by Liz Fielding
‘Wait! Miles said…’
In her opinion, Miles had said more than enough but, keeping her expression impassive, she turned, waited.
‘He asked me to take your keys.’
Of course he had. He wouldn’t want her coming back when the office was closed to prove what havoc she could really cause, given sufficient provocation. Fortunately for him, her reputation was more important to her than petty revenge.
She put down the box, took out her key ring, removed the key to the back door of the office and handed it over without a word.
‘And your car keys,’ she said.
Until that moment none of this had seemed real, but the BMW convertible had been the reward Miles had dangled in front of his staff for anyone reaching a year-end sales target that he had believed impossible. She’d made it with a week to spare and it was her pride and joy as well as the envy of every other negotiator in the firm. Could someone have done this to her just to get…?
She stopped. That way really did lie madness.
No doubt Miles would use those spectacular sales figures to back up his claim of ‘burnout’, suggesting she’d driven herself to achieve the impossible and prove that she was better than anyone else. So very sad…
He might even manage to squeeze out a tear.
All he’d have to do was think of the damages he’d have to pay Darius Hadley.
Taking pride in the fact that her fingers weren’t shaking—it was just the rest of her, apparently—she removed the silver Tiffany key ring Toby had bought her for Christmas from her car keys and dropped it in her pocket, but she held on to the keys. ‘I’ll clear my stuff out of the back.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Janine said, following her to the door. ‘I need to make sure it’s locked up safely.’
She wasn’t trusted to hand over the keys? Or did the wretched woman think she’d drive off in it? Add car theft to her crimes? Oh, wait. She was supposed to be crazy…
‘Actually, you’ll need to do more than that. I’m parked in a twenty-minute zone and it’ll need moving before— Oh, too late…’
She startled the traffic warden slapping a ticket on the windscreen with a smile before clicking the lock and tossing the keys to Janine as if she didn’t give a fig. She wouldn’t give her the pleasure of telling everyone how she’d crumpled, broken down. It was just a car. She’d have it back in no time. Just as soon as Miles stopped panicking and started thinking straight.
She emptied the glovebox, gathered her wellington boots, the ancient waxed jacket she’d bought in a charity shop and her umbrella and added them to the box, then reached for her laptop bag.
‘I’ll take that.’
‘My laptop?’ She finally turned to look at Janine. ‘Did Miles ask you to take it?’
‘He’s got a lot on his mind,’ she replied with a little toss of her head. In other words, no.
‘True, and when I find out who’s responsible for this mess he won’t be the only one. In the meantime,’ she said, hooking the strap over her shoulder and patting the soft leather case that held her precious MacBook Pro, ‘if he should ask for it, I suggest you remind him that I bought it out of my January bonus.’
Janine, caught out, flushed bright pink but it was a short-lived triumph.
‘There’s a taxi waiting to take you to the Fairview,’ she said, turning on her heel and heading back to the office.
Tash glanced at the black cab, idling at the kerb. Even loaded as she was, the temptation to stalk off in the direction of the nearest Underground station was strong, but there was no one apart from the traffic warden to witness the gesture so she climbed aboard and gave him her address.
The driver looked back. ‘I was booked for the Fairview.’
‘I have to go home first,’ she said, straight-faced. ‘I’m going to need a nightie and toothbrush.’
*
Darius strode the length of the King’s Road, fury and the need to put distance between himself and Natasha Gordon driving his feet towards the Underground.
A minor setback? A house that she’d made unsellable, and a seven-figure tax bill on a house he couldn’t live in—what would merit serious bother in her eyes?
Cornflower-blue, with hair that looked as if she’d just tumbled out of bed and a figure that was all curves. Sexy as hell, which was where his thoughts were taking him.
Once on the train, he took out the small sketchbook he carried with him and did what he had always done when he wanted to block out the world. He drew what he saw. Not the interior of the train, the woman sitting opposite him, the baby sleeping on her lap, but what was in his head.
Dark, angry images that had been stirred up by a house he’d never wanted to set foot in again but just refused to let go. But that wasn’t what appeared on the page. His hand, ignoring his head, was drawing Natasha Gordon. Her eyes, startled wide as he’d confronted her. The way her brow had arched like the wing of a kestrel hovering over a hedgerow, waiting for an unsuspecting vole to make a move. The curve of hair drooping from an antique silver clasp, the tiny crease at the corner of her mouth that had appeared when she’d offered him a smile along with her hand. It was as if her image had burned itself into his brain, every detail pinpoint-sharp. The blush heating her cheeks, a fine chain about her neck that disappeared between invitingly generous breasts. Her long legs.
Was he imagining them?
He couldn’t remember looking at her legs and yet he’d drawn her shoes—black suede, dangerously high heels, a sexy little ankle strap…
He did not fight it, but drew obsessively, continuously, as if by putting her on paper he could clear his mind, rid himself of what had happened in that moment when he’d stood up and turned to face her. When he’d looked back, knowing that she’d be there at the window. Wishing he’d taken her with him when he’d left. When he’d hovered for a dangerous moment on the point of turning back…
Wouldn’t Morgan have loved that?
