Читать книгу The Bachelor: Racy, pacy and very funny! - Тилли Бэгшоу - Страница 18

Flora Fitzwilliam stood on the lawn in Lisa Kent’s idyllic Siasconset garden and looked up at the house with real pride.

It was finished, at last. Painful as this job had been on many, many levels, Flora had to admit that the finished product was beautiful. The house itself was clad in traditional grey clapboard tiles. Thanks to Nantucket’s strict building codes, the materials were a given. But the fluid way that the building seemed to flow downhill at the rear, with each storey’s decks tumbling into the next, like a waterfall, or perfectly tiered paddy field, each one affording breathtaking views across the Atlantic Ocean – that was all Flora. As were the formal gardens: the flowerbeds overflowing with plump hydrangeas, delicate roses and glorious sprays of lavender that filled the whole plot with their heavy, intoxicating scent. The exquisitely constructed dry-stone walls, leading down to a private beach staircase, each riser carved lovingly from local limestone, all the way down to the soft white sand.

Inside, the house was just as beautiful, simple and pared down, despite Lisa’s initial insistence that she wanted something grand and opulent.

‘This is opulent,’ Flora had insisted, presenting an initially horrified Lisa with a headboard for the master suite made of driftwood. ‘What could be grander than the ocean? Than nature, right outside your window here, in all her glory. Your husband needed gold and marble to feel he lived in luxury. But his house was your prison, remember? This is your house, Lisa, your palace. A palace of light! Let it breathe. Let it sing.’

OK, so maybe she’d got a little carried away. But the point is, it worked. Lisa Kent had ended up with a stunning home, traditional yet unique, full of space and light. With its white wood and uncut stone, its subtle mix of textures, and of course ocean views from every room, the entire building was a testament to hope.

Lisa adored it. Draping her arm around Flora’s shoulders as if she were an old friend, she stood staring at the house with her, quite overcome with emotion.

‘You’ve changed my life,’ she told Flora, her eyes welling with tears. ‘Really. It’s perfect.’

‘I’m glad you like it,’ said Flora. ‘But you changed your own life, Lisa. You broke free from your marriage. That took courage.’

‘I guess that’s true.’ Lisa brushed away a tear, conveniently forgetting that it was Steve who had left her, not the other way around, and that she’d been frogmarched back into single life like a condemned woman to the gallows, kicking and screaming.

‘This was your vision. Your dream. I just helped you realize it, that’s all.’

Flora could afford to be generous. The job had been a triumph in the end, despite her disappointment over Hanborough. It would be a great addition to her portfolio. And tomorrow she was leaving Nantucket for good and heading off to the Bahamas with Mason for a much-needed romantic holiday.

As always on a project, Flora had become subsumed, to the point where she knew she’d been neglecting her fiancé. It wasn’t just the endless flying back and forth to the island. Even when she was home in Manhattan she was only half there, only half connected to Mason. He was up for partnership at the bank this year, and Flora knew he needed her to be there more, turning up to functions, having lunches with the other partners’ wives.

‘Think of it as training for when we’re married,’ he’d told her, jokingly, although Flora couldn’t help but feel that deep down he meant it. And, of course, she did want to support him in his career. She just wasn’t sure she was ready to give up her own, a subject on which Mason had begun dropping heavier and heavier hints.

We can cross those bridges when we come to them, Flora thought. He probably only resents my work because it’s been so all-consuming lately.

Yes, this vacation would do them both the world of good.

She said goodbye to Lisa and was getting into her rented Jeep when her cell phone rang. It was Graydon. For once Flora was happy to hear from him. After all, she had nothing but good news to report from Nantucket; another very satisfied client and a triumphant conclusion to what had been a difficult project.

‘Hey, you!’ she answered brightly. ‘How’s Merry Olde England?’

‘I need you here,’ Graydon hissed. ‘Now. Immediately. How soon can you be on a plane?’

Flora had only ever heard him this agitated once before, when a powerful French fashion conglomerate had made a hostile bid for GJD. That had been a truly awful few weeks, but it had taught Flora a lot about her boss. Including when not to cross him.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked cautiously.

‘I’ll tell you what’s happened,’ Graydon seethed. ‘That duplicitous, giftless cretin Guillermo only got caught rifling through the family silver at Hanborough.’

‘No!’ Flora gasped.

‘I swear to God I will ruin him! I will flay him alive! The client woke up to find him elbow deep in his girlfriend’s jewellery. Can you credit it?’

Flora couldn’t. She was also finding it hard to stifle a laugh. She knew giving a job as prestigious as the Hanborough restoration to a muppet like Guillermo had been a mistake, but not even she had imagined it would come to this. Talk about karma.

‘I need you to take over.’

‘You still have the job?’ Flora was incredulous. ‘After that?’

‘For now,’ Graydon admitted grudgingly. ‘And at vastly reduced rates, I might add. But what could I do? If this were to get out and go around the industry it could devastate our reputation. Everybody knows we have the Hanborough Castle commission. To lose it now would be disastrous. Henry Saxton Brae’s got me over a barrel and he knows it.’

