Marnie had now started picking prawns off tiny triangles of brown bread and was curling them into her mouth with a long scarlet talon. ‘No, you don’t look at passengers—but you somehow get one of them to leave you a whacking great mansion worth almost a million pounds! Nice work, Lola!’
Lola opened her mouth to protest, as she seemed to have been protesting ever since the totally unexpected legacy had come her way, then shut it again. She had all but given up trying to explain away her unexpected stroke of fortune.
Even if she painted the facts as baldly as possible—that a passenger she had met through her job and her charity work with the airline had taken a shine to her and left her a whacking great housewell, people still put two and two together and came out with a rather grubby five.
Sex, sex, sex. That was all anybody seemed to think about these days! And even if the giver of the house had been over sixty and the recipient a mere twenty-five all but the very nicest people tended to think that Lola had had a red-hot affair with him.
When the truth was that she had never had a red-hot affair with anyone!
‘How’s your mother?’ asked Mamie. ‘Has she seen the mighty inheritance yet?’
Lola shook her head, so that the jaunty blue and yellow cap which all the cabin crew absolutely loathed looked in danger of toppling from her high-piled curls. ‘Nope,’ she answered gloomily. ‘Doesn’t want to know anything about it. I’ve tried telling her that everything associated with the wretched house is above board, but I don’t think she believes me.’
‘Oh, she’ll come around,’ said Mamie comfortingly. ‘And it isn’t as though she was always visiting you when you lived in the flat, is it?’
‘No,’ answered Lola reflectively. ‘She’s a very solitary sort of person, I guess. Doesn’t mix much.’
‘Unlike you,’ smiled Mamie.
Lola shrugged. ‘I don’t seem to have been mixing much recently—the house takes up every bit of my spare time, it’s so big!’
‘My heart bleeds for you!’ mocked Marnie.
‘Then come and live there too!’ offered Lola impulsively. “There’s plenty of room.’
Mamie shook her head. She was engaged to be married and she didn’t want to share Rob with anyone, not even Lola. ‘Just because you want a tame member of staff?’ she quizzed jokingly. ‘No way!’
Lola looked down to find that someone had smeared most of a vegetarian rissole all over the side of their tray. She tutted. Passengers could be absolutely infuriating sometimes.
‘Lola?’
Lola turned around at the gentle tap on her shoulder.
It was Stuart, the purser, the flight attendant in charge of all the cabin crew. ‘I’d like one of you two girls to come up and help out in First Class, please,’ he said. ‘We’re run off our feet up there:
Mamie winked meaningfully at Lola. ‘With pleasure,’ she purred. ‘I’ll be right along, Stuart.’
The purser shook his head. ‘I’ll take Lola, if you don’t mind, Mamie. She’s the only female on board who seems to have any common sense to speak of.’
‘Why, thank you, Stuart!’ Lola beamed. ‘Recognition at long last! Does that mean promotion is about to wing its way to me?’
‘It means,’ growled Stuart, ‘that you seem to be the only woman on board this flight who hasn’t fluttered up to that man in First Class on some pathetic pretext or other, that was so patently transparent he must have been laughing all over his face. I really don’t know what they all see in him!’
‘You just wait!’ mouthed Mamie to Lola.
‘He’s bound to have an ego the size of Wembley Stadium!’ commented Lola, pulling a face. ‘I had an awful night, Stuart, with hardly any sleep to speak of—must I really go and pander to some pretty little rich boy with an over-inflated sense of his own importance?’
Stuart laughed. ‘Go on with you! I want someone up there who won’t come over all silly when she sets eyes on him! Just go and tidy yourself up a bit first, would you, Lola?’
‘Cheek!’ Lola retorted, but she checked her hair and slicked on a bit of lipstick and scraped a particularly stubborn curl back into her tortoiseshell hair-clip, before making her way to First Class, her eyes automatically straying to two rows from the front on the right-hand side, where Mamie had said that...that...
Lola broke out into a cold sweat, shaking her head in a desperate kind of denial. She took a deep breath, shut her eyes very briefly, then looked again.
It was him.
Definitely him.
Geraint Howell-Williams was on her flight, and if she didn’t get out of the way very quickly he would see her, and she would have to serve him, and—
‘Excuse me, stewardess,’ came a deep, mocking voice, and Lola saw, to her absolute horror, that the dark head had turned around and that she was very firmly fixed in the gaze of a pair of stormy grey eyes.
For one mad moment she thought of pretending that she had not heard him, of turning tail and running back up to the other end of the aeroplane, but of course she couldn’t do that. She had a fantastic work record at Atalanta Airlines and she was damned if she was going to let Geraint Howell-Williams interfere with that!
Unconsciously smoothing down her skirt, she glided over to him in her most professional manner, and gave him a frosty smile which she hoped no one but him would recognise as being supercilious.
‘Yes, sir? What can I get you?’
‘You could try getting rid of that superior expression on your face,’ he answered softly.
She kept the saccharine smile fixed firmly to her lips. ‘If I look superior, sir, then perhaps it’s because I am superior.’
He stared up at her innocently. ‘Are you trying to offend me, Lola?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so.’
A suspicion leapt to the forefront of her mind.
Geraint Howell-Williams had now travelled with Atalanta Airlines twice in the past few weeks and before that she had never noticed him. And she would definitely have noticed him. ‘Are you following me?’ she quizzed.
There was an infinitesimal pause. A briefly guarded look hardened the devastating face before the grey eyes cleared and looked up at her with studied amusement. ‘Is that an occupational hazard, then, being followed? Perhaps it happens to you a lot, Lola?’ he suggested sardonically.
‘Oh, ha, ha, ha!’ she retorted crossly.
‘And I have to say that much as I admire your riotous curls and bright blue eyes and luscious curves—’ his eyes glinted—do you really think I’d go to all the trouble of taking flights around all the major capital cities in Europe just so that I could catch a glimpse of them?’
When he put it like that, her question sounded absolutely ludicrous. ‘I suppose not,’ she answered, and forced herself to wait for his order without squirming.
It was strange, really, that in all her years of flying she had never had a problem about being in a servile position with passengers. Until now.
For the first time ever she found herself resenting having to stand with a polite smile glued to her mouth, when, if the truth be known, she would have liked to stomp off down the aircraft and as far away from Geraint Howell-Williams as possible!
He stretched his legs out lazily in front of him, and Lola’s eyes were reluctantly drawn to the muscular shafts of his thighs.
Reclining, he seemed even taller, if