A Deeper Dimension (3 page)

Diana laughed. “All right, Jerry it is.”

Jerry looked at her a little hesitantly. “How do you like working for Mr. Mason, Miss Carrington?” he asked. His tone of voice had a note of awe in it. Diana was privately amused. However, she knew better than to show it.

She answered quietly, “I don’t really know how I’ll feel once I’m settled in, but right at the moment I’m quite enjoying it. Mr. Mason is very nice.”

Jerry’s eyes lit up, and he asked enthusiastically, “Do you really think so, too? I think he’s the most kindest man in the whole world!”

Wondering what “Mr. Mason” had done to deserve such fervent praise, she commented, “I wonder if he evokes that kind of response from all his employees.”

“Oh, I don’t know, ma’am! But if he does half as much for the rest of them as he does for me…” and there he stopped with a hand clapped over his mouth in a most tantalising way. Diana had looked at Jerry with an increasing interest as he had talked, and was very intrigued with the secretive way he had left the statement open. She just couldn’t resist.

“What does he do for you, Jerry?”

He looked at her doubtfully. “He made me promise not to tell anyone.” He chewed his lower lip in an agony of indecision. She opened her mouth to speak when he said suddenly, “I bet he tells you all sorts of secrets and you never tell a soul. Well, I’ll tell you.”

Diana protested, “Jerry, I don’t think you should.”

He grinned. “But I want someone to know how nice Mr. Mason is, and all. You see, I quit high school when I was sixteen, ’cause I didn’t think I needed it. But Mr. Mason talked me into goin’ back to school and finishin’ my education. Well, I said, ‘Mr. Mason, I just can’t afford to do that, ’cause I’m just barely squeezin’ by as it is.’ Mr. Mason just looked at me and he says, ‘Don’t you worry about it, son. Just you go and enroll for some night courses and I’ll take care of the rest.’

“So I went on down to the school nearest my neighbourhood, and enrolled the very next day. And do you know what happened when I got my next pay-check, Miss Carrington? I got a two and a half dollar raise! Two and a half dollars! ’Course, I got to work my hours to get the money, but Miss Carrington, that was the nicest thing anybody has ever done for me in my life. I can even afford to buy new clothes if I need them!” Diana felt a peculiar lump as she heard these words.

She said sincerely, “Jerry, I think it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard of anybody doing for someone else, giving a person the chance to better his own life by education.”

He said solemnly, “Yes, ma’am, and I’m goin’ to repay his kindness someday. Just you wait and see, someday I’m goin’ to do somethin’ for him.”

Diana noticed that the elevator had stopped and the doors had been open for some time. “Oh, lord, if I don’t get to work, I don’t think Mr. Mason is going to be nice to me at all,” she laughed, and shook her head at Jerry.

He smiled too, then said earnestly, “If I might say so, Miss Carrington, it is nice to have you here.”

Looking down that empty corridor once again, she turned her head and answered quietly, “Thank you, Jerry. I think I’ll find it nice to be here. I’ll see you later.” She stepped out into the hall.

“Have a nice day, Miss Carrington,” he called before the doors closed shut.

Diana grimaced, remembering the unread reports in her arms. The day hadn’t even begun, and she wasn’t very sure that it would be at all nice.

She walked into Carrie’s office and glanced at the desk.

It was empty. She probably didn’t get here until nine o’clock or so, Diana surmised. Moving to the other door, she knocked lightly and waited.

“Come in!” a voice snapped. It had a particularly ominous tone, a foreboding of bad temper and little patience.

She opened the door and stepped lightly in, and was immediately struck anew by the physical largeness of the man as she quietly moved into the room. Now that she was actually looking at him, she couldn’t believe that she would ever get used to his bulk. Alex was pacing the room in long angry strides, his hair ruffled up as if he had been raking his fingers through it. He wore a dark grey pair of slacks and a grey waistcoat over a white shirt, and his tie was loosened. A jacket lay across the back of his chair in a crumpled-up fashion, and Diana inwardly winced to think of such a lovely expensive material being so abused. She automatically went to straighten it up, and was halted by the harshness of Alex’s voice.

