by Penny Jordan
‘Sally, I’m a PR consultant, not a dating agency or a marriage bureau,’ Star snapped. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said when she saw Sally biting her lip. ‘I’m just feeling a bit on edge.’
‘A bit!’ Sally exclaimed, feelingly. ‘When Claire told me that Brad was definitely going to offer you a contract I thought you’d be on top of the world. After all, you’ve talked of nothing else for weeks.’
‘I know,’ Star agreed contritely.
What Sally had said was true. When she had first discussed the possibility of organising a PR campaign with Brad and Tim in England she had told Sally that if Brad did give her a contract it would be the biggest step forward in her solo professional career that she was ever likely to take.
She had worked on big accounts before but only as part of a team, and her clients now were, in the main, small, fledgling businesses very much like her own. The mere fact that she would be working with such a male-dominated business would also add the kind of gravitas to her business portfolio that she might otherwise have spent years trying to achieve. It wasn’t just a matter of the additional income she would earn, it was the fact that doors to other business opportunities would open for her if she mounted a successful nationwide campaign for Brad’s company.
She knew that she had a strong flair for her work and that her ideas were innovative and fresh. To have Brad confirm that, not just verbally as he had done this morning but materially as well in offering her a contract, should have filled her with exultation and pride, but instead all she could think of was the fact that Kyle wasn’t going to be an unwanted memory that she could leave behind her when she flew home but a very intrusive presence in her life, and that no matter how hard she tried to ignore him...
Star started to frown. There were always two ways of looking at a problem: one was to see it as an obstacle to be overcome, something that used up valuable energy and time, the other was to look at it in a more positive light, to turn it into something that could be used to one’s own advantage.
She remembered how seethingly angry she had been at the way that Kyle had managed to turn the tables on her and how much it had galled her knowing that she would have to walk away, allowing him to cling to his false piety and morality, secretly laughing at her, but the fact that he was going to be working in Britain, even if only for a short time, meant that she would have a second chance to prove herself right, to make good her angry claim to Sally that he was not the knight in shining armour that Sally believed.
‘I’m sorry if I don’t seem very enthusiastic,’ she apologised to Sally, acknowledging that. ‘I suppose I still haven’t quite taken it all in.’
‘Well, it’s only natural that you’ll worry a little bit about it now that the initial euphoria’s worn off,’ Sally comforted her. ‘But at least you’ll have Kyle on hand to turn to... I know that Tim’s a dear but he isn’t exactly... He doesn’t...’ She paused and made a small face.
‘I doubt very much that I’ shall have much contact with Kyle,’ Star returned crisply as Sally indicated the door which led to their private dining room. ‘After all, it is Tim Burbridge who is in charge of the distribution side of things and Kyle’s role is only peripheral to my work, so I—’
‘Oh, but Tim won’t—’ Sally began, only to break off as her stepmother opened the door and exclaimed warmly,
‘Star, my dear! Come on in!’
By the time she boarded her home-bound flight Star’s mood had been mellowed by the delicious surprise lunch that Claire had given for her and the equally delicious vintage champagne she had consumed.
She settled herself in her seat and closed her eyes, opening them again when she heard an attractive male voice enquiring, ‘Er...mind if I sit here next to you?’
Thoughtfully Star subjected him to a brief inspection. He was certainly good-looking but for some reason she felt less than enthusiastic at the thought of enduring several hours of heavily seductive flirtation.
Refusing to return his smile, Star claimed untruthfully, ‘I’m sorry, that seat’s already taken by my mother.’
Whilst Star was crossing the Atlantic, Kyle was standing at the window of his office in one of the town’s most prestigious blocks, staring frowningly through it.
It would be a simple enough matter to pick up the phone and tell Brad that he had changed his mind; that he couldn’t, after all, help him and fly out to Britain; it was, after all, what all his instincts warned him to do—but he already knew that he wasn’t going to make that phone call, that he couldn’t bring himself to go back on his agreement to help Brad.
He had known, even before they had met this morning, that Star would not forgive him easily either for last night or for withholding from her the fact that he’d known that they would be working together—two strikes against him already. One more and he would be totally and completely out of the game, which, where a woman like Star was concerned, was surely his safer and saner option, he comforted himself.
So why, then, was he so reluctant to embrace it...? As reluctant, in fact, as Star assumed he had been to embrace her—assumed so erroneously, so very, very erroneously. If only she knew...
Thank the Lord she didn’t, he mused; he was going to have enough problems to contend with as it was.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN THE fortnight following her return from America Star was too busy professionally to have any time to spend working on her campaign to prove that Kyle was not the saintly, exemplary male that he liked to pretend he was.
Her hectic schedule culminated in an overnight stay in London whilst she attended a trade fair with one of her clients—a young and very talented interior designer. Having persuaded a highly acclaimed local builder of prestige houses to allow Lindsay a free hand in the interior design of one of his show houses, Star had then used her contacts to get the house featured in the new homes supplement of one of the national dailies.
