by Karen Swan
‘Just wondering. I was at the WestHouse the other day and made a new contact with the concierge there; I like what they’ve done with the refit and they’re keen to get on our lists, so they’ve offered me a good rate. I just thought if he wanted to test-drive somewhere new for us . . .’ She gave a lackadaisical shrug for good measure.
‘That’s worth knowing. I’ll let him know; see if he can swing by sometime next week.’
They lapsed into a small silence, their eyes on the city still at full tilt outside the windows; the first lights were already being switched on, punctuating the tower blocks like a Tetris screen.
‘Well, listen, I should get on and leave you to your Sunday – or what’s left of it,’ she said, leaning forward and replacing her empty glass on the coffee table. ‘And . . . I’m sorry about earlier – I shouldn’t have just turned up here unannounced and almost knocked your door down. I just—’
‘It’s okay, Chloe, I totally get it. It was a big shock to me too.’
She stood, her gaze unseeing upon the city spread out below them. It was almost more than she could imagine, bear – to think that that driver was out there, somewhere in those streets, getting away with it . . .
‘But listen, Chlo, I think it would still be good to keep news of the investigation quiet until there’s a compelling reason not to. We don’t want rumours starting or the clients getting spooked. The fewer people who know at the moment, the better.’
‘And who is that then?’
‘You, me and Tom.’
She nodded, wondering whether she could keep it from Xan; he had an innate ability to tell when she was being evasive about something. ‘Okay, sure.’
She walked slowly towards the door.
‘Things will get better from now on, you’ll see. It’s been a week since the accident and Poppy’s survived both that and the surgery. Every day that passes she’s getting stronger. We’ll be back to normal in no time.’
She nodded but it didn’t ring true. They were in the business of providing the spectacular, the extraordinary, the rare; they moved through a world of bespoke experiences in which there were no limits. Frankly, she wasn’t sure any one of them would know what ‘normal’ was if it came up and punched them in the face.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Don’t do it, Chlo,’ Kate said in her most warning tone. ‘I mean it. You’ve only just started getting your life back together again. Do not let him in.’
‘I’m not, but—’
‘No buts!’ Kate said, jabbing a finger at the screen, eyes wide and serious.
The two sisters stared at one another from different sides of the ocean.
‘But what if what Jack said is true about him and Lucy—?’ The words raced together defiantly, too fast to be stopped, the question needing an answer; she needed an answer.
‘Then why’s it taken him five months to dump her, huh? Why didn’t he do it the moment he lost you?’
Chloe’s mouth opened but no words came out; they never did. She had never won an argument against her sister. She wanted to say something about missing the cow but she couldn’t organize the words into a coherent order. Espresso martinis would do that to a girl.
‘Because he’s a bloody idiot, that’s why.’ The finger jabbed again. ‘And besides, you don’t know he’s the one who dumped her, do you? For all we know, she dumped him! And now he’s turned his attention back to you, thinking you’re an easy target, a sure thing.’
Chloe’s face crumpled at the brutality of her sister’s honesty.
‘Oh!’ Kate’s face came right up close to the screen. ‘Oh, babe, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, please don’t cry.’
‘No, no you’re right, I know you are,’ she sniffed, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes, not wanting to smudge her mascara. She was still drunk, still wearing the fancy Zimmermann dress she’d put on after leaving Jack’s apartment to go to the bar with Elle. She had wanted to escape, to pretend everything was fine and dandy, even if only for a few hours – her conversations with him and Poppy’s mother that afternoon had left her reeling and in need of a vent. Not to mention she hadn’t dared stay at the apartment in case Tom came over again. She didn’t trust herself, especially not now she knew things had changed. Her head was all over the place; the world felt like it had been set on its side and she couldn’t think straight any more. She was trying to do the right thing, she wanted to do it . . . but then the crashing disappointment she’d felt at coming home to find him not on her doorstep only compounded her miserable confusion.
