Chapter 10
Dream Couple Alert! Henry Darlington and Olivia Asterdam Spotted Kissing in Front of The Darlington After a Hot Night of Passion!
Old INsider headline
Henry
Perhaps the unrelenting stress, countless overtime hours, and many sleepless nights were slowly driving me nuts.
Either that, or Ethan was a genius. I’d asked my dad’s lawyers to give me the indictment so I could see for myself if we were, to quote Ethan, fucked, but I didn’t understand any of it.
The lengthy sentences with their technical terms and references to legal paragraphs didn’t offer a shred of enlightenment.
I gathered that it wasn’t good, but did I really know what any of it meant? Nope.
Perhaps I could ask Ethan to explain the indictment, if he ever sobered up.
As far as I knew, he’d been away all weekend, getting hammered with his friends.
I liked to pretend I was judging him for it, but truthfully, I was envious.
I longed to possess his carefree recklessness, a feeling I no longer even remembered.
But I couldn’t afford a lifestyle like his anymore.
Yesterday I’d stayed at the office past midnight trying to come up with a concept for the Pearl Gala.
It had to be perfect. The hotel was under scrutiny, and the papers were watching our every move for the smallest thing to turn into their next scathing headline.
I leaned back in my chair with a sigh and realised how dark it had grown in my office.
A glance at the clock told me it was just after 2 p.m. I switched on my desk lamp and turned my back on the city.
Dark clouds hung over the London skyline.
A storm was brewing. It would clearly be a big one.
The trees bowed in the wind, which whipped up surprisingly large waves across the surface of the Thames.
The London Eye had closed for business, even though it was built to withstand any weather.
Seeing it standing still in the daytime gave me an uneasy feeling.
My thoughts wandered—unsurprisingly, since they often had lately—to Kate.
Not a day had gone by in the past week that I hadn’t thought about her.
About her frankness, her situation, and the things she had to do to survive.
But above all—and this was probably the worst thing—I couldn’t stop thinking about her smile.
About the little dimples in her cheeks and the dainty freckles on her nose.
I wondered if they were visible all year round or if they faded in the winter.
Right now, I was wondering how she would fare in this storm and whether she had shelter for the night. I hoped so.
Sighing, I turned back to my desk and reprimanded myself for not concentrating on my work.
Kate would get by. She’d been living on the streets for a while.
She didn’t need someone looking after her.
With this mantra in my head, I opened September’s financial report, which Rakesh had sent me an hour ago.
But the moment I began to read, my phone rang.
It was Olivia. I accepted the call, and her face appeared on the screen. Behind her was the bathroom of her new flat in Mayfair—she’d moved in a few weeks ago. She was in the process of applying her makeup, her blond hair twisted up in curlers.
“Tell me,” she said without a hello, propping up her phone.
I raised an eyebrow. “What’s to tell?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“No need to pretend. I really don’t know.”
She groaned as if she were annoyed at me and dabbed some cream under her eyes.
There was constant speculation about what cosmetic procedures Olivia Asterdam, heiress to the Asterdam fashion empire, had undergone to achieve her flawless appearance.
But Olivia was a natural beauty. I knew because I had watched her grow up.
Sure, she invested more time and money than most people on her appearance and had some compulsions when it came to her diet and exercise.
Then again, we all had compulsions in our circles.
We called them routines, habits, or traditions, but in the end, it all boiled down to the same thing.
“I’m your best friend, Henry,” she finally said. “Correction: I’m your only friend. Why didn’t you tell me? I had to find out from my brother sending me a link to the INsider.”
I still wasn’t following. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She stopped moving. “Hold on. I’m confused.”
“That makes two of us.”
“So you haven’t seen it?”
“Seen what?”
“Check the INsider.”
I rolled my eyes. The INsider was a tabloid that financed itself by printing lies and rumours.
If there was anyone I disliked as strongly as my dad right now, it was William Hunt: an editor at the INsider who had made it his mission to terrorise my family with lies about us.
Just three months ago, he’d insinuated that Ethan had gotten a woman pregnant, just because he’d been photographed on the street walking next to a pregnant stranger.
Olivia and I also regularly made it into the INsider gossip column together, because William Hunt loved nothing more than speculating about our alleged relationship.
Olivia and I had known each other since childhood and had been friends right from the start.
We’d admittedly gone on a few dates three years ago—it had seemed like the natural progression of our friendship, and uniting the Asterdams and the Darlingtons would have been a strategically clever move.
But it hadn’t felt right. I was a businessman through and through.
I loved negotiating contracts and closing deals.
But if there was one thing I felt should be more than a profitable business deal, it was love.
Luckily Olivia had been on the same page, and we concluded unanimously that we were better as friends.
Unfortunately, the media had continued to write about our “relationship” ever since, much to our mutual aggravation.
So I anticipated yet another fabricated relationship drama as I opened the website on my laptop.
