When She Was Bad... (34 page)

Lita pulled out a clipping and handed it to him. She had cut it neatly, he noticed, and it was as carefully preserved as though it had been a banker’s draft. Her steely determination shone through in everything she did.

‘This guy. Jocelyn Wilson.’

‘Does he know that?’ Edward asked mildly, with one of those flashes of perception that she found so unsettling.

‘He will.’ Lita drained her champagne glags and leaned into him, brushing her nipples, tight under the fabric of her dress, against his shirt. She took his glass from him and kissed him, those thick, plump lips capturing his, her tongue darting across his mouth like it was on a search-and-destroy mission. ‘Come on, let’s go to bed.’

Jocelyn Wilson’s offices were located in a nondescript, attractive building in St James’s Street in Piccadilly, near Hatchard’s and all the

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exclusive shirt-makers and cobblers that Edward liked to buy his clothes and shoes at. It reeked of quiet money. Old-fashioned money. Not the kind of money that liked to hire twenty-something Latina girls from New York.

Lita had walked past it twice. Research. Knowing what the client was all about was an essential part of advertising. She had gone down to Companies House and pulled the annual reports of both Lancaster Holdings and Wilson Shipping. Then, from her house, she had put calls back to the New Wave offices in New York. Janice managed to dig out UK press clippings through their contacts in the media, and Lira spent a weekend reading up on Rebecca, Rupert and their little family empire.

It must be great to be born with a goddamn silver spoon, she thought bitterly as she flicked through the inky pages. Lord Lancaster beaming out at her from the decks of yachts, lounging next to his P,.olls-Royce .. Rebecca throwing a ball at her vast country estate, full of snobs with titles and fur coats. She saw the reporting of the split. Like other people gave a damn about their pathetic love lives. Lita was only sorry Rupert Lancaster had disappeared. The Daily Mail said he was in St Moritz, skiing. She expected he was out there trying to weasel cash out of some other Eurotrash sugar mommies. But in the meantime, she had Rebecca Lancaster, who obviously had never had to work a day in her life.

Painstakingly, Lita pieced Rebecca’s life together. Aristocratic parents, inherits a mansion and a fortune in infancy, swans off to the States. Lita knew gifts like her. Boston Brtihmins in the Hamptons, never working, playing tennis all summer with little white sweaters knotted around their necks and diamond bracelets dangling from their wrists. Her colour rose as she read up on the Honourable Rebecca Lancaster and thought of her own start, cleaning Pappy’s tiny apartment obsessively because it was the or@ way to keep the roaches out. And dragging herself up by her bootstraps in advertising, to the point where she ran her own small firm. Of course, there had been nothing like that for Miss Lancaster. She had swanned straight into a CEO job in Daddy’s baby conglomerate, and then let her dissolute titled boyfriend run it into the ground.

Lita wasn’t fooled by the small amount of good press Lancaster had gotten recently. This Mr Stone, not Becky, seemed to be responsible for some cost-cutting measures, but judging by all the earlier postmortems the British press had published, it was going to be too little, too late. Jocelyn Wilson had never lost a target yet. And she would see to it that he didn’t lose this one.

The thought of Rebecca, standing at the top of the stairs,

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dispassionately watching as she sobbed her heart out in front of tLupert, burned in her belly like pure acid.

Well, she had waited for years. And now it was time to get even.

It took Lita almost a full week to get an appointment with Wilson. This wasn’t surprising. The man was a workaholic, filling every moment of his day with business. He liked to delegate everything, too. But Lita wasn’t going to take a chance on being turned down by some faceless suit. She would make her pitch to Wilson alone.

He finally agreed to give her ten minutes at 4.40 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Lita chose a sober, tailored suit in dark green, with a skirt that came to just over the knee, and a pair of neat low-heeled shoes, together with Wolford hose and light, fresh make-up. She twisted her hair up in a French pleat in an attempt to make herself look older and added a pair of neat pearl studs. Lita wanted Jocelyn Wilson to see her as a kindred spirit. True, he was upper class, like the Lancasters, but unlike them he’d been born poor. A father who’d been a degenerate gambler meant that his room had had to work at low-paid, back-breaking .jobs to support the family, including being a shop girl. Now, instead of serving at Harrods, she shopped there. Wilson had skipped university to start earning money right away. And he’d been very good at it.

