‘It’s a bit early for that.’ He broke some squares from the chocolate and returned the rest. The table was small, so it didn’t create much distance. He was close enough that she had to avoid his legs under the table, could smell the frosty tang of outdoors on his clothes and see every glint of gold in his hair. ‘Thing is, the hotel wants the treatment centre at The Stables. It’s in their brochures. I’ve tried everything I can to avoid taking it on but Isabel Jones says that if I want the big slope area, I have to take on the treatment centre.’
Liza grabbed another four squares of chocolate and gave a disparaging snort. ‘What do you know about running a treatment centre?’
‘Nothing,’ he admitted, cheerfully, his gaze on her mouth. ‘So how about we work something out where you run the treatment centre for me? You put into action your ideas for making the centre profitable, on whatever business model you think will work best with the other therapists, and we work out a fair rent for you to pay to me – obviously, I’m not looking to make a loss. But I don’t have to take a salary out of the treatment centre, like Nicolas did. My profits are going to come from working in the adventure and challenge side. I’ve negotiated with the hotel so that I can rent the big slope and the part of The Stables that’s currently empty, plus take over Nicolas’s lease for your bit. We have to do the sums, but I’m guessing we’ll find your rent to me to be only a little more than the total of what you three therapists have been paying to Nicolas.’
Her heart somersaulted. But she frowned and continued to let the dark delicious bitterness of Bourneville seep over her tongue, because if she let her smile muscles take charge, then her face would become one jolly grin of joy that he was unexpectedly offering her a route forward in a way that she could afford. Galloping to her rescue; making her forget that his scenario wasn’t what she wanted to achieve. Distracting her from how dashed her hopes were.
She needed to explore his proposition up, down and inside out, inspect the ointment for flies before she didn’t look the gift horse in its mouth. If something looked too good to be true, it usually was. ‘If that’s the case, and if Imogen and Fenella were to pay me the rent they pay Nicolas, plus I let out his office as another treatment room and maybe utilise part of reception, too, there’s a way for me to keep Pippa on and still make quite a bit.’ She allowed disbelief to fill her voice, as if giving him the chance to realise that he must have got something wrong.
But he didn’t backtrack. ‘Go for it. You make it as big a success as you can and leave me free to concentrate on my own stuff. Isabel showed me a plan of the other leg of The Stables and it has everything I need except the toilets and kitchen, so both business would have to share the ones the treatment centre currently uses.’ He smiled, slowly, conspiratorially, joyfully. As if the deal was done. ‘Other than that, well, you know I’m not interested in the holistic stuff.’
‘You should be,’ she retorted, picking up her coffee cup and staring over the rim. ‘Stags and hens.’
‘What?’
‘You know that one of my ideas for The Stables is to have pamper sessions for hen nights? We could cross promote. The basic idea would be for the hens to come for treatments and the stags to crash around on adventures, but there are bound to be hen parties just as keen to be adventurous and stags who’d go for the treatments. Stag and hen parties are huge business. People are always looking for new and different.’
Fresh excitement blazed in his eyes. ‘Wow, your ideas are great. And we should be able to get stags and hens concessionary rates at the hotel. Isabel’s keen on reciprocality.’
‘She’d be stupid not to be. Think about the bar bills stags and hens would run up. But I don’t see how you can afford not to put my rent up, now you know how much that greedy bastard Nicolas wants as a premium on his precious lease.’
Dominic’s eyes half-closed in satisfaction – reminding her suddenly of last night. ‘But I’m not going to have to pay his greedy bastard premium, am I? Not now. When you tell him you’re out of the running, I’ll, um, renegotiate.’
‘And if I don’t drop out you can afford his greedy bastard premium anyway, so you’ll just outbid me.’ She refilled both coffee cups from the cafetière and divided the last of the chocolate equally. ‘You just get luckier and luckier,’ she said, slowly. But, still, a little bird of excitement fluttered behind her breastbone. Could his proposal work out? She could stay at The Stables, make more money, get rid of Nicolas, implement all the ideas her head had been bursting with. And Dominic would stay—
And Dominic would stay … The bird fluttered harder, flapping, as it sensed a trap. ‘We’d be in this together,’ she realised.
He planted his elbows on the table; leaned closer. A stillness stole over his face. ‘And?’
