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‘No—’
‘I blame myself.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve pushed you too hard. I should have seen it coming.’
Seen what coming?
‘I didn’t attach the wrong anything,’ she declared, fizzing with indignation, her pulse still racing but with anger now rather than anticipation. How dared anyone tamper with her carefully composed ad? ‘And even if I had made a mistake, don’t you think I’d have noticed it when the proof came back?’
‘If you’d actually had time to look at it.’
‘I made time,’ she declared. ‘I checked every word. And what the hell was the Chronicle thinking? Why didn’t someone on the advertising desk query it?’
‘They did.’ He glanced at the ad. ‘They called this office on the twentieth. Unsurprisingly, they made a note for their records.’
‘Okay, so which idiot did they speak to?’
He handed her the page so that she could see for herself. ‘An idiot by the name of Natasha Gordon.’
‘No!’
‘According to the advertising manager, you assured them that it was the latest trend, harking back fifty years to an estate agent famous for the outrageous honesty of his advertisements.’ His tone, all calm reason, raised the small hairs on the back of her neck. Irritable, she could handle. This was just plain scary. ‘Clearly, you were angry with the executors for not taking your advice.’
‘If they didn’t have the cash, they didn’t have the cash, although I imagine their fees are safely in the bank. Believe me, if I’d been aping the legendary Roy Brooks, I’d have made a far better job of it than this,’ she said, working hard to sound calm even while her pulse was going through the roof. ‘There was plenty to work with. No one from the Chronicle talked to me.’ Calm, cool, professional...
‘So what are you saying? That the advertising manager of the Chronicle is lying? Or that someone pretended to be you? Come on, Tash, who would do that?’ he asked. ‘What would anyone have to gain?’
She swallowed. Put like that, it did sound crazy.
‘You are right about one thing, though,’ he continued. ‘The phone has been ringing off the hook—’ her sigh of relief came seconds too soon ‘—but not with people desperate to view Hadley Chase. They are all gossip columnists and the editors of property pages wanting a comment.’
She frowned. ‘Already? The magazine has been on the shelves for less than two hours.’
‘You know what they say about bad news.’ He took the ad from her and tossed it onto his desk. ‘In this instance I imagine it was given a head start by someone working at the Chronicle tipping them off.’
‘I suppose. How did Darius Hadley hear about it?’
‘I imagine the estate executors received the same phone calls.’
She shook her head, letting the problem of how this had happened go for the moment and concentrating instead on how to fix it. ‘The one thing I do know is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I meant what I said to Mr Hadley. Handled right...’
‘For heaven’s sake, Tash, you’ve made both the firm and Mr Hadley into a laughing stock. There is no way to handle this “right”! He’s withdrawn the house from the market and, on top of the considerable expenses we’ve already incurred, we’re not only facing a hefty claim for damages from Hadley but irreparable damage to the Morgan and Black name.’
‘All of which will go away if we find a buyer quickly,’ she insisted, ‘and it’s going to be all over the weekend property pages.’
‘I’m glad you realise the extent of the problem.’
‘No...’ She’d run a Google search when Hadley Chase had been placed in their hands for sale. There was nothing like a little gossip, a bit of scandal to garner a few column inches in one of the weekend property supplements. Unfortunately, despite her speculation on the source of their wealth, the Hadleys had either been incredibly discreet or dull beyond imagining. She’d assumed the latter; if James Hadley had been an entertaining companion, his money would have earned him a lot more than a smallish estate in the country. He’d have been given a title and a place at Charles II’s court.
Darius Hadley had blown that theory right out of the water.
Forget his clothes. With his cavalier curls, his earring, the edge of something dangerous that clung to him like a shadow, he would have been right at home there. Her fingers twitched as she imagined what it would be like to run her fingers through those silky black curls, over his flat abs.
She curled them into her palms, shook off the image—this wasn’t about Darius Hadley; it was about his house.
‘Come on, Miles,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t buy this kind of publicity. The house is in a fabulous location and buyers with this kind of money aren’t going to be put off by problems you’ll find in any property of that age.’ Well, not much. ‘I’ll make some calls, talk to a few people.’ Apparently speaking to a brick wall, she threw up her hands. ‘Damn it, I’ll go down to Hadley Chase and take a broom to the place myself!’