What I most definitely didn’t anticipate was a photo of Kate and me on the homepage.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
The photo showed the strangely electrifying moment when Kate had placed her hand on mine.
The camera had caught the second before her smile faded.
There was a bright gleam in her dark eyes, and although my face was barely recognisable from this angle, there was no mistaking that I was smiling too—just moments after she’d given me that ridiculous nickname.
We looked intimate and close, enough so that the headline didn’t come as much of a surprise:
Is Henry Cheating on Olivia?
Who Is the Mysterious Woman He’s Been Spotted With?
I opened the article uneasily. It consisted mainly of eyewitness reports of how close Kate and I had seemed.
People claimed that we were obviously on a date and had left the restaurant holding hands.
Hunt accused me in the article of cheating on Olivia, and the last paragraph was dedicated to speculations on who Kate was, indicating that he’d failed to unmask her true identity.
The article sparked two contradictory feelings. I was furious at William Hunt, who had nothing better to do than present these lies to the world, and annoyed with myself for not being more careful. At the same time, though, I felt a strange heat flood my stomach as I examined Kate in the photos.
“Fuck,” I mumbled.
“Is that all you have to say? Who is she?”
I looked from the laptop to my phone. Olivia had been applying her eyeliner as I’d been reading, but now she was looking at me expectantly. “Just a friend.”
“A friend,” she repeated sceptically and gave me a look that warned me not to lie.
She knew me all too well—and she didn’t know Kate at all.
It was enough to rouse her suspicion. Wealthy people liked to keep to their circles.
Everyone knew everyone else, and if an unfamiliar face came along, it often meant scandal.
I sighed. “Her name is Kate.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And we met last week.”
“Ohhh. Where?”
“St. James’s Park.”
“And how did you end up at McDonald’s?”
I hesitated. There was no good explanation.
For one, Olivia knew how much I hated that kind of fast-food chain.
Not because they were beneath me, but because of how appallingly they treated animals.
“I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to tell anyone else.
Not even your brother. He’ll just tell Ethan, and then everyone will know. ”
“I promise,” Olivia said, so I told her the whole story. How Kate had stolen from me, blackmailed me, and more or less forced me to take her to lunch. Olivia listened to me with curiosity, but I couldn’t figure out what she was thinking. She seemed surprised, disappointed, and amused all at once.
“Did you really give her the money?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“She stole from you,” Olivia stated the obvious. She’d finished her makeup and was in the process of taking out her curlers. Her hair fell in gold waves over her shoulders.
“Didn’t you hear the bit where I said that she’s homeless?” I asked, leaning back in my chair. “Kate has nothing. Just a few dirty blankets and an old leather jacket. We’ve had champagne that cost more than four thousand pounds a bottle.”
“OK, OK. I can get behind that. But it doesn’t explain the photo.”
I stopped short. “It doesn’t?”
“No. You look totally relaxed. Almost happy. I haven’t seen you look like that in . . . no idea. Months, if I think about it. Kate must be special if she got you to lose that brooding frown.”
I hastily smoothed out my expression. “I don’t have a brooding frown.”
“You really do. It’s already given you wrinkles.”
I rubbed my forehead. “I don’t have wrinkles.”
Olivia exhaled heavily. “Fine, you don’t. But you will, if you keep going around looking at everyone—Kate aside—like that. Maybe you should see each other more often, given she has the same effect as an antiwrinkle cream.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
Olivia took her phone from the bathroom shelf and went into the kitchen. “When are you seeing each other again?”
“We’re not,” I replied, turning towards my window. The sky had grown even darker and the wind stronger. “Like I said, I only went to lunch with her because she asked me to.”
It was Olivia’s turn to frown. “But you like her.”
“What makes you say that?”
Olivia laughed. “Henry, we’ve been talking about this woman for fifteen minutes. When I tried to set you up with my friend Sandy a few weeks ago, you got up mid-conversation to make yourself a cup of tea.”
“Maybe, but I don’t have time for something like this,” I said, avoiding the point and deciding it was for the best that I didn’t tell Olivia how often I’d thought about Kate since we’d met.
I told myself it was because of my worries about her living situation, but if I was honest, my thoughts about her were unrelated to that.
Olivia tutted. “You don’t have time for anything anymore.”
“It’s true. I have to organise the Pearl Gala.”
“I thought it was cancelled?”
“Not anymore,” I replied, and told her about my dad’s decision to hold the gala after all at such short notice.
Olivia ranted about his erratic behaviour and cursed him for putting even more work on my plate.
But I was only half listening. The article was still open on my laptop.
I studied Kate’s delicate features, her warm gaze, and her adorable smile, which I hadn’t been able to get out of my head.
But it didn’t matter how often I thought about her or how much I had enjoyed talking to her.
Even if I found time to see her again between all the crisis reports, bad news, and organisational chaos, it wouldn’t be anything more than a one-night stand.
My life was already complicated enough without the scandal that would inevitably follow if I got involved with someone like Kate.