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. You’ve been working so hard and all this stress...well...you know...’ Her mother never actually said what she was thinking out loud. ‘He thinks you should come home for a while so that we can look after you.’
Tash sighed. She’d known that whatever she said, they’d half believe the newspaper story, convinced that they had been right all along. That she would be safer at home. No matter how much she told herself that they were wrong, it was hard to resist that kind of worry.
‘Mum, I’m fine.’
‘Tom thinks a break would do you good. We’ve booked the house down in Cornwall for the half-term holiday.’ So far, so what she’d expected. Her dad the worrier, her brother the doctor prescribing a week at the seaside and her mother trying to please everyone. ‘You know how you always loved it there and you haven’t seen the children for ages. You won’t believe how they’ve grown.’
Twenty-five and on holiday with her family. Building sandcastles for her nieces during the day and playing Scrabble or Monopoly in the evening. How appealing was that?
‘I saw them at Easter,’ she said. ‘Send me a postcard.’
‘Darling...’
‘It’s all smoke and mirrors, Mum. I’m fit as a flea.’
‘Are you sure? Are you taking the vitamins I sent you?’
‘I never miss,’ she said, rolling her eyes in exasperation. She understood, really, but anyone would think she was still five years old and fighting for her life instead of a successful career woman. This was just a hiccup.
‘Are you eating properly?’
‘All the food groups.’
When the taxi had delivered her to her door, she’d gone straight to the freezer and dug out a tub of strawberry cheesecake ice cream. While she’d eaten it, she pulled up the file on her laptop so that if, in a worst case scenario, it came to an unfair dismissal tribunal she had a paper trail to demonstrate exactly what she’d done. Except that there it all was, word for word, on the screen. Exactly as printed. Which made no sense.
The proof copy she’d seen, approved and put in her out tray had been the one she’d actually written, not the one that was printed.
Either she really was going mad or someone had gone out of their way to do this to her. Not just changing the original copy, fiddling with the proof and intercepting the phone call from the Chronicle, but getting into her laptop to change what she’d written so that she had no proof that she’d ever written anything else.
Okay, a forensic search would pull up the original, but there would be no way to prove that she hadn’t changed it herself because whoever had done this had logged in using her password.
Which meant there was only one person in the frame.
The man who hadn’t let her know he was back a week early from a six-week rugby tour. The man who hadn’t come rushing round with pizza, Chianti and chocolate the minute he heard the news. Who hadn’t called, texted, emailed even, to ask how she was.
The man who was now occupying the upstairs office that should, by rights, be hers.
Her colleague with benefits: Toby Denton.
She wouldn’t have thought the six-foot-three blond rugby-playing hunk—who’d never made a secret of the fact that he saw work as a tedious interruption to his life and whose only ambition was to play the sport professionally—had the brains to engineer her downfall with such cunning.
His cluelessness, off the rugby field, had been a major part of his appeal. When there was any rescuing to be done—which was often when it came to work—she was the one tossing him the lifebelt. Like giving him her laptop password so that he could check the office diary for an early-morning appointment when, typically, he’d forgotten where he was supposed to be.
The announcement of his appointment as associate partner had appeared on the company website the day after she’d been walked to the door with her belongings in a cardboard box. Photographs of the champagne celebration had appeared on the blog a day later. It was great PR and she’d have applauded if it hadn’t been her career they were interring.
‘Tash?’ her mother asked anxiously. ‘Are you baking?’
‘Baking? No...’ Then, in sheer desperation, ‘Got to go. Call waiting. Have a lovely time in Cornwall.’
Call waiting... She wished, she thought, glancing along the work surface at the ginger, lemon drizzle and passion cakes lined up alongside a Sacher Torte, waiting for the ganache she was making.
She had been baking. She’d used every bowl she possessed, every cake tin. They were piled up in the sink and on the draining board, along with a heap of eggshells and empty sugar, flour and butter wrappers and a fine haze of icing sugar hung in the air, coating every surface, including her.
It was her displacement activity. Some people played endless computer games, or went for a run, or ironed when they needed to let their brain freewheel. She beat butter and sugar and eggs into creamy peaks.
Unfortunately, her mind was ignoring the no-job, no-career problem. Instead it kept running Darius Hadley on a loop. That moment when he’d turned and looked at her in Miles Morgan’s office, his face all dark shadows, his eyes burning into her. His hands. The glint of gold beneath dark curls. The air stirring as he’d walked past her, leaving the scent of something earthy behind.
That moment when he’d