1. ONE
Poppy Fields—don’t laugh, she couldn’t help it—Poppy Fields didn’t normally regret the weekend being only two days long. It wasn’t that she loved her job, but time at the office was time away from her terrible flat. And away from her even more terrible flatmate, who was known to her acquaintance as Lecherous Dave.
Time spent at work was also time spent using someone else’s water, toilet paper, hand-soap, electricity, and heating/air-conditioning depending on the time of year. Not that her flat had air-conditioning. Or much heating, come to think of it. And maybe being warmed and hydrated on the company’s coin didn’t exactly save her millions each year, but it had to save something. Which was…well…something.
But this Monday came round far too fast. She was barely over her hangover. And, more to the point, this particular Monday followed that particular Friday. The one during which she mauled the company prince. Laughed in his face. Then tripped over her feet getting up from the table. He’d had to grab her elbow to stop her from falling. Her memories were hazy, but she knew he had delivered her to a taxi and quietly folded her sloppy, drunken self inside it. Or maybe it was a company car. Something sleek and black and smelling of money and leather polish that had whisked her home through the pouring London rain in safety and comfort. He must have paid for it, too. She certainly hadn’t. She wouldn’t have been able to. At that particular pinnacle of humiliation on Friday night, she had nineteen pounds and forty-two pence left in her bank account, and precisely twenty-two pence in cold, hard cash.
Thatwas what she had spent the weekend thinking about. Not about—
Roscoe Blackton.
She saw him the moment she stepped out of the lift, right there, across the empty office, with his back—thank God—to the open-plan space as he stood looking into one of the rooms along the side. But he never came to this floor, so why…? Crap, crap… Her limbs froze for a moment, then she scuttled down the other side of the room to Liz’s office, fighting the urge to flee in the opposite direction.
She was furiously hot, heart racing, which was ridiculous. Nothing had happened, and he was only a man, just another one of the rich, privileged, entitled men who were ten a penny in this place, stuffing the upper echelons of BlacktonGold with their posh voices and Oxbridge degrees. Except he was even worse than all the rest of them: the boss’s son, and his whole family actual genuine aristocrats, generations of them, with an enormous stately home and money to make you sick—everyone had read that Wikipedia page, not just her. And yes, he might also be the type of man who got featured in Forbes because he was some kind of financial wunderkind and destined for greatness—was basically born to greatness, had it handed to him on a silver plate—but she didn’t really care what he thought of her. She was only embarrassed because she had embarrassed herself.
“Can I touch your hair?”
The cringe hurt, the memory of mild blue eyes, politely bemused. A movie star jaw, mouth faintly smiling. The soft, silky feeling of his hair…
Could she quit? Run for the lift, never step foot in the building again? Hah. Not a chance. She couldn’t go a day without a job, needed every penny. Dignity was for the rich, anyway. Freedom. Choices. All the liberty money bought. But what she wouldn’t give right now to never see him again…
She was almost at the door to Liz’s office—she shared a little cubicle inside with another admin assistant in George Blackton’s exec team—but she’d be safe there, a door and a cubicle wall between her and the open-plan space where—she risked a glance—Roscoe was still standing across the floor, broad dark-suited shoulder leaning against the door frame. Why was he staring at a presumably empty room?
The lift door opened again, and she jumped at the sound of George Blackton’s voice calling a greeting to his son. She fled into the sanctuary of her cubicle.
Roscoe’s father was very much a traditionalist when it came to his properties. For example, Conyers, their house in the Lancashire countryside, looked much as it had done for the last two hundred years. Even the television in the drawing room was hidden behind a fold-out mahogany panel. And the BlacktonGold offices, though sleek and gleaming and modern, largely eschewed internal glass walls and doors for panelled, pale beech wood. Roscoe suspected his father would have opted for dark oak, if the office’s interior designer had allowed it. In fact, he might have organised the whole building as though it was a Victorian workhouse, row after row of desks with a viewing platform where he could supervise it all, and perhaps swoop down occasionally to whack a flagging worker around the head with a blunt stick. Or perhaps Roscoe was feeling a little bitter, a little petty, as he sat listening to his father in the man’s enormous corner office.