He stopped drawing and just let his mind’s eye see her, imagining how he’d paint her, sculpt her and when, finally, he looked up, he’d gone way past his stop.
*
Tash sat back in the cab as the driver pulled away from the kerb, did a U-turn and joined the queue of traffic backed up along the King’s Road.
A little more than twenty minutes—just long enough to get a parking ticket—that was all it had taken to reduce her from top-selling negotiator at one of the most prestigious estate agencies in London, to unemployable.
*
‘It’s a beautiful house, Darius.’ Patsy, having dropped off some paperwork and made them both a cup of tea, had discovered the Chronicle in the waste bin when she’d discarded the teabags. ‘Lots of room. You could make a studio in one of the buildings,’ she said with a head jerk that took in the concrete walls and floor still stained with oil from its previous incarnation as a motor repair shop. ‘Why don’t you just move in? Ask me nicely and I might even come and keep house for you.’
‘You and whose army?’ He glanced at the photograph of the sprawling house, its Tudor core having been added to over the centuries by ancestors with varying degrees of taste. At least someone had done their job right, taking time to find the perfect spot to show the Chase at its best. The half-timbering, a mass of roses hiding a multitude of sins. A little to the right of a cedar tree that had been planted to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria.
The perfect spot at the perfect time on the perfect day when a golden mist rising from the river had lent the place an ethereal quality that took him back to school holidays and early-morning fishing trips with his grandfather. Took him back to an enchanted world seen through the innocent eyes of a child.
‘It’s got at least twenty rooms,’ he said, returning to the armature on which he was building his interpretation of a racehorse flying over a fence. ‘That’s not including the kitchen, scullery, pantries and the freezing attics where the poor sods who kept the place running in the old days were housed.’ Pl
us half a dozen cottages, at present occupied by former employees of the estate whom he could never evict, and a boat house that was well past its best twenty years ago.
She put the magazine on his workbench where he could see it, opened a packet of biscuits and, when he shook his head, helped herself to one. ‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Wring that wretched girl’s neck?’ he offered, and tried not to think about his hand curled around her nape. How her skin would feel against his palm, the scent of vanilla that he couldn’t lose… ‘Subject closed.’
He picked up the Chronicle and tossed it back in the bin.
‘It said in the paper that she’d had some kind of a breakdown,’ Patsy protested.
A widow, she worked as a freelance ‘Girl Friday’ for several local businesses, fitting them in around the needs of her ten-year-old son. She kept his books and his paperwork in order, the fridge stocked with fresh milk, cold beer, and his life organised. The downside was that, like an old time travelling minstrel, she delivered neighbourhood gossip, adding to the story with each stop she made. He had no doubt that Hadley Chase had featured heavily in her story arc this week and her audience were no doubt eagerly awaiting the next instalment.
‘Please tell me you don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers,’ he said as, concentration gone, he gave up on the horse and drank the tea he hadn’t asked for.
‘Of course I don’t,’ she declared, ‘but the implication was that she had a history of instability. They wouldn’t lie about something like that.’ She took another biscuit, clearly in no hurry to be anywhere else.
‘No? She was in full control of her faculties when I saw her,’ he said. ‘I suspect the breakdown story is Morgan and Black’s attempt to focus the blame on her and lessen the impact on their business.’ Lessen the damages.
‘That’s shocking. She should sue.’
‘She hasn’t bothered to deny it,’ he said.
‘Maybe her lawyer has advised her not to say anything. What’s she like? You didn’t say you’d met her.’
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I’m doing my best to forget.’ Forget his body’s slamming response at the sight of her. The siren call of a sensually pleasing body that had been made to wrap around a man. A mouth made for pleasure. The feeling of control slipping away from him.
Precious little chance of that when his hands itched to capture the liquid blue of eyes that had sucked the breath out of him, sent the blood rushing south, nailing him to the spot. A look that eluded his every attempt to recreate it.
It was just as well she was safely out of reach in the Fairview, playing along with Morgan’s game in the hopes of hanging on to her job. Asking her to sit for him was a distraction he could not afford. And would certainly not endear him to his lawyers.
‘I wonder if it was anorexia?’ she pondered. ‘In the past.’ Patsy, generous in both character and build, took another biscuit.
‘No way.’ He shook his head as he recalled that delicious moment when, as Natasha Gordon had offered him her hand, the top button of her blouse had surrendered to the strain, parting to reveal the kind of cleavage any red-blooded male would willingly dive into. ‘Natasha Gordon has all the abundant charms of a milkmaid.’
‘A milkmaid?’
Patsy’s grandparents had immigrated to Britain in the nineteen-fifties and she’d lived her entire life in the inner city. It was likely that the closest she’d ever come to a cow was in a children’s picture book.
‘Big blue eyes, a mass of fair hair and skin like an old-fashioned rose.’ There was one that scrambled over the rear courtyard at the Chase. He had no idea what it was called, but it had creamy petals blushed with pink that were bursting out of a calyx not designed to contain such bounty. ‘Believe me, this is not a woman who lives on lettuce.’
‘Oh…’ She gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘And did this milkmaid apologise with a pretty curtsy?’ she asked, confirming her familiarity with the genre.
