A Kind of Madness by Penny Jordan

Author:Penny Jordan [Jordan, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781488080906
Publisher: Harlequin Presents
Published: 1990-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

CARTER hadn’t returned for any lunch, which didn’t bother her in the least, Elspeth told herself firmly, as she made plans for how to spend her afternoon.

It was tempting to pick up the new paperback she had found in the sitting-room and spend the rest of the day sitting outside in her mother’s pretty garden; after all, officially at least, she was on holiday.

With a start she realised how little thought she had actually given to her work. Normally whenever she was absent from the office she was itching to get back, suffering something approaching withdrawal symptoms, but this time Carter and his invidious behaviour had taken up so many of her thoughts that there hadn’t been any room to spare for worrying about work.

And of course she wasn’t going to idle away her time while she was here. Briskly she decided that she would spend the afternoon in her father’s office sorting out his paperwork. Something she doubted he would thank her for, but her orderly, efficient mind could not bear to see the state in which he managed to reduce even the most simple accounting procedures.

Firmly resisting the temptation of the sunshine outside, she made herself a fresh cup of coffee and headed for the office.

Behind, Jasper was saying in her father’s voice, ‘Is there any tea going, love?’ and then somehow or other producing the sound of someone pouring tea into a mug.

‘Show-off,’ she criticised under her breath as she opened the door into the office and stepped inside.

For a moment she thought she must have come into the wrong room. She stared at her father’s desk, which was somehow smaller and less familiar without its normal burden of scattered papers filed haphazardly in a selection of cardboard boxes that meant nothing to anyone but him.

Behind the desk on the shelves that normally held untidy piles of out-of-date Field and Horse and Hound were a dozen or more neatly indexed filing boxes.

But most astounding of all, sitting squarely on the pristine neatness of her father’s desk was a brand-new, up-to-date computer terminal complete with screen and printer.

Elspeth literally could not believe her eyes. She remembered the number of occasions on which she had virtually pleaded with her father to bring himself into the nineties with the purchase of such equipment.

How he had argued, prevaricated, claimed that he had no use for such new-fangled nonsense, and even when her mother had wryly informed her that it was his fear of the technicality of such equipment that was making him stick so rigidly to his determination not to get one, Elspeth had still not been able to convince him that he would master the technique of using it within weeks.

She had even offered to teach him herself, to set up a series of easy systems for him to use, and, when that failed, she had actually threatened to buy him the equipment and book him on to one of the many excellent computer familiarisation programmes run all over the country.

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