‘You’ll do nothing, talk to no one,’ he snapped.
‘But if I can find a buyer quickly—’
‘Stop! Stop right there.’ Having shocked her into silence, he continued. ‘This is what is going to happen. I’ve booked you into the Fairview Clinic—’
‘The Fairview?’ A clinic famous for taking care of celebrities with drug and drink problems?
‘We’ll issue a statement saying that you’re suffering from stress and will be having a week or two of complete rest under medical supervision.’
‘No.’ Sickness, hospitals—she’d had her fill of them as a child and nothing would induce her to spend a minute in one without a very good reason.
‘The firm’s medical plan will cover it,’ he said, no doubt meaning to reassure her.
‘No, Miles.’
‘While you’re recovering,’ he continued, his voice hardening, ‘you can consider your future.’
‘Consider my future?’ Her future was stepping up to an associate’s office, not being hidden away like some soap star with an alcohol problem until the dust cleared. ‘You’ve got to be kidding, Miles. This has to be a practical joke that’s got out of hand. There’s a juvenile element in the front office that needs a firm—’
‘What I need,’ he said, each word given equal weight, ‘is for you to cooperate.’
He wasn’t listening, she realised. Didn’t want to hear what she had to say. Miles wasn’t interested in how this had happened, only in protecting his firm’s reputation. He needed a scapegoat, a fall guy, and it was her signature on the ad.
That was why he’d summoned her back to the office—to show the sacrifice to Darius Hadley. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t been impressed. He didn’t want the head of some apparently witless woman who stammered and blushed when he looked at her. He was going for damages so Miles was instituting Plan B—protecting the firm’s reputation by destroying hers.
She was in trouble.
‘I’ve spoken to Peter Black and he’s discussed the situation with our lawyers. We’re all agreed that this is the best solution,’ Miles continued, as if it was a done deal.
‘Already?’
‘There was no time to waste.’
‘Even so... What kind of lawyer would countenance such a lie?’
‘What lie?’ he enquired blandly. ‘Burnout happens to the best of us.’
Burnout? She was barely simmering, but the lawyers—covering all eventualities—probably had the press statement drafted and ready to go. She would be described as a ‘highly valued member of staff’...blah-de-blah-de-blah...who, due to work-related stress, had suffered a ‘regrettable’ breakdown. All carefully calculated to give the impression that she’d been found gibbering into her keyboard.
It would, of course, end with everyone wishing her a speedy return to health. Miles was clearly waiting for her to do the decent thing and take cover in the Fairview so that he could tell them to issue it. The clinic’s reputation for keeping their patients safe from the lenses of the paparazzi, safe from the intrusion of the press, was legendary.
Suddenly she wasn’t arguing with him over the best way to recover the situation, but clinging to the rim of the basin by her fingernails as her career was being flushed down the toilet.
‘This is wrong,’ she protested, well aware that the decision had already been made, that nothing she said would change that. ‘I didn’t do this.’
‘I’m doing my best to handle a public relations nightmare that you’ve created, Natasha.’ His voice was flat, his face devoid of expression. ‘It’s in your own best interests to cooperate.’
‘It’s in yours,’ she retaliated. ‘I’ll be unemployable. Unless, of course, you’re saying that I’ll be welcomed back with open arms after my rest cure? That my promotion to associate, the one you’ve been dangling in front of me for months, is merely on hold until I’ve recovered?’
‘I have to think of the firm. The rest of the staff,’ he said with a heavy sigh created to signal his disappointment with her. ‘Please don’t be difficult about this.’
‘Or what?’ she asked.
‘Tash... Please. Why won’t you admit that you made a mistake? That you’re fallible...sick; everyone—maybe even Mr Hadley—will sympathise with you, with us.’
He was actually admitting it!
‘I didn’t do this,’ she repeated but, even to her own ears, she was beginning to sound like the little girl who, despite the frosting around her mouth, had refused to own up to eating two of the cupcakes her mother had made for a charity coffee morning.
