Chapter 3 #2
“Yes, we can offset that. Keep all the invoices and receipts, as usual. You might need to lay off a couple of staff.”
“I can take a pay cut,” I gasp out desperately. “I’d rather do that.” My team are so great, I don’t want to lose anyone.
He shakes his head. “Now is not the time for sentimentality. You need to be focused, and if one or two need to go to preserve the rest, that’s how it has to be. What about upping the fees for the community groups who use the building. They’re tiny, especially for London.”
“I’ll think about it, and have a meeting with one or two of the clubs.” He nods, satisfied I’m actually thinking about it. Last time he proposed that I said outright no.
He clears his throat in a suspicious manner. “Did I hear on the grapevine?” He means my dad down the pub, and the cricket club. “That you had a large offer for the building from a developer?”
My mouth curls into a flat line. “I’ve had no offers. I’ve a developer ringing for a meeting, but not any offers. All hearsay.” I’m not lying. The fact I’m avoiding the developer is just semantics.
“Well, for what it’s worth, I’d have a meeting with him.
I’ve met Jude Greystone.” Unbelievably Dad has opened his mouth if Derek knows which developer it is.
“He’s a fair guy. They have a good reputation, if not a bit tenacious.
A bit like you.” He points at me. “It’s a free hit to hear his offer.
If there is one, of course. It would give you another option, and options are what we need right now. ”
I nod, dejected. To be honest, he hasn’t told me anything I didn’t know.
I do my books. I know the profit and loss.
I knew we were haemorrhaging money, and I’ve cut everything down to the bare bones.
Some of my pet projects for the future I’ve given up on, focused on driving up revenue.
And I’ve succeeded. But for every new contract, the increase in cash I take in one hand, I seem to lose with the other.
And the other is Prestige Recruitment Ltd. Nigel and Terry just cannot leave me alone. It’s as if they want to keep me down. So they deliberately steal my clients. Most of them come back once the inducements are over, but it may be too late for me this time. I’ll need to set that meeting.
That evening, I open my laptop sitting on my settee, a glass of crisp cold white wine in my hand.
I don’t normally drink. But after the meeting today, it’s an essential item.
I stare at the images of Jude Greystone.
How can a man who looks like that steal people's buildings?
How can a man who looks like some sort of DC super hero—tousled, gorgeous, dark brown hair, brown eyes with little blue-green flecks in them (I know, because I rolled my mouse over the image and it zoomed in, making the image so big and vivid) want to buy, and then knock down, a lovely functional community building.
His muscular torso was hardly constrained in the dinner suit he was wearing.
Let’s just say he easily stood out in a line up.
If he’d ripped his shirt open, he would have had a superman symbol underneath.
Is that Marvel then? I’ll ask the kids, they’ll know.
I always get my superhero franchises mixed up.
Can’t keep up these days. I stopped being interested at Iron Man.
His stance is so cocky, so fuck you. As if he was shouting at the camera to love him first. And it really did.
The second image is of him dancing with a woman.
I don’t think I’ve ever been held like that.
Not even throughout my marriage in the privacy of my own bedroom.
I’m sure no hands had held me in their thrall, wielded the power that those hands seemed to have on that woman's waist and shoulders. How he’d looked at her.
The intensity in his face. It gives me goosebumps.
How sad that I knew it had never happened to me, no man had ever looked at me in that way.
How much of an ostrich had I been for all those years.
I met Nigel at university. I was Reading English Lit.
He was doing a Business and Finance degree.
Two years older than me, but only in the year ahead, he swept me off my feet.
He finished his degree and stayed for a masters, so we could finish together.
But in my final year, I got pregnant with Oliver.
Struggled on and did my exams, but it wasn’t my main focus.
He was born in July, as I finished exams in June.
Where everyone else was out celebrating, getting drunk, going out for end of year meals, generally running wild, I was tucked up in bed with my feet raised as my blood pressure was high.
Unsurprising, exams and pregnant, a serious double whammy.
A quick, cheap, registry office marriage, and we’d fallen into married life. Eat sleep, kids, mortgage. No time for fun, no time for me or Nigel. And certainly no time for Nigel to look at me like Jude Greystone looked at the woman in the photograph.
A new bride and mother, my husband and I were like passing ships at times.
The only time we spoke was at the dinner table.
Before he went out to meet his friends or colleagues as he tried to climb the greasy pole of his bank's hierarchy.
He said it was also so at least one of us felt like they had a life.
Not sure why it was me that was always at home. Someone had to be.
After a few years of that, Nigel obviously decided my dining table was not exciting enough. And found a new one. Well, good riddance.
I wasn’t even jealous of her, not really.
It was more the shock of the change, my status quo being ripped out from under me.
My worries over how my children would take it.
If I would be able to make ends meet. At no point did I ever cry ‘I love you.’ No.
‘Come home, I love you’ was not a phrase I’d said to him at the time.
‘How could you?’ ‘What were you thinking?’ ‘Why get me pregnant if you knew you wanted out?’ ‘Selfish Bastard.’ The list of expletives was extensive.
But yet, staring at this image, I’m weirdly jealous of the anonymous woman in the picture.
How would it feel, to have that sort of attention?
That sort of focus. The only time Nigel focused on me in our marriage was if I signed up a large client and the money rolled in.
And even then, it wasn’t me, it was the cheques.
What would she have felt like? To have that man staring at her. I could only dream.
I know Jude Greystone was not her husband.
According to the internet, he’d never married.
Some relationships were long standing, some seriously short, but all loud and gossipy, mainly his celebrity ones.
So he’s still single even now. But lots of women buzzing around him, the tabloids seeming to lap it up.
He’s even annually featured in London’s most eligible bachelor list.
But if, by the looks of all the photographs, he were focused that intensely on you—even if it was fleeting and not real—how would they say no? At least that particular woman had gotten to experience it. Me, nothing at all.
Well, I want it. The more I stare at his photo image album, the more I want more.
I deserve it. I’ve sacrificed as much as I’m going to.
This is my time now. I’m a fully paid-up adult.
Not sure how I got from an accountant’s office to Jude Greystone pictures to me shaking my life up, but I’m here now.
Maybe it was the wine. But I will not be beat. I’ll plan and plot. These conferences in London and Germany are going to be a fabulous success. I’ll meet and schmooze new contracts from people. Spread the joy of recruiting into Europe.
Oooh. Synergy International Recruitment. Motto: Recruiting the world to your doorstep.
I can see it now. Printed in bold letters on a banner above my stand. I’m excited and nervous. Just let me get through January. And this bloody meeting with him. Mogul, CEO, professional negotiator. Entrepreneur. Podcaster. Successful. Everything I’m currently not, but want to be.
Well, I won’t be backing down. As I type out the email, I push all my positive vibes into it. Asking for the meeting that I probably will regret in the morning, along with the extra bottle of wine I open.