All Work and No Play (24 page)

She should never have agreed to go away for the weekend. Never switched off her phone. Never given in to the temptation of Jonny, thought about her own selfish pleasure instead of her team who were depending on her,
never messed around with something and somebody that was only going to lead to disaster—

Jane walked full-tilt into something. Someone. Someone who wrapped arms around her. She tried to push away, looked up, realised it was Jonny, hair rumpled, glasses askew from the force of their collision.

Her insides soared, then plunged. Jonny, who loved her. Whom she’d hurt this morning. Who was looking at her with concern that she knew she didn’t deserve.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked. He didn’t even bother to straighten his glasses, just held onto her, firmly but carefully, as if she were precious.

As if.

‘I blew the Giovanni Franco campaign. They rescheduled the meeting and I didn’t know because I had my phones turned off and I wasn’t checking my emails. And I hadn’t finished the presentation. And I told Franco that he couldn’t demand our staff to be on call for him twenty-four hours a day. So he cancelled the whole thing.’

Saying the words aloud made them even more real, made her flesh creep with dread.

‘Well, you were right,’ Jonny said.

He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, as if she could flush her career down the toilet without a single backwards glance. As if it didn’t matter.

‘No, I wasn’t!’ she cried. ‘It wasn’t right at all, none
of it. I’m not a helpless incompetent female who gets all emotional and screws up. I’m—’

She stuttered to a halt. Because that was precisely what she was, wasn’t it? An emotional female who’d screwed up and was now in the middle of a busy pavement, having her hands held and being comforted by a big, strong man?

She snatched her hands away from Jonny.

‘I can’t live this way,’ she said.

‘Jane, don’t be silly.’

Anger made her teeth clench. ‘I’m not silly.’

‘No, you’re right. You’re not silly. You’re the most incredible woman I know.’ He touched her again, drew her stiff body into the warmth of his arms. ‘I love you and we’ll work it out.’

As if love were the answer. As if love would protect you from failure or humiliation. As if love could just be there, to be relied on, without you having to earn it.

She struggled free of him. He was so damn certain of himself, so stubborn, so male.

‘Prove it.’

‘Look at my parents, look at what they had to deal with, and they were happy.’

‘I’m not like that, Jonny!’ she cried. ‘That’s the whole problem. You want too much of me and I can’t give it to you. I can’t do the wedding and the happy family. I just
don’t know how. I’ve never had it and I don’t know the rules. I can’t drop who I am and become this person who wastes time climbing trees and thinking about sex and trying to love someone.’

She’d thrown the words out, fast and hard, as if she were constructing a wall with them, and from the way Jonny flinched she knew that some of them had hit home. For a moment, satisfaction flared in her, that she had pierced, somehow, his strength.

‘You think that trying to love me is a waste of time?’ he said. And Jonny didn’t hide how he felt. Every word was raw with hurt, and with anger.

The satisfaction drained away more quickly than it had come. Instead, she filled with pain, twisting her heart, pricking at her eyes.

She backed away. Blinking, blinking. Because if the tears fell it was admitting total defeat.

‘I have to go back to work,’ she said.

‘So you can pretend that everything’s all right again?’ He lashed out as she had done, and the challenge made her snap back.

‘Everything was all right until you came along! If I hadn’t met you none of this would have happened!’

‘And you would’ve been stuck in your little “fine” world?’

‘Yes!’

She’d stepped several feet back, her fists clenched, her heart hammering, and she shouted the last word. Passersby stared at her, looked quickly away, deviated from their course to give her a wide berth.

‘I don’t want to do this here,’ she said. ‘I’m finished.’

She turned on her heel and started walking. After only one or two steps, Jonny caught her and turned her around to face him.

‘Jane, the answer to this is simple, and you’ve been playing around and avoiding the question and using work as an excuse from the moment I’ve met you. Do you love me?’

His face was so open. She could see the pain, and the frustration. And the love, too. The love that had never left, and that made it hard for her to breathe, made her think of failure.