As a result, not only had the builder sold every single one of the houses on his small, exclusive development but Lindsay had also been inundated with new commissions and couldn’t heap enough praise on Star for what she had done.
‘At least let me redesign your flat...as a bonus,’ she begged Star now as they travelled home together in Star’s car, Star at the wheel.
‘I’m very tempted,’ Star acknowledged, ‘but there’s the problem of where I would live and, more important, where I would work in the meantime.’
‘Mmm...I’d forgotten for a moment that you work from home,’ Lindsay said and added curiously, ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to rent an office somewhere and keep your work separate from your private life?’
‘My work is my private life,’ Star told her and meant it. ‘And I can see no point in passing the expensive and unnecessary overheads involved in maintaining a fully equipped office on to my clients when I can work just as easily from home and be there on hand whenever they need me. My flat has two good-sized double bedrooms and it was no hardship to convert one of them into an office.’
‘Mmm...Carey’s built your flat, didn’t they?’ Lindsay asked her.
‘Yes,’ Star agreed. ‘That was how I first came into contact with them. I went to look at the site when I first saw the flats advertised. At that stage Frank Carey was planning to build one-bedroom apartments plus some slightly larger flats with one double bedroom and a box room... I pointed out to him that so far as most people were concerned a box room served only one purpose and that was for the storage of junk and that he’d sell the properties far more easily if he cut down on the number of flats by one and increased the floor space of all the others to include a good-sized double bedroom.
‘He refused to listen to me at first...’
Frank Carey was a man in his early sixties who had been in the building trade since he left school and was, it had to be said, just ever so slightly tinged with an old-fashioned attitude towards women, to put it politely. Lindsay, with her own experience of just how stubborn he could be, asked Star curiously, ‘How did you ma
nage to get him to change his mind?’
Star grinned at her.
‘I persuaded twenty of my friends to make interested noises about the rest of the flats with a proviso that he increased the size of the box room.’
‘And it worked...? He didn’t suspect?’ Lindsay asked, awed.
Star laughed.
‘Oh, yes, he guessed what I was up to all right, but in the end he gave in, and out of the twenty people who originally showed interest in the flats he eventually got seven sales.’
Whilst Lindsay stared at her in round-eyed respect, Star gave a small, self-deprecatory shrug and told her, ‘That, like getting your designs featured in the national press, was more good luck than anything else. However, when Frank eventually offered me a good discount on my own flat, I didn’t turn him down.’
‘I suppose I ought to be thinking of moving to somewhere smaller and more easily manageable,’ Lindsay acknowledged dolefully.
‘It’s definitely over, then—your marriage?’ Star queried.
She knew that Lindsay and her husband had split up several months earlier. Her husband, from what Lindsay had said and from what Star had read between the stilted lines of explanation that she had been given, was apparently unable to accept the sudden success of his wife’s business and the fact that she was now the major breadwinner in their small household.
Star had only met Miles Reynolds briefly. He was, according to Lindsay, a hugely gifted and under-appreciated set designer. Star had found him sullen and inclined to try to put down his long-suffering wife.
It had been his decision to move out, because, or so he’d complained, it was obvious that Lindsay’s business success had gone to her head and now meant more to her than he did.
Lindsay had begged him to come back but Star had urged her not to give in to his emotional blackmail and to leave him to stew in his own sulks.
Now it seemed that the marriage was definitely over.
‘You’ll have to take care, when you file for divorce, to protect your ownership of the business,’ Star warned her now.
‘Divorce?’ Lindsay gave her a shocked look. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think...’ She lapsed back into silence, unwilling to admit to Star, whose views of marriage and men she now knew very well, that she still loved her husband and that there were times when, despite the fact that she knew he was behaving both childishly and selfishly, she missed him and ached for him so desperately that she was quite willing to give up the business completely just to have him back.
Only her common sense kept her from telling him so, and she knew that Star would be as little able to understand how she could continue to love him and to accept him as he was, faults and all, as Miles was to understand how important the stability afforded by her own business success was to her and her hopes for the future, for the family she had hoped they would one day have.
‘Remember,’ Star warned Lindsay as she dropped her off outside her front door, ‘no more freebies, no matter who asks for them; you don’t need them any more...’
‘No,’ Lindsay agreed meekly, bit her lip. Then she temporised, ‘Well, only the sitting room at the new centre they’re opening in town for the over-sixties. They deserve it, Star,’ she protested when she saw Star’s expression. ‘They’ve worked hard all their lives and they deserve a bit of comfort and care now; besides, I’ve already promised.’
Giving her a dry look, Star put her car back in gear. Some people were just too soft for their own good, she thought.
Once home, as she went through her post, she reran her answering machine to listen to her messages. Most of them were non-urgent; she tensed as she listened to one from her mother detailing the most recent instalment in the saga of her current romance. Star sighed as she heard the indignation mounting in her mother’s voice as she described the confrontation with her friend over the discovery that she, Star’s mother, was deeply embroiled in an affair with the friend’s still-not-quite-twenty-one-year-old son.
Shaking her head, Star wound the tape on. She would call her mother later.