He snapped, “Where the hell have you been?”

She turned in amazement. “Am I late?” she asked in surprise. She looked at the small desk clock. It read three minutes past eight o’clock. She had walked in to the office one minute late. She turned towards Alex, frowning a little in puzzlement. “I’m not all that late, surely? You did say eight, didn’t you?”

Sighing in exasperation, Alex nodded and ran his fingers through his hair, ruffling it up even worse. He stood with one hand on his hip and acknowledged, “Yes, I did say eight. I’m sorry I snapped at you like that.” It was said briefly, absentmindedly. Almost, she thought with resentment, as if he didn’t really mean it. Alex had continued talking. “…gave you a report last night that I needed to have read by morning, do you remember going over the Anderson report last night?”

Diana, feeling a little uncomfortable, said quietly, “That was on the bottom of the pile, I’m afraid, and I didn’t get to them all.”

Alex’s head snapped around and his eyes narrowed. “You didn’t get to them all,” he repeated in a very quiet voice. “Pray tell, what did you get to?”

She put the different folders down and searched through them. “Here,” she said, “I studied the Nelson proposal. There were a lot of problems I found in it, but the main problem was the wording used in the agreements. What they basically did was use a lot of words that really promised nothing. I sat down last night and retyped the whole thing. It took me several hours and I didn’t get to anything else.”

Alex walked over to the desk and, barely looking at the proffered revision, snapped, “That’s just great! The one report that could have waited a few days, and that had to be the only one you did! Where did you put the Anderson report?” He started to rummage around in the pile.

Diana felt a slow burning anger starting to flare up somewhere around her midriff but said calmly enough, “Maybe I can help you with it to make things go faster.”

He didn’t look up. “No,” he said shortly, “I don’t want help,” sounding, to her, like a child refusing help to tie his shoelaces.

She said, unable to stop herself, “Maybe I should go out and come back in to see if we can start off on a better foot!”

This time he did look up. His eyes were narrowed and he looked every bit as angry as she felt. “That,” he said very evenly, “won’t be necessary. Just finish the reports and proposals that you didn’t do last night.”

Diana flushed. “I’m sorry about not getting to all of them,” she offered quietly.

“So am I.” He didn’t look at her, and his tone was short.

“Look,” she began, feeling goaded by his lack of understanding, “are you going to want to beat me for it? I did my best.”

“Let’s just forget it, all right?” he snapped, his blue eyes and rigid jawline showing frustration. He half turned away from her and began to scan the papers held in his hand as he continued, “Your best just didn’t happen to be what I needed.”

Diana began to whistle soundlessly through her teeth. “Why do I feel like excess baggage?” she remarked to the room in general.

“What do you want me to do—pat you on the back for something you failed to do?” Alex threw down the papers and swivelled back to face her, his face ominous.

“Hey, I didn’t fail at anything,” she responded swiftly, stabbing the air in front of her with one hand. “There was just too much material for one evening.”

“If you can’t handle the work load…” he began nastily. Enough was enough, Diana decided abruptly. If she didn’t get out right away, she would say something she would regret.

“Get out of the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat, is that it?” she asked stiffly. Without another word she pivoted on her heel and headed for the door. She heard a groan behind her.

“Diana!” Alex called. She kept on going, partly for fear of what she might say to him if she stayed, partly from fear of what he might say to her. Every step got faster and faster and her temper got closer and closer to the edge of control. By the time she had reached the door, she was walking very fast, and she wrenched it open, stormed through and slammed the door shut behind her. Eyes glowing with fury, she barely took in the fact that Carrie was standing behind her desk in the act of taking off a sweater. She swept by, ignoring Carrie’s greeting, and threw open the outer door. By this time Alex had the first door open and he called again, “Diana! Come back a moment—damn it, girl, I said come back!”

Chapter Two

Diana was out into the corridor and going swiftly down the hall before he caught up with her. She felt something grab hold of her arm and suddenly she was jerked around to face a very big man.