She knew she ought to sleep; it was two in the morning, she couldn’t start her new week on four hours’ sleep; she had to be on top form in case Pelham or Rosaria or Alexander or any of the others rang in. And yet still she’d spent the several hours since getting in, wandering around the flat with a vodka in hand like some sort of tragic Blue Jasmine figure. It always went like this – her trying to resist, Tom wearing her down even in his absence.
Kate, on the other hand, was not drunk and emotional from a night on the tiles. She was in her dressing gown, puffy-eyed from another night of subsistence-level sleep and already with a Stickle Brick caught in her hair. It was seven in the morning there, but she’d already been up for an hour and a half with Orlando and she’d known even just by the ring tone that her little sister was in crisis.
‘You’re right. I have to forget him. Move on,’ Chloe said in a wobbly, slurred voice. ‘Whatever’s going on with him and Lucy, it’s none of my business.’
‘Exactly. You’re too good for him, babe. Don’t waste your time on some idiot who doesn’t know how lucky he was to have you. You deserve more.’
‘I do. I’m a strong, independent woman,’ she repeated like a mantra, but without any accompanying conviction. ‘I’ve built a new life for myself—’
‘Well, sort of.’ Kate wrinkled her nose.
‘Huh? I moved to a new country,’ she said indignantly. ‘How is that not a new life?’
‘You’re still working at his company.’
Chloe glowered at her. ‘Th-that is not a helpful osverbation.’
‘I’m just saying it makes it hard to keep the guy out of your life, that’s all. If you want to move on, you also need to move job.’
‘I like my job,’ she cried. ‘Why should I be the one to go? He’s the liar! He’s the cheat! Isn’t it enough that I left my homeland, the country of my birth? My family?’ she said dramatically. ‘He can go! It’s the very least he can do!’
‘Uh – it’s his company? Look, I totally agree in principle but this is a hard one to fight against,’ Kate pointed out. ‘Just go to one of your competitors instead; do the same job somewhere else and you’ll get to piss him off too,’ she said gleefully. ‘You won’t be free of him till you do, you know that.’
Chloe did know that – and it was precisely why she hadn’t done it, somehow unable to make the final cut that would set them both adrift from the other. It was one thing to leave the country, to swap a continent to escape him, it was quite another to lose touch completely. She couldn’t imagine a life where he wasn’t in it, even if it was just in the background or through a screen, a name at the end of a memo. Her anger and humiliation had sustained her for these past few months, driving her to rebuild with a sunny smile and complete immersion in other people’s lives; sorting out their problems had been the salvation she’d needed, as it meant she didn’t have to wallow in her own. But now he was here, and Lucy was off the scene and it was getting harder to keep the anger going all the time.
‘I can deal with him at work,’ she mumbled.
‘Hmm, I hope so.’ Kate made her point with a hitched eyebrow and dubious stare. ‘Just don’t forget how he made you feel, okay? Because, trust me, I remember exactly how you sounded when you rang from the back of that cab. You were in pieces. You can’t go back to that, Sis. Don’t let him do that to you again.’
She nodded. Firmly. Decisively. ‘I won’t.’
&
nbsp; In the background, Orlando wandered through with his nappy in his hand, prompting a small shriek from her sister and they said their goodbyes quickly as they always did, blowing kisses across the ocean. Chloe sat back, slumped on her bed, clutching Marmalade – her tatty childhood bear who had followed her from home to university to London, and now here – and staring at the single forlorn long-stemmed freesia Tom had managed to push through the letterbox after she’d left for the opera last night. It was a little bit mangled, some might say crushed, from where someone had trodden on it. But if she closed her eyes, she could still feel her arm glow from his touch. And that was precisely the problem – because no matter what her big sister said, she still remembered exactly how he made her feel.
‘Oh my God, did the cat die?’ Xan asked, a look of horror on his features as she crossed the floor to the desk.
‘What cat?’
‘Your grandma then?’
