An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,30

in the voice of the dowager duchess which made if you please sound like if you care to keep your head attached to your body.

Beatrice took a deep breath and summoned her inner dowager; in other words, her inner woman who was too old and too rich to care what any man thought.

“Mr. Stevens.”

Finally, he looked up. She turned and went into her office and waited at the open door for him to hastily join her. He did.

She shut the door.

They were alone.

Her nerves were on edge.

They both took seats on opposite sides of the desk.

“Mr. Stevens, things I have requested have not been done. Why?”

He smiled at her. Patiently. As if she were a simpleton and he had to explain the basics.

“They have not been done because I have not ordered them to be done. Because that is not the way things have been done here. I wouldn’t expect you to understand that since you’re . . . new.”

New. He was going to go with new.

She nodded.

“So you have deliberately not implemented my orders.”

“For your own good. And for the good of Goodwin’s. I didn’t want you to have regrets when it was too late.” He didn’t say the words “you’re welcome” but the meaning was plain in his expression and his voice: she was a woman, and as such she was silly and frivolous and had to be protected from herself.

Beatrice swallowed her anger and said, “You think I don’t know my own mind.”

“Well, you are very . . . new.”

On the marriage mart, she was too old. But in this position she was too new. It seemed she would always be the wrong age for whatever she wanted to do. What traps the world had set for women! She gave a harrumph of laughter, which had the effect of startling him and sparking a fire in her.

Of course. He expected her to wilt like a delicate flower on a hot day.

“You seem very firm in your opinions.”

“Yes,” he boasted because a man ought to be firm in his opinions.

“Very set in your ways.”

“Yes.” He said this less firmly now because “set in one’s way” implied old and unyielding and unyielding things often broke.

Beatrice summoned the memory of the dowager duchess, particularly the way she held her shoulders back, her spine rigid. She held her head high, like she had the entire hardbound collection of Shakespeare’s works, both the comedies and tragedies, upon her head and it was no burden upon her movements whatsoever.

“Well, Mr. Stevens, we must do things differently around here.” She sat tall, spine straight and rigid, her hands folded in a ladylike way on her desk. Her heart was thundering like the horses at Ascot. “Since you are, admittedly, firm in your opinions and set in your ways and unwilling to change, I think it’s best that you explore other opportunities for employment.”

“I’m quite comfortable here at Goodwin’s.”

“I’m not asking you, Mr. Stevens.”

He could be hired by another department store. Or perhaps he might retire. Either way this he had managed to hear. She watched his cheeks flush with shame and his eyes flash with anger, the particular look of a man who could not tolerate being challenged by a woman. She knew it well. Her heart began to race. It took all of her training to keep her hands clasped on the desk and not fidgeting with her skirts.

“Are you saying what I understand you to be saying?” Mr. Steven replied hotly.

“Yes. Thank you for your years of service to Goodwin’s but—”

Now her heart was thundering like the horses at Ascot during the final stretch of the race, all while an earthquake was happening. Nothing like being alone with an angry man to get one’s pulse racing. And he was angry. Red faced, nostrils flaring, deathly calm voice.

“You cannot fire me. I worked for your father. Your brother. They trusted me to execute their orders.”

“All true. But I cannot trust you to execute my orders. And I can fire you.”

Her instinct was to storm out, make a dramatic exit. Then she remembered this was her office and she had asked—no, ordered—him to leave. Every nerve in her body was twitching for escape but she would not give him the satisfaction. She’d have to try another tactic instead.

Beatrice rose to her feet, a ruthlessly simple demonstration of her power. By anyone’s definition of etiquette, a man ought to stand when a lady did, and Mr. Stevens, out of habit, stood, as well. Ha! She