Читать книгу The Perfect Widow - A.M. Castle - Страница 14

By my second day, I’d found a skirt that was within shouting distance of my knees, and I listened like an over-eager schoolgirl, lapping up everything Jen told me. Not that I needed much help to work out how the great bank of phones worked. Yes, it looked like something Lieutenant Uhura would have sat in front of in Star Trek, but I had mastered it in minutes. At least it wasn’t the olden days, when you had to plug in little wires and make a cat’s cradle, physically joining one call to another. That might have given me pause. Now it was just the flick of a switch.

Reception was all about smiling, really. The name said it all. Receiving people, welcoming them, looking them right in the eye. And pacing yourself so you didn’t feel as though your face was going to split after the first half-hour.

Where had I got the training for this? Ushering friends into our home? Ha. Don’t make me laugh. It had all been about keeping people out. ‘The busies,’ my mother called them. Not just the police. Social workers, top of the list. Then all the other undesirables. Relatives, not that they bothered much. Mum had successfully alienated all of them. Various complex grudges that I never really got the hang of, though I suppose everything boiled down to money and sex in the end. Women friends were the same. Sometimes she’d shout about it all, depending how far down the bottle she was. I learned to block out the noise. Then there were the more obvious no-nos – ex-boyfriends, retribution on their minds. Money lenders, occasionally. And, more than once, the bailiffs. Hard to stop them, though, after they’d stoved in the door. All of the above could fit more than one category, a Venn diagram with more circles than hell.

So my instincts were to curl up, protect myself, hide from the light. But I was desperate for this to work. So I learned. And soon, I blossomed. Not in a showy way. Concealing my feelings was one of the very few transferrable skills my upbringing had given me. But I could pin on a smile brighter than the chrome of my fancy office chair when I had to. And I felt so much more at home at that desk, than I ever had anywhere else before. Including my actual home.

Partly, that was because of Patrick.

I couldn’t have told you what it was about him that clicked with every bit of my DNA. But it was as though a key had been turned, somewhere. Like a Chinese puzzle, my shrivelled heart was now open, ready to be trashed. I distrusted the feeling. Protected myself as best I could. But it was no good. I didn’t know his name, which floor he worked on, or anything else about him. Yet I was already his.

As it turned out, the more I found out, the more I loved the idea of him. Or just loved him. I asked Jen, all casual, as soon as the lift had swished closed on him that morning, but of course she was no fool. Immediately, she warned me off.

‘He’s a bit of a player, Louise. You need to be a bit careful there. I’d think again, if I were you.’

Whether it was genuine concern for me or not, I neither knew nor cared. All it did was make me keener. If that were even possible. Though those words of hers would come back to haunt me.