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For the first time since setting eyes on Blaise Walker that morning Maya finally felt as if she could breathe freely again. Never before had a man unsettled her and yet perversely commanded her attention quite as much. It seriously troubled her. No doubt if her friends found out he’d given her a lift home they’d think she was mad for not agreeing to a date! But then none of them had experienced what Maya had experienced in associating with people from similar privileged circumstances. People who were part of an elite, almost oppressive circle of wealth, fame and privilege that was a million light years from the kind of ordinary lives Maya and her friends lived…Wolves in sheep’s clothing, as her young teenage self had thought of them. All glitz on the outside but frighteningly shallow and cruel within.
She realised she was definitely apprehensive that Blaise could potentially turn out to be like that. No doubt her friends would be more than impressed with his dazzling good-looks, achievements and wealth if they were in her shoes—but then they still thought that money and fame were some kind of Holy Grail to instant happiness while Maya sadly knew different.
With a sigh that was part relief at getting away from that horrible weekend party and—shockingly disturbingly—part lingering regret that she’d more or less indicated to Blaise that she wasn’t at all interested in going out on a date with him, she let herself into the tiny studio flat, dropped her bags onto the rush-matted floor and moved across the room to open the window and let in some fresh air.
As she turned back to survey the small domain that was both her living room and her sleeping quarters, when she turned down the functional bed-settee each night, Maya’s gaze alighted on the medium-sized portrait hanging on the opposite wall. It was a painting of herself at fourteen… Her dark hair was in thick plaited ropes, and there was an expression in her eyes that easily reflected the painful shadows in her teenage heart. It had been painted at her father’s insistence, during one of his more mellow periods. A rare time when he hadn’t been drinking and partying into the early hours and had perhaps had an inkling of his daughter’s deep unhappiness at his neglect of her.
‘Smile, darling!’ he had coaxed from behind the easel that had been permanently set up in what had once been the dining room of the grand Georgian residence they’d lived in. The space had been commandeered as her father’s studio due to the exceptional quality of the light that had flooded in through the huge windows.
‘I don’t feel like smiling,’ Maya had answered, in typical sulky teenage fashion but with an ache in her heart big enough to fill an ocean.
The portrait had turned out to be the last picture her father had ever painted.
After that, more late-night drug- and drink-fuelled parties had beckoned, with his so-called ‘friends’, and there had been no more mellow periods ever again. Three years after that he’d taken his own life, and at seventeen Maya had lost her home as well as her father.
Impatient at the deeply disturbing memories that made her feel heavy as lead, she glanced at the time on her watch, making a decision. She would forgo unpacking her stuff and instead go into Camden Market and have a coffee at her friend Diego’s coffee bar. She’d sit and scan the Sunday newspapers, deliberately bypassing the doom-laden stories for the lighter ones, and instead of letting her mind be racked with regret and pain she’d watch the endlessly interesting characters that came and went in the market, imagining what their lives were like instead of dwelling on her own, and the day could just unfold however it willed…
‘What do you mean, give her a job?’ Jane Eddington—Blaise’s quick-minded, sharp-suited American agent—threw Blaise one of her most piercing and suspicious glances over the top of her high-fashion reading glasses.
‘Someone really has stirred your sugar, honey, haven’t they? You’ve never gone this far before in order to get a woman into bed! Don’t tell me there exists in the world a female who can actually resist your charms, Blaise—myriad and devastating though they are?’
‘Your encroaching years are making you cynical, Jane…and it doesn’t suit you,’ Blaise countered with a scowl.
‘I’ll ignore that distinctly ungentlemanly remark and simply say this: you’ve just spent the past twenty minutes verbally blasting Jonathan Faraday again for being an out-and-out sleaze and a snake for trying to coerce this girl into bed against her will, and now you’re doing the same…albeit more covertly…by asking me to give her a job just so you can conveniently call on her whenever the mood takes you!’
