CHAPTER FOUR
“YOUCAN’TSTEAL from clients, Felicity.” Her supervisor, Luz, was dark red beneath her normally light brown complexion.
“I didn’t steal,” Fliss argued weakly. “It was in the bin.”
But it had been wrong to take the invitation. She had known it was wrong when she’d taken it out of the bin. And when she’d stuck it in her handbag. She had been dead wrong to put it in her clutch and carry that wretched card to the art gallery.
She wanted to sink through the floor with humiliation and guilt that she’d ever even noticed the darned thing.
“You’ve cost me a good client.” Luz’s voice rang with anger. “You know I can’t keep you on.”
“I know,” Fliss mumbled, feeling sick.
For three days, she had thought she had gotten away with her futile attempt to advance herself. Photos of her with Saint had turned up online, but none had shown her face very well, so no one had recognized her.
Then, this morning, she’d been told to report here to Luz before starting her shift at a luxury flat in Chelsea. Fliss had known immediately that her dark deed had come to light. Her stomach had begun to churn.
“Did you really have sex with Saint Montgomery?” Luz hissed.
“What?” That knocked Fliss back in her chair. “Why do you think that?”
“Because he’s Saint Montgomery. You went to his hotel with him, then he tried to send you earrings through Delia Chevron. You left them in his room, I presume?” Luz elevated her brows with disdain.
“What? No.” She touched her earlobe, which was naked, but she had definitely come home with the hoops she’d worn to the gala. She was deeply confused. “I don’t know anything about any earrings. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Which is what Delia said. She pieced together that someone had attended the gala with an invitation addressed to her and had her team investigate how you came by it.”
“I didn’t pretend to be her,” Fliss rushed to assert. She had only implied she was Delia’s plus-one, then had been shuffled off to the side to wait for her. She didn’t explain that Saint was the one who had actually brought her into the gallery. “He hasn’t called you, has he? Did you give him my number?”
Luz glared outrage at her.
“I’m not saying you should,” Fliss mumbled. Where was astral traveling when you really needed it? She would give anything not to be inhabiting her body in this profoundly mortifying moment.
“I’m really disappointed in you, Felicity. I thought you were someone I could count on. Your final pay will go into your account overnight. I cannot give you a reference, but I wish you well in future.” Luz straightened a stack of papers that didn’t need straightening, signaling this discussion was over.
“I’m genuinely sorry, Luz.” Fliss rose. She was tongue-tied, unable to find anything more to say that wasn’t full out groveling.
Her only hope was that this incident wouldn’t follow her around like a bad smell, the way those awful rumors started by her old boyfriend had.
She went home and, since her workday had barely started, pulled up her CV on her ancient laptop. She was immediately disheartened. Scrubbing toilets was her top skill these days, but without a reference she wasn’t even fit for that. The fashion design route was even further out of reach.
She couldn’t waste time on berating herself, though. There would be ample time for that later. For now, she needed to make rent.
Perhaps she should go back to school. It was months until September, though.
Fliss looked around her room with its chipped sill and saggy bed and toilet down the hall. It wasn’t much, but it had enough space for her sewing machine and table, her form and a tall, cardboard wardrobe where she stored her finished creations.
She could sell those, she supposed, but that would be counterproductive to her aspirations. Plus, experience had taught her that she would be lucky to earn back the cost of the fabric, especially when she was in a hurry to sell. She rarely got enough to cover her many hours of labor.
As for the gown, she could barely look at it.
She was both appalled and elated when she thought about her night with Saint. Nearly everything about it had been perfect, from the way he’d swept her into the glamor of the gala, then taken her for such a fancy dinner. She’d felt like Cinderella. Maybe she hadn’t been fully on his level socially and financially, but she hadn’t felt as far away as this life put her.
And the sex. If that was what she’d been missing all this time, she had a newfound contempt for her old boyfriend for making her think sex was something you worked up the courage to offer someone. With Saint, there’d been surprisingly little awkwardness. She had reveled in sharing herself with him. He’d been equally generous with his body and kisses and skill.
When she’d awakened in that wide bed on those luxurious sheets, she’d been pleasantly sore all over, feeling as though she’d hiked to a challenging peak and was brimming with accomplishment. As though she’d won the lottery and could live her life on her own terms from now on.
The first knock of reality had arrived when she had discovered she was alone.
Saint had warned her that he’d had an early flight, so she had tried not to let his disappearance bother her, but it had felt a bit tawdry that he’d slipped away without saying goodbye. She’d splurged on a car share rather than a walk of shame on the tube. She had been home and emptying her clutch before she’d found the number he’d scrawled with Call me on the back of the invitation that bore Delia Chevron’s name.
