How to Get Over Your Ex (19 page)

‘It made me angry that I wasn’t. I
so
wasn’t. And I realised why the moment you walked back out of this
studio. You took all the light with you.’

‘And you want me to live in your house?’

‘I want us to be together. I think I’ve been sitting in that
house just waiting for it to populate itself with a family. A family I didn’t
want. But, truthfully, I don’t care where we live. In fact, I’d be really happy
to go back to Göreme and grow old underground with you. Whatever you want.’

Heat filled her cheeks. ‘I really want your garden.’

His lips turned up slightly at the corners. ‘Just the
garden?’

‘No,’ she breathed. ‘I really want you.’

She lifted her lips and Zander pulled her up closer in his arms
to help close the distance. They clung together, sealing their promise in
flesh.

On the other side of the glass the two announcers were
exploding with mute action, like a pair of mime race-callers. Georgia feared for
exactly what was being said but, after the year they’d had, really, how bad
could it be?

‘I’m sorry we’re not going to be rich,’ he whispered against
her lips.

‘I don’t want to be rich.’

‘I wanted to give you the world.’

She traced his jawline with her finger. ‘You already have.
Besides,’ she said, breathless, ‘I’m only cash-poor.’

He frowned. ‘But your flat...’

‘It’s one of four in the complex,’ she reminded him. And he
nodded. So she broke the news. ‘I own them all.’

He just gaped.

‘Well, technically the bank owns them all but, you said
yourself, I’m thrifty. When all my friends were out clubbing, I was paying the
world’s biggest mortgage. Determined never to have to beg for somewhere to live
again. Between my neighbours’ rent and my own repayments and the area booming I
have more than seventy per cent equity. So maybe we’ll end up closer to
equal?’

‘You were so scathing about my money.’

She shrugged. ‘It was so fun do to. That’s the real me. You may
want to reconsider...’

‘I wouldn’t want to do this with anyone else.’

That raised the tiny ghost of the past. ‘You did want to do
this with someone else, once.’

He considered her seriously. ‘It took me a really long time to
get to the place where I could be objective about Lara. About the whole sorry
mess. But our relationship was always about me making allowances for her, and
she loved
that
, she didn’t love me. She did me the
biggest favour in getting out before it was too late.’

Just as Dan had. ‘I understand.’

‘Yes. I think you do.’

They kissed again, stepping back out of the view of the viewing
window between studios.

‘You were so right about how I treat people at work. To keep
them at a distance. And my running. All designed to stop me from having to
interact with anyone emotionally. And then you came along.’

‘And bullied my way in?’

‘And looked deep inside me and accepted who I was.’

She beamed up at him. ‘Well, aren’t we a pair of
lucky-to-have-found-each-others?’

He smiled. ‘Yeah. We really are.’

‘Mr Rush?’ The producer’s voice boomed out over the studio PA
system. Georgia could hear music in the background and knew the segment was
over.

She was free.

Free to love the best man in the world.

Zander crossed to the panel and pressed a blue button.
‘Yes?’

Just as fearsome as ever, despite the monumental scene he’d
just made in front of his whole staff. His tone must have worked because she
spoke to him with more courtesy than Georgia had heard from her all
afternoon.

‘
Nigel Westerly
is on line two, Mr
Rush.’

She said it with the same awe she would have used if the Queen
of England had picked up the phone.

Zander glanced down at the flashing light on the console, then
back at Georgia. He pressed the blue button.

‘Tell Westerly I’m busy.’

And then he stepped away from the panel, towards her. The last
thing she saw as his head swooped back down for another kiss was the gaping
dread on the face of the producer at having to tell the head of the entire
network he wasn’t going to get his way. And the secret smile on the face of the
work-experience kid.

‘That was terrible,’ she whispered up at him between
kisses.

‘God, it felt good, though. Never did like her.’

‘They aren’t all bad.’

‘No, they’re not. I’m thinking of taking Casey with me, in
fact. I’ll need a bomb-proof business partner.’