Lira admired him. He hadn’t let the recession and strikebound Britain’s industrial woes slow him down. She knew he didn’t deal with a lot of businesswomen, but she preferred to suppose he was open minded.

It all depended on whether he’d think she could make him some money.

She had prepared as well as she could. She had a briefcase full of clippings, previous campaigns from New York and costings. She had planned every aspect of this meeting right down to the scent she was going to wear. Now she sat in his outer office on a mahogany chair, her heart thudding at a million miles an hour.

Wilson’s fifty-something Scottish secretary, terribly prim and proper in tweeds, came to fetch her. Her voice had the quiet solemnity of a librarian.

‘Miss Morales? Mr Wilson will see you now.’

Showtime.

2o7

‘You’ll appreciate, Miss Morales, that it’s very unusual for me to be discussing my business with …’

Wilson, a fifty-something guy in an immaculate suit, gestured at Lita. His office was everything she had expected - sober, with dark red wallpaper and oil paintings on the wall, the desk a dark, glossy wood,

the chair she was sitting on black leather.

‘A young woman?’ Lita supplied.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you one of the women’s libbers, Miss Morales?’

Lita shrugged. ‘My only cause is my company. New Age is a small agency, Mr Wilson, but we have a prestigious client list owing to my previous work for Doheny Inc. in Manhattan …’

He coughed gently. ‘I know your bona tides, Miss Morales, or I wouldn’t have agreed to meet you. In fact, our ferry route to Scandinavia has lost a little market share recently, which is an unacceptable state of affairs, and providing your fees are substantially lower than your competitors’ I am prepared to consider a pitch for that account.’

‘Substantially lower?’

‘You’ll need to take a fee dip in exchange for establishing yourself on this side of the Atlantic, which I presume you. are in a hurry to do.’

Lira grinned before she could stop herself. Cheeky bastard. She liked the way he thought.

‘If you will allow me, Mr Wilson, I would prefer to make a counterproposal. It relates to the bid you recently announced for Lancaster Holdings.’

‘I hardly need advertising for that,’ he said dismissively.

‘Sir,’ Lira said, slightly nervously, ‘if you will allow me to present my proposal, I can wind up this meeting in less than eight minutes.’

He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers, indicating that she could go on.

‘Lancaster Holdings is a slightly unusual case for your company. They are making a small profit, they have financing in place, they are looking

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to sell and slash costs. Presented well, it might appear to the shareholders as though hanging on to the stock would be worthwhile, even though they haven’t paid dividends for years. You are looking to buy at an extreme discount. You have also not lost a takeover yet. Your reputation causes smaller outfits to simply fold in their cards and sell to you.’

Wilson raised an eyebrow minutely. She could see he was impressed. She ploughed on.

‘Thus, going after Lancaster is a risky proposition for you. You could gain a company very cheaply, a bigger target than your previous ones. Or you could lose your invincible reputation. Something to be avoided at all costs.’

‘Not at all costs, Miss Morales. I take costs very seriously. I don’t like them.’

‘Understandable, sir. Your key to this deal, then, is persuading the stockholders that the Lancaster reorganization is like arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They can get rid of the pain and misery of endless loss-making company reports by simply selling to you at your reasonable offer. They must be convinced that the Lancaster restructuring effort is

doomed. I can help you with that.’

‘How?’

‘Mr Wilson, corporate public relations is limited. It usually involves pictures of a chairman next to a giant cheque his company has donated to some charity or other, preparing a report, or possibly organizing sponsorship of some sporting event. I propose to do something different for you. Attack PIK. I will find out, and I will make sure the press finds out, every problem in existence with Lancaster, their holdings, their unions and their executives.’

‘And how do you know there are problems?’

‘There are always problems,’ Lira said. ‘If I go to the union foreman in their shipyards, he could help me look for them. If I ask pointed questions about spending at the company’s public meeting, I can create some. There are always plenty of problems. The interest rate is a problem.’

‘You are an advertising agency.’

