Tilly Bagshawe 3-book Bundle: Scandalous, Fame, Friends and Rivals. Tilly Bagshawe
shock for you, Jackson. You’ll need some time to consider your options. Whether you wish to continue at Wrexall, in a more junior position of course, or …’
‘If I could just interrupt you there, Lucius.’ Jackson got calmly to his feet. ‘No discredit to the detailed research that you’ve obviously done, Bob.’ He smiled sweetly at Massey. ‘But I think you’ll find you’ve made a small error in your figures.’ The door opened and Liana sashayed into the room, carrying twelve newly bound documents. ‘Thank you, angel.’ Jackson kissed her on the cheek, eliciting a blush of pleasure. He passed the documents around the table.
‘What’s this?’ Bob Massey snarled. He’d been over those figures hundreds, thousands of times. There was no mistake.
‘A new transaction I’ve been working on, turning around a chain of failing beach hotels in Hawaii. Great land, crappy businesses. I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull it off. But as you can see, it’s a whopper. Two hundred and eighty-five million dollars, to be precise.’
Jackson watched as the twelve men turned the pages. With each line they read, more colour drained from their faces. Fucking Rita Halston last night had been fun. But it was nothing compared to this.
‘But how …’ spluttered Dan Peters.
‘This price … it makes no sense,’ said Darryl Jeffries. ‘Why would anyone pay that for these hotels? They’ve been making a loss for five years.’
‘Yes. It was rather a good price, wasn’t it?’ Jackson beamed. ‘I had to put in a lot of … what should I call it? Ground work. Yes. A lot of ground work with the buyer. But she was happy to do the deal in the end.’
She. Of course it was a she.
Bob Massey’s face had turned a colour that Jackson had never seen before. He was pretty sure it didn’t occur in nature.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said through tight lips. ‘It’s too late. The deadline for your revenues to improve was this morning. There’s no way the fund could have cleared in that time.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ said Jackson. ‘But Alana’s been terribly organized about it all. We closed the deal on Wednesday. The money hit Wrexall’s account at eleven o’clock last night.’
‘Alana?’ Lucius Monroe looked up. ‘You don’t mean Alana Davis? Senator Davis’s wife?’
‘That’s right.’ Jackson smiled. ‘It turns out she’s hugely wealthy in her own right. Why? Do you know her? I’m meeting her tonight as it happens for a celebration dinner. I’ll give her your best, shall I?’
Later that night, in bed at Jackson’s apartment, Alana Davis closed her eyes and tried to remember the last time she had felt so alive. Feeling Jackson’s huge dick inside her and his powerful thighs clamped around her own, rippling with strength and power and virility and youth, she gasped with pleasure, surrendering to her third orgasm of the night.
‘That was incredible, baby,’ she purred.
‘You’re incredible,’ said Jackson, nuzzling into her neck.
At forty-five Alana Davis had believed that the days of mind-blowing sex were behind her. But in the space of a few short weeks Jackson Dupree had changed all that. On the night stand, her cellphone started to buzz. Alana turned it off.
‘The senator?’
‘No. My lawyer. He’s been getting dreadfully antsy about this hotel deal. You are going to do that buy-back on Monday, aren’t you, darling?’
‘Of course,’ Jackson assured her. ‘As soon as my board approval’s official, I’ll take them off your hands. I’m sure I can turn them around for a small profit eventually. Somewhere in the twenty-million range with any luck.’
‘If you turn me around,’ Alana looked at him naughtily, ‘you can make a big profit right away.’
Jackson Dupree grinned. It was the perfect ending to a perfect day.
Theresa Dexter strolled across the UCLA campus towards the parking lot, where her hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes convertible gleamed in the sunshine. Above her, a perfectly blue California sky stretched cloudlessly to the horizon. Theresa thought, I’ve just given a seminar on Shakespeare to a packed lecture hall. I’m rich. I’m healthy. I’m doing my dream job in a beautiful, sun-drenched city and I’m married to the most gorgeous man in the world.
She had never felt more unhappy in her life.
It was four years since Theresa and Theo Dexter had moved out to LA. Four years in which Theo had gone from being a minor British celebrity (his first TV series for Channel Four, Space, started shooting days after his dispute with Sasha Miller ended and had quickly become a ratings winner) to a world-famous television star. At first Theo had been reluctant to leave England. Dividing his time between Cambridge, where he still taught a half-weekly schedule at St Michael’s, and London, he revelled in the sensation of being the biggest fish in a relatively small pond. Unlike Theresa, who avoided it as much as possible, Theo found the London media scene wildly exciting. He joined the Groucho Club and Soho House, and got invited to private screenings at the BBC and book launch parties at the V&A. His book, The New Universe, had kept its position in the Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller List for a record twenty-two consecutive weeks, and ITV were already bidding against Channel Four for a second series of Space. It was only after TV Times magazine described him, much to Theo’s chagrin, as ‘Science’s answer to Alan Titchmarsh’ that he began to take Ed Gilliam’s entreaties seriously.
‘You’re wasting your time over here, Theo. We need to take you to America. Start flirting with the big boys, NBC, CBS. Unless of course you’re happy to end your career as a guest DJ for Radio 2.’
The Dexters’ ‘Goodbye to Cambridge’ party was filled with enough celebrities to warrant a full page in the Daily Mail and a six-page photo special in Hello! magazine. Theo looked blonder and more glamorous than ever, his newly streaked hair perfectly offsetting the blue linen of his Paul Smith suit. Theresa, swollen-eyed from crying, stood beside him in an orange Next maxi-dress that did nothing for her figure, a lone ugly duckling amidst the twenty-something TV present ers in their Luella mini-dresses and Vivienne Westwood boots.
‘For God’s sake, cheer up, T,’ Theo snapped at her between photo calls. ‘Anyone would think I was dragging you to Beirut, not Bel Air.’
He was right, of course. LA would be an amazing opportunity. Theresa already had a teaching job lined up at UCLA that paid three times what she was earning now, and a grant to continue her Shakespeare research. Just because Los Angeles didn’t have thousand-year-old libraries, or original Shakespeare folios, or churches with entombed medieval knights, or dry-stone walls, or Christmas carols in King’s College Chapel … She started to cry again.
They flew out first class on Virgin. That part was fun. Theresa got tipsy on free champagne and blubbed loudly watching chick flicks on her personal in-flight movie screen, in between stuffing her face with warmed (warmed!) cashew nuts. Theo, doing his best to look like a world-weary, regular first-class traveller, put in his earplugs and pretended to go to sleep. He longed to make his bed go flat so he could rest properly, but didn’t want the sexy Asian stewardess to think he didn’t know how to operate the seat. As a result, by the time they landed at LAX, Theo was tired and irritable and Theresa badly hungover. It took them an hour to hire a rental car, and another two to reach their rented property in Bel Air, thanks to traffic on the 405 and Theresa’s poor map-reading skills. On first impressions LA seemed to be little more that a giant network of freeways, vast, supersized eight-lane roads endlessly intersecting beneath a flawless blue sky. It’s hideous, thought Theresa bleakly. It wasn’t until they reached Sunset Boulevard that the city began to look more like the tourist brochures.