He was still clutching the box, and she wondered what was in it, gasping when he opened it. The ring was beautiful.
He took it out and waited until she realised he wanted her to hold out her hand, then he slipped it onto her finger. It was far too big, but she pretended it fitted and let him kiss her, melting against him as her treacherous lips met his.
Another round of applause.
After thanking the keeper, he took hold of her elbow and guided her out of the tortoise enclosure, then they made a run for it.
By the time they reached the car, the pair of them were giggling like fools.
‘Sorry about that,’ Noah said, when they got their breath back, ‘but it was the only way I could talk them into letting a member of the public pet the tortoises. It’s not one of their usual VIP activities, though you could have fed the penguins instead, or the lions.’
‘Thank you, but I liked the tortoises just fine.’ She held up her hand. ‘Whose ring is this?’
‘My mother’s, but it’s not real. It’s something called cubic zirconia?’ He glanced at her for confirmation.
‘Fake diamond,’ she said. ‘Did you tell her why you wanted to borrow it?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘You didn’t ask her at all, did you?’
Noah hung his head sheepishly. ‘She’ll never know, as long as I put it back where I found it.’
‘Doctor Hartley, I’m appalled. First you pretend I’m a doctor, then you steal a ring. What’s next?’
‘This.’
He lowered his head and their lips met, softly at first, then more insistently when she opened her mouth to him, letting him taste her. When he moaned a little, deep in his throat, her insides turned to liquid heat. Then he wrapped one arm around her waist and buried the other in her hair, and she gave herself up to the pleasure of it.
Finally, after long, wonderful moments, he pulled away. His eyes were so dark they were almost navy, and the desire in their depths hurt to look at. Daisy suspected she had the same hungry, lustful expression on her own face.
Chapter 31
Monday morning arrived and the rain hadn’t stopped for the past two days. Daisy shot out of her car and dashed into the builder’s merchants, Bradley and Son, brushing the water off her shoulders and hoping her hair didn’t look too much of a fright and that her mascara wasn’t half way down her face. She had emphasised her maturity during the rather odd telephone interview, so she didn’t want to look like a teenager who’d been out on the town all night for her face-to-face meeting with Mr Bradley.
‘Yes?’ the bloke behind the counter asked, his tone belligerent.
‘I’m here to see Mr Bradley.’
The man looked her up and down, and harrumphed. ‘Ken, a woman for you,’ he shouted over his shoulder.
One of the customers snorted and Daisy glanced at him, nervously. Dressed in a battered old fleece with stained jeans, and dusty, scuffed work boots, the builder (she assumed that’s what he was) winked at her. ‘Probably the best offer Ken’s had all weekend, eh, Ken?’ This last was directed at the elderly man emerging from a back room.
Ken, a.k.a. Mr Bradley, grunted. His turn to look her up and down. ‘Through here,’ he muttered, jerking his head towards the door behind the dusty counter, and he turned his back on her and went inside, leaving Daisy to try to figure out how to follow him, because the counter stretched right across the width of the shop.
The bloke behind it, sighed, and flipped a section up, then stood to the side to let her through, before slamming it back down again.
She sidled past him, and walked nervously to the half-open door, tapping on it.
‘Come in, what are you waiting for?’ Ken called.
No wonder the previous office junior hadn’t been up to much, if that’s how he treated his staff, Daisy thought, edging inside, careful not to brush against the dirty door-frame. She was wearing her best black coat – her only black coat – and the way her luck was running at the moment, she didn’t want to get muck on it because dry cleaning wasn’t cheap, and if she failed to get this job, then she wasn’t sure she could afford the astronomical price to get it done.
Ken Bradley was sitting behind his desk (though overflowing, grubby table would be a better description) and peering at her over the top of a pair of reading glasses held together by some kind of grey tape. Daisy estimated him to be in his late sixties. His grey hair was thin, and his grey face was even thinner. His shirt was grey, and missing a button, and he wore a pair of grey cord trousers, which might well have been black about thirty years ago.