‘Oh haha.’ Chloe stuck her tongue out at him and let her bag drop to the floor with a thunk. She had thought the cream vintage Valentino skirt-suit – a bargain at the Saturday flea market – had done a pretty good job of detracting from her exhausted pallor. ‘You are glowing with radiance too, darling.’ She sipped harder from her coffee and sank down into the spinny chair. Automatically she began swaying herself from side to side, soothed by the comforting motion and wishing she could close her eyes and go back to sleep.
‘What did you do that’s left you so broken?’ Xan persevered, his chin cupped in his hands, watching her. He gave a stage-worthy gasp. ‘Did you hook up with someone? Tell me everything.’
She opened her mouth, ready to slap him down – since when did she ever hook up? – when she saw a familiar gait in her peripheral vision. Tom was several metres away, walking from his temporary office in the meeting room, behind her desk, towards the kitchen. She knew he was getting a tea – strong, no sugar, dash of milk – he always had a cup of tea at ten, but his mere presence was like a scent, something tangible she could grab.
A small smile curved her mouth upwards. She may not have slept a wink, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t pretend it was down to more interesting reasons than pacing all 335 square feet of her apartment most of the night.
‘No,’ she said in a provocative voice.
‘You did hook up!’ Xan gasped. ‘I can tell.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said primly, refusing to make eye contact and instead sitting far too upright, Miss Moneypenny-style and booting up the computer. Predictably, Xan went into a spin.
‘Was he hot?’
‘No comment.’
She registered that Tom had stopped walking and was loitering by the desks nearby, picking up a magazine and pretending to flick through it.
‘Then give me a name at least. Something to work with. Come on. This is news.’
Instead, she raised her eyes to Xan’s and pressed a silencing finger to her lips, a discreet tip of her head towards Tom making him glance towards their boss. ‘Not now,’ she mouthed.
Xan sat back, scandalized and delighted, quietened for the moment at least.
‘Well I went to Cape Cod,’ he said, instead picking up the conversational slack and speaking in an entirely unconvincing way. ‘Caleb’s been on for weeks about going so we finally went over, but you know, it so wasn’t all that.’ He rolled his eyes but Chloe wasn’t paying attention. Tom, hearing the conversation had switched topic from her social life to Xan’s, had tossed down the magazine and resumed his stroll to the kitchen. Chloe couldn’t help but notice several of the younger girls followed in his wake a few moments later, a small group congregating around the kettle like horses around water; there was certainly as much head tossing and hair flipping going on. Did they know his engagement was broken? He was an attractive man and highly eligible; she knew he wouldn’t be single for long, not once word got round.
He only caught her staring the once, his eyes easily catching hers across the room as he stood almost a head taller than his acolytes. Neither one of them smiled, wretchedness in both their gazes, and she made a point of being on the phone when he passed back several minutes later.
She wanted to cry.
She heard the door to his glass office close and saw Xan watching him take his seat again.
‘Right, the coast is clear,’ he said, getting up and walking over to her side of the desk and plonking himself down in what had once been her chair beside Poppy’s. ‘I want to know everything. And don’t leave out the juicy bits.’
It had been precisely the morning she didn’t need – thanks to the Carlyle debacle last week, Pelham Hungerford’s engagement hopes were now hanging by a thread and he felt it required a grand statement of love to keep things together. They were now in Vienna, so after twenty minutes of intense wall-staring, Chloe had suggested a private cruise on the Danube that evening, with petals being scattered from the bridges as they passed beneath. Pelham had loved it and she had just sourced the boat and was finalizing hiring a private chef to put together a menu for them, when Rosaria Bertolloti had called in. She was in Argentina but the hotel had run out of San Pellegrino water; they had offered Perrier but her dogs only drank San Pellegrino – what was more it had to be poured from the glass bottles, thank you very much, not plastic ones. ‘They can tell,’ she’d said, before hanging up and leaving Chloe to the task of sourcing glass-bottled San Pellegrino stockists in a two-mile radius of the hotel. Then Proudlock had remembered his winter tyres hadn’t been changed off his Maserati and he was going to be back in the country next week – could she see to it? So she had.