She hissed at him, “Will you let go of my arm, please, before I say something to you that I shouldn’t!” He was silent, and she stared up into his face with a puzzled anger.

He seemed infuriatingly calm as his eyes went over her face. Diana was breathing rather heavily from her temper and her colour was higher than usual. Eyes emanating sparks glared back at him. She looked very beautiful.

He turned back to the office and started walking back, never letting go of her arm. Diana immediately began to pull back and resist.

He growled, “Not now, all right?” and kept going.

Back at the outer office, Carrie sat behind her desk with her mouth lightly open as they stomped back through to the inner room. Neither one paid any attention, though, and the door slammed one more time as Alex and Diana disappeared.

He let go of her arm when they reached the privacy of his office and moved to the front of the desk to lean against it, rubbing his eyes. “I’m a bad-tempered son of a bitch.” This brought Diana’s eyes to him quickly, and she looked at him more closely. She saw lines radiating from tired looking eyes, lines she hadn’t noticed before, and a faint stubble of beard. She suddenly thought to herself, Good lord, it doesn’t look as if he got any sleep last night!

She said abruptly and aloud, “How much sleep did you get last night? Any at all?”

He peered at her from over the hand covering his face and said flatly, “None.”

“What happened?” Diana responded immediately. He didn’t reply for a moment.

Then he said, “The workers at the Pittsburgh factory went on strike last night unexpectedly. They’d been threatening it for a few weeks, but Dobson, the factory foreman, had told me they were settling down. That contract for Steve Anderson was to have been shipped by the end of the week. Now
I’m not sure we can even get enough steel poured by the end of this week, let alone put on freight cars and shipped to Anderson’s factories.”

Diana, in a swift, comprehending flash, took in all the unsaid implications. There was a great deal of money that the company could lose, besides the irrevocable blemish of a contract unfulfilled. She let out her breath in a long sigh as she stared at nothing. Alex’s voice brought her eyes to focus on him.

He asked quietly, “If I tell you I’m sorry for yelling at you like I did, and say what a rotten-tempered pig I am, will you forgive me for being so rude?”

She considered him with her head cocked to one side. Her eyes crinkled in a smile as she replied humorously, “Yes—only if you say you’re a rotten pig!”

One side of his mouth tugged upwards. “Consider it done.”

Diana had never worked so furiously in all her life as she worked that day. Alex was planning to take an early evening flight to Pittsburgh, which made the day even shorter for them. She had panicked when he had told her that he was to be gone for a few days, and that he would relay instructions to her from there. She had a horrible feeling of inadequacy, a feeling that any decision she made would end up being wrong, terribly wrong.

She said as much to Alex as they drove the company car to the airport. “I feel very unsure of myself,” she confessed to him, watching his hands on the steering wheel. They looked strong and capable as he handled the car patiently in the midst of traffic. “I know virtually nothing about what to do if a crisis comes up.”

Alex flicked her a glance, and she caught the flash of blue eyes. “All you need to do is to relay instructions that I give you. Nothing should come up in the next two days that’s out of the ordinary. If you have a problem deciding what needs to be done, ask either Owen Bradshaw, Carrie, or call my number in Pittsburgh. I don’t expect any major problems, or else I wouldn’t be going. Besides, Diana, I respect your judgment.”

Diana looked out the window and wished she felt as confident as Alex. “Thank you, Mr. Mason,” she said quietly. “I hope I can live up to that respect.”

Half laughing with exasperation, he asked her, “Everyone else in the office is on a first-name basis, Diana. I’ve even noticed you called Carrie by her first name today. Do you think you could bring yourself to call me by my first name? And please make it ‘Alex’ and not ‘Alexander’!”

Diana smiled and asked, “What happens to people who call you Alexander?”

He started to grin. “Well,” he drawled in a deliberating tone, “I used to beat up anyone at school who tried to tease me by calling me Alexander. I suppose now I’d turn anyone smaller than me over my knee, since it’s almost as bad as calling me ‘sir’.” Stopped at a redlight, he turned his head, and Diana could see the proud lines of his posture. “Are you thinking about trying out my full name to see if you can get away with it?”