Everything about the man was grey, and Daisy had to hold her lips together to prevent a smile from escaping as the thought Fifty Shades of Grey popped into her mind. Though having never read the book, or seen the film, she had a fair idea what it was about, and she didn’t think the author had a rather grimy pensioner in mind when she wrote it.
‘Hope you got better clothes than those,’ Ken said, pointing to her.
What was wrong with them? They were perfectly respectable for an interview, weren’t they? She’d made sure she wasn’t wearing anything too short, too tight, or too revealing, and she crossed her legs self-consciously, hoping she didn’t have a ladder in her tights.
‘You need old clothes in this job,’ he said, putting her mind at rest.
‘If I’d had turned up in a pair of track-suit bottoms and an old jumper, it would hardly look professional, would it?’ she retorted, with a forced smile on her face.
‘Depends what job you’re going for,’ was Ken’s reply.
‘I’ve got plenty of old clothes,’ she said. ‘I could always go home and change.’
‘Best had. You don’t want to get that nice skirt of yours all covered in cement dust.’
Did he honestly expect her to hump bags of cement? She didn’t think that was in the job description. But then, not much had been – it was the shortest job description Daisy had ever seen, and she’d seen a fair few. The only thing which really stuck in her mind was an ability to make tea.
‘Will you carry on the interview if I come back in old clothes?’ she asked.
‘What interview?’
‘This interview.’
‘This isn’t an interview,’ Ken said.
Daisy must have looked as perplexed as she felt, because he added, ‘I can see you’ve not got two heads, so you can start now.’
‘Now, as in “today”?’
‘Bloody hell, you’re quick, aincha? Yes, today.’
‘Oh, erm, I see. I wasn’t expecting that. Okay, uh thanks.’ She was totally and utterly off guard. ‘Can I just ask, what are the hours?’
‘Thirty-seven a week, Monday to Saturday. You’ll be on the other one’s rota, ’er what left. The yard is open seven o’clock til four.’
‘The yard?’
‘Aye, the shop, you know, the builder’s yard. “Merchants” is just a silly name for it. It was always called the yard when it first opened.’
‘I see, and uh, should I go home now?’
‘Unless you’ve got somewhere else you need to be?’ Ken’s eyes bored into her.
‘No, nowhere else. Right, then, I’ll be off. See you in about half an hour.’
That was the quickest, strangest interview ever. Not that she’d been to any, apart from Caring Cards, and that was years ago, but she’d researched lots of interview techniques and possible questions, both those which might be asked of her, and ones she, herself, could ask. Like how has the big new B&Q store on the outskirts of the city affected Bradley and Son’s trade and—
Oh heck, that surly man behind the counter wasn’t the son, was he? She hoped not, because he was one of the rudest blokes she’d come across. And if that was his idea of customer service, then she was surprised the business was still afloat!
After a Superman-fast change, and a lightning quick dash back to Bradley’s (she’d told her mum that she’d got the job, and noticed that her mum had referred to it as Bradle
y’s, leaving off the son part – and no wonder!), she was back in “the yard” and awaiting her first instruction.
‘Milk, two sugars, and none of that cat’s piss stuff. I like a decent brew,’ Ken yelled at her before she’d got halfway in through the door. ‘He’ll have the same, but he likes Earl Grey.’
“He” was Mr Surlypants, and Daisy was taken aback to hear he had such refined taste. She’d have put him down as a Tetley man. She nearly laughed out loud – if anyone should be the Earl Grey drinker, it should have been Ken, what with him being the greyest man in the world. “He”, she also found out, was called Tim, and he wasn’t the son. The son was in Australia, and had no intention of coming back. Ever.
Over the course of that first day, Daisy learned a great deal, indeed, and most of it had nothing to do with the job at all.
‘See that one there?’ Ken pointed to a man wearing a sweatshirt with A* Electrical emblazoned across his chest. He’d come in for some “one mill, grey” (funny that) “three core, on a one-hundred metre cable”. Apparently, he was in the middle of rewiring a house, and apparently, he was also screwing his best friend’s wife, who also shopped here.
