I clear my throat, smooth my hair down and hunch my shoulders, trying to close the bra-level gap in my shirt buttons without overtly holding it closed and drawing more attention. These businessmen do not need any more reasons to look at me when their menacing eyes are already making my armpits prickle with more sweat.
I get the feeling Harrison is delaying while he tries to formulate a plan. There’s something panicked in his eyes that says my interruption has caught him completely off-guard.
‘My secret weapon,’ he states eventually.
I am no one’s secret weapon.
‘When I implied that I could acquire this land for you, gentlemen, I had of course hoped we wouldn’t need the assistance of Felicity, but these protestors aren’t giving up, so I thought now was the time to bring in our undercover man. Er, woman.’
I’ve got to give him points for improvisation because until a few minutes ago, he didn’t have the foggiest idea where I came from. He could probably have narrowed it down to somewhere in Wales, because even he is observant enough to notice my Welsh accent.
The businessmen clap. For me. The most one of Harrison’s businessmen has ever done for me before is condescendingly ask if I’d like to get myself a cup of water when I coughed in a meeting once.
Why didn’t I pay attention to this meeting before now? “Undercover man” sounds suspiciously like someone might expect me to go back there. To Lemmon Cove. The only time I go there is to see my father and sister at Christmas and special occasions, and those visits are planned with military accuracy. I get a late-night train down, spend never more than a day with my family, and leave that night, always under the cover of darkness, so there’s never a chance of running into him.
Ryan Sullivan. The guy I was in love with. The guy who broke my heart. The guy who might not even still live there. Who probably doesn’t still live there. The guy I never want to see again to find out.
I’m going to be honest and tell them I don’t know what they’re on about, but Harrison holds up a preventative hand. ‘Felicity, a word outside, please. As you were so late today, we didn’t have time to reiterate our plan. Excuse us, gents.’ With two swift finger jerks, he indicates for me to follow him into the hallway and the chair makes squelching noises as I unstick my body from it, silently seething at being yet again blamed for causing a gap in some fictional idea he’s made up on the spot.
‘This is brilliant, Felicity.’ The door closes with a click behind him and he ushers me along the corridor, away from any chance of being overheard. ‘I wish you’d mentioned it before.’
‘Mentioned what? Being from Lemmon Cove? Since when are you interested in where I’m from?’
‘I’m not, unless you happen to be from a village where I’ve promised those chaps the acquisition of a plot of land, and my plans have been scuppered by protestors.’
‘What? What village? What protestors? What land?’ I can feel myself starting to panic. I can not go back there. I haven’t been back there, not properly, for fifteen years.
Harrison raises an eyebrow at how much attention I’ve been paying to this project. I knew he was looking at land for a hotel company in Wales, but Wales is a big place. How was I supposed to know he was looking at land on the South Wales Gower coastline where I grew up?
‘This is a real “in” for us. A game changer for that lot in there …’ He starts pacing up and down, clicking his fingers as he formulates a plan that I already know I’m not going to like. ‘You’re exactly what we need. You have family there, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I can’t deny it, and I’m impressed that he’s remembered me mentioning going to visit family on days off. ‘My dad and little sister. But I don’t see them often. It’s a long way, and—’
‘Then it’ll be a wonderful chance to visit, won’t it?’
‘I’m not going to—’
I’d be fired if I cut people off as much as he does.
‘This is exactly what we need,’ he continues. ‘This protest is getting out of hand. We need someone to go in and pour water on the flames, and who better than you? You’re one of them. A local. You’ve got a family connection to the area.’
‘I have no connection whatsoever to—’
‘You can earn their trust from the inside out. Find out what their plans are. Gently persuade them that their time would be better spent playing bingo and doing jigsaw puzzles while eating prunes and having blue rinses or whatever it is old people like to do.’
‘What?’ I say again. I really am failing to grasp what he’s getting at.
