Gold Digger

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“Vicky,” I said through gritted teeth. “You did not tell me that your brother was going to be here.”

Since I’d started working for Vicky three months ago, I’d managed to avoid Ollie as now I didn’t even have to waitress at that awful bar anymore – and I was keen to keep it that way.

“No, I didn’t,” she said, stating plain facts as always, no apology in her voice.

“Well, why the heck not?”

“You would have refused to come, and I needed you here.”

I rolled my eyes. “I knew you weren’t telling me something.”

“I know you did. You can sense omission.”

“Vicky,” I said slowly as Ollie scowled at me across the room. “This is where you apologise.”

“Oh, right,” Vicky said and then paused. “But I’m not sorry. I need you here.” Vicky had a tendency to see things her way. If she needed me to be somewhere then that to her was the priority.

“Lie to me.”

“You know I can’t do that, and also, you can tell if people are lying.”

I gave up and took a big glug of my elderflower instead, swiping the tiny canapés as the tray went past and shoving one in my mouth. “I could be at home right now eating Chinese food with Hayley.”

Vicky frowned. “Chinese food has MSG in it. You and Hayley should not be eating it.” She paused for a moment, then turned to me. “I do not want you eating it. I like you and Hayley. I don’t want you to get sick or have reduced life expectancies.”

“Vics, there’re a lot of things I’d do for you, babe. But abstaining from Chinese food for life is not one of them.”

She huffed. “I’ll send you a meal plan tomorrow.”

“We’ve already got the last three you sent over, love. And I hate to break it to you, but there’s no universe where Hayley is going to eat spinach.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s eight, Vicky.”

“Even more important that she eat green vegetables.”

“Can we maybe concentrate on why we’re here?” I said. “I’d prefer to be able to get away the right side of midnight and before I run into your brother.”

“Right, yes,” Vicky said. She looked over my shoulder and then bit her lip. “Er… there might be a problem.”

“What problem?”

“Mr Arkins is talking to my half-brother.”

“Mother trucker,” I muttered. Mr Arkins was the whole aim of tonight. Vicky wanted to invest this man’s money for him. This shouldn’t have been a problem, seeing as Vicky was the best investment broker in the business. But Mr Arkins was not going to be impressed with just the stats and cold, hard facts that Vicky could provide. The man needed schmoosing. Now, schmoosing was not Vicky’s strong point, which is where I came in. I closed my eyes for a long moment.

I squared my shoulders and told myself to woman up. Vicky was paying me to help her with this stuff – I didn’t need to let another employer down. So I forced a smile. “Come on then,” I said briskly. “I’ve got to face your brother at some point, might as well be now.” Anyone else might have heard the shaky nature of my voice or noticed how my hands were bunched into tight fists, but Vicky, bless her, was totally oblivious. In her mind, if I said it was fine to go and see her brother, then it was fine.

So we made our way over there, but it was only when I was feet away from Ollie that I realised I’d made a mistake. Being this close to him again was not a good idea. He was glaring at me, his body language screaming for me to stay away, hatred coming off him in waves, but my heart hadn’t seemed to have caught up to the fact that he wasn’t the potential love of my life. All I wanted to do was fall into him and let him hold me against his broad chest, let him kiss my temple in that unbearably sweet way he had and absorb all the regret and longing inside me, bursting to get out. The feeling was so strong it was all I could concentrate on as I stared at him dumbly. I even felt myself sway towards him slightly, only clawing it back when I saw that his lip had curled with disgust and he had actually shifted back in the wake of my advance.

Abrupt greetings were exchanged between the four of us. I was barely able to form coherent words, let alone be of use to Vicky. And before I could stop her, Vicky had launched into the stats behind her investment strategies, and Mr Arkins’ eyes had started glazing over. I shook my head to clear it and shifted my focus from the furious man across from me to the one I should be focusing on.

Mr Arkins was leaning slightly away from Vicky. I could feel annoyance, boredom and some frustration rolling off him. So I reached for Vicky’s wrist and gave it a squeeze. Vicky was fine with touch as long as it was firm and deliberate, not light and unexpected. She knew to expect the wrist squeeze in this situation. It was the signal that we had come up with together to use if she needed to stop and take a breath. Once Vicky started on a subject, she tended to run with it at an alarming pace. She could lose her audience very quickly if we weren’t careful, and right now we were dangerously close to losing Mr Arkins. His eyes were already flicking to either side, looking for some sort of escape. But they snapped back to us when Vicky’s verbal diarrhoea cut off abruptly.