‘I don’t even know what that means,’ she whispered.

His eyes narrowed, his lips thinned. His expression closed.

‘And you don’t want to find out.’ He let her go, dropped his hands. ‘Go ahead and go back to work.’

‘Jonny,’ she said, ‘without my job I’m nothing.’

‘Jane,’ he said, and he was, at that moment, the angriest she had ever seen him, ‘if you really believe that, maybe it’s true. Goodbye.’

He turned and walked away.

She should have felt free. Instead she felt like what Jonny had just called her.

Nothing.

Jane turned around again and forced herself back towards Pearce Grey. She might be a failure, but she wasn’t a coward. She would apologise to everyone concerned—the whole company, if necessary. And then she’d start racking her brains to come up with damage-limitation strategies.

Walking and having something definite to do, even something so awful, made her tears less imminent. Jane opened the door, nodded at Melinda the receptionist, who was staring at her openly, and went up the short flight of stairs to the office proper. Before she stepped into sight she took a deep breath, smoothed her suit, made sure her hair was tidy. When she raised her hands near her face she smelled the indefinable, clean scent that was Jonny.

She shook her head and took the final step into the office, with all of the team she had let down.

The room wasn’t silent this time; it was abuzz, full of people. But again, heads swivelled when she entered, and she heard someone say, ‘Jane!’

And then she heard something incredible.

Applause.

The entire staff of Pearce Grey stood up behind their desks and raised their hands and clapped, smiling at her.

Jane froze, staring. Amy detached herself from a group near the centre of the room and ran to Jane, her arms outstretched.

‘Woman!’ she cried, throwing her arms around Jane and giving her a huge, perfumed squeeze. ‘You rule!’

‘What?’

Amy leaned back, still hugging Jane. ‘The way you stuck up for us with Franco! You said exactly what every single one of us wanted to say but were afraid to.’

‘But—I lost the contract.’

‘Stuff his contract! Who wants to work for a client who can’t be bothered to trust your judgement? Giovanni has worked with six agencies in the past three years and never once had an advertising campaign that he stood behind one hundred per cent. He thinks he wants edgy, but then he gradually chips away at the campaign until it’s nothing but a compromise. My friend works for Hinterland who did his last womenswear campaign. She said it was a nightmare and they were relieved when he decided to look elsewhere.’

‘But it’s a huge source of revenue for the company—high profile—and our reputation—’

‘Given his history, being fired by Giovanni Franco might do our reputation more good in the long run.’ Gary had appeared by her side. ‘I’ve got a conference call scheduled with both of our partners this afternoon
and I’m planning on backing your conduct one hundred per cent. They might not be happy, but they’ll have to take all of their employees’ feelings into account.’

‘And we all feel the same way,’ Amy told her. ‘Sometimes there are things that are more important than work. Like principles, and a life, and your friends.’

Jane stared around the room. All of these people, whom she’d tried so hard to put a perfect face on with, to be all professional, all of the time—all of them were smiling at her. Applauding her.

Agreeing that they were her friends.

And yet she still felt empty. Like a big zero. Nothing. Because in a room full of friends, she couldn’t think about anybody except for Jonny, her best friend and her lover. Walking away.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘What have I done?’

In the end, it was Amy who tracked him down, after Jane tried phone calls and emails and got nowhere. Jane called Thom’s mobile.

‘Uh, no, no idea where he might be,’ Thom said, and the tone of his voice made him sound as if he were shifting around uncomfortably in his seat, wherever that was. ‘None at all. Nope. Sorry. Good luck.’

‘He’s a lousy liar,’ Amy told her when Jane hung up and reported the conversation. ‘He tried pretending he
didn’t care about the fact that I had a daughter, too. Utterly unconvincing. Come on, I know where he is.’

‘Where is he?’ Jane asked, following Amy out of her office, the two of them stopping to pick up Amy’s voluminous handbag.

‘At my flat looking after Stacy. She had a dicky tummy this morning and I couldn’t stay home with her because of evil Franco man.’

