The Secretary's Scandalous Secret Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t!’
    ‘Oh, I would, believe me. The man’s a crook who’s decided to take advantage of you. I’m not a superstitious guy, but I’m beginning to think that my mother’s phone call was the hand of fate, because another month in that place in the middle of January and
you
would have been the one occupying the hospital bed—with pneumonia! No wonder you wear ten layers of clothing when you come to work. You’ve probably become accustomed to that!’
    ‘I don’t wear ten layers of clothes when I come to work.’ The words ‘charity case’ were swimming in her head, making her feel nauseous.
    ‘You weren’t equipped for life in London.’ Luc steamrollered over her interruption. ‘You grew up in a vicarage and spent your short working life in a garden centre watering plants. I can’t say that I enjoy being anybody’s caretaker, but I’m beginning to see why my mother wanted me to get involved.’
    ‘That’s the most horrible thing you could ever say to me.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because…’ Because, a little voice said nastily, she didn’t want Luc Laughton to think of her as a hapless country bumpkin who needed looking after. She wanted him to think of her as a sexy young woman—or even just as a
woman.
Fat chance! He hadn’t even noticed her outfit. At least in any way that could be interpreted as complimentary.
    ‘Well? I’m not in the habit of doing good deeds, butI’m willing to change my life rules for you. You should be flattered.’
    ‘No one’s ever flattered to think that they’re too stupid to take care of themselves,’ Agatha told him stiffly. Her eyes stung but she wasn’t going to feel sorry for herself. She was going to remember that she was about to have dinner with a dishy, eligible man who would never have asked her out if he had thought that she was as pathetic as Luc made her out to be.
    ‘I’ve always found that it pays to be realistic,’ Luc responded bracingly. ‘When my father died and I came home to that financial mess, I realised very quickly that I could do one of two things: I could sit around, get depressed and become bitter or I could just go out and begin to rebuild everything that was lost.’
    ‘I find it hard to think of you getting depressed or feeling bitter.’
    ‘I don’t allow those negative feelings to influence what I do in life.’
    ‘I wish I could be as strong minded as you,’ Agatha was forced to concede, thinking of all the doubts she had nurtured over the years despite her very happy background.
    When her friends had all started experimenting with make-up and going on diets so that they could look like the models in magazines, she had taken a back seat, knowing that inner beauty was all that mattered, and that wanting to look like someone else or aspire to someone else’s life was a waste of time. Of course, in London, the whole inner-beauty conviction had taken a bit of a knocking. She had largely felt like a fish out of water when she had gone out with her girlfriends from work, who had developed amazing skills of transformation, morphing from office workers to vamps with a change of clothes and bold make-up. Her stretchy black dress which made her feel horrendously exposed becauseit was fairly short with a fairly revealing neckline was still conservative compared to the stuff some of her friends wore, and she was so unaccustomed to wearing jewellery that she had to stop herself from twiddling with the strands of chunky copper round her neck.
    ‘I mean,’ she continued, musing, ‘You’re so sure of yourself. You set your goals and you just go after them. Like a bloodhound.’
    ‘Nice comparison,’ Luc muttered under his breath.
    ‘Don’t you ever sit back and wonder if you’re doing the right thing?’
    ‘Never.’ With more than half the journey completed, Luc thought that it was time he got down to the business of quizzing her about her date. More and more, he got the feeling that she was a loose cannon, an innocent