Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Beck
“How do you know my name?” she asked, flashing me a suspicious look.
“May I join you? I’ll explain.” She frowned but didn’t say no, so I pulled a chair from a neighboring table and took a seat.
Stella London was the only single woman going to this wedding.
The other two possible names were elderly aunts: one who was completely bedbound, the other based in Florida and no longer able to fly.
Both were clearly invited just to be polite.
Stella was my last chance. I had to make this work.
I’d headed to Stella’s office to try to meet her.
The situation was too complicated to explain in an email—I’d end up sounding like I was one of those Nigerian lawyers promising you a cool hundred mil if you just sent him three hundred quid for admin.
I’d decided the best thing to do was to turn up at her office and ask for a meeting—it was a business proposition I was suggesting, after all.
As I passed her in the street, she’d looked familiar and beautiful, but I thought nothing more than that as I’d headed into the bar to go to the loo before heading up to her office.
While I had my dick in my hand, I’d realized who she was.
I wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to approach her. There was too much at stake.
“I understand you’re a recruitment consultant,” I said. “And an ambitious one from what I can tell. You’ve been promoted since you joined Foster and Associates, and you’ve only been with them a couple of months.” I paused. I needed to slow down. Take my time. I couldn’t blow this.
I sat back and regarded her. The social media photographs I’d found didn’t do her justice.
Her hair was longer and fell in soft, blonde waves to her shoulders and what I’d thought were blue eyes were almost purple—and entirely distracting.
She had full lips that bore no trace of make-up, and a beauty spot on her left cheekbone that a fifties Hollywood bombshell would have been proud of.
She looked at me and frowned. “Why do you know how long I’ve been in my job? Never mind, I need to be going.”
“I know this is a little odd.” I sat forward. “Just give me a couple of minutes to explain. I’m here to make you a business proposition. One that I believe you’ll find very interesting.”
I’d done my research on this woman as I always did when entering into a new business relationship.
The worst thing in development was to be surprised after work started.
It was the easiest way to overspend. Much easier to spend the effort up front—understand what things were going to cost you and put it into your budget.
From my research, I’d seen that Stella had progressed quickly in her job since coming to London.
She’d had a career change, but she was clearly ambitious and driven.
She’d given an interview in a trade magazine last month talking about how much she loved the firm she worked for and how she hoped to be partner.
I needed to make sure she said yes to my proposal, so it made sense that I would offer her something she really wanted—a further step up, a chance to realize her ambitions.
I didn’t have time to waste negotiating. I needed Stella to agree.
I was going to make her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“I’m a real estate developer, and I’m about to start a new project. I thought you might want to work on recruiting the team.”
“You want to use Foster and Associates?” Instead of looking excited, she looked confused. It was the same look Joshua had gotten when I’d asked him if he was going to Vegas for Gabriel’s stag party—as if my question didn’t make sense.
“I think we’d be a great fit. I’ll need to recruit over a hundred people, and I could take the proposition to the partners in your firm and make my business contingent on you getting junior partnership.
” She can’t have ever had that many appointments just fall into her lap.
No question of negotiating the fee or it being a non-exclusive contract—Stella had the business.
Plus working for Wilde Developments would be a feather in her cap. We were a brand people talked about.
“Why would you do that?”
“Lots of reasons. Like I said, I think we’d work well together and from what I hear, you’re good at your job.”
She rolled her eyes as if I were some lecherous old weasel who had just asked her to come upstairs and see his etchings rather than someone who was offering her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I’d expected her to be a little more enthusiastic.
“Then I suggest you call the office. I don’t deal with real estate. ”
Perhaps she’d misheard me. There’s no way she’d be so dismissive if she’d heard me properly. “I’m offering to help you make partner.”
She burst out laughing. Was this girl drunk? This was not going how I’d planned. “As if I care.”
I fisted my hands as my palms started to sweat. Fuck. I’d thought that Stella London was career driven and ambitious. Had I got it wrong?
“You don’t want to be partner?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Why do you care? Who are you?”
“I need a great recruitment consultant,” I said, my brain whirring, trying to get ahead of this conversation.
“Well, I’m not one.” She exhaled and turned to her friend. “I’m not cut out for it.”
If she didn’t care about recruitment then she could just name her price.
I was an idiot; I should have had a backup plan.
From the article I’d read, I’d clearly made assumptions I shouldn’t have.
“I need your help, Stella.” How had I ended up in a place where the goal I’d been working toward my entire life was dependent on whether a stranger wanted a promotion?
If this was any other real estate deal, I would have walked away months ago. But I couldn’t give up on this one.
“Seriously, anyone in the office would be glad of the work. Call Sheila. She’s in charge of real estate recruitment.”
