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Liar!
She glared at her wan face in the mirror. She knew very well what was causing her despondency, and it had nothing to do with a lack of sunlight.
‘No, it’s not for Out Of The Box,’ said Carly. ‘It’s personal—for you.’
‘Is it from Mum?’ Her mother was always sending care-parcels of home-baking and organic produce—afraid that the big city would corrupt her into a fast-food lifestyle saturated with agri-chemicals.
‘No, it’s another one of those…’
Veronica froze, her heavy heart squeezing in her chest. She should just go—her appointment was with a new client and she didn’t want to jeopardise her chance of an order by arriving late for their meeting.
Nevertheless, five minutes later she was opening the little box and lifting out a perfectly crafted, miniature shepherd-boy out of its bed of shredded green tissue.
‘Oh, isn’t he cute?’ gushed Carly, who had been hovering with cheerful nosiness. Fresh out of university, she was a great worker, full of ideas and a whiz with the computer, and so eagerly interested in everything that Veronica had given up trying to preserve a businesslike distance between employer and employee. ‘Now you’ll have someone to put beside the lamb, and keep the old shepherd and his sheep company. What a pity it’s only October—I wish it was Christmas already. I’m dying to see you put the whole crèche together!’
‘Don’t wish the Christmas rush on us just yet,’ said Veronica croakily, her fingers smoothing over the glazed terracotta figurine. ‘We still have an awful lot of work to get through before we’re ready to ship off an avalanche of simultaneous orders…’
She turned the figure upside down to see the distinctive maker’s mark on the base, although she didn’t really need to look. She knew it came from Sénanque, as had each of the other five santons she’d received irregularly through the post over the past eight weeks.
She put the shepherd-boy back in its box with trembling fingers. Damn Luc! What on earth was he trying to do to her?
All the packages had arrived bearing a UK postmark and a customs sticker with his signature, but there was never any note inside so Veronica had no way of knowing what kind of message he was sending. If it was an apology it was a wretchedly cryptic one. Maybe it was just his way of rubbing her nose in her cowardice, but she had felt that his decision to leave for Avignon with Elise Malcolm in the middle of Zoe’s party had been a fairly definitive statement of his priorities!
She snatched up her briefcase and slid in the laptop, and the glossy brochures and order forms, in case her potential client turned out to be electronically impaired. She had initially made a rule that, for the corporate side of the business, she wasn’t going to pitch for business with companies that had less than twenty-five employees, but experience had quickly shown her the error of her ways. Many small companies valued their personal touch with their staff, and were more generous with gifts as rewards and incentives than larger organisations, and, besides, hungry small companies often mushroomed into big firms with many more clients and contacts. Sarron Holdings, according to her research, was a small but rapidly growing event-management company with contracts from a number of city councils and government organisations, as well as links with offshore promotions.
Picking up her handbag, she shot a furtive look at her assistant’s back before tucking the new santon into the side pocket. Her personal talisman, a little piece of Luc to carry with her…
As she shot out the door her eye was caught by the card propped up on the credenza. It had arrived the day before and she was still dithering about it—another reminder of that hedonistic, life-altering two weeks in Provence: a totally unexpected invitation to Sophie’s twelfth birthday party the following week.
Waving to Carly, she sped out to her car, parked in one of the t
wo spaces marked with the Out Of The Box logo in front of the long, rectangular building. Fortunately, it wouldn’t take her more than fifteen minutes to get to the hotel where the meeting was to take place.
The series of disasters that had hit her immediately after she got back from France had helped distract her from her emotional trauma. The small warehouse she had previously arranged to lease was destroyed by a fire and the owner had decided not to rebuild, and the flat she had been poised to move into fell through, when the couple with whom she was going to share decided to go their separate ways. But then her real estate agent had offered her the rental of a ‘work/life unit’, a new concept of mixed-use development in an inner-city suburb, which comprised office and lock-up warehouse space downstairs and a spacious open-plan apartment above.
Veronica was living alone for the first time in her life…and the solitude gave her far too much time to brood on her sorrows. The only way she could bear it was to bury herself in work—hence her booming business.
The hotel was a downtown luxury high-rise overlooking Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour, which at present was whipped up into white-caps by a passing spring squall. Veronica brushed the light rain spatters off her smart pale yellow linen suit as she entered the lift, her hopes regarding her new client rising with every floor, along with her nervous apprehension. She hadn’t realised the room number she had been given was the penthouse suite. It indicated that Sarron Holdings might have a lot more money to spend than her initial research had led her to believe and she knew it was important not to show that she was intimidated. She would need to present a cool, confident front, no matter how much she might be quaking inside. But by now, she thought bitterly, she was practised at hiding her wayward emotions.
In the lobby, a bell-boy had inserted a security key to enable access to the top floor so she assumed that the front desk had called ahead, and was disconcerted when the lift door opened directly into the suite and there was no one to greet her.
She walked tentatively into the large room, elegantly furnished in creams and golds, the heels of her smart grey shoes, bought in a sale on the rue de Rivoli, clicking across the marble tiles in the open lobby before they sank into the deep pile of the luxurious carpet. The several doors that opened onto the room were all closed and she hesitated, clearing her throat.
When that tentative approach brought no response she walked over to the long cream couches that faced each other across a veined marble coffee-table, to put down her briefcase and handbag. Her eyes fell on the stack of newspapers on the coffee table she assumed were supplied by the hotel and her knees almost buckled.
The top one was an English broadsheet dated the previous day, and there on the front page was a photograph of a radiant Elise Malcolm laughing up at Max Foster at the Los Angeles première of his latest film, his big hand splayed over the distinct baby-bump revealed by her figure-hugging dress. An inset picture of a grim-looking older man whom the caption identified as Andrew Malcolm, who had released a statement the morning after the première that he had filed for a divorce from his wife on the grounds of adultery. No co-respondent was named in the divorce petition, but Malcolm had revealed that his wife was now living in Foster’s Los Angeles home.
‘I thought you’d like to see it hot off the presses—given your habit of relying on everyone’s word but mine.’ The dark, cynical words sliced through her heart, cutting off the oxygen supply to her brain.
With a virulent curse, Luc leapt forward as Veronica folded like a pack of cards, just managing to catch her up in his arms before her head hit the sharp corner of the table. Still cursing, he picked her up and laid her on the cream brocade couch, kneeling down to unbutton her jacket and comb her hair back from her milk-white face, tucking a cushion under her head and patting her cheeks.
‘Veronica? Damn it, don’t do this to me!’
Her eyes fluttered open and she stared up at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Where’s Mr Atkinson?’ she murmured, wildly disorientated.
Luc sat beside her, his hip hard against hers, his arm braced on the back of the couch above her prone body, his other hand smoothing her pleated brow.