There was a message from Tim saying that he wanted to discuss with her the story-boards that she had dropped off with him the week before.
These outlined the basics of a possible nationwide advertisement that she had thought of running to bring the company’s product into the public eye.
What she had in mind was to use a similar theme to that of a certain very successful coffee ad, by planning a set of ongoing ads that linked together in instalment form to make a story.
The first depicted the overheated atmosphere in an industrial setting without the benefit of any air-conditioning, coupled with the arrival of a visitor from a competitive business which had the benefit of Brad’s air conditioning units. To inject a little humour into the situation Star’s story-boards had depicted several of the extras in various states of undress. She intended to follow the first ad up with a second showing the coolly competent visitor offering the name of their air-conditioning supplier, but his rival deciding to use a cheaper and less reliable X brand.
Into the resultant chaos would walk the cool, important female buyer whose business both firms were competing for, at which point the X brand units would break down, allowing the user of Brad’s air-conditioning to sweep her off to his own cool and well-ordered factory where the deal could be agreed in true ad fashion with a clinch. At this point there would be a tongue in cheek stating that there was only one situation where an efficient air-conditioning system could be too efficient. The elegant female buyer would purr, ‘And is this how you turn it down...? Ah, yes... Goodness, it seems hot in here...’ Her hand would reach out to stop the man’s from turning it up again as she whispered, ‘I have a better idea,’ and reached behind her to undo the halter-neck tie of her top.
So far Star had only presented Tim with the first segment of the story, hoping to whet his appetite for the rest.
What she hoped to persuade him to do was to agree to a nationwide TV campaign. She had done her costings and was convinced that a successful campaign would fully justify the costs involved.
It wasn’t just Tim whom she would have to convince, though, she reminded herself; it was Brad as well.
Having checked her diary, she rang and left a message on Tim’s answering machine to confirm that the appointment he had suggested for the following morning was convenient.
As she left home the following morning, Star noticed that the ‘TO LET’ board for the flat adjacent to her own had disappeared, and she wondered briefly what her new neighbour would be like before concentrating on more important matters.
They were having an exceptionally good summer and the town was full of people in casual, brightly coloured clothes.
Star, in contrast, was quite formally dressed in a subtle beige pleated silk skirt and a contrasting cream silk long-line sleeveless top. Her skin tanned well despite the colour of her hair, going a warm peach rather than a deep bronze, and she was sardonically aware of the interest that she was creating amongst the male motorists at the garage when she stopped for petrol.
Resolutely refusing to make eye contact with the most persistent of them, she went to pay for her petrol. The garage sold basic groceries along with sweets and ice cream, and, whilst she was waiting to be served, on impulse, Star reached into the freezer for an ice cream— the kind that came on a stick and was covered in chocolate.
Having unwrapped it and disposed of the wrapper on her way back to her car, she had just unlocked the door when she heard a male voice to one side of her. ‘Very sexy... It’s really turning me on and making me hot, watching you suck that.’
Inwardly furious, but refusing to be intimidated or to show any kind of embarrassment or self-consciousness, Star turned round and looked coldly at him.
Middle-aged and besuited, he looked for all the world like the ‘Mr Average’ respectable family man he no doubt claimed that he was, and Star had no doubt that his wife would immediately have denied the very idea that her husband c
ould behave so offensively.
He was still leering at her and now he was looking at her breasts, Star observed, and she removed the ice cream from her mouth and told him with acid venom as she pushed the melting ice cream onto the front of his shirt, ‘Here—perhaps this will help you to cool down.’
Let him explain that to his wife if he dared, she thought.
As she spun round on her heel and got into her car she noticed that the garage forecourt was now empty apart from the obnoxious man’s saloon and a sturdy four-wheel drive which had drawn up at the other side of the pumps.
As she drove off she glanced at her watch. She had plenty of time to make her appointment with Tim. Mentally she rehearsed the argument that she had prepared to counter the objections she suspected he would have to such a high-profile and expensive campaign.
From his hired four-wheel drive, Kyle watched thoughtfully as Star slammed her car door and started her engine.
He had seen her crossing the forecourt as he had driven into the garage and had been on the point of walking over to speak to her when he had witnessed her confrontation with the other driver and overheard what he had said to her.
There was, in his book, no possible excuse for the other man’s behaviour, but he wondered what it was about certain people that caused them to attract to themselves situations which could only reaffirm their distorted views and suspicions of others. Was it, perhaps, due to some powerful cosmic force which had as yet to be scientifically identified? he mused fancifully as he went to pay for his own petrol. He doubted it.
He had been in Britain less than a week and had already discovered that although the climate was reputed to lack a certain warmth its people did not. Sally and Chris in particular had made him very welcome. Star, he suspected, would greet his arrival with considerably less enthusiasm.
‘I don’t think Star realises that you’re actually going to be taking over from Tim,’ Sally had confided to him the previous evening when she and Chris had invited him round for dinner. ‘I know she can seem a little difficult—’ she had begun in defence of her friend, but Chris had interrupted her acerbically.