Chagrin had wormed into her at that point, boring holes in her midsection. Fliss hadn’t lied to him about who she was. She hadn’t dropped Delia’s name to impress him, but his knowing that she’d possessed that card made her reluctant to text the number he’d given her. If she were a student at this point, she might have felt more confident in connecting with him again, but she was now an unemployed housekeeper and she didn’t have a good way to explain that card.
She peered into the nightstand drawer where she had left it, keeping his note like a war bride holding on to a love letter. Should she text and ask What is this about earrings?
Oh, God. He wasn’t trying to pay her, was he?
Thatfelt tawdry. Sex work was fine for people who chose it, but she was ultrasensitive to how she was perceived sexually, especially when it was a wrong impression. Had he thought that was what her motive had been in going to that gala? Did he think she’d been trolling for a sugar daddy?
Fliss buried her face in her hands, ready to do anything to go back in time and not take that card!
Which would mean she wouldn’t have the memory of those few magical hours with him.
No. She dropped her hands from her face. Much as she regretted how things had turned out at work, she didn’t regret that night. Saint had helped her discover a passion she hadn’t known she could feel. It had been a wonderful experience and now it was over and that left her wistful, but fine. She would suffer the consequence of her impulsive theft of that card, find another job and never see him again. Her boring little life would go on.
She believed that right up until her phone rang the next day. It was a reporter for one of the tabloids.
“Are you the Felicity Corning who was with Saint Montgomery last weekend?”
“People keep asking me for a statement. This is my statement,” Delia Chevron said on her social media reel.
Saint took the phone from Willow to watch the slender brunette with a wide mouth and eyelids that sat at a bored half-mast.
“I’ve never met Saint Montgomery or Felicity Corning. She was working for a housekeeping agency and took an invitation from my home that she used to get into the gala. The next day, Mr. Montgomery tried to send earrings to her, through me. This alerted me to the theft. My security team recommended I end my contract with the agency, so I have. That’s all I know. Don’t ask me for dirt on any of them. I don’t have any.”
“I do.” Julie had spliced Delia’s statement into the front of her own so the video cut to her in the back of a car. She wore a ponytail and yoga clothes to give the impression this was an impromptu reaction, but she wore full make-up and he would bet his encryption software that she was getting paid to wear that brand.
“This is how he operates,” Julie told the viewer. “He’ll sleep with anyone, even a light-fingered housekeeper. And the earrings? Judging from where they were purchased, they’re worth at least two hundred thousand pounds. In fact, they were probably purchased for me. I was meant to attend that gala with him. He told me he’d have something pretty for me to wear, then he dumped me. For her. Although I wouldn’t doubt he was trying to get Delia’s attention. Watch out, girlfriend. That man is a playa...”
Saint swore and clicked off the phone, handing it back to Willow.
“I’m going to have to take legal action against her, aren’t I?” he muttered.
“Who?”
“What do you mean ‘who’? The woman destroying my reputation,” Saint snapped.
Willow drew a breath and held it, as though still at a loss.
He swore again. “The woman who is intentionally destroying my reputation for the paycheck she’s earning off her viral clicks.” Although all of these women were contributing to this debacle in their own special way. He couldn’t blame Willow for not being sure which one was causing him the most irritation. “Did you send the apology to Delia?”
“With a gift basket and an offer to cover her PR costs.”
“Good. And Ms. Smythe?”
“Has the earrings. You’re not out of pocket. She has also received a gift basket and some tickets for an opening in the West End as compensation for her trouble. I had the sense that future calls from you might go to voicemail.”
No doubt. Saint scratched his eyebrow. How had one night turned into this?
“What about Fliss? Any word from her?” He braced himself as he picked up his phone to look for a text, not sure what kind of reaction he expected from her. Something that monetized her own notoriety? Blame for the attention that had fallen onto her? An apology for not being completely honest with him?
Nothing. Not even a redirection for delivery of the earrings.
“Her socials have been switched to private,” Willow said. “She hasn’t returned to the house in London. Her housemates are quoted as not knowing where she went.”
Fliss had been photographed leaving her home five days ago, when gossip from her coworkers had leaked to the press. She’d since found a good place to hide because she wasn’t turning up online. That was both a relief and a frustration for Saint.
He didn’t love that she’d hidden so much about who she really was, but she hadn’t been outright dishonest, either.
Are we prevaricating?
I’m out of my league.
He was dismayed to hear she’d stolen from a client’s home. It was too much like Julie’s laptop snooping for his comfort. It made him wonder if Fliss was hiding from paparazzi while she negotiated the best way to capitalize on her night with him—the way Julie had.
“I did find some background on her that was...concerning,” Willow continued.
“I’ve seen what the trolls are saying,” Saint grumbled.
“They claim to be childhood friends.”