Any recruitment consultant wasn’t what I needed. I had to level with her or I was going to lose her. “Yeah, but she doesn’t have what I need.”
She turned toward me. “Which is what? I’m not sleeping with you because you have a staffing crisis.”
I couldn’t help myself—I laughed. “No, that’s not what I mean. I want to talk to you about Matthew and Karen’s wedding.”
She turned the color of freshly fallen snow. “What about it?”
“I was hoping I could go as your guest.”
“Well, you’re fresh out of luck. Because there’s no way I’ll be there and even if I was—you’re a perfect stranger.”
I was jinxed when it came to this deal. “I just need you to hear me out. Give me five minutes.”
She glanced at her friend. “You’re right. I’m not good at putting myself first. I should leave, right?”
Her friend shrugged. “You can always walk away when you’ve heard him out.”
Stella sighed and collapsed back on her chair. “Okay, then be straight with me. Who the hell are you, how do you know me, and what on planet Earth do you want?”
She was clearly out of patience. I normally found that when my back was against the wall, straightforward honesty was the way to go.
“I’m Beck Wilde. I’m a real estate developer. A man called Henry Dawnay holds my future in his hands. He owns a building that I need to buy.”
When I was doing up bedsits in Hackney, before Hackney was popular, exhausted from twenty-hour days and filthy from pulling up floorboards and knocking down walls, every now and then I’d take the tube to Bond Street and wander around Mayfair in the middle of the night to stare at the Dawnay building. It had become an obsession.
I wanted that building. I wanted to buy it so I could demolish it. Rebuild it from the ground up so it was new and better. I wanted to conquer it. Conquer my past.
I would stop at nothing to buy that property.
But Stella London was my last hope.
“Karen’s godfather?” she asked.
I had to hold myself back from pinning her to the chair and asking her whether she had met him. This could work out even better than I’d hoped. “You know him?”
“A bit. He was always around for her birthdays, and we went to his place in the Bahamas when we were seventeen, but I don’t see why you need to go to a wedding to buy a building. How do you know me and what—”
“On planet Earth do I want?” I finished for her. “I’ve been trying and failing to get a meeting with Henry for months. That wedding will provide an opportunity to speak to him, to convince him to sell his Mayfair property.”
“I don’t get what that’s got to do with me.”
“I did my research. I know you were invited—I want to go as your plus one.”
She laughed. “Yeah, well, like I said, I’m not going, so you need to find someone else.”
I hadn’t counted on her refusing the invitation just like I hadn’t expected her to laugh in my face when I offered to help make her partner.
I never fucked up like this. Every sign I got was telling me to walk away from this deal.
But I couldn’t. This building was a symbol of bad luck for my family.
It just made me more committed to buying it and making it mine.
“I would make it worth your while.” She could have the entire nine-point-four million in profit I was projected to make for all I cared. Well maybe not the entire profit.
“Like I said, I’m not going to the wedding and I don’t care about getting Foster and Associates new work.” She stood again. “And this time, I’m really leaving. Florence, I’ll call you later, and man with the Dom—Beck, whatever—thanks for the champagne.”
Christ, I was losing her. Maybe I’d come on too strong.
I should give her space. Try again on a different day when she’d had time to think about it.
I pulled out a business card. “You don’t care about getting Foster and Associates new business,” I said.
“I get it. But consider what it is you do want. Even if it’s just a check. I need to get into that wedding.”
“A check? No amount of money could convince me to celebrate the marriage of Matt and Karen.”
Why couldn’t I catch a break, have a stroke of good luck?
It was like someone was deliberately trying to sabotage this project.
I was used to my hard work paying off. I’d never put so much time and effort into securing a property and yet I was stuck—making no progress.
It was as if the development was punching me invisibly and in slow motion over and over.
“If not a check, maybe I can do you a favor,” I said. “I know a lot of people. If you wanted to move jobs, I might be able to help. Or maybe you want a holiday of a lifetime. Have a think.”
“I’m not interested,” Stella said. “Going to that wedding would be like a holiday in hell. Worse.”
“Stella,” her friend said. “Take his business card.”
Stella shot her friend a look that could kill. “I’m not going to that wedding. I don’t care about getting a shitty promotion. Or a holiday. Nothing is worth enduring that for.”
“I know. But there are things you do care about,” her friend said. “You don’t lose anything by taking the guy’s business card. That way if you think of something you want that’s worth going to that wedding, you can call him.”
I wanted to write Stella’s friend a check right there.
She grabbed my business card out of my hand like a child resignedly eating its carrots. “This day is out of control. I need it to be over.”
I knew that feeling.