He hesitated. “Why, yes, of course. I should have replaced them with new ones. Forgive me.” He tugged at the packet, and Zani tightened her grip.
“No, that’s not what I meant at all. I just didn’t expect them back.”
“And I wish to replace them,” he hissed at her, jerking the packet out of her grasp.
“Ouch,” yelped Zani as the sharp edge nicked her thumb. “That hurt,” she snapped and stuck it in her mouth, glaring at him.
“Well, you shouldn’t have snatched the packet, then,” he said, picking up the menu and studying it closely.
Zani pulled a face at his bent head and poked out her tongue. Insufferable man. If this cozy tea party was some sort of effort at team bonding, it wasn’t going well so far. Corbin de Villiers would have trouble bonding with super-glue.
She tried to think of a subtle way to begin a conversation about the company. At this point most women would probably use a few feminine wiles, chat him up a bit, get him talking about himself.
“Do you mind reporting to the board of directors?” she asked.
This caused him to put down the menu.
“Er, no. It’s part of my job.” He looked disconcerted. But she ignored his expression and tried again. The Baltic 147 and Vladimir Klebnikoff were depending on her.
“It must be difficult, though, not being your own boss, having to run everything past them.” She smiled sympathetically.
“I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”
“I’m just curious.” She shifted uncomfortably. “About what it must be like to be in charge of such a large company, all on your own. All that responsibility.”
“Yes, it is very tough. Few people understand the troubles and worries I bear. It is very difficult to be me.” Corbin had assumed a mournful expression. Zani felt a glow of satisfaction. Getting information out of Corbin was going to be peanuts. He was putty in her hands.
“So Sunberri isn’t having any confidentiality problems or anything then?”
This galvanised Corbin. He stiffened, and the humour that had briefly danced in his eyes abruptly disappeared. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you? That’s why you were messing about in my files. I will not be commenting to the press about the leaks onto the Internet until I have a clearer picture of the situation.” He pushed back his chair and stood, radiating such anger that Zani nearly flinched.
Crap, she thought. Crap, shit, bugger and bollocks.
“No… I…my brother, er…” Each excuse she came up with led to murkier and murkier waters.
She took a deep breath and relaxed. Leaning forward in her chair, she dipped her chin to her chest and looked up at Corbin through her lashes.
“You just seem so worried about something. My brother is a gaming geek and when I told him about this temp role he mentioned there were all sorts of rumours floating around about the new Sunberri game. I hate to see you stressed. I thought you’d brought me here to discuss what was on your mind.” There, even she could scrape together a bit of feminine charm when required.
The waiter hurried over. “Everything all right?” he asked.
Zani looked at Corbin, who didn’t seem to believe anything. “Yes, everything is fine,” he said and sat again.
“Look, here’s Adam with your food,” said the waiter soothingly. A thin young man appeared with thick slices of apple cake and tea in plain white mugs.
“Thank you.” Corbin dismissed them both with a nod and gave the bishop and his companion a reassuring smile.
“Playing the ditz really doesn’t suit you,” he observed. Zani, coughing on a cake crumb, remembered how fundamentally she disliked him. She swallowed an acidic retort and quietly tore her paper napkin into shreds on her lap. This man was tighter than a drum. She’d never get anything out of him, anymore than she’d find “evidence” lying around his office. She was stuck on a fool’s errand.
“Look, Zani, I can’t keep you on. I’m going to terminate your contract.”
Zani hesitated for a moment. She hated to fail at anything, but at the same time she felt deeply, deeply relieved.
“Oh thank God,” she muttered and relaxed back into the chair. It was her escape clause and she hadn’t even realised it. Now her father and Paul were going to have to get someone professional to investigate.
Corbin appeared a little nonplussed. “What? You’re glad I’m firing you?”
“Yes. Well, no. No of course not.” She ran a hand through her hair, dislodging another bobby pin, and tried to look more upset.
“Don’t you like working for me? Why did you come back?”