‘Care home residents, Felicity. Those men in there are all set to buy a big chunk of land in Lemmon Cove, on the clifftops above the beach, but the grounds currently belong to a care home. It’s all overgrown and no one’s used it for years, but as soon as the owner decided to sell it, the residents took it upon themselves to object and suddenly it’s this all-important garden for them even though no one’s set a house-slippered foot out there since the days when woolly mammoths were roaming it.’
‘Right,’ I say slowly. There are a few care homes in Lemmon Cove that overlook the beach. That doesn’t narrow it down.
‘They’re all out there with their placards every day. They’re playing the environment card, but they’re being stirred up by some youngster who owns a nearby campsite, so there’s clearly an ulterior motive because a campsite would be impacted by a state-of-the-art hotel across the road. No more slumming it in tents for all the tourists who visit the area. This youngster is using his adorable team of old biddies to save his own business. It’s exploitation.’
Campsite? Since when is there a campsite in Lemmon Cove? And Harrison is not one to lecture on exploitation – he’s a cut-throat businessman who will exploit every opportunity he can.
‘One of the old biddy protestors has discovered how to use Twitter for their cause … Well, she hasn’t really discovered how to use it because she keeps tweeting random things that aren’t supposed to be tweets, like that time Ed Balls tried to do a search for his own name and it became known as Ed Balls Day. She keeps posting photos of the bottom of a Zimmer frame and blurry ground where she’s accidentally pressed the camera button and tweeting things like “What do you do with a courgette?” and “What IS a courgette?” and “Is a courgette the same as a zucchini?”’
‘So it’s all very vegetable-based then?’
‘You can laugh, but the public are falling in love with this technically challenged old bat. Her tweets are getting more and more likes and retweets, and it’s only a matter of time until she goes completely viral and the national news agencies pick up the story, and our clients don’t want to be known as the heartless hotel magnates who threw a load of old biddies out of their garden.’
‘Why are they doing it then? Some of those care homes don’t have much garden space at all. The paths down to the beaches are too steep for the residents, so the garden is the only way they can enjoy the view. You can’t plonk a hotel outside their windows.’
‘That’s for the owner to decide, and the owner’s decided that no one’s using the land and he wants a chunk of money for it. There’s untapped tourist potential because there’s nowhere in the area for civilised people to stay – a campsite doesn’t count – and now all these old folks are rioting and it’s gaining traction. Not the sort of publicity we want getting out, you know?’
‘You’ve dealt with protestors before. You usually just get the police in.’
‘Local police are in their pockets, I reckon. They’ve given an excuse about not having a legal right to turf them out when some of the protestors are chained to trees.’
I snort at the idea of anything so lively happening in Lemmon Cove, but I quickly realise he’s not joking. ‘They’re chained to trees?’
‘There’s some old tree that they’re up in arms about losing.’ He waves a dismissive hand.
‘It’s not on the strawberry patch, is it?’
‘How should I know?’
&n
bsp; ‘Is it a sycamore tree? Where wishes are made?’ I try to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach. No one would even contemplate felling that tree, but the old strawberry patch is right behind a care home on a clifftop …
His brow furrows. ‘Why would anyone make wishes on a sycamore tree?’
‘It’s a local legend. All the kids used to rush there in the autumn for the falling sycamore seeds. It’s said that if you make a wish and throw one over the cliff and it makes it to the sea, your wish will come true.’
He looks at me like I’m a few slices short of a full loaf. ‘Honestly, Felicity, I sent you out for my laundry, not to have a few gins down the pub. Don’t mention wishing trees out loud – we’ll be a laughing stock. Now, this protest has been going on for a couple of weeks, and they’re showing no signs of giving up. The youngster has got them all stirred up, and that’s exactly where you come in. We need to deliver this sale quickly and quietly. You’ll go there as one of them. Infiltrate this protest as a local. Pretend to be on their side and earn their trust, and find out what it’s going to take to get them to give up. Everyone has a price – we just need to find it.’
