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.
‘She didn’t appear to have read the script.’ No apology, no excuses... ‘She suggested that the advertisement was little more than a minor setback.’
‘Really? You’re quite sure the poor woman is not cracking up?’
‘As sure as I can be without a doctor’s note.’ But there was a distinct possibility that he was.
Milkmaids, roses...
Forget wheeling her in to apologise. If it was possible to be any more cynical, he’d have said they were hoping that she might use her charms, her lack of control over her buttons, to distract him from taking legal action.
He shouldn’t even be thinking about how far she might go to achieve that objective. Or how happy he would be to lie back and let her try.
* * *
‘Dad’s really worried about you, Tash.