‘Thom’s babysitting?’

‘He said he didn’t know how, but I could see he was dying to. They get on like a house on fire. Speaking of which, I hope they haven’t tried using the gas cooker.’

Amy’s face, as she said this, was radiant.

A cab ride later Jane was standing next to Amy as she unlocked the door to her flat. She bit her lip and twisted her hands together. She didn’t feel empty any more.

She felt terrified.

‘If the Franco cologne campaign had gone forward and been extended, Jonny would be looking at earning some serious money,’ she told Amy. ‘But when I told him it had fallen through he didn’t even think about himself. He only cared about how I felt about it.’

‘He’s a keeper,’ Amy said, and swung the door open. ‘What the—?’

The door opened straight into the living room of the flat. Jane had never been here before and she knew that
creative people were often chaotic, but she doubted that Amy was usually as chaotic as this. The floor was strewn with clothes, a laundry basket was overturned on the floor, and the ironing-board, with its legs not extended, lay on the carpet. Thom was carefully balanced on it, his arms outstretched and his knees bent, while Stacy sat on the pointed front.

‘What are you two doing?’ Amy asked.

Thom leaped off the ironing-board. ‘Uh, I was teaching Stacy how to surf.’

Amy put her hands on her hips. ‘If you’re well enough to surf, young lady, you’re well enough to go to school.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I told her,’ said Thom quickly. He caught Jane’s eye and jerked his head in the direction of the next room.
Kitchen,
he mouthed.

Jane threaded her way through the laundry and went into the kitchen. Jonny was sitting at the table, with a mug of tea in front of him.

She had to catch her breath. Because he was perfect. Hair rumpled, chin rough, wearing clothes that had spent the night on a damp bathroom floor. Every single inch of him was exactly everything she had ever wanted a man to be.

He looked up when she entered and their eyes met. It was like electricity. And it didn’t make her any less terrified.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Jonny stood. ‘Jane, I shouldn’t have said—’

‘No, wait.’ She held up her hand and Jonny stopped. He didn’t need to say anything anyway because she could tell exactly what he was thinking from the look on his face.

‘I’m frightened of loving you,’ she said. ‘I messed things up with Gary and I never loved him. If I lost you, I couldn’t bear it.’

He pushed his chair aside and came a step closer to her. ‘You’re not going to lose me.’

She held up her hand again. ‘I don’t understand why you love me. I don’t think I’ve earned it. I keep on messing things up with you. I’m completely clueless about relationships. I didn’t even know I had friends until I did something that made me sure I was going to lose all of them.’

Her eyes prickled. The tears she’d held back for so long because she didn’t want anybody to see. One of them fell. She didn’t care. She could cry with Jonny. She didn’t have anything to lose. And, maybe, everything to gain.

‘So I have a theory,’ she said, wiping her eyes, ‘and maybe you can tell me if it’s right. I wondered if maybe I didn’t have to earn your love. Because you didn’t have
to do anything to make me love you. You just had to be yourself.’

This time she couldn’t have stopped him if she’d wanted to. He was across the kitchen and he had pulled her into his arms and he was kissing her in that exciting, passionate, tender way that only Jonny could kiss. Smearing her tears on her face, warming her entire body and heart and soul.

When it was over he smiled at her. No, he beamed at her.

‘You only have to be yourself, Jane,’ he said to her, and wiped her eyes for her.

This time, she believed it. She beamed back, through her drying tears, full of love and joy and the possibility of a happy ending.

And mischief, too. ‘What’s your wildest fantasy, Jonny?’ she asked him.

‘Marrying you. Being together. Talking with you. Having adventures. Raising kids. Being happy.’

‘Okay. We can do that. But what I meant was—’ and she leaned forward, touched his upper lip with her tongue, and asked the rest of the question in a husky murmur that made Jonny’s hands tighten on her, and made his eyes take on that sexy gleam ‘—what’s your
wildest fantasy that I can start making come true tonight?’

Jonny began to whisper in her ear.

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

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