to think that it was no good for her and then decided that she was just, finally, dealing with things in an adult fashion. Not hiding, not fighting, just accepting and moving on. What could be dangerous or unhealthy about that? Besides, she enjoyed looking at him, even though she hated admitting that weakness to herself. She liked seeing him rake his fingers through his hair as he was doing now. It was a gesture that had followed him all through his teenage years.
    ‘My secretary loves working for me,’ he denied. ‘She can’t wait to start work in the mornings.’
    Jennifer imagined someone young, pretty and adoring, following him with her eyes and working overtime just to remain in his company, and suddenly was sick with jealousy.‘She’s in her sixties, a grandmother, with a retired husband who gets under her feet. Working for me is like having a permanent holiday.’
    The relief that flooded her set up a series of alarm bells in her head and she resolutely ignored them. So that crush she had had might not have been quite as dead and buried as she had hoped, but she could deal with that!
    He was grinning at her and she smiled back and said something about his ego, but teasingly, blushing when he continued to look at her with those fabulous deep blue eyes.
    ‘So tell me why you threw the book,’ she said, still feeling a little hot and bothered by his lingering stare. She knew that it wasn’t good to feed an addiction, however much you thought you were in control, but she found she just couldn’t stand up and walk back to the kitchen and carry on reading recipe books.
    ‘A couple of months ago, we finalised a deal with a publishing company. On the whole a lucrative buyout with a lot of potential to go somewhere, but one of the subsidiary companies is having a problem toeing the line.’
    Jennifer leaned forward, intrigued. She remembered reading about that buyout on the Internet. ‘What do you mean
toeing the line
?’
    ‘They need to amalgamate. They have a niche market but it makes no money. The employees could be absorbed into the mainstream publishing company and get on board with ebooks but they’re making all sorts of uncooperative noises and refusing to sign on the dotted line without a fight. Of course, they could be made to toe the line but I’d rather not take on board disgruntled employees.’
    Jennifer had worked with a couple of small publishing houses in Paris, one of which specialised in maps, the other in rare limited edition books. She had been fascinated tofind how differently they were run from their mainstream brothers and how different the employees were. They were individually involved in their companies in a way ordinary employees tended not to be. Both had successfully broken away from the umbrella of the mother company and both were doing all right but hardly brilliantly. Without any security blanket, it was tough going.
    She peppered him with questions about the legal standing of the company he was involved with, quite forgetting her boredom in the kitchen when she had been unable to concentrate on work.
    Digging into her experiences with similar companies, she expanded on all the problems they had faced when they had successfully completed management buyouts.
    ‘You want to work with them,’ she said earnestly. ‘You can exploit a different market. It doesn’t all have to be about ebooks and online reads. I personally think it’s worth having that niche market operating without interference because it really lends