‘I’m sorry, Natasha, but if you refuse to cooperate we’ll have no choice but to dismiss you without notice for bringing the firm into disrepute.’ He took refuge behind his desk before he added, ‘If you force us to do that we will, of course, have no option but to counter-sue you for malicious damage.’
Deep, deep trouble.
‘I’m not sick,’ she replied, doing her best to keep her voice steady, fighting down the scream of outrage that was beginning to build low in her belly. ‘As for the suit for damages, I doubt either you or Mr Hadley would get very far with a jury. While the advertisement may not have been what he signed up for—’ she was being thrown to the wolves, used as a scapegoat for something she hadn’t done and she had nothing to lose ‘—it’s the plain unvarnished truth.’
‘Apart from the woodworm and the stairs,’ he reminded her stonily.
‘Are you prepared to gamble on that?’ she demanded. ‘Who knows what’s under all that dirt?’
She didn’t wait for a response. Once your boss had offered you a choice between loony and legal action, any meaningful dialogue was at an end.
TWO
How dared he? How bloody dared he even suggest she might be suffering from stress, burnout? Damn it, Miles had to know this was all a crock of manure.
Tash, despite her stand-up defiance, was shaking as she left Miles Morgan’s office and she headed for the cloakroom. There was no way she could go downstairs and face Janine, who’d obviously known exactly what was coming, until she had pulled herself together.
She jabbed pins in her hair, applied a bright don’t-care-won’t-care coating of lipstick and some mental stiffeners to her legs before she attempted the stairs she’d run up with such optimism only a few minutes earlier.
She’d been ten minutes, no more, but Janine was waiting with a cardboard box containing the contents of her desk drawers.
‘Everything’s there,’ she said, not the slightest bit embarrassed. On the contrary, the smirk was very firmly in place. They’d never been friends but, while she’d never given Janine a second thought outside the office, it was possible that Janine—behind the faux sweetness and the professional smile and ignoring the hours she put in, her lack of a social life—had resented her bonuses. ‘It’s mostly rubbish.’
She didn’t bother to answer. She could see for herself that the contents of her desk drawers had been tipped into the box without the slightest care.
Janine was right; it was mostly rubbish, apart from a spare pair of tights, the pencil case that one of her brothers had given her and the mug she used for her pens. She picked it up and headed for the door.
‘Wait! Miles said...’
In her opinion, Miles had said more than enough but, keeping her expression impassive, she turned, waited.
‘He asked me to take your keys.’
Of course he had. He wouldn’t want her coming back when the office was closed to prove what havoc she could really cause, given sufficient provocation. Fortunately for him, her reputation was more important to her than petty revenge.
She put down the box, took out her key ring, removed the key to the back door of the office and handed it over without a word.
‘And your car keys,’ she said.
Until that moment none of this had seemed real, but the BMW convertible had been the reward Miles had dangled in front of his staff for anyone reaching a year-end sales target that he had believed impossible. She’d made it with a week to spare and it was her pride and joy as well as the envy of every other negotiator in the firm. Could someone have done this to her just to get...?
She stopped. That way really did lie madness.
No doubt Miles would use those spectacular sales figures to back up his claim of ‘burnout’, suggesting she’d driven herself to achieve the impossible and prove that she was better than anyone else. So very sad...
He might even manage to squeeze out a tear.
All he’d have to do was think of the damages he’d have to pay Darius Hadley.
Taking pride in the fact that her fingers weren’t shaking—it was just the rest of her, apparently—she removed the silver Tiffany key ring Toby had bought her for Christmas from her car keys and dropped it in her pocket, but she held on to the keys. ‘I’ll clear my stuff out of the back.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Janine said, following her to the door. ‘I need to make sure it’s locked up safely.’
She wasn’t trusted to hand over the keys? Or did the wretched woman think she’d drive off in it? Add car theft to her crimes? Oh, wait. She was supposed to be crazy...
‘Actually, you’ll need to do more than that. I’m parked in a twenty-minute zone and it’ll need moving before— Oh, too late...’
She startled the traffic warden slapping a ticket on the windscreen with a smile before clicking the lock and tossing the keys to Janine as if she didn’t give a fig. She wouldn’t give her the pleasure of telling everyone how she’d crumpled, broken down. It was just a car. She’d have it back in no time. Just as soon as Miles stopped panicking and started thinking straight.
