The Beautiful Widow

Toni walked across to look down at them and as she stood there her heart filled with thanksgiving for her babies. She had to count her blessings and the biggest two were right here, healthy and happy and safe. She was all at sixes and sevens at the moment, but was it any wonder with all that had happened in the last months? And she didn’t know why she was feeling like this tonight; she had coped so well up to this point.

For a moment a dark male face was there on the screen of her mind, a pair of stunningly beautiful silver-blue eyes challenging the thought before she shook her head determinedly. No, it wasn’t Steel Landry who had so unsettled her tonight. She wouldn’t let it be. She worked for him, that was all, and she could dismiss the memory of what had happened that night in the garden just as easily as he apparently could.

Poppy was right. She’d fallen into a terrific job, which she absolutely loved, and she had got everything she wanted. She had to relax and go with the flow. Life was what you made it and she was going to make a good life for her and her daughters. It wasn’t what she’d imagined in her teens—living life without a partner, a husband, someone to love and laugh and grow old with—but she had her girls and that was a lot more than some women had.

No more self-pity. She touched each of the girls’ faces before leaving the room. She was back on track again.

This resolution was severely tested over the next weeks and months. Working with Steel proved to be exhilarating and stimulating and exhausting, but never, ever dull. Within the first month she could understand why once someone worked for him they rarely left unless they had to. Although a fiercely hardworking and exacting employer, he never asked one of his staff to do something he wouldn’t do himself. In fact it was fair to say he worked harder and longer than anyone. And he was immensely generous when it came to holidays and time off and helping the families of those he employed. Bill’s wife was by no means an isolated case. He actually seemed to care about his employees as people and not just efficient working machines. Although they definitely had to be that too. He simply didn’t understand less than one hundred per cent commitment and loyalty.

Joy’s replacement worked out well. Fiona was a very capable and friendly woman in her mid-forties who had been the breadwinner in her family most of her married life, due to her husband being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when their two children were very young. Her boys were away at university now and the fact that they were twins provided an immediate bond between the two women.

Amelia and Daisy had sailed into big school life although Toni still received tales of the terrible Tyler most days, and as Toni paid for the girls to attend an after-school facility, where they were cared for until six o’clock when she picked them up, the load on her parents had lessened considerably.

So, everything in the garden was coming up roses, or it would have been but for the persistent and ridiculous feelings regarding Steel, which were a daily battle. Maybe if he hadn’t kissed her that night, if he hadn’t aroused all sorts of dormant sexual desires she had never been aware of, maybe then she would have been able to learn to disregard her magnetic boss as a man. But he had kissed her, breathing life into a side of her that had the power to shock and agitate her in the cold clear light of day. Some mornings she had difficulty looking him in the face.

If only he didn’t have such a—such a physical effect on her, she thought early one cold morning at the beginning of December. It had been six months she’d worked with him now, but every time she caught sight of him in the morning her heart beat rapidly and her mouth went dry. And it didn’t help that, the more she’d got to know him, the more she appreciated his dry, slightly wicked sense of humour, his ability to laugh at himself, his cynical but definitely amusing take on life.

Toni pushed her hair back from her forehead as she stood gazing out of the kitchen window into the tiny garden dusted with white from a heavy frost the night before. Spider webs on her mother’s pots and bushes surrounding the patio glinted and sparkled in the weak morning sunlight, and a carpet of diamond dust coated the stone slabs.

She took a sip of the coffee she’d made for herself before the rest of the household awoke, and contemplated the day ahead. The apartments having been finished the week before and immediately snapped up, Steel now had a list of rich and influential would-be buyers for the new project that had been started while the apartments were still being worked on. This was the conversion of an enormous old riverside inn sitting in a quarter of an acre of ground into four three-bedroom apartments, complete with a new garage block over which was planned a caretaker’s flat. The whole would be surrounded by an eight-foot brick wall and electric gates, with enough security to match Fort Knox.

But it wasn’t the inn on the agenda today. Before she had left the office the night before, Steel had told her they’d be visiting a property outside London this morning, midway between the capital and Oxford. She had nodded interestedly. ‘Another conversion?’

‘Not exactly, no. Just come and see the place with an open mind anyway and then I’ll tell you my plans for it,’ he’d said, somewhat cagily, Toni thought now.

