The Tycoon's Takeover. Liz Fielding

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      They hadn’t known what had hit them until it was too late. She had to ensure that for the next month she was the one in front and Farraday was always following her. If he ever turned the tables and took the lead it would all be over.

      Sitting at her desk going over last month’s sales figures when—if—he responded to the challenge in her incendiary e-mail wouldn’t fit the bill. He’d be expecting that and he wouldn’t be impressed by her ability to read a balance sheet.

      She had to be doing something that was totally outside his normal experience. Something that would give her an advantage. With a whole department store to play with, it shouldn’t be that difficult.

      She glanced at the noticeboard listing the special events taking place in the store that day. An all-day specialist doll collectors’ fair in the gallery. A cookery demonstration, with a celebrity chef doing his stuff, in the food hall at lunchtime. A book-signing by a well known American author in the country to promote her newest blockbuster novel. Bags of opportunities for photographs, she thought as she took the lift to the top-floor office suite.

      She needed to keep her photograph in the papers. Remind everyone that she was running the show. She’d get Molly in the PR department on to that, as her sister was away. The lift door opened to dust sheets and the sound of hammering, and she smiled a little grimly as she crossed to her office.

      Jordan Farraday might be sharing it with her for the next month, but he wouldn’t enjoy the experience much.

      ‘Indie…’ Her PA appeared in the doorway. ‘We’ve got a small problem in the nursery department.’

      ‘How small?’

      ‘Baby-sized. One of our customers left it a little late to do her shopping and she’s gone into labour. The paramedics have arrived, and they’ll be moving her to hospital as soon as they can, but I thought you’d want to know.’

      ‘I’d better go down there—make sure everything possible is being done.’

      ‘Well, actually…’ India paused on her way out. ‘There’s no need.’

      ‘No need?’

      ‘It’s being taken care of. Since you weren’t here, JD took charge—’

      ‘JD?’ India frowned.

      ‘Jordan Farraday. His staff call him JD, he said.’

      ‘Jordan Farraday? He’s here already? In the store?’ Her mouth was working on automatic, she realised. A bit like a goldfish, and making about as much sense. Of course he was here.

      She’d been mentally redesigning the frontage, chatting with the commissionaire, taking her morning stroll through the main selling floors while Jordan David Farraday had gone straight to the top floor and was already taking over her job.

      ‘He arrived on the dot of ten o’clock. You said you were expecting him some time today, so when Security buzzed through I told them to send him up.’

      ‘I was expecting him to ring and let me know when he was coming. I wasn’t expecting him to just turn up…unannounced!’

      ‘I was supposed to say, Go away, we aren’t ready for you?’ India raised a hand in a gesture of apology, shook her head. ‘I gave him coffee and put him in your office. There is nowhere else,’ she complained.

      No, there was nowhere else. It had seemed like a great idea when Romana suggested ripping out underused offices and moving Customer Services to the top floor in order to create more selling space. And why hang about? Get in the builders, create a noisy, dusty atmosphere and maybe, without an office—or even a desk—to call his own, JD Farraday would be less inclined to linger in the store. It was time she needed. Not her arch-nemesis following her every move.

      ‘I’m sorry, Sally. You did the right thing, of course, but just because he was sitting in my office did you have to treat the man as if he were already running the place? Did you have to tell him about the population explosion in the nursery department?’

      ‘I didn’t. Someone came rushing in with the news and he just sort of…well…took charge,’ she said, a little breathlessly.

      ‘Great.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But I really do think I’d better go and see what’s happening downstairs.’ She was in no rush. In fact she had a sudden craving to be somewhere else. Lying on a deserted beach, perhaps. ‘Do you ever just wish the alarm clock hadn’t gone off? That you’d slept through the day?’

      ‘Not this one, I promise you. JD Farraday is not a man I’d ever want to miss.’

      ‘That’s all I need. A secretary with a crush on a man who wants to take over my store.’

      ‘His name is above the door too. And I don’t have a crush. My personal life is fully spoken for.’ Then she grinned. ‘But I’m not dead.’

      ‘That’ll be a comfort to you when he’s sitting in my chair and you’re looking for a new job.’

      ‘Oh, come on. That’s never going to happen.’

      ‘Two months ago I might have agreed with you.’ Suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Her fallback position was the equal opportunities argument. He had a centuries-old agreement stating that control should pass to the ‘oldest male’. She was basing her equality on being ‘oldest female’. Would a lot of old men in wigs be swayed by the logic of that argument? Or would they—as she suspected—go for just plain ‘oldest’. Farraday, after all, was a man with a track record for making money. All she had to offer was a lifetime’s knowledge of the business and a passion to turn Claibourne’s into a household name—not just in London, or Britain, but in the world.

      ‘Hey, if all else fails you can always do a Claibourne on him.’

      Dragged back from the yawning chasm of failure, she frowned. ‘A Claibourne?’

      ‘Flutter those long dark lashes at him. Once he’s in love, he’ll forget all about taking away your toy.’

      ‘Oh, great. I’m trying to convince everyone that I can run this store on merit and you want me to seduce the man. Whatever happened to thirty years of women’s liberation?’ As she turned angrily away she snagged her tights on a battered cardboard box. Great. The day that she’d begun with an uneasy feeling of foreboding was rapidly going downhill. ‘Sally, what the devil is this?’

      ‘Oh—’ She sucked in her teeth as she saw the damage to India’s tights, took a new pair from a supply she kept in her bottom drawer and handed them over. ‘Sorry. The builders left it there. They’re files from your father’s office. Pretty old stuff, but I thought you might want to look at them before I sent them down to the basement.’

      ‘But I cleaned out all the filing cabinets in Dad’s office.’

      ‘These were right at the back of that big walk-in cupboard. It looked like a box of old catalogues, but, knowing how disorganised your father was, I thought I’d better check before it went down the chute into the skip. The files were at the bottom.’

      India flicked through the top file. Thirty СКАЧАТЬ