‘And …’ He was so close that she could see flecks of blue and silver in his eyes, and every one of his thick dark lashes. ‘Isn’t what you’re suggesting a lot like a relationship?’ There. Right there. Ointment. Big fat fly.
A black frown snapped down above his eyes. ‘A business relationship. You’d be managing the treatment centre for me.’
‘So now you’re saying I’d be your employee? After having my own biz?’
The gift horse set its mouth in a grim line. His eyes narrowed. ‘“For me” was probably the wrong phrase. You’d simply be running the treatment centre so that we can both get what we want. You’d still be self-employed, you’d have a “biz”, but with a wider scope and more income, and would be paying rent to me, not Nicolas.’
His gaze never wavered. But he was looking wary and tense. And, as if to fulfil his every apprehension, Liza felt her heart deflate into a pancake of disappointment. ‘My disastrous relationship with Nicolas proves that I’m not good at being answerable to anyone.’ She paused. ‘I can’t give you an answer just now. I need to consider my position.’
Silence. His gaze bored into her. Eyes flat, excitement gone. ‘I get it,’ he said, finally, slowly. He looked suddenly fatigued. Disappointed. Grim. Unhurriedly, he reached inside his jacket, took out a blister pack of white pills and washed two down with a swill of coffee. ‘Last night’s getting in the way.’
She flushed. ‘I want to believe it’s a good thing that you’re offering me. But, yes, it would mean us spending a lot of time together, which could get messy if we’re—’
Slowly, he pushed back his chair. Waited a beat and then climbed to his feet. ‘If we’re having sex.’
Swallowing an unexpected ache in her throat at the non-compatibility of business and that particularly sweet pleasure, she nodded. ‘It would be a screaming nightmare if things go wrong.’
He drained his coffee mug and slapped it down, the noise loud in the quiet of the kitchen. ‘Just got that from findafeebleexcuse.com? How convenient for someone who thinks they’re rubbish at relationships.’
‘It’s not convenient. It’s a valid consideration. Because I am rubbish at relationships.’
He zipped up his jacket and rammed his hands into his pockets. ‘If forgetting one night of sex will put everything on a business footing, then consider it forgotten.’
Taken aback at this slamming of his cards on the table, she breathed, ‘Oh!’
He strode past her, face constructed of flinty hard lines in the harsh kitchen light. ‘Don’t look so affronted. I’m trained in problem solving. You told me the problem, I’ve solved it. To be honest, Liza, if you don’t take this opportunity, I’m going to have to offer it to Fenella or Imogen or find someone else. I need the centre.’
He swiped up his skateboard from where he’d left it, tossing back over his shoulder, ‘It’s you that’s optional.’
He skated hard up the pavement of Main Road, past the garage where Jos worked, its doors shut for the night, fuelled by anger adrenaline – not just anger at Liza, for trashing his fine bloody dream. He was cursing himself.
He was supposed to be able to deal with changing scenarios. Observe. Assess. Plan. Formulate strategies and have contingen
cies in place. And wasn’t he supposed to be the fucking bloody perceptive one? He’d known that Liza was wary and edgy and stubborn and suspicious and focused on her own goal.
But he’d disregarded all of that knowledge.
He hopped the board off the kerb to allow two middle-aged women by, before bunny hopping back onto the path again.
In the euphoria of his meeting with Isabel Jones, he’d seen only what he wanted to see – attaining his personal goal in such a way as not to rob Liza of The Stables. He’d wilfully ignored the fact that his solution would involve a big compromise for her.
Where had he left his brain?
He slowed as the lights from The Three Fishes came into view, curved around the pillar box on the corner of Great End in a rush of wheels, then stepped off the deck and kicked the board up into his hand. Legs suddenly heavy. Adrenaline ebbing.
His position was stronger than hers, his proposal more attractive to the hotel. But he shouldn’t have been so pleased with himself. For fuck’s sake, he was meant to be a people person. He trudged across the road towards Miranda and Jos’s warm, safe little house. All he’d had to do was make sure Liza had some control. No wonder, in her disappointment, that she’d seized on their history as an excuse to refuse. He edited and reran his opening in his mind: I have an idea, but I don’t know if you want to hear it, when the bank’s just knocked you back.