‘She didn’t appear to have read the script.’ No apology, no excuses… ‘She suggested that the advertisement was little more than a minor setback.’
‘Really? You’re quite sure the poor woman is not cracking up?’
‘As sure as I can be without a doctor’s note.’ But there was a distinct possibility that he was.
Milkmaids, roses…
Forget wheeling her in to apologise. If it was possible to be any more cynical, he’d have said they were hoping that she might use her charms, her lack of control over her buttons, to distract him from taking legal action.
He shouldn’t even be thinking about how far she might go to achieve that objective. Or how happy he would be to lie back and let her try.
*
‘Dad’s really worried about you, Tash. You’ve been working so hard and all this stress…well…you know…’ Her mother never actually said what she was thinking out loud. ‘He thinks you should come home for a while so that we can look after you.’
Tash sighed. She’d known that whatever she said, they’d half believe the newspaper story, convinced that they had been right all along. That she would be safer at home. No matter how much she told herself that they were wrong, it was hard to resist that kind of worry.
‘Mum, I’m fine.’
‘Tom thinks a break would do you good. We’ve booked the house down in Cornwall for the half-term holiday.’ So far, so what she’d expected. Her dad the worrier, her brother the doctor prescribing a week at the seaside and her mother trying to please everyone. ‘You know how you always loved it there and you haven’t seen the children for ages. You won’t believe how they’ve grown.’
Twenty-five and on holiday with her family. Building sandcastles for her nieces during the day and playing Scrabble or Monopoly in the evening. How appealing was that?
‘I saw them at Easter,’ she said. ‘Send me a postcard.’
‘Darling…’
‘It’s all smoke and mirrors, Mum. I’m fit as a flea.’
‘Are you sure? Are you taking the vitamins I sent you?’
‘I never miss,’ she said, rolling her eyes in exasperation. She understood, really, but anyone would think she was still five years old and fighting for her life instead of a successful career woman. This was just a hiccup.
‘Are you eating properly?’
‘All the food groups.’
When the taxi had delivered her to her door, she’d gone straight to the freezer and dug out a tub of strawberry cheesecake ice cream. While she’d eaten it, she pulled up the file on her laptop so that if, in a worst case scenario, it came to an unfair dismissal tribunal she had a paper trail to demonstrate exactly what she’d done. Except that there it all was, word for word, on the screen. Exactly as printed. Which made no sense.
The proof copy she’d seen, approved and put in her out tray had been the one she’d actually written, not the one that was printed.
Either she really was going mad or someone had gone out of their way to do this to her. Not just changing the original copy, fiddling with the proof and intercepting the phone call from the Chronicle, but getting into her laptop to change what she’d written so that she had no proof that she’d ever written anything else.
Okay, a forensic search would pull up the original, but there would be no way to prove that she hadn’t changed it herself because whoever had done this had logged in using her password.
Which meant there was only one person in the frame.
The man who hadn’t let her know he was back a week early from a six-week rugby tour. The man who hadn’t come rushing round with pizza, Chianti and chocolate the minute he heard the news. Who hadn’t called, texted, emailed even, to ask how she was.
The man who was now occupying the upstairs office that should, by rights, be hers.
Her colleague with benefits: Toby Denton.
She wouldn’t have thought the six-foot-three blond rugby-playing hunk—who’d never made a secret of the fact that he saw work as a tedious
interruption to his life and whose only ambition was to play the sport professionally—had the brains to engineer her downfall with such cunning.
His cluelessness, off the rugby field, had been a major part of his appeal. When there was any rescuing to be done—which was often when it came to work—she was the one tossing him the lifebelt. Like giving him her laptop password so that he could check the office diary for an early-morning appointment when, typically, he’d forgotten where he was supposed to be.
The announcement of his appointment as associate partner had appeared on the company website the day after she’d been walked to the door with her belongings in a cardboard box. Photographs of the champagne celebration had appeared on the blog a day later. It was great PR and she’d have applauded if it hadn’t been her career they were interring.
‘Tash?’ her mother asked anxiously. ‘Are you baking?’
‘Baking? No…’ Then, in sheer desperation, ‘Got to go. Call waiting. Have a lovely time in Cornwall.’
Call waiting… She wished, she thought, glancing along the work surface at the ginger, lemon drizzle and passion cakes lined up alongside a Sacher Torte, waiting for the ganache she was making.
She had been baking. She’d used every bowl she possessed, every cake tin. They were piled up in the sink and on the draining board, along with a heap of eggshells and empty sugar, flour and butter wrappers and a fine haze of icing sugar hung in the air, coating every surface, including her.
It was her displacement activity. Some people played endless computer games, or went for a run, or ironed when they needed to let their brain freewheel. She beat butter and sugar and eggs into creamy peaks.
Unfortunately, her mind was ignoring the no-job, no-career problem. Instead it kept running Darius Hadley on a loop. That moment when he’d turned and looked at her in Miles Morgan’s office, his face all dark shadows, his eyes burning into her. His hands. The glint of gold beneath dark curls. The air stirring as he’d walked past her, leaving the scent of something earthy behind.