Valentine's Day. Nicola Marsh
her a list of activities that the station was prepared to send her to and been done with it. Instead of being a sap. Instead of reacting to an event fifteen years old and letting it colour his better judgement.
Instead of empathising.
Just because he’d been exactly where Georgia was; on the arse-end of a declined proposal. Only in his case, he got all the way down the aisle before realising his fiancée wasn’t coming down behind him because she was on her way to Heathrow with her supportive bridesmaids. What followed was a horrible half-hour of shouting and recriminations before the priest managed to clear the church. Lara’s family and friends all went wildly on the defensive—as you would if it was someone you loved that had done something so shocking. His side of the church rallied around him so stoically, which only inflamed Lara’s family more because they knew—knew—that there were a hundred better ways to not proceed with a marriage than just not turning up. Less destructive ways. But she’d gone with the one that would cause her the least pain.
And, chump that he was, he actually preferred that. He wasn’t in the business of wishing pain on people he loved back then.
The heartbreak was bad enough, slumped in the front row of the rioting church, but he’d had to endure the public humiliation in front of everyone he cared about. Their whispers. Their pity. Their side-taking. Worse, their determined, well-meant support. Every bit as excruciating and public as Georgia’s turn-down live on air. Just more contained.
Like atomic fusion.
But the after-effects rippled out for a decade and a half.
He jogged up the stairs and headed straight for his study. The most important room in his house. The work he got done there was the difference between just-hanging-on in the network and excelling. No one excelled on forty hours a week. He was putting in eighty, easy.
It was the one thing he could thank Lara for.
Setting him up for the kind of success that gave him a luxurious study in a big house in Hampstead Heath and had him rubbing shoulders with some of the most powerful people in the country.
And just like that he was thinking of Georgia again. Her crack about big houses and unworn clothes and crowded garages. There was a reason he parked the Jag on the street. Because both the cars in his garage were worth more. He liked his life. Excessive though it might be at times. He barely drove the Lotus or the Phantom but he could if he wanted to. And he could look at them whenever he wanted. But they represented something to him. As did the suits and the house and the title on his business card.
They represented the fact that no one would ever pity him again.
And, God help him, no one would ever come to his emotional aid as they’d had to in that church. Not family. Not friends. He would never allow himself to be in that kind of vulnerable position twice.
Money made sure of that.
Success made sure of that.
The corporate world might be a brutal mistress but it was constant. And if you were going to get screwed you’d always see it coming.
He’d never be hijacked again.
* * *
How pathetic that she needed a good excuse to go to Kew and accidentally see Dan. If she’d found the courage to face the truth about her reasons for proposing, could she really not face Dan himself? The man who’d been such an important and steady part of her life for the past year. Even longer if you counted their friendship before that.
She did need to speak to him face to face. Six weeks was long enough to take the sting out of everything for both of them.
And she had seeds to deliver to his colleagues for identification.
She dropped them to the propagation department and then hit the pathways across Kew to the behind-the-scenes greenhouses. That was where Dan spent most of his time—cultivating the carnivores, he called it—as popular with him as they were with the public.
She knew these paths like the freckles on her body. Long before she knew Dan.
Huh. Look at that. Life before Dan. She’d almost forgotten what that felt like.
Determined not to cut corners—even turf deserved not to be trampled—she followed the path the long way around to the plain glasshouse where Dan primarily worked. Her pulse began to thump.
As she approached it the doors opened and a woman emerged.
‘Oh, excuse me!’ Georgia exclaimed, her hand to her chest. She had crazy blonde curls, and the serviceable work-coats that everyone wore here. But she had a tight pink dress beneath it, bright, manicured nails, three inch heels and flawless make-up.
Not like everyone else here.
‘Nearly got you.’ The woman smiled, stepping back to hold the door.
That was perfect, too. Her eyes dropped briefly to the woman’s ID tag and, just like that, all Georgia’s carefully constructed excuses about why she didn’t have better clothes and better hair vanished in a puff of perfume. This woman was an orchid specialist—she worked with dirt all day. Yet she could do that and still look like this.
What excuse did she herself have?
‘Can I help you?’ the woman said.
‘I’m looking for Daniel Bradford.’
‘He’s out in the display house tending to a struggling Nepenthes tentaculata. Can I give him a message?’ The slightest hint of curiosity filled her eyes.
It was pure luck that she hadn’t run into someone she knew, someone much more familiar with the past relationship between she and Daniel. She wasn’t going to blow the opportunity for anonymity.
‘No, I know the way. I’ll chase him down there. Thank you.’ Georgia stepped back from the entrance.
The woman stepped away from the doors, smiling, and they swung shut behind her. ‘You’re welcome.’
She turned left, Georgia turned right. But she watched the woman walk away from her. Heels. They did something very special to a walk, even on gravel and grass. Pity she didn’t have a single pair above a serviceable inch.
Maybe that was something she could put on her Year of Georgia list.
Learn to walk in heels.
And not because men liked them—though the distracted glances of two groundsmen passing the woman confirmed that they did—but because heels were a side of herself that she just never indulged.
Heels and pole dancing. They could go on the side-list she was quietly developing.
Though both could easily break her neck.
It took nearly ten minutes to cross out into the public area and work her way around to the carnivorous-plants exhibit. The doors were perpetually closed to keep the ambient temperature inside right but, unlike the clunky ones behind the scenes, these opened and closed whisper quiet.
She took a breath. ‘Dan?’
The silence stayed silent, but somehow it changed. Grew loaded. And Georgia knew she’d been heard.
‘I know you’re here, Dan.’
‘Hey.’ He stepped out from behind a large sign. Confused. Wary. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
‘I was dropping down some stock for identification. Thought I’d come and say hi.’
Oh, so horribly bright and false.
He nodded. ‘Hi.’
Silence. Maybe six weeks weren’t enough. ‘How are you doing?’ she risked.
‘OK. Managing.’
The intense scrutiny. Right. ‘It’s not getting better?’
His lips thinned. ‘Not really.’
She nodded.