Pride and Privilege: a hilarious, hot, and heartwarming office romcom (Entitled Love: The Novels)

Prologue

“I wouldn’t,” Aubrey advised Roscoe, but though he realised he was staring, Roscoe couldn’t drag his eyes from the redhead across the bar in the sofa booth. Surely he had seen her before?

But he wouldn’t have forgotten. She had an old-fashioned sort of beauty. Porcelain skin and tumbling, flowing red hair. One of those pre-Raphaelites, a Rossetti, all harps and flowers. Ophelia in the water. Or—

That’swhy she looked familiar. The painted ceiling of the entrance hall at Conyers House, his family’s country seat. There was a red-haired muse, and she looked exactly like this girl.

Someone shouldered past him. It was Friday night, and the bar was packed with the usual after work crowd. The motion jolted him from his thoughts. Faintly embarrassed, he turned to the man standing next to him. “Why not?”

Aubrey Ford, around eight years older than Roscoe, was technically his boss. Tall, dark, and ironic, he was also Roscoe’s closest friend at work. He laughed slightly. “Spoke to her in the lift once. Strangest five minutes of my life.”

“Oh?”

With the hand that wasn’t holding his drink, Aubrey sketched a line through the air as though conjuring a vast horizon. “Imagine the glorious sight of me turning on the charm. Smiles. Smoulder. Compliments. She asked me if I thought quantitative portfolio management was going to put me out of a job one day.”

Roscoe laughed. But his attention returned to the girl. It had never really left. She was sitting with a few other women who looked vaguely familiar. “But she does work for us? Why have I never seen her before?”

“Probably because she has regular human features instead of a fund analysis for a head. The only time you’re not working is when you’re in this bar. And she, as far as I know, has never actually come out for after work drinks before.”

“What is she? Research? Compliance? Risk?”

Aubrey shrugged. “Business support? Or the girls she’s with are. That’s your father’s EA, isn’t it?” He nodded to an older woman sitting near the redhead.

“Liz,” confirmed Roscoe. He smiled at Aubrey. “It’d only be polite for me to go over and say hello, don’t you think?”

But as Roscoe slid into the booth next to the redhead after some inconsequential words to Liz, he took one look at her bleary smile and reevaluated his plans for the evening. She was drunk. Far too drunk to try and take home. That really wasn’t his style. Shouldn’t be anyone’s style. The redhead gave a laugh while Roscoe subtly tried to get the attention of a passing bartender for some water.

“I feel like I should ask for your autograph,” she said.

Roscoe looked back at her, reevaluating again. She had a strong East End accent—what he would call Cockney—and she was quite clearly laughing at him. He didn’t mind the accent. It just took him by surprise, not being one he often heard in the day-to-day course of his life. But, together with the way she was slurring her words, it made her hard to understand.

He leant closer, watching her lips as she said, “Goldy, Goldy, the famous RB Goldy. Is that how you’d sign it, Goldy Golden Boy of BlacktonGold?”

He had no trouble deciphering that last part. The nickname was irritatingly familiar. He smiled amiably despite his growing reservations. “I’d probably sign it Roscoe. As that’s my name.”

She leant towards him and poked him painfully in the shoulder. “Roscoe Blackton.”

“Yes,” he said, smile somewhat fixed. “I’m aware.”

“Your dad owns the whole company.”

He just smiled again and looked around rather desperately for that bartender, spotting her heading back to the bar with a tray of empties. He waved her over. “Some water for this table. Please.”

The bartender nodded, eyes slipping to the redhead in understanding. She was oblivious to the exchange, ruby lips clamped around a small black straw, noisily attempting to suck the last vestiges of whatever cocktail she’d had from the crushed ice at the bottom of her glass. She poked the straw around with a moue of disappointment then giggled to herself and whispered, “Hit and missed. Brahms and Liszt. Elephant’s trunk, drunk.”

Roscoe smiled at that, because despite the apparent disdain for his familial connections, she was still exceptionally pretty. And, more to the point, he was beginning to suspect she was slightly weird. He had a soft spot for eccentrics. Was probably one himself, though he hid it well.

She put her glass clumsily down on the table then looked up at him, eyes widening. “Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Roscoe Blackton.”

“Erm. Yes?”

Just how drunk was she? He looked past her to Liz—or rather, where Liz had been sitting. They were now alone at the table.

“You were an agenda item at today’s big hush-hush board meeting.” She laughed again. “I spent an hour last night photocopying things with your name on.”

“You have the advantage of me. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

She chuckled, poking the ice in her glass again, seeming to enjoy the act of turning it into a slushy mess. “Of course you don’t know my name.”