‘The friend, not the wife,’ Ken explained. ‘She wouldn’t be seen dead in here, the stuck-up madam, so she sends her husband in instead, though by rights it’s her business. She only likes the swanning about and meeting new clients bit. The husband, poor bugger, has to do all the donkey work. And him over there,’ Ken had his back to the shop and was trying to waggle his eyebrows in the direction he wanted Daisy to look. ‘He starts a business, makes a cock up of it, winds it up, and starts another one. Let me give you a word of advice, if he offers to do your roof, run a mile.’
Daisy wondered if “do your roof” was builders’ euphemism for something, until she overheard the man in question on his phone regarding taking delivery of a pile of slates.
All the while Ken was talking, Daisy watched Ted. He was gruff and short with the customers, but then, most of them were gruff and short with him. A typical conversation went something like this:
Customer: Four lengths of two by four, and a bag of cross-head screws.
Tim: Treated or untreated?
Customer: Untreated.
Tim: Planed?
Customer: Yep.
Tim: Size?
Customer: Number tens.
Tim: Five by seventy-five.
Customer: Yep.
Tim: £36.43. VAT receipt?
Customer: Yep.
Daisy had hardly understood a word, and she realised she needed to learn fast if she was going to be answering the phones.
‘What exactly is it that you want me to do, Mr Bradley?’ she asked.
‘Call me Ken. Sort out the office.’
Wow, that was a rather large job, especially since she had no idea where to start, what was important, what could be filed, and what could be thrown out.
‘Um, okay,’ she said and disappeared into the office, feeling she may not come out for a long time, if ever.
She wanted to start with Ken’s desk, but wasn’t sure she should. It was an absolute tip, but maybe Ken was the type of person who seemed to work in a pigsty, yet knew exactly where everything was, so she gave the filing cabinet a go first, figuring that if she knew what was in there and the order things were supposed to be in, then she could work out if anything on the desk could be filed. But first, she had to clear the stacked tops of each filing cabinet, and she removed each precarious pile with care and placed it in order on the floor.
Within minutes her hands were filthy and she’d breathed in enough dust to wreck her lungs for a lifetime, yet strangely, she found she was enjoying the challenge, especially when she discovered an unused tin of furniture polish at the back of one of the drawers and an unopened pack of dusters.
Working methodically, she first cleaned the outside of each cabinet, then took out the contents of every drawer, wiped the inside of the drawer, and replaced the contents exactly as she found them, giving each file and folder a quick once-over with the duster before she put it back. And all the time she was cleaning, she studied what was kept in each of the little hanging thingies. Surprisingly, the filing system was remarkably good, though she noticed one drawer which was labelled “Trade Catalogues” was stuffed full, and most of them were years old.
‘Can I throw any of these away,’ she asked, the next time Ken shuffled back into the office, ostensibly to check something on his desk, but in reality, Daisy thought, to check up on her.
‘No.’
‘But they’re so old!’
‘We use ’em for reference,’ Ken replied, haughtily.
Daisy lifted one out at random. It was more than eleven years old. ‘Can you still get…’ she flicked through the pages, ‘…a Bosch cordless, chuck-free hammer drill, item number P354672D, priced £39.99?’ she asked.
‘Doubt it, they don’t make that model anymore. The nearest one they got to that, is the—’
‘So, what are you keeping this for, then?’ Daisy waved the catalogue at him.
‘Reference. I said so.’
‘But you said they don’t make this model anymore,’ she pointed out.
‘They don’t!’
‘I’m going to refile it,’ Daisy said, making a decision. ‘In the round filing cabinet.’
‘Oh okay.’ Ken glowered at the now-gleaming row of filing cabinets. ‘Keep up the good work.’
Daisy waited until he left, and promptly threw the ancient catalogue in the bin. Then she stared at it for a minute, before fishing it back out again, and going in search of some black rubbish bags. She had a feeling she was going to fill more than one.