“Um, it’s complicated.” She fumbled for an excuse. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy working for you. I do. It’s a blast. It’s just that I haven’t been myself lately.” Well it was kind of true. Being a PA certainly wasn’t Zani’s true self.
Her fingers itched to reach for her mobile and call Karen. She carefully hid her elation and kept her face arranged in an appropriately devastated expression.
“Is there something wrong?” asked Corbin. He looked so concerned she felt a moment’s shame.
“Oh, it’s just a personal matter.” The concern was swiftly replaced by trepidation, and Zani briefly entertained herself wondering if she should launch into a graphic description of some icky condition from which her fictional grandmother was about to expire.
She gestured to the cooling cups of tea and barely touched apple cake. “Really, it’s nothing. Did you arrange all this just to tell me you’ve decided to let me go?”
Corbin shifted uncomfortably.
“It’s the thing I hate most in the world, to tell a person I don’t need them working for me. I always try to make it as gentle as I can.”
“Even for someone who was as bad as I was?” joked Zani.
“I don’t fire people who are good at their job,” said Corbin.
Anger welled, fierce and unexpected. How dare he suggest she was bad at the job? She didn’t want the bloody thing anyway. She wanted to shriek at him, accuse him of everything her father suspected.
“I’d better get my things and go,” she said and bolted from the café. Hurrying through the cathedral, her heels tip-tapped on the tiled floor. I sound like a small circus pony, trotting my way to freedom.
He caught up with her as she grabbed her bag from under her desk.
“Well, thank you for your time. I do hope we meet again, Zani,” said Corbin with awkward finality.
“Goodbye, Mr. de Villiers,” she said as he disappeared into his office. “May we never meet again,” she muttered. She wrenched her mobile phone and charger from the wall socket then escaped down the stairs and out of the building to freedom.
At his desk, Corbin listened to her leave then turned back to reading a scintillating financial report, the silence of the office enveloping him.
Euphoric at being so unexpectedly set free, Zani hightailed it from Edes House to her own office at the marina, where she surprised Karen and Fang.
“I thought you were attending to urgent family business and wouldn’t be back for a couple of days?” accused Karen.
“Yes, well, it’s suddenly become much less urgent. Thanks for puppy sitting Fang.” She bent to pat the dog who was dementedly wagging her tail and only just remembering not to jump up. “You know, Karen, you do a really fabulous job.”
“Oh God,” said Karen.
“What?”
“You’re going to fire me aren’t you?”
“Actually, I was going to give you a raise.” Zani had the pleasure of seeing the generally verbose Karen struck utterly dumb, but only for a moment. Waving aside her thanks Zani turned her attention to a large pile of documents that sat on Karen’s desk.
“Are those the contracts for the Vladimir Klebnikoff deal?”
“Yup…”
Absorbed quickly into the demands of catching up, Zani worked late. The night was bitterly cold, and snow drifted down, settling on the freezing ground. She quickly walked the short distance fr
om the Apuldram marina to her small house, with Fang skittering along beside her.
The dark house met her with a welcome huff of warm centrally heated air when she arrived. Fang hurtled past, desperate to do a bowl check in case things had changed, or food had magically appeared since the morning. As Zani locked the door behind her, the phone rang.
“Where the hell have you been?” snapped her father. “I’ve been trying to ring all evening.”
“Sorry, I was at work”
“Work? De Villiers kept you back this late?”
“No, Dad. My work. You remember, designing boats?” she said sarcastically.
“Oh.” He seemed a little confused for a moment. “So anything to report from Sunberri?”
“Yes, actually. I got fired.”
“Fired?” His voice barely changed, but Zani could feel the waves of anger travelling down the phone line to wash over her.
“Yes, fired, I told you the whole plan was ridiculous…” Zani trailed off as her father began a litany of hysteric abuse. Dizzy with anger she hung up the phone. Her father had never acted in such a way. It reminded her of Paul. The phone rang almost instantly and she answered it automatically. Without so much as a hello, her father began to swear at her again.
