temp in a jolly nice office. Regular hours, no weekends and the money isn’t bad, either.’
Vickie rolled her eyes in a give-me-strength look, not fooled for a minute.
OK, ‘jolly’ probably overstated it.
‘They’ve asked me to stay on,’ she said. ‘Permanently.’
‘It’s not even as if you’ll have to put yourself out,’ Vickie continued, treating this statement with the contempt it probably deserved and completely ignoring it.
Jacqui had done a very good job for her temporary employers, doing all the dull, repetitive jobs that no one else wanted and doing them well. She’d hated every minute of it, but it was her penance and for six months she’d punished herself. But it hadn’t helped. She was going to have to try something different and maybe her family were right, a couple of weeks on her own, with no pressures, would give her time to decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
‘You practically pass the house,’ Vickie persisted, crashing into her thoughts and forcing her to concentrate on the immediate problem. But then she hadn’t attracted all those crème-de-la-crème clients by allowing herself to be put off at the first obstacle.
‘Is that so? The motorway runs right through Little Hinton, does it?’
‘Not exactly through it,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s a very minor diversion. The village is no more than five miles from the nearest exit.’
‘Five? Would that be as the crow flies?’
‘Six at the most. I can show you on the map.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll pass.’
‘OK, OK, I’ll be totally honest with you—’
‘That would make a nice change.’
‘I’m counting on you.’ Oh, help… ‘Selina Talbot will be arriving at any moment and it could be hours before I can find someone else to do this for me.’
‘If you go in for Machiavellian subterfuge, Vickie, you should always have a back-up plan.’
‘Please. It’s only a little job and you wouldn’t want to leave a small child here, in my office, bored to tears, would you?’
She pressed her hand over the chain on her wrist until it dug in painfully. ‘I could live with it,’ she said. ‘Whether you could is another matter.’
‘Please, Jacqui. I’ve got meetings, interviews—’
‘And an office full of your own staff—’
‘Who are all fully occupied on vital work. Just drop Maisie off at her grandmother’s house and then you can head for the sun and spend the next two weeks without a thought for the rest of us slaving away in the cold and rain.’
‘You think you can make me feel guilty?’ she enquired, with every appearance of carelessness.
The holiday hadn’t been her idea. It was her family who kept insisting that she needed a break. Not that she needed telling. She had to face herself in the mirror every morning. Vickie, she suspected, thought she knew better and had manufactured this ‘crisis’ purely for her benefit. It was about as blatant a piece of in-at-the-deep-end amateur psychology as she’d ever witnessed and it would serve her right if she walked out and left her lumbered with a spoilt brat causing chaos in her well-run office.
‘I’ll pay you double—’
‘That is desperate.’
‘—and when you come back,’ Vickie continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘we can have a little chat about your future.’
‘I don’t have a future,’ she declared forcefully, cutting her off before this whole thing got completely out of hand.
She’d only agreed to come into the office on her way to the airport because it gave her the perfect chance to tell Vickie face-to-face that she must remove her from her books once and for all. Finally. Irrevocably. Put a stop to the tempting little job offers that she kept leaving on her answering machine.
At least in Spain she’d be safe from these sneaky little raids on her determination.
‘Not as a nanny,’ she said as she headed for the door. ‘I’ll send you a postcard—’
Vickie leapt to her feet but before she could fling herself between Jacqui and freedom, Selina Talbot swept in; tall, golden and clearly worth every cent of the millions of dollars she earned as a supermodel. The fortune she was paid as the face of a famous cosmetic company.
Maisie, her six-year-old adopted daughter—familiar from endless full-colour ‘happy family’ spreads in lifestyle magazines and the object of Vickie’s unsubtle strategic planning—was at her side.
The little girl was not wearing the wash-and-wear clothes any sensible nanny would have dressed her in for travelling. Instead she was togged out in the full fairy-princess kit: a white, full-skirted voile dress with a mauve satin sash, opaque white tights and satin Mary Janes, the perfect foil for her beautiful chocolate-dark skin. A sparkly tiara perched on top of her jet curls completed the picture. Only the wings were missing.
One of her hands was in fingertip contact with her mother. From the other dangled a small white linen tote bag on which the words ‘Maisie’s Stuff’ had been appliquéd in the same mauve satin as her sash.
The designer’s logo embroidered in the same colour suggested that the outfit was a one-off creation for his favourite model’s little girl.
Most small girls of her acquaintance—and she’d known enough to be certain of this—would have been crumpled and grubby within five minutes of being dressed in such an outfit.
Not Maisie Talbot. She looked like an exquisite doll. One of those collector’s editions that was kept in a glass case so it wouldn’t get spoiled by sticky fingers.
Most children faced with the prospect of being left in the care of complete strangers—and once again Jacqui had plenty of experience as a flying nanny to back up her theory—would have been clinging tearfully to their mother at this point.
Maisie remained still, silent and composed as Selina Talbot air-kissed her daughter from about three feet above her head and—having acknowledged Vickie’s introduction to ‘Jacqui Moore, the very experienced nanny I told you about’ by the simple expedient of handing over the matching white holdall that contained her daughter’s belongings—departed with an unnerving lack of maternal fuss.
A tug of something very like compassion for this doll-child slipped beneath Jacqui’s defences; a dangerous urge to pick her up and give her a cuddle. The impulse was stillborn as Maisie’s dark eyes met hers and, with all the poised hauteur of her mother on a Paris catwalk, warned her not to think of doing any such thing.
Then, having firmly established a cordon sanitaire about her person, Maisie said, ‘I’d like to go now, Jacqui.’ And headed for the door, where she waited for someone to open it for her.
Vickie Campbell mouthed the words ‘please’ as Maisie tapped her foot impatiently and Jacqui was sorely tempted
