‘Perfect,’ I muttered to myself, hurriedly changing shirts and checking out my blouse for permanent damage. ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’
‘So the launch phase will take place in Q three so we can be out for fashion week, with Gloss on limited availability in New York,’ I said, as confidently as I could. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Delia nodding confirmation. Directly in front of me, Mr Spencer, my boss, formerly known as Bob, was not nodding. He was sipping coffee and fixing me with a gaze so steely I was fairly certain it could cut through a tin can. I concealed a tiny squeak and clicked onto the final slide of my PowerPoint presentation. Oh yes, I was a PowerPoint person now. ‘Once we’re out there and have established a solid audience, we’ll launch on the West Coast in Q four, and then, Q one, we go nationwide with a long-term view to international expansion in Q three the following year.’
I was incredibly proud of myself. After a less than promising beginning, I’d got through all my slides without cocking up and I hadn’t spilled a single thing down Delia’s jumper. Things were looking up. Now all we needed was Mr Spencer’s go-ahead and we were quite literally in business. I attempted my best Wheel of Fortune pose in front of the drop-down screen and gave my audience of two a dazzling smile. I was ninety-nine percent certain I looked deranged, but still, Bob was pulling his concentrated face and Delia hadn’t kicked me yet, so I took that as a win.
‘Interesting,’ Mr Spencer said. ‘Very interesting.’
Once upon a time, Mr Spencer and I had been best buds – he had brunched with me at Pastis, offered me dream jobs in Paris. We were total besties − but then I might or might not have accidentally called his granddaughter and Delia’s identical twin sister, Cici, several very colourful and slightly unflattering names in an email and, well, punched her in the face at Christmas. After that, we sort of drifted apart. He’d given Delia and me a chance to get Gloss going, we had a small office in the Spencer Media building and some office equipment, and he had reluctantly agreed to support my visa application, but that was where it ended. There was no free ride in the Spencer family. Not if you saddled yourself with a foul-mouthed British girl who knocked out a member of your family at a Christmas party while dressed like a slutty Santa. It was a long story, but Cici totally had it coming. Delia agreed. Often. I didn’t have a sister but if I did, I’d want one like Delia. Kind, thoughtful and cleverer than anyone who had ever been on The Apprentice. I did not want one like Cici. She was the Ursula to her Ariel, the coffee cream to her hazelnut whirl. Pure evil. But she was out of the picture. At least she hadn’t actively tried to ruin my life for the last couple of months so that was nice. It was just as well, I had been busy.
At last, we were ready to go. We had a killer dummy issue, we had a business plan that made sense, we had writers on standby, we even had a retailer lined up to distribute for us. We just needed advertisers. And to get advertisers, we had to get Grandpa Bob to include us in the annual Spencer Media sales conference. Delia was convinced it was a lock, but I wasn’t so sure. Yes, he’d stayed all the way through our presentation without nipping out to the loo or anything. And he’d only picked up his iPhone once; and there was no way he’d been on it long enough to be playing Fruit Ninja. Unless he was very good. Which he probably was.
‘So you have a retailer on board?’ he asked Delia.
‘Trinity,’ she confirmed. ‘As you know, the second largest women’s fashion retailer in the US.’
‘And you’ll be distributing through them directly?’ he asked Delia again.
‘We will,’ she nodded.
‘And is she actually barefoot?’ He cocked his head in my direction.
Ohhhh.
‘She is,’ Delia confirmed. ‘But she’s also a very good writer, a fantastic creative planner and an absolute asset to your company.’
I tried not to blush. Shucks.
‘Even if she is a little eccentric.’
I couldn’t really argue with that. Even if it did take the edge off her original compliment.
‘I know I’m going to regret asking,’ Bob said finally, turning to face me, ‘but what did happen to your shoes?’
‘Well, I was at my friend Jenny’s house −’ As soon as I opened my mouth I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop − ‘and I’d been borrowing her shoes, but she was just a big drunken weeping mess and she made me take them off—’
‘You don’t have shoes of your own?’ Bob interrupted. ‘I don’t follow …’
‘Maybe if we just deal with questions about the magazine right now?’ Delia suggested. ‘And let Angela’s shoe situation resolve itself. Do you have any questions about the business plan?’
Bob looked at Delia, at me, and then his phone. ‘No. It was very clear and concise.’
Delia beamed. ‘Any questions about the creative?’
‘None at all. You know more about that market than I do.’
‘So any questions at all?’ She straightened the collar on her sky-blue shirtdress. ‘Now’s the time to ask them, Grandpa.’
The stately, grey-haired media magnate leaned forward and rested his elbows on our glass conference table. ‘In all honesty, Delia, I just really want to know why she isn’t wearing shoes.’
Delia sat back, rubbed her forehead and gave me a quick, sharp nod.
‘So …’
‘That wasn’t scary at all,’ I said, spinning round and round in my office chair after Bob had left the office. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘It’s fine.’ Delia stretched her yoga-toned arms high above her head. ‘He’s going to say yes. There’s no reason for him not to. I have a good feeling.’
‘I’m glad someone has,’ I said grimly. I didn’t have any good feelings. I only felt like I had dirty feet and a craving for bacon. ‘Then why didn’t he just say yes?’
‘Don’t panic, Angela − I know my grandpa,’ she said. Her confidence was somewhat reassuring. ‘He never says yes on the spot. He likes to think about things, weigh up his options, but we’ve given him every reason to say yes. Besides, I know he wants me on the magazine side of the business. It’s not like Cici is proving herself heir apparent to the business when he retires.’
Despite a lifelong ambition to work in publishing, Delia had avoided Spencer Media until we started working on Gloss due to her batshit mental sister already working at The Look magazine. But while Cici’s ambitions only reached as far as stealing from the fashion cupboard and ruining the lives of British freelancers (cough − me − cough), Delia actually wanted to succeed. On the surface she was a blonde, Upper-East-Side WASP princess, but underneath she was a fiercely ambitious uber-genius. She was basically Serena van der Woodsen with the brain of Rupert Murdoch, and she had enough self-confidence to make Lady Gaga look like she was a bit down on herself. God help anyone who got in her way.
‘I just can’t cope with the idea of this not working out.’ I laid my head on the cool desk and peered at my iPhone. Ooh, some peas needed harvesting in my Smurf Village. ‘If he doesn’t go for it, then the last six months have been for nothing.’
‘Not going to happen,’ Delia said, enunciating each word with a clarity and confidence I couldn’t even try to feel. ‘Look, why don’t you take the afternoon off? There’s really nothing we can do now until he gets back to us.’
‘I was going to try to talk to Mary about some new features ideas,’ I said,