By the end of the day, she was possibly the dirtiest she had ever been in her life (she was going to have to have a long soak in the bath with a body scrub to shift the grime from her pores), but she felt a certain satisfaction from a job well done. The office was far from pristine, and she had yet to touch Ken’s desk, but she now had a feel for where things went, and even if Ken’s filing system was a bit haphazard, she was getting to grips with it.
To her surprise, she’d enjoyed her first day, and as she drove home, she found herself, for the first time in a long time, looking forward to tomorrow.
Chapter 32
Daisy fingered the letter cautiously, turning it over yet again to examine the franking mark. It was from Caring Cards, posted yesterday. A part of her didn’t want to open it, guessing what it would contain. She’d already received her P45 and final wage slip, so it couldn’t be either of those, and she felt a little sick.
Should she phone Hazel Holmes? She checked the time – too late, the solicitors’ office was probably shut by now. Besides, what if it wasn’t what she thought it was, she’d look a right idiot phoning when it might be nothing to do with her appeal.
Taking a deep breath and bracing herself, she tore open the envelope and pulled the letter out. The top was embossed with the Caring Cards familiar logo and she ran her thumb across it, feeling an odd mixture of nostalgia and regret. She’d enjoyed working there, she really had. The job had been easy and had appealed to her creative side, and she’d liked her colleagues – most of them.
She wished none of this had happened, and that she could walk back into the office and sit at her desk and do what she was good at. She might have had a good first week at the builders’ merchants, but the euphoria had sluiced away, along with the dirt and dust in the shower, and she’d been left feeling a little flat.
Stop faffing about and read the goddamn thing, she told herself. How bad could it be? It was probably just a letter of acknowledgement anyway.
It wasn’t. Far from it.
Dear Miss Jones,
Further to your recent letter of appeal, regarding your dismissal from Caring Cards for gross misconduct, the company is prepared to offer you a settlement figure of £9,860.00. This offer is without prejudice and is non-negotiable…
…blah blah blah.
Daisy
didn’t read any further, letting the letter slip from her numb fingers in shock. They were paying her off!
Amazed, she wondered how they had arrived at such an odd figure. Perhaps they’d calculated her earnings for so many months, or something, and had taken off the tax. Anyway, it didn’t matter – she’d won. She realised that “without prejudice” meant Caring Cards wasn’t admitting it had done anything wrong by dismissing her, but she felt vindicated all the same. Besides, if they’d thought they had a solid case against her, they would have fought her all the way.
Now she’d phone Hazel Holmes.
‘Should I accept it?’ she asked the solicitor.
‘My advice would be, yes. Well done, Miss Jones!’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ Daisy said. ‘It’s all down to you.’ And Zoe – she’d take her a bunch of flowers later. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘No need for thanks. I’m just pleased the case has been settled amicably.’
Amicably wasn’t the word Daisy would use, because she still felt very raw and upset, but she knew what the other woman meant: no tribunal, no having to stand up in front of a judge (or whoever ruled on such things), no having her character dragged through the courts. Okay, the last might be a bit of an exaggeration, she acknowledged, having no real idea what might have happened if the company hadn’t been willing to settle.
Never mind, it was all over now, and she could put the whole sorry mess behind her.
‘I can finally think about a home of my own,’ she said to Noah, later that evening. Yes – evening! A proper after-eight-pm dinner in a proper restaurant and everything, like a real date. And he didn’t have to go to work until tomorrow. Her heart did a little jig. They had all night…
‘That’s wonderful news.’ Noah reached across the table to squeeze her hand. ‘A new job, a new house – your luck has certainly turned.’
It had been nearly a week since she’d last seen Noah, because they simply hadn’t been able to match their work schedules. It felt a lot longer, and though they’d spoken on the phone every day, and Noah had begun a habit of texting her good morning and good night, it didn’t fill the need inside her.
A Very Lucky Christmas Page 21