Sins (49 page)

Patsy gave her a contemptuous look. ‘Josh loves me, not you, and he can’t wait for us to go to New York. But thanks to you he’s stuck here until this business of the partnership that you foisted on him is resolved.’

Rose could feel her face starting to burn.

‘Oh, I don’t blame you for wanting to keep him. In fact it was rather clever of you to tie him to you with the partnership, but you must see that he doesn’t want it, or you, any more.’

‘Josh knows that I am perfectly willing to end the partnership,’ Rose told her. ‘The delays are not being caused by me. It’s Josh who has insisted on waiting until the lease expires before formally ending things.’

‘Because he feels sorry for you,’ Patsy answered. ‘We both do.’

Rose winced, hating the thought of the two of them discussing her.

‘Josh can leave for America any time he likes, as far as I’m concerned,’ Rose defended herself fiercely.

‘Then why don’t you tell your solicitor to get the partnership ended? Like I said, Josh is only hanging on here because he feels he owes you something.’

Patsy stood up, her hair swinging immaculately onto her shoulders, her mini revealing the long length of her slim legs. Her whole bearing was one of triumph as she walked out of the room, leaving Rose too upset to focus on the work she had been doing.

She’d been thinking of calling round to see Emerald later. Ridiculously, she’d been worrying about her cousin–not that she had expected Emerald to welcome a visit from her–but now she felt too vulnerable to see anyone, never mind Emerald.

An hour later, when she was still unable to concentrate on her work, Rose decided that there was no point in continuing to sit at her desk doing nothing other than
think about Josh and her own misery. She had always found that walking was a good cure for her occasional creative blocks, and right now she needed to escape from her workroom, where the air still smelled of Patsy’s scent, even though Rose had opened the windows to dispel it.

She was wearing a silk shift with a pop art design on it in tangerine and black against a white background, the striking combination perfect for her colouring, several fine thin gold bangles circling her wrist. As she caught sight of herself in the mirror, she noticed that her hair needed trimming. She had stuck to the same shiny bob for several years now; Josh claimed that it was the perfect style for her. But soon there would be no Josh to cut her hair for her, no Josh to hold secretly in her thoughts and her heart late at night when she couldn’t sleep, no Josh to talk to about her work. No Josh, full stop.

Her hand was reaching for the door handle when it turned, and the door opened inwards to reveal Pete Sargent.

His greeting was accompanied by a long curling smile, which unexpectedly set off a fizz of reaction inside Rose’s stomach.

‘Pete, you’re back.’ What an inane comment to make, Rose derided herself. Obviously he was back; he was standing there.

‘Got back yesterday.’

He looked lean and tanned, his jeans clinging to his thighs, the top buttons of his shirt unfastened, his hair curling into his collar. He looked rough and untidy and very sexy.

‘So I thought I’d call by and see if you were free for lunch.’

Of course she should say ‘no’. After all, they had nothing in common, she assured herself hastily, not wanting to remember exactly what they did have in common. In fact, she was opening her mouth to turn him down when she had a sudden image of Patsy’s smug expression when she’d spoken to her earlier.

‘I was just going for a walk,’ Rose told him instead.

‘Great. I’ll come with you. We can walk in the park and have a picnic.’

‘We can’t do that,’ she protested, although in reality the prospect was very tempting.

‘Why not?’

‘Because you are Pete Sargent. You’ll be mobbed by fans, hordes of screaming girls.’

‘I’ll wear a disguise, and if that doesn’t work then you’ll just have to protect me from them.’

It was no use, Rose realised, he was not going to give in, and besides, he had just made her laugh, for the first time in a very long time indeed.

Reaching for her hand, he added, ‘Of course, if you really wanted to protect me you could always marry me.’

Rose laughed again.

‘Don’t laugh,’ he told her. ‘I mean it.’

‘But, Mummy, I don’t want to go back to London’.

Emerald had arrived at Denham just over an hour ago to find that her mother had already told Robbie that she intended to take him back to London with her, and now her son was looking reproachfully at her. His dark hair
was flopping over his forehead. Emerald raised her hand to push it out of his eyes, about to comment that he needed a haircut, and then stopped.

‘Apart from anything else you need a haircut.’ A hazy memory stored many years previously came into sudden sharp focus of another boy with the same dark hair and the same stance. Luc, of course. Funny how the memory could store such things–things the brain should have been too immature perhaps to register because she could only have been a two-year-old at most, at the time. Luc would have been older than Robbie, but not much.

Robbie, who had been on the point of scowling, suddenly broke into a wide smile, announcing enthusiastically, ‘Uncle Drogo’s here,’ before setting off at a run across the lawn towards the two men coming out of the house.

Without looking at her mother, Emerald said, ‘He looks like Luc.’

‘Yes,’ Amber agreed.

Still keeping her face averted from her mother, Emerald continued, ‘They resemble him then, do they? The painter?’

Amber exhaled, flinching from the raw bitterness of the way Emerald pronounced the words.

‘Not really. Luc actually looked very like Robert, probably because he had Robert’s mannerisms. Jean-Philippe’s hair was dark but so were his eyes; Luc, like Robbie, had blue eyes. Luc adored Robert and copied everything he did.’

Emerald, who was watching Robbie coming towards her, flanked on one side by Jay, on the other by Drogo,
tensed abruptly as she saw that Robbie was walking with exactly the same stride as Drogo.

A surge of conflicting emotions rushed through her.

‘Mummy, do I have to go back to London?’ Robbie demanded as the three of them reached the spot where Amber and Emerald stood. ‘Only Uncle Drogo is going to do lots of exciting things, like going for walks and looking for fossils and things.’