They had been sitting in Steel’s office at the time, a routine they seemed to have slipped into before she left to pick up the twins each evening. Initially the chat and cup of coffee at the end of the working day had been a time for discussing any problems or difficulties that had occurred on the job, but somewhere in the time between June and December it had changed into something more …

What, exactly? She frowned, her gaze caught by the robin who appeared on the window sill outside, peering in the window and reminding her she hadn’t put his cake out that morning. Delving into the cupboard for the cake tin, she cut him a generous chunk of her mother’s fruit cake and opened the back door, crumbling his breakfast on the sill in front of him. He didn’t bother to move, watching her as she retreated and pecking even as she closed the door. He

’d brought young ones along in the summer but since they’d matured he’d seen to it they were sent packing.

Her mind returned to Steel; she asked herself what it was about their evening chats that was so unsettling. Since the incident in the garden in the summer he’d been propriety itself; she could have been a man for all the impact she made on him. This thought wasn’t new and one she didn’t like to dwell on. It had the power to ruin her day.

Perhaps it was the fact that they now tended to discuss anything and everything in a way she’d never had with anyone before. And he was more relaxed in the evenings and unfortunately ten times more attractive, often sitting with his tie loose and the first few buttons of his shirt undone revealing the beginnings of the black curly hair on his chest. She was galled just how much this affected her, especially in view of his indifference to her, but the flagrant masculinity was all the more potent for its naturalness. He was just one of those men who radiated maleness, she told herself irritably. Oozed it. Every little gesture, the way he held his head, the way he walked.

She finished her coffee, washing up her mug along with a couple of dishes from supper the night before. Her mother’s tiny kitchen didn’t boast a dishwasher.

She had a shower and got dressed before she woke the twins and took her parents their morning cup of tea in bed. By the time she dropped the twins off at school for their breakfast club a beautiful December day had unfolded, the sky high and blue and a winter’s sun casting wisps of pale yellow light over the world below. It was good to be alive on such a morning.

Steel had obviously been working for some time when she arrived at the office and he called her into his room. His desk was strewn with papers, the biscuit tin was open and the delicious smell of coffee permeated the air. ‘Don’t take your coat off. We’re leaving straight away,’ he said, fastening the first couple of buttons of his shirt and pulling his tie into place as he spoke. ‘And bring a notebook with you.’

‘OK.’ It was all she could manage, having caught the clean scent of his aftershave as he’d raked his fingers through his hair. It was a habit of his, the attempt to control the quiff of hair that was forever falling onto his forehead no matter how short he had his hair. She could imagine its refusal to obey irritated him no end. She didn’t know how it had the temerity!

He also narrowed his eyes slightly and pulled at his left ear when he was considering something, became completely deadpan when he was unsure of his ground—which wasn’t often—and had a delicious way of quirking his mouth when something had struck him funny when it shouldn’t have.

Oh, she knew quite a bit about what made her one-in-a-million boss tick, Toni thought wryly. Apart from his love life. In all their discussions he’d never mentioned women, for which she was eternally grateful. And the office grapevine had gone silent on the subject too. Normally, apparently, Steel’s latest woman was discussed and dissected at length. The last one to be mentioned—a flame-haired attorney with a body to die for, according to most of the men—had bit the dust months and months ago. Rumour had it that Barbara Gonzalo had been as passionate and vibrant as her name suggested, but she’d committed the cardinal sin of falling in love with him. She had been very vocal when he’d finished their relationship, even going so far as to storm into the office the morning after and cause a scene that had rocked the building. Toni could just imagine how that had gone down with Steel.

They left the office and entered the lift, and once it had deposited them in Reception he took her elbow as they crossed the foyer. Immediately a heated weakness suffused her body. It was always the same. His slightest touch seemed to set off a chain reaction in her body she was powerless to do anything about.

They were in the Aston Martin and on their way before he said, ‘This project is slightly different from the others, Toni.’

Glad he was speaking at last—he’d been silent and withdrawn so far—she nodded in what she hoped was an efficient way. ‘Oh, yes?’ she asked encouragingly.

‘I’m thinking of buying a house, somewhere I can escape to but which is still not too far from London.’

Completely taken aback, she stared at the expressionless profile. ‘Oh.’ Not exactly an intelligent comment, a separate part of her brain noted. Bringing her mind to bear, she said, ‘And you want me to suggest ideas if you decide it’s what you want? Throw a few facts and figures into the equation?’

‘Exactly. You’re a woman—’