“Sorry, I went off on one,” Vicky explained to Mr Arkins who was looking at her curiously. “Lottie tells me when I do it by squeezing my wrist. I’m not very good at letting other people talk.” He blinked. Vicky looked at him seriously. “Apparently, I bore people,” she said.

“That’s bullshit, Vics,” Ollie snapped at her, then turned to me. “How dare you say that to my sister.”

I ignored Ollie’s furious gaze. All my focus on Mr Arkins. He was a big man, not as tall as Ollie but just as broad, and he didn’t look particularly comfortable in a suit. One of his ears had been mauled at one stage; it wasn’t a full-on cauliflower ear, but it wasn’t that pretty either. And he had a scar on his lip, suggesting it had been busted a couple of times before.

I forced a laugh. “It’s just there’s so much flying around that huge brain of hers,” I explained. “She knows all there is to know about investing people’s money. But then there’s all sorts that Vics knows about. Don’t get her started on the latest rugby stats.”

“You like rugby?” Mr Arkins asked, his eyebrows going up in surprise.

Vicky opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off. She didn’t like rugby, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t know everything there was to know about it.

“Oh, she loves it.” I put my hand on her shoulder in a firm pat – this was another signal that said don’t correct the speaker in the lie they’ve just told . “Don’t get her started on the starting line-up for the World Cup team in the semi-finals at the weekend.”

“But the starting line-up is not logical,” Vicky put in. “Just because Sam Vaughton has played well for the last two games does not mean he’s earned a place there. If you look at his stats, he’s the least reliable player by about thirty-three per cent.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” cried Mr Arkins. “Finally, someone who agrees. He’s too much of a wildcard. They need a steadying influence.”

Vicky nodded and opened her mouth, probably to launch into another rugby-related rant, but I gave her a light poke under her arm on her ribs – the poke was a prompt to either ask a question or to agree with someone (Vicky had a really hard time agreeing with something that she felt was untrue, but we’d been practising and she could just about manage a nod and a “that’s interesting”).

“Which players would you choose?” she asked. And it was Mr Arkins’ turn to launch into his own rant. I cleared my throat and Vicky glanced at me, then copied my body language – head tilted to the side, steady eye contact with his, small nods of agreement as if she were hanging off his every word. When I risked a glance at Ollie, his eyes were narrowed on me and he didn’t look very happy. Luckily, someone else came to claim his attention just as Mr Arkins and Vicky had launched into another debate about the front row. I had to poke her twice before she managed her nod and a “that’s interesting”, which Mr Arkins took as her agreement with his superior rugby knowledge when it very much was not .

“Well, if you’re as sensible about the markets as you are about rugby, then maybe I should reconsider your proposal. I’ll get back to you on Monday.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when that was done, and we were one step closer to leaving. Needing a bit of a breather, I downed the glass of elderflower I’d been holding and told Vicky I was going to find the bathroom without looking at Ollie. Not wanting to leave her for too long, I hustled across the room, unreasonably relieved when I found the door to the bathroom straight away. Once there, I just sat on the side of the ornate bath and concentrated on my own breathing. After a minute of silence my heart rate had calmed down and I was no longer hyperventilating, but the ache in my chest that had started when I first saw Ollie glare at me was still there. I was tempted to just stay hidden, but Hayley’s face flashed through my mind and I gritted my teeth. Quitting was not an option.

So I forced myself off that bath and back out into the fray. But just as I was about to search for Vicky, my upper arm was enclosed in a large hand and I was brought to an abrupt halt. At my startled flinch, Ollie’s hand fell away, but he still blocked my path in the narrow corridor.

“Why did you do it?” he snapped, his anger palpable. “Why did you take the money?”

“I-I need to go,” I muttered, avoiding eye contact now, my face feeling like it was on fire.

But then Ollie surprised me again. His expression softened and his hand went to the back of his neck, a move which never failed to exhibit all his arm and chest muscles to their full potential, even when trapped under that suit.

“Listen, Lottie. I’ve been thinking and if you’re in some sort of trouble. If you need the money for something and… well, I can give you fifty grand. You don’t have to?—”

“Fifty grand for what?” I said, hardening myself to his concern. He hadn’t seemed so concerned over the last three months when he was out being photographed all over the place with other women hanging off his arm. I mean, he had a blooming date here, for cheese’s sake. There was a lipstick mark on his collar. What kind of fool did he think I was? “To be your bit of rough on the side? I might have taken that money, but I have some pride, you know.” If I wanted to shake him off, I was going to have to squash this completely and be the bitch. I could actually feel the atmosphere around us change as his mood darkened – the air was thick with his anger.