She emptied the glovebox, gathered her wellington boots, the ancient waxed jacket she’d bought in a charity shop and her umbrella and added them to the box, then reached for her laptop bag.
‘I’ll take that.’
‘My laptop?’ She finally turned to look at Janine. ‘Did Miles ask you to take it?’
‘He’s got a lot on his mind,’ she replied with a little toss of her head. In other words, no.
‘True, and when I find out who’s responsible for this mess he won’t be the only one. In the meantime,’ she said, hooking the strap over her shoulder and patting the soft leather case that held her precious MacBook Pro, ‘if he should ask for it, I suggest you remind him that I bought it out of my January bonus.’
Janine, caught out, flushed bright pink but it was a short-lived triumph.
‘There’s a taxi waiting to take you to the Fairview,’ she said, turning on her heel and heading back to the office.
Tash glanced at the black cab, idling at the kerb. Even loaded as she was, the temptation to stalk off in the direction of the nearest Underground station was strong, but there was no one apart from the traffic warden to witness the gesture so she climbed aboard and gave him her address.
The driver looked back. ‘I was booked for the Fairview.’
‘I have to go home first,’ she said, straight-faced. ‘I’m going to need a nightie and toothbrush.’
* * *
Darius strode the length of the King’s Road, fury and the need to put distance between himself and Natasha Gordon driving his feet towards the Underground.
A minor setback? A house that she’d made unsellable, and a seven-figure tax bill on a house he couldn’t live in—what would merit serious bother in her eyes?
Cornflower-blue, with hair that looked as if she’d just tumbled out of bed and a figure that was all curves. Sexy as hell, which was where his thoughts were taking him.
Once on the train, he took out the small sketchbook he carried with him and did what he had always done when he wanted to block out the world. He drew what he saw. Not the interior of the train, the woman sitting opposite him, the baby sleeping on her lap, but what was in his head.
Dark, angry images that had been stirred up by a house he’d never wanted to set foot in again but just refused to let go. But that wasn’t what appeared on the page. His hand, ignoring his head, was drawing Natasha Gordon. Her eyes, startled wide as he’d confronted her. The way her brow had arched like the wing of a kestrel hovering over a hedgerow, waiting for an unsuspecting vole to make a move. The curve of hair drooping from an antique silver clasp, the tiny crease at the corner of her mouth that had appeared when she’d offered him a smile along with her hand. It was as if her image had burned itself into his brain, every detail pinpoint-sharp. The blush heating her cheeks, a fine chain about her neck that disappeared between invitingly generous breasts. Her long legs.
Was he imagining them?
He couldn’t remember looking at her legs and yet he’d drawn her shoes—black suede, dangerously high heels, a sexy little ankle strap...
He did not fight it, but drew obsessively, continuously, as if by putting her on paper he could clear his mind, rid himself of what had happened in that moment when he’d stood up and turned to face her. When he’d looked back, knowing that she’d be there at the window. Wishing he’d taken her with him when he’d left. When he’d hovered for a dangerous moment on the point of turning back...
Wouldn’t Morgan have loved that?
He stopped drawing and just let his mind’s eye see her, imagining how he’d paint her, sculpt her and when, finally, he looked up, he’d gone way past his stop.
* * *
Tash sat back in the cab as the driver pulled away from the kerb, did a U-turn and joined the queue of traffic backed up along the King’s Road.
A little more than twenty minutes—just long enough to get a parking ticket—that was all it had taken to reduce her from top-selling negotiator at one of the most prestigious estate agencies in London, to unemployable.
* * *
‘It’s a beautiful house, Darius.’ Patsy, having dropped off some paperwork and made them both a cup of tea, had discovered the Chronicle in the waste bin when she’d discarded the teabags. ‘Lots of room. You could make a studio in one of the buildings,’ she said with a head jerk that took in the concrete walls and floor still stained with oil from its previous incarnation as a motor repair shop. ‘Why don’t you just move in? Ask me nicely and I might even come and keep house for you.’
