What You Made Me. PENNY JORDAN

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      There was a wealth of fine irony in her voice, but Scott didn’t take her up on it, merely saying, ‘You come very highly recommended. You’ve worked for Sir Nigel, who’s reputed to be one of the hardest-headed businessmen around. I don’t think he pays you simply to sit around looking pretty.’

      ‘How long do you intend to keep me here?’ Philippa demanded, reminding him that she wasn’t here of her own free will. ‘Until you can find another secretary?’

      ‘As long as it takes,’ he told her unequivocally, ‘and remember, Philippa, whilst you’re here you’ll fulfil any role I give you, that was part of the deal.’

      What exactly did he have in mind? Philippa wondered as he showed her the Directors’ dining room and the conference room which lay beyond his own. Last night when he had given her his ultimatum she had seen in his eyes a look which had stripped her body of every shred of clothing she had worn, and which had committed even worse outrages against her, but she had put his violence down to his shock at seeing her, dismissing it in the calm light of morning as no more than a trick of her fevered imagination. Now she wasn’t so sure. Scott ached to humiliate her as he thought she had once humiliated him and she would be a fool if she tried to deny that fact.

      ‘I’ll show you the other wing. It’s this way.’

      A long gallery connected the two wings, and the doors which Philippa remembered as once opening on to the main body of the Hall and the family’s living quarters had been sealed off, apparently, because the wall was now blank, presumably to ensure that Scott had privacy when he retired to his own part of the house.

      ‘Did you plan to do this when you… when you left for America?’ she asked him, feeling slightly foolish when he turned and subjected her to an ice-cold, acerbic glare.

      ‘I wasn’t in any mood to plan anything,’ he flung at her bitterly. ‘I was aching too much from what you had done to me, Philippa. No, it was only when my grandfather died that I realised I might have a chance of getting the Hall back. I was doing quite well then, but it wasn’t until two years ago that the company was doing well enough for me to buy it.’

      They had reached the door at the end of the gallery and he pushed it open, standing back so that she could precede him. The doorway was narrow and Philippa felt the hairs on her arms stand on end as she brushed past his suit-clad body, the violent response of her nerve endings to his proximity so totally unexpected that it threw her off balance, both physically and mentally, and she was glad that she had her back to Scott for the few seconds it took her to get herself back under control.

      What was the matter with her, for heaven’s sake? She wasn’t seventeen any longer. She had met many handsome and sexy men since she left Garston but none of them had affected her in the way that Scott had just done. Neither had he eleven years ago, but then she had trusted and loved him with innocence and inexperience, now she was immediately wary of the undeniably physical response of her body to his, her sense relaying to her the total maleness of him, the faintly arousing scent of his body whenever he came close to her, the diabolical ease with which her mind supplied her with an image of his unclothed body, even to the extent of adding the changes that time would have brought, turning’ him from a boy to a man.