She slammed down the phone and with a vicious wrench pulled the cord out of the wall. “They got themselves into this, they can get themselves out,” she muttered, staring at the wire in her hand as if her father could reach out of it and grab her.
Her mobile began to ring. He was so furious he’d even managed to get over his revulsion of mobile phones. Zani fished it out of her bag and turned it off with a satisfied grimace.
As always, her anger cooled quickly and was replaced by the ever-present guilt. With a sigh she decided she’d call him in the morning when he’d calmed down and explain what had happened at Sunberri. “Until then,” she told Fang, who didn’t really care and just wanted dinner, “he’ll have to wait.”
An hour later, when she was about to tuck herself into her warm bed, the doorbell rang, its soothing bing-bong closely followed by irate hammering. Fang levitated from the end of the bed, barking hysterically and nearly breaking her neck as she shot down the stairs. Arming herself with a vase, Zani crept after Fang.
“Zani, it’s your father, let me in,” he said, rattling the door handle. She hesitated, wishing she could tiptoe quietly back to bed and pretend her father wasn’t outside her house making a scene.
“Quiet, Fang,” she told the dog, who ignored her. “Fang!” She raised her voice a notch and the little dog subsided into angry growls.
Wishing her family would leave her alone, she carefully put the vase on the hallway table and opened the door. Her father barged past and took himself into the kitchen, closely followed by Fang, who didn’t let up on the growls.
“Did you drive all the way from Wimbledon?” asked Zani incredulously. “Dad, it’s snowing.”
“You have to get back into Sunberri,” he ordered her. “And shut that dog up or I will.”
“Hush, Fang.” She sat tiredly at the table, wrapping her thick white dressing-gown around herself more tightly and wishing she’d worn her slippers. “Look. Corbin fired me. I can’t go back. I have my own life, my own business. I’m sure you can find someone else to go and do your snooping around. Someone who at least knows what they’re doing.”
“Oh, your little business can wait,” snapped her father. Studying the wood-grain on the table, Zani wondered how long she was going to be able to keep her temper and wondered if Karen and the tradespeople she employed thought her business could wait. She doubted it.
“Dad, stop it. Stay in the spare room tonight. Let’s discuss this tomorrow.”
The fight seemed to go out of him. He pulled out a chair and slumped into it.
“I’ll lose everything, including Everwood. I need you.”
“Yes, but, why is it my responsibility to sort it out?”
“Please. Don’t do it for me, do it for your mother.”
Zani closed her eyes for a moment. She wanted to scream, she wanted to punch something, she wanted to howl. Mum has been dead for ten years. Why does she still control my life? But instead she just threw her hands up in defeat.
“Okay, okay. I’ll endeavour to get the job back. It’s the best I can try, but if Corbin won’t rehire me, then there’s nothing I can do.”
Rather than thank her, Zani’s father merely smiled.
“Good, that’s good.”
Having got his way, her father didn’t stay for long. With a patronising “You know you’re doing the right thing”, he strode out the door. Fang escorted him, making sure he left the premises.
“I’m an idiot,” Zani told Fang when she trotted back into the kitchen and hopefully inspected her dinner bowl. “Why do they keep doing this to me?”
Zani stumbled back up to bed, but, despite her tiredness, found sleep elusive. Strategies to get the Sunberri job back whirled around with angry thoughts about Paul, resentful thoughts about her father and concern over the running of her own business.
In the wee hours, as snow coated the ground outside, sleep finally enveloped her and as the minutes ticked toward the thin grey dawn, Fang kept silent vigil at the end of the bed.
As Zani drifted to sleep, far away in the north of England a fat sorrowful man, hunched over a computer received a phone call.
“I have some more information for you.” The man came alert. He didn’t know the caller’s name, but he recognised the voice.
“More on Sunberri?” he asked as adrenaline began to pump through his grossly overweight form.
“Indeed.” The voice began to outline secrets: delicate information that Sunberri’s competitors would, if given the opportunity, pay dearly for.