‘You and whose army?’ He glanced at the photograph of the sprawling house, its Tudor core having been added to over the centuries by ancestors with varying degrees of taste. At least someone had done their job right, taking time to find the perfect spot to show the Chase at its best. The half-timbering, a mass of roses hiding a multitude of sins. A little to the right of a cedar tree that had been planted to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria.
The perfect spot at the perfect time on the perfect day when a golden mist rising from the river had lent the place an ethereal quality that took him back to school holidays and early-morning fishing trips with his grandfather. Took him back to an enchanted world seen through the innocent eyes of a child.
‘It’s got at least twenty rooms,’ he said, returning to the armature on which he was building his interpretation of a racehorse flying over a fence. ‘That’s not including the kitchen, scullery, pantries and the freezing attics where the poor sods who kept the place running in the old days were housed.’ Plus half a dozen cottages, at present occupied by former employees of the estate whom he could never evict, and a boat house that was well past its best twenty years ago.
She put the magazine on his workbench where he could see it, opened a packet of biscuits and, when he shook his head, helped herself to one. ‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Wring that wretched girl’s neck?’ he offered, and tried not to think about his hand curled around her nape. How her skin would feel against his palm, the scent of vanilla that he couldn’t lose... ‘Subject closed.’
He picked up the Chronicle and tossed it back in the bin.
‘It said in the paper that she’d had some kind of a breakdown,’ Patsy protested.
A widow, she worked as a freelance ‘Girl Friday’ for several local businesses, fitting them in around the needs of her ten-year-old son. She kept his books and his paperwork in order, the fridge stocked with fresh milk, cold beer, and his life organised. The downside was that, like an old time travelling minstrel, she delivered neighbourhood gossip, adding to the story with each stop she made. He had no doubt that Hadley Chase had featured heavily in her story arc this week and her audience were no doubt eagerly awaiting the next instalment.
‘Please tell me you don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers,’ he said as, concentration gone, he gave up on the horse and drank the tea he hadn’t asked for.
‘Of course I don’t,’ she declared, ‘but the implication was that she had a history of instability. They wouldn’t lie about something like that.’ She took another biscuit, clearly in no hurry to be anywhere else.
‘No? She was in full control of her faculties when I saw her,’ he said. ‘I suspect the breakdown story is Morgan and Black’s attempt to focus the blame on her and lessen the impact on their business.’ Lessen the damages.
‘That’s shocking. She should sue.’
‘She hasn’t bothered to deny it,’ he said.
‘Maybe her lawyer has advised her not to say anything. What’s she like? You didn’t say you’d met her.’
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I’m doing my best to forget.’ Forget his body’s slamming response at the sight of her. The siren call of a sensually pleasing body that had been made to wrap around a man. A mouth made for pleasure. The feeling of control slipping away from him.
Precious little chance of that when his hands itched to capture the liquid blue of eyes that had sucked the breath out of him, sent the blood rushing south, nailing him to the spot. A look that eluded his every attempt to recreate it.
It was just as well she was safely out of reach in the Fairview, playing along with Morgan’s game in the hopes of hanging on to her job. Asking her to sit for him was a distraction he could not afford. And would certainly not endear him to his lawyers.
‘I wonder if it was anorexia?’ she pondered. ‘In the past.’ Patsy, generous in both character and build, took another biscuit.
‘No way.’ He shook his head as he recalled that delicious moment when, as Natasha Gordon had offered him her hand, the top button of her blouse had surrendered to the strain, parting to reveal the kind of cleavage any red-blooded male would willingly dive into. ‘Natasha Gordon has all the abundant charms of a milkmaid.’
‘A milkmaid?’
Patsy’s grandparents had immigrated to Britain in the nineteen-fifties and she’d lived her entire life in the inner city. It was likely that the closest she’d ever come to a cow was in a children’s picture book.
‘Big blue eyes, a mass of fair hair and skin like an old-fashioned rose.’ There was one that scrambled over the rear courtyard at the Chase. He had no idea what it was called, but it had creamy petals blushed with pink that were bursting out of a calyx not designed to contain such bounty. ‘Believe me, this is not a woman who lives on lettuce.’
‘Oh...’ She gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘And did this milkmaid apologise with a pretty curtsy?’ she asked, confirming her familiarity with the genre.