A Pretend Engagement Read Free Page A

a blanket over the whole country.

    But eventually, aware that other people were coming in all thewhile, she vacated her place and went to sit in her car. She was glad then to feel angry again that through no fault of her own-expect perhaps blind trusting gullibility she was where she was anyway, and not safely tucked up in her own bed at home.

    Men! she fumed, though had to modify that when she thought of the sweetness that had been her grandfather, the loving generosity that was the man her mother had married-Johnny's father-and Johnny himself, given that Johnny had always seemed to be getting himself into some sort of scrape or another. They were always honest scrapes, though. Well, she had to qualify, honest since he had left his boyhood behind. Which honesty was more than could be said for MartinWalker. How honest was it to tell one woman you loved her while married and still living with another? He even had children that she had known nothing about! Men! She'd had it with the lot of them.

    Why-look at Leon Beaumont! She had evidence for her own eyes in the paper today of what an adulterous swine he was. Varnie searched the recesses of her mind for information she would probably have given no heed to if her brother had not gone to work for him. Hadn't Leon Beaumont been involved in some divorce scandal only recently? Hadn't he been toting around some other married lovely, whose marriage had ended in divorce on account of him?

    Somehow she found that she could not get thoughts of Leon Beaumont out of her head. Which was odd, because until she had seen that picture of him today, having just thumped Neville King and waiting for him to get up so he could give him another one, she'd had no idea of what the man her brother admired so much looked like.

    He was tall, that much was obvious, even when bent over from decking the man on the floor. Good-looking too-dark-haired, athletic looking-and loaded. As Johnny had said, as bachelors went, they didn't come any more eligible. Varnie was unimpressed-she was off mid-thirties men, and Leon Beaumont looked only a year or two older than Martin Walker.

    But where Martin was trying to build up a business-if what he said was true-Leon Beaumont, head of an international design and development company in the field of communication systems, had already done that.

    That was according to Johnny who, while waiting to know if he had got the job as Leon Beaumont's assistant, had never ceased singing the man's praises.

    Apparently the man already had a PA who was little short of brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that when she'd married last year, and then started to fret about being apart from her new husband when called to go on the many trips out of London and out of the country, Leon had taken action. Rather than lose his gem of a PA, he'd decided she could stay office-bound and he would create the new position of peripatetic assistant, who, when they were both in the office, could give her a hand.

    Johnny was well versed in office routine, a wizard with his laptop and anything to do with computers. Plus, he had a pleasing personality and having learned something of a lesson from his car crash, was a very good driver.

    To start with he had truly believed the position advertised would go to some female, but he'd felt he had interviewed well. There had then followed a period of him phoning home every day in panic that he had heard nothing, and they'd been in no doubt, as the days had gone by, that he would feel totally crushed if he did not get the job.

     

    'I'd work the first three months for nothing if only he'd give me the chance,' Varnie remembered him saying one time. That, she realised,From a brother who never seemed to have any spare cash, just proved how desperate he had been to have the job.

     

    The day he'd rung to say he had actually been offered the job, actually had the letter in his hand, Varnie had been so glad for him.Though she had thought that some of his