“Don’t get too comfortable in this new role,” he was saying. “I want you taking a more strategic position in the next six to twelve months. Specifically, I want you heading up the new tax advisory department.”
Roscoe glanced out of the window. Metal and glass and an iron-grey sky. The view from his new office was much the same.
“Strategic?” he asked. “Is that why I’m here on the exec floor rather than down on sixth?”
“You like the new office? Much more fitting for your position.”
Did he like his new office? Room 906—it sounded like a prison number—with a vertigo-inducing wall of glass behind the desk, the whole of London dropping away at his back? Its only view out onto other people was a tall, narrow pane to the side of the door. There would be no Aubrey to keep him company. No bustle and life around him. The perfect room to go quietly mad in.
“My new position is Senior Portfolio Manager,” he tried, keeping his tone light. “I would have thought being down on sixth with all the other PMs—”
His father waved a dismissive hand. “It was necessary for appearance’s sake to start you off on the grad programme—treat you like anyone else—but it’s time to wipe the traces of shop floor off you. Let’s remind people who you really are.”
“And that is?”
“A Blackton, of course. Two years setting up this new tax department, and you’ll be ready for the Chief Operating Officer position. Father and son leading BlacktonGold, just the way I always planned it.”
Roscoe nodded slowly. And if the Imperial March from Star Wars started playing in his head, he tried to ignore it. We can rule the galaxy as father and son…
“Tax?” he repeated, vainly hoping he’d misheard.
“It’s the one area we’re uncompetitive on.”
“But…” He stopped himself from saying what first came to mind: But I like portfolio management.
It was the perfect job for him. Not just because it made use of all his skills, his knack for analysis and turning overwhelming data into something meaningful and understood. But because it was useful, too. He enjoyed working with his clients, helping them meet their investment goals, plan their retirements, their children’s savings, their philanthropic aims.
It silenced the little whisper at the back of his mind that sometimes asked, What’s it all for?
Tax. He repeated the word in his mind, trying to find some spark of enthusiasm for the idea. What his father really meant was tax avoidance. Advising their clients on what were euphemistically called tax efficient strategies. It didn’t surprise him that his enthusiasm proved hard to find.
“Don’t get too comfortable in this new role…”
He should have known something like this was coming. Ever since that moment a week ago, sitting in his father’s study at Conyers, in the heart of that enormous old house, the air heavy with the weight of generations of Blacktons, he’d begun to feel a sort of foreboding. His chair had been hard, the horsehair padding ancient. The clink of glasses and his father’s hard-won congratulations should have filled him with joy. There should have been a fire in the tiled fireplace: a crackling, glowing warmth, with the heat of the flames echoing the heat of the whisky in his throat. The warmth in his father’s eyes. But the grate had been empty and cold.
“Don’t get too comfortable…”
Now Roscoe left his father’s office with a sigh, the feeling of foreboding beginning to coalesce into something he tentatively identified as gloom. But as he headed to the lift to go and collect his things from his old desk, he couldn’t help giving a look across the floor to Liz’s office. That’s where she would be, the unforgettable redhead with the unforgettable name. Would she be as strange when sober? Would she ask to touch his—? He laughed to himself at the memory, momentarily forgetting his gloom. It might be fun to be on this floor after all.
Fun—from a distance. That’s all it could be. He’d looked her up on the company personnel system, but similar to the old adage about eavesdroppers never hearing any good of themselves, he hadn’t enjoyed what he’d learnt. She was an administrative assistant in his father’s executive team. And if she was on his father’s own staff, then she was off limits. That was one of many rules branded into the fibre of his being, especially after a memorable family breakfast years ago when a young female member of the housekeeping staff had dumped an entire pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice over his brother Hugo’s head.
His smile faded as quickly as it had come, that gloomy feeling settling around his shoulders again. Rules. Rules and duties and obligations. Sometimes, he’d rather be anything than a Blackton.