“If you had pride , you wouldn’t have taken fifty grand in the first place. I expect that was your plan all along, to extort money out of my family.” He looked me up and down with a sneer. “Was any of it true? The quirky dungarees, the multiple earrings, the cat sweatshirts – was any of that really you? Because you seem to have morphed into Corporate Barbie a bit too seamlessly if you ask me.”

I faked a smile. “Glad you approve. Corporate Barbie was exactly the look I was going for.” I decided he didn’t need to know that it was Vicky’s stylist who had dictated everything I was wearing, from my pale pink nail varnish to my form-fitting but reserved little black dress. The job with Vicky had included the makeover and clothes. Vicky explained that it was pretty much essential. She called it armour . I hated it. But then, so did Vicky – and for her it really was a struggle as she couldn’t bear restrictive clothing. When I went over to her house with Hayley last night to plan for today, she had been in a buttery soft hoodie with leggings, and I could feel how much more relaxed she was. “And I didn’t extort any money. I was offered money as a severance package.”

“Well, you made a big mistake. Fifty is pocket change for us – you could have extorted a lot more. But you know that, don’t you? That’s why you’ve latched onto my sister.”

“I work for Vicky,” I said defensively, and he tilted his head to the side.

“What exactly are you doing for Vics? Seeing as you have no university degree and you’re totally unskilled. How arrogant are you to think that you could offer her anything? She’s a fucking genius.”

“I am helping her, you douchebag. Not everything requires a university education.”

His eyes flashed, and he moved again, too suddenly for me to anticipate. One minute he was glaring at me from a few feet away, the next he was right in my space, crowding me against the wall, his smell all around me, his breath on my cheek. My heart felt like it was beating outside of my chest, which was rising and falling with rapid breaths. What I should have done was tear right out of there or kneed him in the balls, but when my eyes locked with his, I was frozen completely. His hand came up to the side of my face slowly, and I stopped breathing altogether as his fingers brushed my temple, sweeping some hair that had fallen into my eyes back behind my ear, so achingly gentle that I felt my eyes start to sting. Even with these heels on (something I was yet to be totally reliable in), he still loomed over me; my head tilted right back as he bent forward.

“Beautiful little liar,” he breathed, searching my face as if trying to see everything I was hiding. “Now, I’m going to tell you this once. Understand?” I nodded, still under his spell. “You’re going to stay away from my family. Don’t think you can get any more out of us. You’ve already been paid off. There won’t be a second payday. Whatever you think you’re going to get out of Vicky, you’re wrong. Everyone in my family knows what a grasping, scheming gold digger you are, so don’t mess with us again.”

The worst thing was the delivery – it was slow, calculated and controlled, as if every word had been carefully weighed with maximum precision to hurt me as much as possible.

“ Vicky doesn’t think that,” I said, my voice shaky despite my best efforts to keep it steady. “And the rest of you can sod off. I hope you always have stale Jaffa Cakes, your Marmite toast ratio is always slightly off and your tea is perpetually too weak.”

He blinked, his angry expression cracking for a moment. “Is that the best you can come up with – weak tea, poorly spread Marmite and stale Jaffa Cakes?”

“ Nobody likes a stale Jaffa Cake.”

“True.” He looked like he wanted to laugh. I could feel the battle within him – hatred mixed with reluctant affection. Then he frowned and shook his head as if to clear it, giving me one last furious look before he pushed away and stood back. Totally wrung out and desperate to get away, I forgot the footwear situation as I launched myself away from the wall and nearly went headfirst onto the solid wood floor. But, of course, I didn’t fall. Just like in the past, Ollie caught me, his strong arm hooking me around my middle and setting me back on my feet. The heat from the contact flashed through me, his hard body against mine for a long moment before the pressure of his arm fell away and I took stumbling steps back, doing my very best to remain upright this time.

“You really shouldn’t be wearing heels,” he grumbled. When I glanced back, he had his hand on the back of his neck again, frowning at me, his expression conflicted. “Lottie—” he started, but I couldn’t take any more, not that night. I needed to get home. I needed to concentrate on what mattered: my family. Not on dreams that weren’t for grasping, scheming gold diggers like me.