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“I know she is.” He turned to Natalie and dug into his pants pocket. He pulled out a key and a number. “This is to the villa, and this number is to the driver, Ted.”
“What am I supposed to do with these?”
“We’re going to pack this up. And I’m going to see if I can mend some fences.”
She twisted her fingers together. “Which fences? You’re not going to go talk to her father, are you? That’ll make it worse.”
“No. I’m tempted to show him this, show him just how talented she is. But she has to do that. I can’t do that for her. Much as I want to fix everything for her, I’m beginning to understand her a little better.”
He shouldn’t have taken over and pushed this on her like he did. If he’d brought her in on the idea, she could have controlled it better. He had a feeling the outcome would have remained the same.
She was much too talented to sit behind spreadsheets and a dusty office that didn’t know its way into the twenty-first century, let alone the 2020s.
“So what are you going to do?”
“What I was hired to do. I’m going to fix the company’s inventory system so that it will run as efficiently as possible. And I’m going to add in a mobile interface.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
He grinned at Natalie. “I’ve been studying the way all of these artists and distributors work. It will make Warren Jewelers relevant again. But I need some time.”
“From Presley?”
Vance nodded. “She needs to know that I don’t want to control her. Helping her doesn’t mean controlling her.”
“She’ll come around to that.”
“I know. That’s why you’re going to go to the villa and be with her, then take the plane back home tomorrow.”
“And where are you going?”
“Home.”
“You live in Kensington Square?”
“I do, but I’m going to my folks’ house.” He opened his phone and texted Natalie the address. “If she wants to find me, she can come for me there.”
“You don’t have to leave your plane. Not that it isn’t super amazing from what Presley told me in text messages.”
“See if you can convince her to talk to her father.”
Natalie lifted one of the display case shields off. “I’ll try.”
“Good. Now let’s break this down.”
Eighteen
One Week Later
Presley restedher chin on her hands. The slideshow scrolled by on her screen for the fourteenth time that day. That was about as many times that she’d been staring out the window long enough for her screensaver to activate.
Why she tortured herself by making the slides her screensaver, she didn’t really know. To remind herself what she’d been working toward for the last few years?
To remind herself that she was too much of a coward to go after it?
Or to remind her of Vance, who believed in her enough to put this together?
A sharp knock on her door made her twitch her mouse so a spreadsheet filled her screen instead of the platinum choker she’d designed over the summer.