‘You think she’ll come?’

‘I have a way with women.’

‘Cocky.’

‘I got you, didn’t I?’

‘Yeah,’ she breathed against his lips. ‘You absolutely
did.’

* * * * *

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Hitched!
by Jessica Hart.

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ONE

I was having a good day until George Challoner turned
up.

It had rained almost every day since I had arrived in
Yorkshire, but that morning I woke to a bright, breezy day. By some miracle
Audrey had started first time, and I hummed as I drove along the country lanes
lined with jaunty daffodils to Whellerby Hall.

When I arrived at the site, Frank, the lugubrious foreman, had
even smiled—a first. Well, his face relaxed slightly in response to my cheery
greeting, but in my current mood I was prepared to count it a smile. Progress,
anyway.

The ready-mixed concrete arrived bang on time. I stood and
watched carefully as the men started pouring it into the reinforced steel raft
for the foundations. They clearly knew what they were doing, and I had already
checked the quality of the concrete. After a frenzied couple of weeks, I could
tell Hugh that the project was back on schedule.

Phew.

Everything was going to plan. I had it all worked out.

1. Get site experience.

2. Get job overseas on major construction project.

3. Get promoted to senior engineer.

And because I was an expert planner, I had made sure all my
goals were Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound. I was
aiming for promotion by the time I was thirty, an overseas job by the end of the
year, and I was already getting site experience with the new conference and
visitor centre on the Whellerby Hall estate.

True, things had got off to a shaky start. Endless rain,
unreliable suppliers and a construction team made up of dour Yorkshiremen who
had apparently missed out on a century of women's liberation and made no secret
of their reluctance to take orders from a female. My attempts to involve them in
team-building exercises had
not
gone down well.

For a while, I admit, I had wondered if I had made a terrible
mistake leaving the massive firm in London, but my plan was clear. I badly
needed some site experience, and the Whellerby project was too good an
opportunity to miss.

And now it might all just be coming together, I congratulated
myself, checking another grid off on my clipboard. I'd won a knock-down-drag-out
fight with the concrete supplier, which might account for Frank's—sort of—smile
and now we could start building.

Perhaps I could let myself relax, just a little.

That was when George arrived.

He drove the battered Land Rover as if it were a Lamborghini,
swinging into the site and parking—deliberately squint, I was sure!—next to
Audrey in a flurry of mud and gravel.

I pressed my lips together in disapproval. George Challoner was
allegedly the estate manager, although as far as I could see this involved
little more than turning up at inconvenient moments and distracting everyone
else who was actually trying to do some work.

He was also my neighbour. I'd been delighted at first to be
given my own cottage on the estate. I was only working on the project until Hugh
Morrison, my old mentor, had recovered from his heart attack, and I didn't want
to get involved with expensive long-term lets so a tied cottage for no rent made
perfect sense.

I was less delighted to discover that George Challoner lived on
the other side of the wall, his cottage a mirror image of mine under a single
slate roof. It wasn't that he was a noisy neighbour, but I was always so aware
of him, and it wasn't because he was attractive, if that's what you're
thinking.

I was prepared to admit that he was extremely easy on the eye.
My own preference was for dark-haired men, while George was lean and rangy with
hair the colour of old gold and ridiculously blue eyes, but, still, I could see
that he was good-looking.

OK, he was
very
good-looking.
Too
good-looking.

I didn't trust good-looking men. I'd fallen for a dazzling
veneer once before, and it wasn't a mistake I intended to make again.

I watched balefully as George waved and strode across to join
me at the foundations. The men had all brightened at his approach and were
shouting boisterous abuse at him. Even Frank grinned, the traitor.

I sighed. What was it with men? The ruder they were, the more
they seemed to like each other.

‘Hey, Frank, don't look now but your foundations are full of
holes,' said George, peering down at the steel cages.

‘They're supposed to be that way,' I said, even though I knew
he was joking. I hated the way George always made me feel buttoned-up. ‘The
steel takes the tensile stress.'