Flora tried not to visualize the divine Henry Saxton Brae having Graydon James over a barrel.

‘I’ve told him I can’t oversee it personally, not full time. I had to draw the line somewhere,’ Graydon huffed.

Flora let the full import of this statement sink in. She allowed herself a short but intense moment of deep, personal satisfaction.

‘You want me to take over the project?’

‘What? Of course I want you to take it over!’ Graydon barked. ‘I’m not flying you to England for a fucking vacation, Flora!’

Vacation.

The Bahamas.

Mason.

For a moment a dark cloud of foreboding hovered ominously over Flora’s happiness. They did need a vacation. And Mason really was her priority.

But she and Mason had their whole lives together to look forward to. There would only ever be one chance to restore Hanborough Castle.

‘I’ll catch a flight to London tonight,’ she heard herself telling Graydon. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Good,’ Graydon said gracelessly, and hung up.

Mason Parker gripped the steering wheel of his Tesla Model S tightly and gritted his teeth, keeping his eyes on the road ahead.

‘You’re mad,’ said Flora.

‘No, I’m not,’ Mason grumbled. ‘I’m disappointed.’

He was driving her to JFK, something he’d hoped to be doing tomorrow, en route to their long-planned Bahamas vacation.

‘I’m disappointed too. But what was I supposed to do?’ Flora asked plaintively. ‘Turn down the job?’

Mason shrugged sulkily.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Flora. ‘If you’d been asked to work on some deal at the last minute, or to fly to meet an important client, you wouldn’t say “no”.’

‘That’s different,’ said Mason, taking the exit for the airport and immediately running into a solid wall of traffic.

‘How is it different?’ Flora bristled.

‘Because my job actually pays the bills,’ Mason snapped, in a rare loss of self-control. ‘Our bills. I’m sorry, Flora, but I’m done pretending our careers are on some sort of an equal footing.’ He paused meaningfully before the word ‘careers’, putting it in audible quotation marks. ‘I work really hard and I don’t think it’s too much to ask that when I plan, and pay for, an expensive vacation, my goddamn fiancée comes with me.’

Flora opened her mouth to speak then closed it again.

I work really hard?

What, and I don’t?

She was angry, but at the same time she knew that she was the one who had let Mason down. She was the one who’d changed their plans at the last minute. It was only natural that he should be disappointed.

Reaching out, she put a conciliatory hand on Mason’s leg. ‘We’ll do it another time, honey. Soon, I promise.’

‘I’m doing it next week,’ said Mason.

‘You’re still going?’ Flora failed to keep the surprise out of her voice. ‘On your own?’

‘Sure. Why not? The villa’s already paid for and I closed my deal. The Coateses are gonna be out there, so I won’t be on my own. And Chuck and Henrietta.’

Flora’s stomach lurched unpleasantly. Charles ‘Chuck’ Branston was Mason’s best buddy from Andover, and would be best man at Mason and Flora’s wedding next year. His sister Henrietta had always held a torch for Mason, and made no secret of her dislike for Flora, although Mason claimed not to see it.

Oh God, Flora thought miserably. He’ll be mad at me, and drunk half the time, and she’ll be all over him like a rash. In a tropical paradise.

What am I doing? What am I doing?

Mason pulled over and turned off the engine. How had they gotten here already?

‘Please don’t be mad,’ said Flora, this time with tears in her eyes. ‘I love you so much.’

‘I love you too.’ Mason softened, pulling her to him, inhaling the sweet, gardenia scent of her Kai perfume. ‘I’m only mad because I miss you, Flora. I want you with me. Now. All the time.’

‘I want that too,’ Flora whispered, relief flooding through her. He wasn’t going to run off with Henrietta Branston. She would get things started at Hanborough, then fly back and make it all up to him. Everything was going to be OK.

They both got out and Mason lifted Flora’s case out of the trunk.

‘Maybe we should bring the wedding forward?’ he said, setting it on the ground.

‘Bring it forward?’

‘Sure, why not? We could do it at Christmas.’

‘Christmas?’ Flora stammered. ‘This Christmas?’

‘I know it’s quite soon.’ Mason grinned, slipping an arm around her waist. ‘But just think, by this time next year we’d already be married and settled. How great would that be? You might even be pregnant.’

Flora forced herself to smile, shutting out the clang, clang of prison doors closing.

‘OK, well, let’s think about it.’ She kissed him. ‘I’d better run. Don’t want to miss my flight.’

‘Don’t talk to any boys on the plane!’ Mason yelled after her.

‘I won’t,’ Flora called back, waving and smiling till he was out of sight.

By the time the plane finally took off, engines roaring as it shook and juddered its way up into the clouds, Flora was so physically and emotionally exhausted she fell instantly asleep.