Harrison’s answer to every problem is to throw money at it, and if that doesn’t work, throw larger amounts of money at it. ‘I can’t do that. I don’t want to go back there. I haven’t been home in fifteen years.’
‘You go to visit your father occasionally, don’t you? I distinctly remember you saying that was how you’d spent a holiday once.’
‘Yeah, but not … properly.’
‘I’m going to level with you, Felicity. This is a huge client for us and we couldn’t risk them going elsewhere, so I’ve taken a leap of faith and indicated I have this land for them, but I don’t yet have a signed agreement from the owner. It looked straightforward. I never expected it to go wrong like this. The care home owner has got cold feet with all the protestors and is dillydallying about signing, but if we can stop the protest quickly, he’ll soon be back on our side. This is no time for your silly family disputes. You are going to Lemmon Cove, you are going to go undercover as a protestor, you are going to find out what it’s going to cost to shut these people up, and this is not a request.’
‘You can’t—’ I start, my voice rising with indignation.
He rolls his eyes. ‘This is a chance for you to move on from being my assistant and start to head up your own projects. If we deliver on this without problems for the client, they’ve got their eye on several other spots around the UK and they’re going to be coming to us for all of them. We’re going to be busy, so it’ll be time for me to get a new assistant and for you to oversee your own project, have your own office …’
An office would be nice. Right now I have a desk in the corner of his office and if he wants to take a private call, I get sent out into the corridor to twiddle my thumbs until he’s finished, and then yelled at for wasting time. A project would be nice. Something of my own. Seeing the potential in different spaces and selling that to a client … It’s what I’ve wanted since I started here. I’d love to show him that I’m capable of more than making tea.
‘So you’ll do it then?’
I don’t know why he phrases it as a question when it’s clearly an instruction. He threatens to have me replaced at least once a week. I live in London; I can’t afford to be fired for refusing this.
Maybe it won’t be that bad. I’ve got an idea of where the care homes are, and they’re a good few miles away from Sullivan’s Seeds where I used to work with Ryan Sullivan; also I know the company went into liquidation years ago. The chances of him still living there are slim to none. I always get jittery when I think about going home, but I’ve gone back for visits and never seen him around, and this could be a much easier job than it sounds. A youngster who owns a campsite could be easy to sway. Harrison hasn’t given me a budget yet, but he’s usually pretty generous when it comes to removing obstacles. A chunk of money, even the promise of a spot of land elsewhere. It shouldn’t be difficult to offer enough to put an end to the protest. I could be in and out within a day; no different from family visits.
Harrison takes my quiet overthinking as an agreement. It wasn’t, but I also know I have no options if I want to keep my job, and I haven’t been collecting his dry-cleaning and polishing his shoes for the last four years just to give up now. This is an opportunity I thought would never happen – a chance to prove that I can be a reliable and valued member of the team, capable of more than non-work-related errands and wiping down tables and refilling water jugs.
This is what I’ve always hoped for. I’ve always wanted to travel for work. I left Lemmon Cove all those years ago for an opportunity in a job that involved travel and when that fell through, I ended up in a series of dead-end admin jobs until I landed here, with promises of training and promotions and working my way up the corporate ladder. So far, none of them have come true, but this could finally be my chance.
‘There we go. Now you’re all up to speed.’ Harrison pats me patronisingly on the shoulder like this was the plan all along. ‘I have total faith in you, Felicity. You’ll get this sorted in a jiffy.’
He has more faith in me than I have in myself. And he’s been exceptionally good at hiding it up until now. Generally he doesn’t trust my ability to open a bottle of milk for his morning tea. ‘And if I do this, I’ll get my own projects? My own office?’ I prompt, determined that if I have to face going back to Lemmon Cove, I’m doing it for a good reason.
‘If you succeed, this client is a big firm with unlimited money and a budget to build several hotels in unspoiled spots around the country.’ He gives me a lion-like smile. ‘And if you fail, our firm will have lost their biggest client and we’ll all hold you personally responsible.’
