could see the disappointment in her eyes.
‘Really?’ She paused. ‘It’s just that I thought maybe you’d got one of my emails and it was why you’d come in here today for lunch.’
‘I haven’t received any of your emails,’ he told her honestly. ‘I was inspecting work that’s being carried out next door. And the only reason I came in here for lunch was that it was convenient.’
‘I see.’ She bit down on her lip for a moment. She had very soft lips, he noticed; in fact, she had a nicely shaped mouth. ‘Well, seeing as you are here, maybe I could leave my business plan with you?’ She looked over at him hopefully. ‘I have it all printed out in the office. I can put it in a folder and leave it at the reception for you to take.’
He had to hand it to her, she was tenacious. ‘You can leave it if you want and I’ll take it. But it’s a no-go as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Well, you never know—you might think differently when you look at it.’ She smiled at him.
The waitress brought his food and Victoria pushed her chair back from the table and got up. ‘Thanks for taking the time to listen to me,’ she said politely. ‘I hope you enjoy your lunch.’
After her appointment at the bank, Victoria picked Nathan up from kindergarten. And then following their usual routine she pushed him through the park in his stroller.
The sun was sending dappled light onto the path through the tracery of green branches and there was a fragrant smell from the eucalyptus trees. Hard to believe that on such a beautiful September day her life was falling apart. But it was. Because the bank had said no to her and that was her last hope.
Deep down she’d known that they wouldn’t extend her credit, but it was still the most dreadful disappointment. Now it seemed that everything she had worked so hard for was slipping away.
And what on earth was she going to tell her staff? They all seemed to have the utmost faith that she would sort the business out.
How had this happened? she wondered in anguish. How could she be the owner of a successful restaurant one moment and be staring bankruptcy in the face the next? The situation had crept up on her so gradually as to be almost insidious.
Nathan wriggled impatiently in his stroller. He wanted to get out and although he didn’t talk much yet he was making the fact very clear.
Victoria stopped and went around to unfasten his safety harness. ‘OK, honey, you can toddle for a while now,’ she told him softly, and he gave her a winning smile, his dark eyes sparkling up at her full of life and mischief.
At least she had Nathan, she thought, her heart swelling with love. He was the most important thing in her life. Everything else could be worked out.
But what would become of them now? The question made fear coil inside her like a snake. Everything she had was tied up in the business.
Victoria had experienced poverty as a child, had watched her parents scrimping and scraping to get by. They’d tried to hide the problems from her but she remembered all too well the cold hard reality of it. Her father had died when she was thirteen—the family home had been lost and for a while she and her mother had lived in a small flat in an inner city suburb of London. That had been a truly terrible time and her mother had died less than a year later, leaving Victoria under the care of social services until her mother’s sister in Australia had been found and she had been sent to live with her.
She’d never met her aunt Noreen until the day she’d stepped off the plane in Sydney and she had been incredibly nervous. All she had known about the woman was that she was her mother’s older sister but they hadn’t been close. Deep down Victoria supposed she had been hoping for a kindly aunt—someone who resembled her mum, someone who would help heal the loneliness and loss she felt. But it had been immediately apparent that Noreen was not the sentimental type and looking after a heartbroken fourteen-year-old girl was not something she had wanted at all. In fact, she’d made it very clear from the start that she had only taken her in because she’d felt obliged to. There had been no warm hug of welcome, no platitudes about how sad the situation was—just a cool handshake and a let’s-get-on-with-it attitude.
Noreen had been in her late forties, single and a formidable businesswoman. She owned a small restaurant out at Bondi Beach and she put Victoria to work there almost as soon as she arrived. ‘You’ll have to pay your way, girl. I can’t afford passengers,’ she’d told her as she tossed an apron in her direction. ‘You can have two evenings off during a school week, the rest of the time you start work at six-thirty.’
Those years had been hard and the hours unsocial but Victoria had done as she was told, and had in fact shown a natural aptitude for cooking as well as for business. And Noreen had been pleased. An emotionally cold woman, she had no time for the fripperies of being a female but she had taught her well in the ways of business, encouraging her to go on to college to get business qualifications and qualifications in catering.
When she was twenty, Victoria was running Noreen’s business for her single-handedly. But the hours were long and hard and she had little time for herself. And it was at this point that she had met Lee. He was a highly respected member of the business community and ten years her senior.
Looking back now she realized how naive she had been to fall for his smooth lines. But she had been very lonely and he had made her feel special—had looked at her and admired her and showed interest in her, and she had lapped it up.
But it had been a big mistake. As soon as she had gone to bed with Lee he had stopped being interested and had cut her dead and moved on to his next conquest.
She felt a wave of shame now as she remembered going to him to tell him she was pregnant, remembered the way he had calmly told her to have an abortion and had written a cheque and slid it across the desk to her.
Victoria hadn’t wanted to cash that cheque; she’d wanted to tear it up and fling it in his face. She’d had no intention of having the abortion. Neither had she had any intention of allowing Noreen the pleasure of throwing her out, which her aunt had coldly insisted she would do if she went ahead with the pregnancy. Instead she’d taken a leap of faith and had used the money as a down payment for rent on a small bedsit.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ Noreen had demanded as she had watched her pack a suitcase to leave.
‘I’m doing what you told me I should do. I’m standing on my own two feet.’
She remembered her aunt’s rage. ‘You’re just like your mother! Well, don’t think you can come back here when the going gets tough because you can’t. I’ll want nothing to do with you.’
‘That’s OK. I won’t be coming back. And just for the record my mother may have been pregnant with me when she married my dad but they were very much in love. But you wouldn’t understand feelings like that.’
‘Oh, I understand all right. I understand that your mother stole the only man I ever cared about, trapped him when she fell pregnant with you…’
The bitter words spilling out into the silence had explained so much about Noreen’s cold, derogatory manner over the years—her almost vehement disdain for Victoria at times, the veiled insults.
She’d never seen Noreen again. Two months later on her twenty-first birthday Victoria had received a solicitor’s letter. It seemed her mother had taken