“Friends don’t say things like that about friends.” And who cared if she’d had an active sex life? So had he.
No, those rumors bothered him for a different reason. They didn’t fit with the inexperience she’d expressed.
I’ve always wondered how these things were handled.
If she was as practiced as those rumors suggested, he would have expected less bashfulness, more assertiveness. She’d been enthusiastic as hell while they’d been making love, which was the part that really mattered, but maybe playing an ingenue was her kink?
Role-play was fine, too, but he hated feeling gullible. He didn’t want to believe he’d fallen for an act when he’d been fully involved and as real as he could be for those few hours.
He didn’t want to question his own acuity when his father and the board were already doing that for him.
Saint’s phone rang. He glanced to see that it was his father and muttered another curse under his breath.
“I’m talking to the lawyers right now,” he said in lieu of a greeting, then rolled his wrist at Willow to get on it. He wouldn’t out Julie for her gambling addiction, but... “I’ll have them threaten a defamation suit if she doesn’t cease and desist.”
Ted ignored that. “Your mother is asking why you have two hundred thousand pounds for a prostitute’s earrings—”
“She is not—”
“But I won’t bankroll another thoroughbred. Make that go away.” His father ended the call.
“Fuuuun...” Saint groaned at the ceiling, crushing his phone in his grip. He was tempted to throw it against the wall.
“Tell Legal to inform Julie that I will pursue industrial espionage charges if she doesn’t keep my name out of her mouth,” he told Willow. He reached for the extra-strength acetaminophen in his desk drawer and swallowed two before he tapped his mother’s number. “Interrupt me in ten minutes with a life-or-death emergency.”
“Mrs. Bhamra? I’m back,” Fliss called over the Bollywood musical playing on the senior’s television.
She was later than usual, having picked up a few things on her way home and detoured to view a bedsit. She loved being here. It was almost like being home with Granny, but it had been more than two weeks. She didn’t want to overstay her welcome.
Mrs. Bhamra had become Granny’s best friend back when the pair had been young widows raising their children on their wages from the lace factory. They had lost their jobs at the same time when the factory had closed but had continued to bolster each other through the rest of life’s ups and downs—job changes and weddings and grandchildren, Granny’s loss of her son and Mrs. Bhamra’s battle with breast cancer.
The pair had had a standing date twice a month where they drank tea and exchanged gossip, romance novels and knitting patterns. Mrs. Bhamra had teased Granny about her belief in psychics, and Granny had complained that Mrs. Bhamra’s curry was too spicy. Otherwise, they’d been stamped from the same mold, or so Granny had always said.
As they’d both aged, Fliss had moved back into Granny’s modest flat while Mrs. Bhamra had moved to the upscale Mapperley Park, where her son had converted a coach house into a sunny bungalow. It was one floor so she didn’t have to climb stairs and had a guest bedroom that her sister used when she visited from Canada. The front window looked onto the landscaped garden where a bridge crossed a pond before its path continued to the steps of the mansion that was the main house.
When Fliss had turned up in the Daily Mail next to Saint Montgomery, Mrs. Bhamra had called to ask if the photograph was really her. Since Fliss had been on the verge of hysteria, realizing she was in far worse trouble than simply losing her job, she’d come as clean as she would have to Granny.
Mrs. Bhamra had offered her guest room, much to the chagrin of her son, Ujjal. He wasn’t 100 percent thrilled to have Fliss here. He knew as well as she did that the paps would figure out where she was eventually, especially now that she was leaving the house to go to work.
The job was janitorial work for an assisted living facility, thanks to Ujjal making a call, but it was a foot in the door. They were desperate for care aids, too. Fliss could attain her certificate with only a few courses, and that would improve her pay. She was actively looking for her own place, planning to be on her own again very soon.
Provided, of course, that this persistent tummy bug was actually a tummy bug and not what she was starting to suspect it was.
“You worked late today,” Mrs. Bhamra said as she muted the television.
“I stopped to buy a few things for dinner.” Fliss shrugged out of the baggie hoodie she wore whenever she went out, adding sunglasses like every poorly disguised criminal on the run in every heist movie. “Let me change and wash up, then I’ll get started.”
“You don’t have to cook for me,” Mrs. Bhamra protested. She often ate at the house with her family or her daughter-in-law brought a plate if it was a gloomy day and Mrs. Bhamra preferred to stay here.
“I want to.” Fliss might’ve been borderline destitute, but she drew the line at imposing on the elderly woman’s family. She ate groceries she bought, sharing as often as she could but mostly subsisting on peanut butter toast.
If her suspicions were correct, she needed to start eating more vegetables and probably get some special vitamins.
“Do you know I’ve been thinking of your grandmother all day?” Mrs. Bhamra mused.
