The Baby Plan. Liz Fielding

as if the cabbie had given way politely. ‘I’ve heard she’s a bit of an old tartar,’ he said. ‘Your Miss Garland.’

      ‘Have you?’ The lady with the beautiful mouth seemed surprised. ‘Who told you that?’

      ‘She’s famous for it. Efficiency with a capital E. Are you a new girl?’

      ‘Er … no.’ The tartar in question wondered briefly what he would say if she told him the truth. She resisted the temptation. This was far more entertaining. ‘I’ve been with the agency since the very beginning.’

      ‘Oh, well, you’ll know all about her. What’s she like?’

      ‘I thought you knew all about her.’

      He shrugged. ‘Only gossip.’

      ‘And the gossips say that she’s a tartar? No, wait, an efficient tartar.’

      ‘A very rich, efficient tartar I would imagine, if she charges the kind of fees that include chauffeur driven cars for her secretaries.’

      He was making it up as he went along, she decided. Just to keep her talking. The thought made her want to smile. She tried very hard not to. ‘Her standards are certainly very high.’

      ‘I don’t suppose she’d approve of one her ‘‘girls’’ chatting with a common chauffeur, then?’

      As long as they looked the part and did a good job, her ‘girls’ could chatter to whomsoever they wished, in their own time. ‘Are you common?’ she asked.

      Amanda didn’t think so for a minute. His accent was pure London, but the streets had been pretty effectively scrubbed from it. And from the brief impression she’d had of him as he’d opened the door, waited for her to fasten her seat belt, she knew that few men of her acquaintance could have matched him for physical presence. He topped her by a head, with shoulders that could have borne the troubles of the world and the kind of bone structure that gave a face character. She catalogued his attributes and found none of them wanting. And there had been something distinctly uncommon about those eyes.

      It occurred to Amanda that if she had been looking for a man, rather than a sperm donation, she would be hard pressed to find a more attractive proposition. The thought settled low in her abdomen and lingered there.

      Was he common? It wasn’t the answer Daniel had expected, but it was certainly the one he deserved. He’d made the kind of remark that would leave a girl appearing snobbish, feeling uncomfortable if she didn’t answer, chose not to engage in conversation. Hardly the way to treat a paying customer, even if someone else was doing the paying.

      He was pleased that she hadn’t fallen for it, but then his passenger was hardly a girl. She was a self-assured and very beautiful woman, far too mature to be taken in by that kind of line—by any kind of line for that matter. Looking the way she did, she was bound to have heard them all before. It would take originality to catch this lady’s attention, to hold it. It occurred to him that it was a long time since he’d met a woman capable of holding his.

      ‘I was a docklands brat,’ he said, leaving it for her to decide. ‘In the days when there were still docks worthy of the name.’ He still was, he realised, and smiled at the thought. He hadn’t moved very far from his roots.

      ‘In the days before the warehouses were bought by developers and converted into luxury homes for the seriously rich?’ He had been direct, assuming that the truth would put a brake on the conversation, but her mouth widened in another of those smiles. ‘A bit of a tearaway, were you?’

      Got it in one. ‘I’m a model citizen these days,’ he assured her.

      ‘Mmm.’

      The sound portrayed a world of doubt and Daniel laughed. Flirting was a bit like riding a bicycle; there might be a bit of a wobble when you hadn’t done it for a while, but it soon came back.

      ‘What about you?’ he asked.

      Nice teeth, Amanda thought, looking at his smile reflected in the rear view mirror. Then gave herself a mental slap for checking him out feature by feature. As if she were looking over a stud horse. Nice mouth. ‘Am I a model citizen?’

      ‘That’s a given; after all you’re a Garland Girl. Highly trained, beautifully groomed and guaranteed trustworthy.’

      Her shoulders lifted half a centimetre. The public relations image was still in place and doing the job, she was happy to note. It was the quality image she intended to exploit to the full with her plans for expansion. ‘I told you, Miss Garland has very high standards.’

      ‘Bad-tempered old tartars always use that excuse.’ Stuck fast in rush hour traffic, with nothing to do but look in his mirror at his passenger, he saw her mouth begin to form a protest, then give a little half-smile as if she were secretly amused by his less than flattering description of her boss, but she refused to join in. ‘How did you get to be one of the famous Garlands Girls?’ he prompted.

      She’d been born to it, that was how. Garland had been her mother’s maiden name and she’d suggested that Amanda use it when she started the agency, rather than the family name of Fleming, just in case it had all gone pear-shaped. She’d been irritated at the time by this apparent lack of faith, but then a journalist doing a feature on secretarial agencies had coined the phrase ‘Garland Girls’ to describe her particular brand of educated, classy temps and it had stuck—become a brand-name almost. She was seriously thinking of trademarking it.

      But she wasn’t about to tell this flirtatious chauffeur any of that. No matter how attractive his mouth, or uncommon his eyes. Or wicked his smile. ‘I took a secretarial course so that I could help my father. When he didn’t need me any more, I looked around for something else to do.’ Well, it was the truth, as far as it went.

      ‘I suppose if you’re going to be a temp, you might as well work for the best,’ he agreed.

      ‘Even if the boss is a bad-tempered old tartar?’ She saw his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. He was looking straight at her and for just a moment she thought he knew, that he had simply been teasing her. Then the traffic began to move and he looked away as he eased the car forward.

      ‘Don’t you have any ambitions beyond temping?’

      More than ambitions. Plans. Business plans and personal plans. And today she had put them into action. ‘Is all you ever wanted to be a driver?’ she countered.

      Well, he’d asked for that, Daniel reflected. And when you came right down to it they both worked for other people by the hour. ‘I get to meet some interesting people that way,’ he said. And meant it.

      ‘So do I.’

      There was something about that voice, something soft and warm that curled around his gut and settled there like a warm puppy. He looked again in the mirror, couldn’t stop himself, but all he could see was her mouth, full and shining and very kissable.

      Kissable? This was getting out of hand. He readjusted the mirror, slipped on a pair of dark glasses and decided it would be a whole lot more sensible to keep his entire attention fixed on the rear of the car in front. His mouth couldn’t have been wired up to the sensible part of his brain, though. ‘Sometimes I even get to know their names,’ he said, encouragingly.

      ‘Do you?’ Amanda had wondered how long it would be before he got around to asking her name and she had looked forward to telling him. Looked forward to saying, I’m Amanda Garland. The old tartar. How d’you do? Watch him flinch. Instead she found herself saying, ‘I’m Mandy Fleming.’

      Well, so she was. Her father had called her Mandy. Her brother still did. And Garland, after all, was just her professional name. Her company name. The old tartar’s name.

      ‘Isn’t that the old tartar’s name?’

      His words echoed the ones in her head, mocking her. He had known all along … Who was going to look the idiot now?

      ‘Isn’t