hard to believe that he had missed them until now.
Rafe swallowed.
It had been hard enough reconciling prim Miranda Fairchild, the efficient temp, with the woman who had smiled so sensuously in the sunshine, without knowing that she was also a catsuit-wearing waitress with a figure that had lingered in his memory far longer than it should.
How was he to deal with her now?
‘You let your hair down when you’re waitressing,’ he found himself saying absurdly.
‘Only when the client insists.’ Miranda looked defensive. She sat very straight, feeling exposed. She might as well still have been wearing that cat suit. ‘We don’t normally have to wear those stupid costumes.’
‘Do you get hassled like that a lot?’ he asked uncomfortably, remembering the casual way that man had touched her and wished he’d thumped him when he had the chance.
She smiled a little wryly. ‘Nobody has ever noticed me at all,’ she said. ‘Those cat suits were deliberately provocative-I wasn’t the only waitress who had problems that night-but that’s the first and last time we’ve ever had to wear anything like that. Normally I just wear a regular uniform.’
Rafe wished she’d been wearing a regular uniform the other evening. Knowing what a gorgeous figure she had under those shapeless suits of hers wasn’t going to help his concentration at all!
His throat was dry. Miranda’s knees were tugging at the edge of his vision, but he mustn’t stare. Nobody’s ever noticed me, wasn’t that what she had said? If only
Which was absurd. It wasn’t as if she had turned into a raving beauty. She was still cool and prim, and her hair was still tied back in that ugly style. All he had to do was forget about how she had looked in that cat suit.
All?
Hah.
‘I didn’t realise you had an evening job,’ he said, conscious that he sounded lame, but he who was never at a loss for a flip comment was suddenly as tongue-tied as a boy and unable to think of anything to say.
Miranda leaned forward to pour the coffee. ‘It’s not a problem, is it?’
‘No, no,’ he said hastily. ‘It must be tiring, though, working all day and then starting another job in the evening.’
‘It is, but I need the money. Temping doesn’t pay well, even when you’re working somewhere like the Knighton Group.’
‘Couldn’t you get a permanent job?’ Rafe took the cup she passed to him with a murmur of thanks. ‘It’s obvious that you’re more than capable. Simon told me you’d have been able to run Communications by yourself by the time you’d been there a week. You ought to be a manager or administrator at the very least.’
‘Unfortunately, I don’t have much of a CV.’ Miranda stirred her coffee mindlessly. She had been over and over this so many times.
‘You learnt to organise somewhere,’ Rafe pointed out. ‘How old are you? Twenty-nine? Thirty?’
A faint flush stained her cheekbones. ‘Twenty-seven.’
‘Then you’ve been doing
‘Only of failure,’ she said bleakly, her eyes on her coffee.
‘You surprise me,’ he said. ‘You strike me as so competent I would have said that you would make a success of whatever you did.’
Miranda’s mouth twisted. If only he knew! ‘I’m afraid it would have taken a lot more than competence to rescue Fairchild’s.’
Rafe raised his brows. He remembered Fairchild’s from his childhood. A long-established chain of department stores, the shops had disappeared from London years ago. He had heard the company had gone belly up the year before but he’d been in Africa at the time and didn’t know any details.
‘You’re one of
She nodded. ‘Looking back, I can see that the firm had been going steadily downhill for years, but I didn’t realise how badly until I went to university. I’d only been there a year when it became obvious it was in big trouble. My father was struggling, and there was no one else to help him.’ Miranda lifted her shoulders helplessly at the memory. ‘I dropped out and went to work with him instead. I thought I could make a difference but…’
‘What happened?’
‘We didn’t innovate. We didn’t develop. We didn’t recognise that the world had changed and we had to change with it.’ She sighed, remembering.
‘It sounds as if
‘I wasn’t enough,’ she said with a trace of bitterness. ‘I couldn’t persuade my father that we had to do things differently. Perhaps it was too late, anyway. It would have taken a complete transformation to turn things round, and my father wasn’t the only one convinced that our reputation would see us through.’
‘Reputation is a two-edged sword,’ said Rafe thoughtfully. ‘It can work to your advantage, sure, but it can be a huge liability, too. Once it’s established, it’s almost impossible to change the way people think of you.’
He glanced down at Miranda, and his smile gleamed suddenly, burning behind her eyelids. ‘I should know,’ he said.
She looked away. She had an uncomfortable feeling that
‘So what happened in the end?’ he asked after a moment. ‘Were you taken over?’
‘No, there were some offers, but my father refused to consider any of them.’ He had never accepted the reality of the situation, Miranda remembered, but had insisted on hanging onto the trappings of wealth long after the substance of it had been squandered.
‘Then he had a heart attack, and died, and by then it was too late. The firm just collapsed in on itself. We were declared bankrupt, and that was it. I did what I could for the employees, but it wasn’t much, and then I had to find a job for myself, which wasn’t that easy. I’m not exactly employable.’
Her face was set, her mouth pressed firmly together, and glancing down at her Rafe was struck by the mixture of strength and vulnerability in her expression. It couldn’t have been an easy time for her, and obviously the sense of failure ran deep, but she had evidently picked herself up and started again, right back at the bottom. That took guts.
‘So you became a temp?’
‘I had to do something,’ she pointed out. ‘We had to sell everything. My father wasn’t very savvy about money-probably because it had always just been there for him-so he’d never considered setting up trusts or transferring ownership of the houses, or even taking out life insurance.’
Rafe grimaced. It sounded as if her father had been completely feckless. ‘Leaving you with nothing?’
‘Leaving me with what most of us have, the ability to earn my own living,’ said Miranda sharply. She hated people feeling sorry for her. ‘I’m really lucky to have a good friend who’s let me rent a room in her flat at a ridiculously cheap rate, and since I signed on with an agency, I’ve got an income. Things could be a lot worse.’
It must have been hard for her nonetheless, Rafe thought, pitched from a life of wealth and privilege into the day-to-day grind of working for a living and scraping by from one pay day to the next. One moment she had been a board member, the next she was a lowly temp, reduced to wrestling with photocopiers.
Miranda puffed out a sigh and leant forward to put the cup and saucer back on the tray. ‘I just feel so sad about Fairchild’s,’ she confessed. ‘My great-grandfather started the firm, and my grandfather built it up to a household name. They both worked so hard to make it a great firm. We just let all that go to waste.’
It was a pity she hadn’t had longer, Rafe thought. She might have been able to turn things round, but it sounded as if her father had frittered away his inheritance long before she tried to take the reins.
‘Companies have natural life cycles,’ he said comfortingly. ‘Three generations isn’t a bad run. It’s a classic pattern: one generation to make a fortune, one to consolidate it, and one to spend it. It happens a lot.’
‘It hasn’t happened to Knighton’s.’
‘No,’ Rafe admitted. ‘I’m the fourth generation, and I don’t intend to be the one to let it fall apart either, in spite of what everyone thinks.’
His expression had hardened, and when Miranda looked at him she saw that his mouth was set. Deep inside her, something shivered into life for a brief moment before she suppressed it firmly.