“But I’d like to.”

Now she snorted. Roscoe couldn’t help but look over at Aubrey, wondering if his friend had maybe given him fair warning after all. But the man was busy in conversation with one of the willowy blondes from Legal. Roscoe gave them a rather wistful look before turning back to his drunk.

“If I tell you my name…” She paused with a breath of laughter, running her eyes over him as though doubting he was real. She seemed a hair’s breadth from poking him again, just to make sure. “If I tell you my name, there’s something you need to understand first.”

“OK…?”

“I was born in early November.”

He nodded politely, because she said it with the absolute conviction of its importance.

“And my mother is…my mother.”

He nodded again, wondering where the hell that bartender had got to with the water.

“My name…” She paused. Laughed. “My name is Poppy…Fields.”

Roscoe tried to keep a straight face. She held his eyes, watched him lose the fight, her own laugh bubbling over in response. “See?”

“I do see. Yes.” He attempted to smooth out his grin, though the corner of his mouth stayed crooked, not helped by the amused light dancing back at him in her eyes. “Did she just happen to see a midwife wearing a poppy, do you think?”

“It was the registrar!”

He laughed again. “And he didn’t see fit to point out the…ah…full implications of the name?”

“Oh, no, he did. But according to legend—or my grandad, which is sort of the same thing—my mum said, ‘I’m bloody knackered, I’m not coming up with anything else now.’”

“And so the remarkable Poppy Fields came to be,” intoned Roscoe, grinning with her.

For a moment her smiling eyes held his. They were the brightest blue he’d ever seen, even unfocused and hazed with drink. Shockingly blue against the red of her hair. Or that’s how it felt anyway, every time they caught his. Like a small electric shock. Then the bartender finally arrived with a jug of iced water and glasses. Roscoe thanked her. He poured a glass and pushed it in front of Poppy. “I think you should drink some of this.”

She shook her head resolutely. “Never accept drinks from strange men in bars.”

“It’s water, not Rohypnol. Here, look.” He picked up the glass and took a long swallow, then put it down again in front of her. “Just water, I promise. Or I can get you an unopened bottle of mineral water from the bar?”

But she was giving him an amused look, water apparently forgotten. She seemed to be trying not to laugh, her head tilted, eyes darting up to him then away. “Can I…touch it?”

“What?” he asked, startled.

“Your hair. Is it real?”

“My hair? Of course it’s real.”

“It’s just so soft and wavy and luscious and caramel-looking.”

He stared at the woman. He was as vain as any man talking to an attractive woman—any man who knew his body and his clothes and his entire demeanour were all part of the role he played at work. The successful city boy. Not the coke-snorting reprobates of the eighties, but the new breed: competent, smart, collected. Guys who had all their shit together and were perfectly able to handle multi-million-pound portfolios without breaking a sweat. And get in two hours at the gym. And eat well. And dress right. And get on with everyone. And charm more millions out of clients.

Invest with me. I’m made of the right stuff.

But his dominant emotion at that moment was a sort of cringing disbelief. What on earth…? Besides, of the two of them, she was the one with the fantastic hair. A rich, red sheet with a slight wave that tumbled halfway down her back and spilled over her shoulders, vivid against her white blouse. He suspected she wore it up at work, that she was quite literally letting her hair down tonight. How would it look spread over his pillow? Wrapped around his fingers? His eyes traced the wide, high cheekbones of her face, the perfect Cupid’s bow of her mouth, dipped down to her simple white blouse, only the top two buttons undone—

His gaze flicked back up, and she was watching him, still smiling to herself, biting her lip to hold back a laugh as she reached out and pushed her fingers into his hair.

Goosebumps poured down his spine. Her fingertips scraped over his scalp, and he felt it everywhere. She made a small noise, a tiny grunt of appreciation, and he felt that in the inevitable place. She took her hand away, laughing. “Oh my God, just like I imagined.”

He smiled, pretending that his heart wasn’t pounding, that he wasn’t desperate to grab her hand and bring it straight back.

“You imagined, huh?”

She snort-laughed and clapped a hand over her mouth. “No.”

His smile deepened. “And what else did you imagine?”

She shook her head. “Mainly your family’s tax avoidance strategies over the last hundred years.”

“What?”

“Shit. No.”

He sat back, bewildered. She sat back, too, hands braced on the table, looking down at the sticky wood as she said with slow, surprised emphasis, “I. Am. So. Drunk.”

How had Aubrey described his first meeting with Poppy Fields?

Strangest five minutes of his life.