And if she hadn’t wanted to hear it right then, her natural curiosity and cussedness would have made her want to hear it tomorrow or the next day, when the rawness of defeat had begun to heal. That’s how you dealt with awkward situations. You managed and finessed them.
You didn’t ignore someone’s setback and try and palm them off with a consolation prize. Especially one that so admirably suited your own purpose, your own grand plan, that happened to be going exceedingly well.
And then you really, really, really didn’t lose your temper and stalk out when that someone failed to fall to their knees in gratitude. That was just throwing petrol on the fire.
He let himself into the light of Miranda’s hallway, dragging off his jacket in the sudden warmth. Crosswind frisked out of the sitting room, all propeller tail and welcoming woofs. ‘Hiya, Crosswind.’ Tiredly, Dominic opened his arms and, in an instant, they were full of warm, fluffy, wriggling dog, his face under assault from a cold nose and a hot tongue. He listened, and heard Jos on the phone in the kitchen and the splashing and singing from the bathroom that signified Miranda supervising Ethan’s bath time.
Good. He didn’t have to talk to anybody just yet. He yawned, turning his head away so that Crosswind wouldn’t use it as an invitation for some tongue action. ‘Five minutes,’ he muttered. ‘Or ten.’ He headed for the sofa, set the alert on his phone, and crashed out, the comforting weight of Crosswind still in his arms.
Chapter Twenty-Four
From the sitting-room window, she watched him launch his skateboard into the middle of The Cross with three mighty pushes of his right foot and no apparent regard for the likelihood of approaching traffic, settle both feet on the deck, hop the board onto the pavement, lean left, and vanish around the corner of Crowther’s shop.
Douchebag. Smug, smartarse, up himself douchebag.
She wished she hadn’t let him share her chocolate.
In fact, she was tempted to run over to the shop to invest in one of those huge slabs of Dairy Milk and then send Dominic bloody Christy the empty wrapper. She had only a hazy idea of how that would express her displeasure, or even exactly what form her displeasure took or whether she had any right to feel it. But. Anyway. Something was bubbling in her anger cauldron.
But before she could decide on a better bitter revenge, she received a text from Cleo’s Justin. Can u talk to Cleo about the wedding for me? She’s being difficult.
Welcoming the distraction, she responded, OK, after dinner, decided it was too cold to go to the shop just for Dairy Milk, and flung some chicken and a rainbow of chopped veg into her wok. Dominic Douchebag wasn’t worth the bad karma that came with revenge and she refused to sully her brain with the notion that she’d all-but-dismissed his offer with stupendous imprudence – not mature caution.
She arrived at Cleo’s house two minutes after eight and Shona promptly thundered downstairs to launch herself at Liza from the fourth step. ‘Aun-tee Lie-zah!’
Liza fielded the pyjama-clad missile in mid air. ‘Sho-nah!’ But then Cleo, hair sticking out as if she’d been tearing at it, sent her a silent scream of frustration, and Liza turned a stern look on her niece. ‘Were you in bed?’
Shona flicked her mother a glance from under long lashes. ‘I wasn’t asleep.’
Liza smothered a grin as Cleo mimed banging her head against the wall. ‘You’re not supposed to get up, though, are you? I’ll tuck you back in and read you a story.’ Shona was a great sleeper, once she gave into it, but the older she got, the less giving in seemed to appeal. Between her bed-evasion tactics, Gus’s colic, Gus waking Shona and Shona waking Gus, Cleo sometimes seemed close to gibbering with sleep deprivation.
Liza had better have Shona and Gus after the wedding, she decided, guiltily, as she trod upstairs, Shona hanging around her neck like an orang-utan baby. Cleo was Liza’s go-to person during trials and tribulations, but rarely asked for anything in return.
‘Right.’ Tumbling her niece, angelic in lemon-yellow pyjamas, back into her white wooden bed, Liza composed her face into decisive lines. ‘One story. If you get up again tonight, I won’t ask Mummy if I can look after you at the weekend.’
‘I don’t want you to look after me,’ retorted Shona, grinning like the Joker as she wrapped her little arms around Liza and dragged her down to snuggle.