A few hours later, Corbin woke in the low ceilinged bedroom of his seventeenth century farmhouse. The room had a luminous glow, and when he wrenched the curtains open the sight of snow greeted him, covering the garden and the fields beyond. It wasn’t deep, just a thin layer that would no doubt be gone by lunchtime, but it put paid to his plans for a morning run.
The electronic sound of the French national anthem drifted up the stairs, and Corbin swore softly as he leapt to get to his mobile. Calls at this time of the morning could only mean one thing: trouble.
Secret Intentions
Chapter Three
Zani sat at the kitchen table, staring blearily into a cup of black coffee. Normally she had it white. Very white. So white that most would describe it as a cup of warm coffee-flavoured milk. Caught up in the Baltic 147 and eating out or at the office, she’d let the mundanities of life slide. On inspection the milk in the fridge had turned out to be solid.
She hated coffee. But after a restless night, Fang had woken her far too early, pestering to go out, and she’d decided that the only thing that was going to get her moving at all was loads of caffeine. After tossing the empty coffee jar into the bin, she added two tablespoons of sugar to her mug, trying to make up for the lack of milk.
Outside, Fang sniffed busily around the garden, trying to keep all four paws out of the snow. It was a miserable grey day. The overcast sky leached away what little colour there was and held the threat of endless freezing drizzle if not more snow.
Her eyes felt gritty and she had the beginnings of a tension headache. Only the memory of the scene with her father kept her from taking herself back upstairs to bed and a few more hours of blissful sleep.
How on earth am I going to get the job at Sunberri back?
Unable to even contemplate the Sunberri situation, Zani distracted herself with a second foray into the fridge. It was as bleak and depressing a scenario as the weather outside. A fetid selection of dry and withered remnants of meals, some growing fur, three bottles of Thai fish sauce and an ancient jar of pesto were the meager contents. In the freezer, however, she hit pay dirt. Bread covered in freezer snow, but nonetheless reasonably edible. With some effort she managed to pry the slices apar
t and, having given them three goes in the toaster, she covered them in some elderly jam she found in the pantry. Breakfast.
Crunching the toast with a grimace, Zani ran over the options that’d kept her awake for most of the night.
Option One: Rush to Sunberri, hammer on Corbin’s door and beg for her job back.
Drawbacks: High embarrassment potential for everyone and likely to make him think her a desperate lunatic.
Option Two: Find Corbin in some neutral setting, drop hints about fictional financial dire straits and desperately hope that he feels guilty and rehires. Had potential, especially if ill grandmother rehashed.
Drawbacks: Plan required lying.
Option Three: Ring father and tell him he can’t possibly be saved from possible jail term and certain financial ruin by ungrateful daughter.
Drawbacks: Endless guilt and resentment from father, loss of family home, betrayal of dying mother’s wish that she forevermore look after her father. Paul likely to be even more unbearable. Not an option.
Option Four.
There was no option four. Brushing crumbs off her dressing gown, Zani took a sip of the super-sweet black coffee, scowled in disgust and stamped upstairs to get dressed. She may as well go to her office and think about it there.
She fished gloves from the depths of her coat pocket, and wrapped a scarf twice around her neck. With wool tights on under her jeans and a thick sweater under her coat she felt like a round, well-padded teddy bear. When she opened the door, the frigid wind made her gasp. Fang, usually keen for sniffing opportunities and looking very fetching in a tartan dog coat, shrank back. I think my eyeballs are freezing. She wiped away tears, and with a word to Fang hurried through the village to the marina.
The grey sky became marginally lighter as the sun started to rise. The tide was out, and boats moored along the harbour edge leaned sadly on their sides in the silty mud. She crunched through frozen puddles, the ice creaking and snapping under her feet.
She’d just started up the stairs to her office when the marina manager appeared from his office, pulling on a pair of gloves. “Hi, Zani. Fang.”
Secret Intentions Page 4