When she woke up three hours later, drenched with sweat after a horrible dream, the cabin lights were off. For a moment Flora felt the blind panic of not knowing where she was. But as the familiar sights reasserted themselves – blanket-covered passengers, smiling, red-skirted stewardesses – she exhaled, tipping her chair back and trying to relax for the first time in at least twenty-four hours.

It wasn’t easy.

Going back to England was a big deal for Flora, even without the tensions with Mason. The dream hadn’t helped.

It was the same dream she’d had hundreds of times before. She was back at Sherwood Hall, the English girls’ boarding school where she’d been so happy until the awful day her father had been arrested for fraud, and her world had collapsed around her like a straw house in the wind. She was walking up to the auditorium stage, about to receive the prize for Art & Design, when two things happened. First, her halterneck dress somehow untied itself and fell off, leaving her standing in front of the entire school naked. And second, Georgie, Flora’s most hated enemy at Sherwood, had popped up out of nowhere and started taking photographs, tossing her long blonde hair behind her and laughing spitefully as Flora frantically tried to cover herself with her hands.

God, that laugh. It was as if Georgie were right there in the Virgin Upper Class cabin with her, tormenting her, taunting her about everything from her transatlantic accent to her clothes to her weight to her (nonexistent at that time) love life.

‘You know what they say about Flora: it’s easy to spread.’

How many times had Flora heard that ‘joke’ at school? Hundreds? Thousands?

Georgie was far prettier than Flora, at least in Flora’s opinion. Yet she must have perceived Flora as some sort of threat. Either that or she was just a sadist who enjoyed humiliating people. Come to think of it, that was actually perfectly possible.

Before Flora’s dad went to prison, her Sherwood friends would stick up for her and protect her from the worst of Georgie’s barbs. But, after that, there was nothing. Everybody dumped her, like a hot lump of coal. The life Flora had believed she had – her friends, her family, her school, her entire place in this world – had evaporated like water spilled on a stove, instantly and completely. Sherwood became every bit as much of a prison for Flora as Mount McGregor Correctional Facility had been for her poor dad. Although Flora’s sentence was shorter. Unable to pay the fees, her mother had been forced to withdraw her and enrol her in public school back in New York. That would turn out to be a different form of prison.

But the point was that Flora had never been back to England since that awful time.

Until now.

Of course, now everything was different, she told herself firmly, pressing the call bell for the stewardess and ordering herself a belated dinner of steamed chicken and saffron rice. She was an adult now. Engaged to be married, happy, successful, flying into Heathrow first class on a ticket paid for by the great Graydon James. She was coming back to work on her dream job, restoring Hanborough Castle. Hanborough would be a career game-changer for Flora Fitzwilliam, the start of a new and, hopefully, much more profitable chapter in her life as a designer.

You’re not at Sherwood now, Flora reminded herself, taking a sip of the ice-cold Chablis that had arrived with her meal. Georgie and her gang of bullies can’t touch you now. None of them can.

She’d seen all the films on offer and wasn’t in the mood for TV, so after dinner she wandered down to the Upper Class bar and picked up a couple of magazines. Flipping through Tatler a few minutes later, she was amused to find a profile of her client, Henry Saxton Brae, in the ‘Ten Hottest Aristos’ feature. It seemed to Flora that the bar was embarrassingly low in this particular category, with most of the men on offer looking distinctly chinless, weedy and unappealing. Henry, however, was undoubtedly a looker, with dark hair and perfect features, slightly hooded eyes that gave him a predatory look, and a curl to his upper lip that was at once disdainful and sexy. He had a good figure too, tall and lean, no doubt a testament to his days as a teenage tennis star. His girlfriend, the model Eva Gunnarson, pictured with him at the end of the piece, was even more wildly beautiful, all flowing limbs and hair, like some exotic, land-bound mermaid.

But it wasn’t Eva, or Henry, that had Flora reading the piece over and over, poring lovingly over each page. It was the pictures of Hanborough in the background, with its moat and turrets, its crumbling keep and chapel tumbling against the grand Georgian style of the West Wing, more country house than castle on this one side. There was something charmingly higgledy-piggledy about the place, despite its indisputable grandeur. Flora loved the way that different generations had simply added their own touches, building on and over and around the original structure, which had clearly been intended as a fortress. Part palace, part battlement, part idyllic family home, Hanborough Castle was truly iconic, as English as toast and Marmite in some ways, and yet almost French or Italian in terms of its many romantic flourishes.

Flora felt adrenaline flood her veins at the thought of stepping inside. This time tomorrow she would literally be crossing that drawbridge and stepping into history. She, Flora Fitzwilliam, would add her vision to Hanborough, tying together all its different strands and styles, its quirks and its beauty and its majesty, evolved over a thousand years to meet here, now, in this moment.

She felt like a princess in a fairy tale. But it wasn’t a prince who had swept her off her feet, or made her dreams come true.

This is my moment. My chance. The pinnacle of my life as an artist.

The last chapter of Flora’s life in England had ended in misery and shame. It was time to write the next one. Time to create her own happy ending.