‘I wish I had something to take
my
stress,' said George. He had an irritating ability to give the impression that
he was laughing while keeping a perfectly straight face. Something to do with
the glinting blue eyes, I thought, or perhaps the almost imperceptible deepening
of the creases around his eyes. Or the smile that seemed to be permanently
tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Whatever it was, I wished he wouldn't do it. It made me
feel...ruffled.

Besides, I had never met anybody less stressed. George
Challoner was one of those charmed individuals for whom life was a breezy
business. He never seemed to take anything seriously. God only knew why Lord
Whellerby had made him estate manager. I was sure George was just playing at it,
amusing himself between sunning himself on the deck of a yacht or playing
roulette in some swish casino.

I knew his type.

‘What can we do for you, George?' I said briskly. ‘As you can
see, we're rather busy here today.'

‘The guys are busy,' said George, nodding at the foundations
where the men had gone back to pouring the concrete. ‘You're just watching.'

‘I'm
supervising
,' I said with
emphasis. ‘That's my job.'

‘Good job, just watching everyone else do the work.'

I knew quite well that he was just trying to wind me up, but I
ground my teeth anyway. ‘I'm the site engineer,' I said. ‘That means I have to
make sure everything is done properly.'

‘A bit like being an estate manager, you mean?' said George.
‘Except you get to wear a hard hat.'

‘I don't see that my job has anything in common with yours,' I
said coldly. ‘And talking of hard hats, if you must come onto the site, you
should be wearing one. I've reminded you about that before.'

George cast a look around the site. Beyond the foundations
where the concrete mixer churned, it was a sea of mud. It had been cleared the
previous autumn and was now littered with machinery and piles of reinforcing
wires. ‘I'm taller than everything here,' he objected. ‘I can't see a single
thing that could fall on my head.'

‘You could trip over and knock your head on a rock,' I said,
adding under my breath, ‘with any luck.'

‘I heard that!' George grinned, and I clutched my clipboard
tighter to my chest and put up my chin. ‘I never had to wear a hard hat when
Hugh Morrison was overseeing,' he said provocatively.

‘That was before we'd started construction, and, in any case,
that was up to Hugh. This is my site now, and I like to follow correct
procedures.'

I promise you, I wasn't always unbearably pompous, but there
was just something about George that rubbed me up the wrong way.

‘Now, that's a useful thing to know,' he exclaimed. ‘Maybe
that's where I've been going wrong!'

His gaze rested on my face. Nobody had the right to have eyes
that blue, I thought crossly as I fought the colour that was stealing along my
cheekbones. My fine, fair skin was the bane of my life. The slightest thing and
I'd end up blushing like a schoolgirl.

‘So what's the correct procedure for asking you out?' he asked,
leaning forward confidentially as if he really expected me to tell him.

I kept my composure. Making a big play of looking over at the
foundations and then checking something off my list, I said coolly: ‘You ask me
out, and I say no.'

‘I've tried that,' he objected.

He had. The first night I arrived, he had popped round to
suggest a drink at the pub in the village. He asked me every time he saw me. I
was sure it was just to annoy me now. Any normal man would have got the point by
then.

‘Then I'm not sure what I can suggest.'

‘Come on, we're neighbours,' said George. ‘We should be
friendly.'

‘It's precisely
because
we're
neighbours that I don't think it's a good idea,' I said, making another mark on
my clipboard. George wasn't to know it was meaningless. ‘You live right next
door to me. If we went for a drink and you turned out to be some kind of weirdo,
I'd never be able to get away from you.'

‘Weirdo?'

He was doing his best to sound outraged, but he didn't fool me.
I could tell he was trying not to laugh.

Pushing my hair behind my ears, I glared at him.

‘Maybe weirdo isn't quite the right word,' I allowed, ‘but you
know what I mean.'

‘I see.' George pretended to ponder. ‘So you think that after
one date, I might never leave you alone? I might pester you to go out again or
fall madly in love with you?'