And now she was here, in a conference room seventy-two floors up and waiting to see the CEO of the property development company that had won the contract for a development of fifteen super-luxury chalets, a five-star hotel and two twelve-apartment buildings in Andermatt, Switzerland. A rare decision by the Swiss Federal Council had meant the properties could be purchased by non-Swiss nationals and she was keen to get them under the noses of Invicta’s clients.
Being here was also a valuable chance to get out of the office – all morning, as she had hit the phones, working her contacts and tapping her resources, she had caught Tom’s eyes on her in the reflection of the small monitor mirror. He couldn’t see her watching him watching her, but that almost made it worse; she wasn’t sure how much more she could take. It felt like the oxygen was being slowly sucked from the room, leaving her light-headed and breathless.
The door opened and a red-haired woman in a navy pant suit came in, a slim MacBook Air under one arm. ‘Chloe, thanks for coming.’
‘The pleasure’s all mine, Helen,’ Chloe said, rising to shake hands with her. ‘I’ve been dying to see what you’ve got for us. It sounds incredibly exciting.’
‘I’ll be honest, we’re incredibly excited about it,’ Helen beamed, sitting down opposite her in one of the turquoise-velvet chairs. ‘The location is just spectacular and of course, it’s so rare to get an opportunity to make something like this available to the international market. Switzerland is prime but such a closed shop.’
‘Exactly why I thought our clients would want to know about it.’
‘You did well to get in first. We’re anticipating strong demand,’ Helen said. ‘I’ve had Quintessentially on the phone twice daily for the past fortnight. They’re not happy we won’t take a meeting till we’ve seen you.’
‘Well, I guess you snooze, you lose,’ Chloe smiled; she had known this was a good fit for their clients and she’d been first off the blocks to negotiate the exclusive on it. It was her job to make sure that Invicta’s members would be the first to get eyes on the development, first refusal would be theirs; she was damned good at her job and she still bristled at Kate’s suggestion that she should have to give it up to escape her ex. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’
Helen opened up the MacBook and picked up a small remote on the table. ‘Tell me, how are things at the office?’ she asked, as a screen slid down f
rom the ceiling and an overhead projector whirred into life. ‘I heard about your colleague’s accident. I’m sorry.’
Chloe nodded, hating being reminded of it, having to talk about it in polite muted terms when she wanted to scream and tell everyone that it was no accident. ‘Thank you. It’s been a tough time but she’s hanging in there. All indications are good.’
‘I’m so glad to hear that.’
An image of a pristine alpine landscape – jagged mountains tearing into the sky – came up on the screen, just as there was a knock at the door. They both looked up.
‘A Mr Elliott from Invicta to see you?’ an assistant said, peering in. ‘He apologizes for being late.’
Helen frowned. ‘. . . Okay. I thought it was just going to be the two of us.’ She glanced across at Chloe who could only shrug in reply – now she really couldn’t hide her shock. ‘But that’s fine. Show him in, please.’ The assistant disappeared and Helen looked at Chloe again.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize Tom was coming,’ Chloe said, embarrassed. Tom’s games were going to make them look incompetent and unprofessional. It was one thing doorstepping her outside her apartment but did he really think he could stalk her meetings too? ‘He’s our co-founder, over from London for a while and wanting to sit in on some of our projects here.’
‘Hey, that’s great from our point of view,’ Helen said. ‘Backing from the top can only be a good thing.’
The door opened again and Tom came through, looking lean and polished in a navy suit and pale-pink shirt with no tie. He always looked as though he’d just come from a run and shower, his skin bright, foppish hair gleaming. Chloe looked down, hating the way her heart accelerated at the sight of him – instinct, habit – as his eyes instantly sought hers.
‘Forgive the intrusion, I hope I’m not too late?’ he asked, shaking Helen by the hand.
‘Not at all. We’re delighted you can join us.’
‘Well I was keen to make it; I know for a fact we’ve got names on the London books that are going to be hugely interested in this project of yours,’ he grinned, rubbing his hands together. ‘Hey, Chlo.’