“Oh?” Fliss paused in starting toward her room. “I did a reading this morning. I must have conjured her, and she decided to stay and watch your shows with you.”
“Pfft.” Mrs. Bhamra waved that away with amusement. “I did watch a very nice travel program that she would have enjoyed. The host was some fool traveling around the world. He started at the Eiffel Tower, forgot his sunscreen in Australia, got himself stung by a scorpion in America. Did you know they had those there?”
“Scorpions? No.” Fliss pushed a smile onto her lips, but her heart began thudding so hard she grew lightheaded.
The three cards she’d pulled this morning had all been from the Major Arcana—the Sun, the Tower, and the Fool. They were such a powerful combination, she’d barely functioned all day, trying to work out what they meant.
As if the universe was trying to be subtle. The Fool represented blind faith, but it might as well have been a hand mirror. She was the fool. The Tower indicated unexpected events. It showed a tower being struck by lightning, throwing two people plummeting to the ground. She was definitely in freefall, but she hadn’t meant to cause Saint’s downfall along with her own.
Finally, the Sun indicated the beginning of a new life cycle. Given she would have to reinvent herself after losing the life she’d made in London, drawing that particular card made sense. The fact that it showed a naked baby on a horse was just a coincidence. Surely.
“Oh, Granny,” she whispered as she slipped into the powder room. “Help me. Please, please, please.”
She didn’t know what outcome she was praying for as she unpacked the pregnancy test. It seemed ridiculous to even be bothering. She and Saint had used condoms. Yes, they’d had a lot of sex that night, but they’d used condoms.
Still, her cycle had always been regular as clockwork. She had nursed denial for five days, desperately trying to believe the stress of hiding from the press was making her late. That lateness was making her feel queasy. She wasn’t pregnant.
She knew, though. She knew what she would see.
Positive.
How could such a simple procedure, such a thin pale line, upend her life so completely?
As she sat on the closed lid of the toilet staring at the result, she had to fight the pressure of emotive tears that rose behind her eyes.
She knew she had options. She knew that raising a baby alone was hard. Especially when your income was scant and unreliable. At least her grandmother had had a small settlement from the crash that had killed Fliss’s parents. That had helped keep the wolves from the door, but that was long gone to Granny’s final years of care. Fliss didn’t have that sort of cushion. Aside from Mrs. Bhamra, she didn’t have anyone who cared about her, and she’d already taken advantage of the elderly woman enough.
There were social services to help, she knew, but even with assistance she was in for a long and difficult struggle. Her dream of becoming a fashion designer was firmly down the loo. Even finding the sort of job that would support her and a baby would be complicated, given this awful black mark of stealing she had on her record. Then there was the notoriety of the baby’s father.
In response to all the questions about her, Saint had made a statement that he didn’t discuss his private life in the public sphere, but that wasn’t stopping the rest of the world from not only pursuing but also capitalizing on her mistake. She’d seen those awful videos from his other lover, disparaging her as a lowly housekeeper and a thief. There were memes all over the internet about her now, too.
My retainer went missing. The housekeeper wore it to the dentist, pretending to be me. Now my celebrity crush is asking for earrings. #RichPeopleProblems
It was excruciating.
I’m being punished, Granny, I really am.
Fliss felt as though she was being punished for ever having dreams in the first place. She shouldn’t compound her situation by giving the world more reason to mock her. Bringing a baby into this mess she’d made would be a terrible mistake.
And how would Saint react? Blame her? Maybe he’d accuse her of getting herself pregnant on purpose to come after his money, but she had truly believed she was protected.
He had used condoms.
As the reality of her situation began to take hold, everything in her was folding in on itself. Having this baby would be a huge mistake. A disaster. She could see that clear as day.
But deep inside, she imagined she already felt a physical presence, as though the baby was a living, burning glow. It was the spark of connection to Fliss’s parents, whose loss had left her devastated for years. And Granny, who she missed so badly right this minute her eyes began to leak the tears that were brimmed against her lashes.
If she didn’t have this baby—for any reason—she would mourn its loss as deeply as she mourned the rest of her family. This baby was her family. She wanted a child.
This baby was hers. It didn’t matter what anyone thought of her or the father—
She caught her breath, blinking to clear the blur from her vision.
That was it! The paparazzi had interviewed some of her old schoolmates who had revived that awful reputation that she was loose. For once, those rumors might actually serve her. She could claim paternity was a gray area.
Could she? White lies had gotten her into this mess, but at least she had a fresh approach to consider as she carefully put the test back into its packaging and crumpled it inside the bag, checking first that there was no receipt with her name on it. She would toss it into a public dumpster at some point, but for the moment her heart was lighter as she looked forward to her new life, one that included the baby she was going to have.