My beastly cheeks were turning pink again, I could feel it. ‘I
don't think that's very likely.'

‘Why not?'

I looked down at my clipboard, wishing that he would stop
asking awkward questions and just go away.

‘I'm not the kind of girl men fall madly in love with,' I said
evenly after a moment.

Sadly, all too true.

George pursed his lips and his eyes danced. ‘OK, so if you're
not worried about me falling for you, maybe you're worried
you'll
fall madly in love with
me
.'

‘I can assure you
that's
not going
to happen!' I snapped.

‘That sounds like a challenge to me.'

‘It certainly isn't,' I said. ‘I'm just saying that you're not
my type.'

Of course, he couldn't leave it there, could he? ‘What
is
your type, then?'

‘Not you, anyway,' I told him firmly, and he put on an injured
look. Like I say, he didn't take anything seriously.

‘Why not?'

‘I don't trust handsome men,' I said. ‘You're too good-looking
for me.'

‘Hey, isn't that lookist or something?' he protested. ‘You
wouldn't hold my looks against me if I was ugly, would you? Or at least you
wouldn't admit it.'

I sighed. ‘I don't know why you're so keen to ask me out
anyway,' I said. ‘You must be desperate for a date.'

‘I'm just trying to be friendly.'

‘Well, I appreciate it,' I said crisply, ‘but I'm only here for
a couple of months and I'd rather keep our relationship professional if that's
all right with you.'

‘I like the idea of us having a relationship,' said George,
‘but I'm not so sure about the professional bit. Is everything professional with
you, Frith?'

‘It is while I'm here. This job is important to me,' I told
him. ‘I really needed some site experience and this is my first time in charge.
It's a great chance for me. Plus, this contract is really important to Hugh.
He's been so good to me, I don't want to let him down.'

I looked around the site, narrowing my eyes as I envisaged what
the centre would look like when it was finished. The specifications were for the
use of sustainable materials wherever possible, and the wood and glass finish
was designed to blend into the backdrop of the trees edging the site.

‘It's going to look good,' I told George. ‘It's expensive, but
I gather Lord Whellerby's plan is to make Whellerby Hall the top conference
venue in the north, and the centre will be a step towards that. It's a good
idea,' I added. I rather liked the sound of Lord Whellerby. I hadn't met him
yet, but I got the impression that he was astute and sensible—unlike his estate
manager!

George had been following my gaze, rocking back on his heels as
he studied the site thoughtfully. The breeze ruffled his hair and set it
glinting where it caught the sunlight. In spite of the muddy boots and worn
Guernsey, he looked as if he were modelling for a country sports catalogue.

‘He had to do something,' he said frankly. ‘These stately homes
are expensive to keep up. Roly nearly passed out when he saw the first heating
bill!'

‘Does Lord Whellerby know you call him Roly?' I asked
disapprovingly. In spite of his regular requests for progress reports, he had
never visited the site, apparently happy to appoint the laid-back George as his
go-between.

‘We were at school together,' George said. ‘He's lucky if Roly
is all I call him!'

‘Oh.' I was disconcerted. ‘I'd imagined an older man.'

‘No, he's thirty-two. He never expected to inherit Whellerby.
The last Lord Whellerby was his great-uncle, and he had a son and a grandson who
were groomed to take over the estate in due course. But they had a whole string
of family tragedies and Roly was pitched into the middle of things.'

‘It must have been difficult for him,' I said, still trying to
picture Lord Whellerby as a young man instead of the experienced landowner I'd
imagined.

‘It was. This is a big estate. It was a lot to take on, and
Roly had never even lived in the country before. He had no experience and he was
frankly terrified. I don't blame him,' said George.

‘Oh.' The breeze was pushing in some clouds, I noticed
worriedly. It kept blowing my hair around my face and I wished I'd taken the
time to plait it. My hair, by the way, is another bane of my life. It is fine
and straight and brown and I can't do anything with it other than let it hang
there.