‘That’s true. But we’re branching into pubiic relations. It will help us to start with a high-profile success.’

‘And how do you know you’ll be successful?’

Lita thought Wilson had a slight twinkle in his eye. Th corners of his mouth twitched slightly.

‘I just know it,’ she said firmly. ‘And here’s the best part. It won’t cost you anything.’

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He blinked, looking surprised for the first time since she had walked into his office.

‘We’ll charge you expenses, of course. But that’s all. And what we get out of it, if you get the company, is an exclusive contract to represent

you for one year. At whatever you are currently paying your ad agency.’ ‘Less five per cent,’ Wilson said.

It took Lira a second to realize he was actually agreeing to it. ‘Yes,’ she said, trying hard not to smile. ‘Less five per cent.’

‘I was taken,’ Jocelyn Wilson told her when he took her out to dinner at Claridge’s that night, ‘by the fact that you knew so much about my company. Usually, advertising agencies only brush up on the project.’

‘I believe in preparation.’

‘Try the smoked salmon to start with, why don’t you? I think it’s some of the best in the world. And a bottle of Krug.’ He handed his

menu to the waiter. ‘The usual, please.’

‘Very good, Mr Wilson. Madam?’

‘Oh, I’ll have the grouse,’ Lita said, enjoying the soft candlelight and the pianist softly rippling out ragtime jazz. Not to mention the air of quiet luxury everywhere. When they weren’t being patronizing assholes, she liked the English.

I could get used to this, she thought.

‘I know you believe in preparation. That’s why I’m letting you try

this.’ ,

‘And because we’re free.’

‘That, too.’ He nodded. Wilson kept a couple of very expensive and discreet mistresses in flats in Chelsea. Mentally he compared them to the American girl. They dressed a little better, but no amount of expensive Chanel suits could compensate for her sensational tits, handspan waist and perfect curvy arse. The sober thing she was wearing couldn’t hide any of it. Of course, she was achingly young. He indulged in a brief fantasy of Lita straddling him, her breasts bouncing, heavy, still firm, dark-nippled. Mmm. Of course, he would never say anything. Business was business. You could get high-end call gifts anywhere, but the money that paid for them was more valuable. And Morales made some excellent points.

After she left, Jocelyn Wilson had called a few people in the States. She was quite well known in New York, though Doheny was trying to blacken her name. On Madison Avenue, he was told, Ogilvy &T Mather had already tried to buy out her fledgling agency. It was true that he was taking a risk, going after Lancaster. But maybe she could help. She was

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aggressive and pushy, but that was the seventies woman, wasn’t it, at least in America.

‘What do you know about Lancaster?’ he asked, squeezing the lemon wedge over his fish.

‘Quite a bit. I think your best asset there is Rebecca Lancaster.’

‘The heiress. She seems to have done reasonably well in turning the company around.’

His companion leaned over the table, her heavy-lidded eyes narrowing dangerously. ‘She dated a playboy, she’s in her twenties, she’s practically a foreigner, she has no business experience, and she’s just the latest scion of the family that spent this company into the ground. She’s a liability.’

‘You’re in your twenties, Miss Morales.’

Lita smiled wickedly. ‘Ah, Mr Wilson, but I’m not front and centre here. She is. At least, for as long as she opposes this takeover.’

He nodded. ‘Well, the bridging loan they received recently is

designed to let them sell off some tin mines in Cornwall.’ ‘That won’t happen.’ ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lira told him, ‘but I’m going to find out.’

‘What will you need, do you think?’

Lira grinned. She had already thought about this. ‘Space in your offices, about five of your analysts, and a large enough budget to entertain any journalist I want to, lavishly.’

‘You have it,’ Jocelyn Wilson said, without hesitation. He took a sip of his champagne, delighted. He suddenly had a very good feeling about his investment.

‘There has to be something we can do,’ Becky said.

She felt physically sick. Nothing so far had prepared her for this kind of onslaught. Not the bitter negotiations with the unions, not relocating the company and selling the London offices, not even firing all those extraneous workers and executives. All the late nights with Ken Stone and his team of financial lKottweilers had toughened her up. Or so she’d thought. But the attack from Wilson Shipping had been vicious, swift and thorough.