‘Mr McMaster, the Australian corporate world closes down at five this afternoon,’ she said, meeting his gaze square on. ‘This entire building will be shutting down. There’ll be no air conditioning, no servicing; the place will be locked. The business district will be deserted. You pay me to be in charge of this office and I’ve already let the staff leave. And you can’t sort the Berswood contract. There’ll be no one at Berswood to sort it with.’

She was meeting her boss’s gaze, tilting her chin, trying to sound calmly confident instead of defiant and scared.

She was definitely scared.

McMaster’s gaze was almost blank, but she knew there was nothing blank about what he was thinking. This man sorted multi-million business deals in the time it took her to apply lipstick. Not that she had time to apply lipstick when he was around.

‘Very well,’ he conceded. ‘You and I can work from my hotel suite.’

You and I can work from my hotel suite…

Her face must have changed again. He got it. He always knew.

‘There’s a problem there, too?’

‘Sir, there’s no rooms.’

‘If I have to change hotels I will,’ he snapped, but she shook her head. This was why she’d be fired. It was something she should have foreseen. At the first rumour she should have booked, but she’d missed the rumours.

She’d been frantic in the Christmas lead up, and she’d done her shopping in one crazy rush last night. The shops had been open all night. McMaster had let her go at eleven and she’d shopped until three. Then she’d fallen into an exhausted sleep-and been woken to a demand for clean shirts. She’d sorted it and been back in the office at seven, but her normally incisive scheduling had let her down. She’d missed listening to the morning news.

Fallback position… What was that?

There wasn’t one.

‘There really are no rooms,’ she said, as calmly as she could. ‘The country’s full of trapped people.