taking care to make sure they’d both eaten. It had been a long time since the new Zander came along. This Zander had perfectly defined business muscle but it had come at the expense of social niceties.
Any muscle would atrophy without use.
And then the coup de grâce. Any time. He could have said ‘you’re welcome’ or ‘think nothing of it’ but he went with ‘any time’. As though there’d be a repeat performance.
He pushed through the gate to his property and started down the long, winding path between the extensive gardens to the conservatory.
Clearly something of the old him still existed. Something that responded to Georgia’s easy company and complete failure to engage with him the way others did. She just didn’t care who he was or that he was the only thing standing between her and a lawsuit. Or maybe she just didn’t recognise it.
She stared up at him with those big brown eyes and treated him exactly like everyone else.
No one did that any more. Even Casey—the closest thing he had to a friend at work—was always super careful never to cross a line, to always stop just short of the point where familiarity became contempt. Even she was sensitive to how much of her future rested in his hands.
Because he was so thorough in reminding them all. Regularly.
His minions.
He smiled. The irony was he didn’t think that way at all. Not deep down. He believed in the power of teams and much preferred collaborative working groups to the way he did things now. They’d served him well back in the day when every programme he’d produced had been the product of a handful of hard-working people. But there was no getting around the fact that EROS really did run better with a clear, controlled gulf between himself and the people who worked for him. And he didn’t mind the gulf; it meant no complications between friendships and workplace relationships.
And driving Georgia home would have been a complication.
Having her here, in his house, would have been a complication.
He had a signed contract; the time for courting The Valentine’s Girl, professionally, was over. He should have just given her a list of activities that the station was prepared to send her to and been done with it. Instead of being a sap. Instead of reacting to an event fifteen years old and letting it colour his better judgement.
Instead of empathising.
Just because he’d been exactly where Georgia was; on the arse-end of a declined proposal. Only in his case, he got all the way down the aisle before realising his fiancée wasn’t coming down behind him because she was on her way to Heathrow with her supportive bridesmaids. What followed was a horrible half-hour of shouting and recriminations before the priest managed to clear the church. Lara’s family and friends all went wildly on the defensive—as you would if it was someone you loved that had done something so shocking. His side of the church rallied around him so stoically, which only inflamed Lara’s family more because they knew—knew—that there were a hundred better ways to not proceed with a marriage than just not turning up. Less destructive ways. But she’d gone with the one that would cause her the least pain.
And, chump that he was, he actually preferred that. He wasn’t in the business of wishing pain on people he loved back then.
The heartbreak was bad enough, slumped in the front row of the rioting church, but he’d had to endure the public humiliation in front of everyone he cared about. Their whispers. Their pity. Their side-taking. Worse, their determined, well-meant support. Every bit as excruciating and public as Georgia’s turn-down live on air. Just more contained.
Like atomic fusion.
But the after-effects rippled out for a decade and a half.
He jogged up the stairs and headed straight for his study. The most important room in his house. The work he got done there was the difference between just-hanging-on in the network and excelling. No one excelled on forty hours a week. He was putting in eighty, easy.
It was the one thing he could thank Lara for.
Setting him up for the kind of success that gave him a luxurious study in a big house in Hampstead Heath and had him rubbing shoulders with some of the most powerful people in the country.
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