Nothing like that for a bit of motivation.
‘Go on.’ He shoos me away. ‘No time to lose.’
‘But the meeting …’ I point towards the room we came out of, a finger hanging limply in mid-air. I might have agreed, but I expected a few days to worry about it first. I mean, to plan, obviously. To prepare. There’s nothing to worry about, but I didn’t think he expected me to go now. What does he think I’m going to do? Jump on the train today?
‘You can claim your train fare back on expenses,’ he says, making me sure he has an ability to read minds. He also has a look that says “why are you still here?” ‘I’ll explain all to the lads in the meeting. They were impressed by our brilliant plan, don’t you think? I must give myself a pat on the back for such quick thinking.’
He reaches around and pats the back of his own shoulder. People don’t actually do that, do they?
‘Have fun, Felicity. Wear some … daffodils or leeks or whatever it is you Welsh people like. Dragons? Sheep? I’ll have your office ready by the time you get back.’
An office of my own. A job that feels like a “real” job. Colleagues who see me as an equal. It would be so nice …
And all I have to do is deceive a few old people and offer some youngster a chunk of money. Harrison makes it sound business-like and sensible, but it sounds like underhanded and deceitful bribery when I say it.
It’s business, I tell myself as I walk back to my desk. I am a professional. If Harrison really is going to let me head up my own projects, I’m going to have to get used to things like this. Making deals and thwarting protestors and overcoming obstacles. I’ve got to start somewhere. Maybe this is exactly what I was supposed to do with my life and I just need the opportunity to become a shrewd businesswoman who zips up and down the country for work, carries a briefcase, never has a hair out of place, and always manages to walk in high heels. Maybe she’s inside me somewhere and I need the right opportunity to find out. Maybe I was cut out for this shrewd businesswoman lifestyle and this’ll turn out to be a piece of cake … A shrewd businesswoman who doesn’t get distracted by thoughts of cake, obviously.
What could possibly go wrong?
Chapter 2
Why does my heart
start pounding as the train gets closer to the South Wales coast? There is no way Ryan Sullivan still lives here. There is no way I’m going to accidentally run into him. He was ambitious; he wanted to travel and see the world. His family company is long gone from the area. He wouldn’t have stayed here.
I wipe sweaty palms on my jeans as the announcement of reaching the end of the line comes over the tannoy and I gather up my bags. I had no idea what to bring, no idea how long I’m likely to be staying, so I shoved some summery clothes into a holdall bag along with toiletries and overnight essentials.
I don’t do well with things I have no time to prepare for … I don’t do particularly well with things I do have time to prepare for, but today has been a real flailing around in the deep end moment. At first I was glad that I didn’t have time to overthink it, but I’ve been exceptionally grateful for the four-hour train journey that my brain has spent inventing all the hypothetical things that could possibly go wrong, and having one final stalk of Ryan Sullivan on Facebook, but – like all the other times I’ve checked – he doesn’t exist on social media. I thought everyone had an account on at least one platform, and while there are millions of Ryan Sullivans online, none of them are that one. I know because I’ve stalked all their profiles over the years. But wherever he is now, he clearly doesn’t do the internet. Which is useful, in a way, because I’m not a regular Facebook stalker and it’s only once in a while that I decide to check if he’s got a Facebook account yet, but what would I do if he was actually on there? I’d like to say I’d send him a friend request and a bright and breezy message asking if he remembered me, but if I sent him a message, he’d know I’d been stalking him. He’d know I still thought about him often enough to seek him out online, so I’d probably just lurk and follow his every post and never comment or do anything to let him know I was watching.
And then I’d inevitably end up accidentally hitting a “like” button and he’d see it before I could undo it, and then he’d know that even though fifteen years have passed since I last saw him, when I’m lonely, or at the end of yet another break-up, I still think of him and wish I’d never kissed him. Maybe we’d still be friends if I hadn’t.
The Wishing Tree Beside the Shore: The perfect feel good romance to escape with this summer! Page 2