‘Oh. Right.’ Liza sighed, obligingly snuggling. The four-year-old was getting too clever for mere grown-ups to manipulate. ‘Well, don’t get up again, anyway.’ She settled Shona, who smelled of shampoo and baby talc, against the hollow of her shoulder, and picked up a book of dog stories from the bedside table, choosing the one she knew to be the longest in the hopes that Cleo might grab a few minutes of feet-up time. ‘Fluffy was a fox terrier,’ she began.
Shona stabbed the picture of a fox terrier with a dimpled finger. ‘I saw that dog that skate boarded, today.’
Liza paused. ‘Crosswind? Did you?’
‘Me and Mummy and Gus went, and I played with Ethan, and we had bread and carrots for lunch, even though I don’t like carrots, but the man called Dominic put Crosswind in the garden.’
‘Went where? Ethan’s mummy’s house?’ Liza tried not to let indignation enter her voice.
Shona nodded, pretending to stroke the pictured fox terrier with one finger. ‘But he got the dog out of the garden before he went out and he rolled over on the carpet and he walked on his back legs.’
‘Dominic rolled on the carpet?’
Shona erupted like a giggle fountain. ‘Crosswind, the dog!’ And demonstrated, by kicking off the duvet and waggling her legs and arms whilst making breathy, ‘Rrrrh, rrrrh’ noises.
‘OK, let’s stop being a dog, now.’ Liza flipped the duvet back into place and flattened Shona into human form.
‘Rrrrh,’ persisted Shona. But by the time that Liza had read the story she did finally look soft and drowsy, accepting a last cuddle preparatory to the turning out of the light. She halted Liza just as the door shut. ‘I do want you to look after me, really.’
Liza grinned as she crept away. ‘OK. I’ll ask Mummy.’
Downstairs, Cleo and Justin half-lay at opposite ends of the sofa, managing, by dextrous entwining of limbs, to massage each other’s feet as they watched TV. Liza shifted a yellow changing mat, a pot of baby wipes and a fluffy orange goggle-eyed duck from a chair, so that she could sit down.
Justin withdrew his attention from the sci-fi film exploding all over the TV. ‘Liza, tell your sister that she has to have a wedding dress.’
Liza raised aghast eyebrows at Cleo. ‘You have to have a wedding dress!’
> Cleo smiled serenely. ‘No, I don’t. At least, nothing new. I have that ivory-coloured suit I only wore once.’
‘Wow.’ Liza was impressed. ‘Can you get back in that so soon after having Gus?’
Justin glared at Cleo. ‘It’s our wedding day and I want you to have a new dress.’
‘We can use the money better in other ways. And I can’t bear the idea of trudging around shops with Gus and Shona in tow.’ Cleo heaved a huge, downtrodden, martyred sigh. ‘You haven’t bought a new dress, have you, Liza?’
Liza had fully intended to suffer wearing a past-season dress in the interests of her personal economy drive, but when Justin’s glare turned meaningfully in her direction, she executed a hasty rewriting of plans. ‘Tomorrow’s Wednesday and I’m not working till three, so I’m going to hit the shops in the morning.’ As she wasn’t going to be paying Nicolas his greedy-bastard premium, now, she could kind of afford it, if she steered clear of designer labels. ‘Let’s go together and I’ll look after the kids while you try things on.’
Cleo groaned. Justin lifted her right foot and kissed the instep. ‘I’ve got the money from the extra work I took on. Go with Liza and get a dress that I’ll love.’ His voice softened. ‘Maybe a red one …’
Cleo opened her eyes to slits and smiled, slowly.
Wistfully, Liza envied their ability to communicate without words. And Justin had kissed Cleo’s foot when she wasn’t fresh out of the shower. It made her feel, just a tiny bit, the way she used to when Cleo got something that Liza didn’t get on a long-ago Christmas. She fought down the feeling that Cleo’s relationship was a good example whereas Liza’s had proved to be more of a horrible warning. ‘So, where are you guys going for your wedding night?’
‘Here,’ said Cleo. ‘It’s not worth the effort to do anything else, with the kids.’ Justin grimaced, but didn’t disagree.
But Liza had had time to get her plan together. ‘I’ll have the kids. You can put Gus on the bottle for the night. In fact, I’m working afternoon and evening on Monday, so you can stay away two nights, so long as you’re back to take the kids by late Monday morning.’
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