‘We can still do that in London, old chap,’ Drogo assured Robbie. ‘We could go to the Natural History Museum, if you like—’

‘Yes. And can we go to Madame Tussauds as well?’

Emerald was about to point out to Drogo that he had no right to make arrangements that included her son without asking her permission first, but before she could do so Drogo was turning to her and asking, ‘Did you drive down from London or come on the train?’

‘The train,’ she answered him in a sharp voice.

‘Then how about going back with me in the car? I was planning to drive back tomorrow anyway.’

Robbie’s excited, ‘You mean in your new Bentley?’ warned Emerald that there was no point in her trying to refuse. And besides, it was ridiculous of her to feel somehow that being transported back to London in the comfort of Drogo’s Bentley was something to be avoided.

‘Oh, c’mon, Janey, it was nothing really.’

It was ten o’clock on Monday morning and they were in Janey’s office. Janey had barely slept or eaten since she had found Cindy and Charlie in bed together, despite John’s kind efforts to persuade her to do so. Her head still ached from all the crying she had done, but Cindy, in contrast, looked not just relaxed about the whole thing but almost amused.

‘Nothing?’ Janey retorted, her voice rising. ‘How can you call being in bed with my boyfriend nothing?’

‘Because it was. OK, so Charlie and I bumped into one another on Friday night, and I ended up going back to his place with him, and the one thing led to another and we went to bed together, but so what? I don’t know what you’re getting so uptight about. That handsome guy you were with on Saturday is a friend of yours, right, and I’ll bet the two of you have shared a bed when the mood’s taken you.’

‘No, we haven’t,’ Janey denied. John was good-looking and kind, but somehow she had never thought of him in
that
way before. He had always just been John.

‘More fool you then,’ Cindy told her. She shrugged. ‘Why don’t we just forget Saturday, Janey? Personally I think you’re making a fuss about nothing, and making a bit of a fool of yourself as well, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I can agree to that,’ Janey snapped at her. ‘I certainly made a fool of myself over Charlie.’

‘You don’t need to worry about me and Charlie. Charlie is yours. What happened meant nothing to either of us, and if you’d just calm down and stop acting like a provincial, and remember instead that this is London and—’

‘Charlie is not mine and I don’t want him to be. In fact, I don’t ever want to see him again.’

Cindy lit herself a cigarette and drew slowly on it before exhaling and telling Janey dismissively, ‘You’re getting things totally out of proportion.’

‘I find my partner in bed with my boyfriend and you say I’m getting things out of proportion? You’d obviously…had sex.’

‘Yeah, well, people do. So what? It didn’t mean anything.’

‘Maybe it didn’t mean anything to you but it certainly meant something to me,’ Janey told her.

Cindy gave a small contemptuous laugh. ‘I hadn’t realised that you were so behind the times, Janey. No one bothers about a bit of sex between friends. Everyone does it. Poor Charlie, you’ve really upset him.’

Cindy was enjoying making fun of her, Janey suspected. The partner she had admired had become someone she didn’t very much like.

‘I don’t want to talk about it any more,’ Janey told her.

‘That’s fine by me,’ Cindy responded. ‘Let’s just forget it.’

‘I can’t do that,’ Janey was forced to tell her. ‘I’m sorry, Cindy, but I want to end the partnership.’

‘Because Charlie fucked me? Did you really think that someone like Charlie wouldn’t fuck anyone else just because he was going out with you?’

Janey’s heart was thudding in heavy sledgehammer blows. ‘It’s a matter of trust, Cindy. If I can’t trust you then I can’t work with you, and I think we both know anyway that it would be impossible for us to continue as partners now.’ It was the truth, and Janey was relieved to have managed to vocalise what she thought.

‘I know we put a clause in our contract that said we had to give one another two months’ notice if we decided to end the partnership. I’ll speak to my solicitor and arrange for him to send you an official letter. In the meantime, whilst we work out the two months we have to stay in business together, I’d be grateful if we only discuss business matters and not personal ones.’ Janey held her breath. She hated rows.

But to her relief Cindy merely shrugged and said laconically, ‘Suit yourself.’

‘I can find my own way back to my shop, you know,’ Janey teased John.

He was up in London on business–something he had been doing frequently just recently–and had taken her out for lunch–something else he was doing frequently, and not just for lunch but to dinner as well. He was coming up to London at least twice a week and staying all weekend most weekends. She had got so used to his company now that she missed him dreadfully when he went back to Macclesfield.

He was being a wonderful friend to her, a real shoulder to lean on, during these recent difficult weeks whilst she and Cindy worked through the notice period.

‘I know you can, but it’s a gentleman’s responsibility to ensure that a lady returns home or, in your case, to her shop, safely.’

John might sound serious but he was smiling at her, and Janey couldn’t help but smile back.

She was feeling astonishingly happy these days, given what had happened, and hadn’t missed Charlie one little bit. That was all down to John, Janey knew. He was relaxing
to be with, and so very kind, spoiling her, treating her with an old-fashioned courtesy that was incredibly sweet.

Today she’d had a rather self-indulgent lunch hour, Janey admitted, with them making plans to take a boat trip to Richmond on Sunday if the weather stayed warm. John had come round to the shop to meet her at just gone twelve, and now it was gone half-past two. She was smiling as she walked into the shop after she had said goodbye to him.

Fiona, the most senior of her salesgirls, was waiting for her.

‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ she announced.

Janey agreed absently. John wasn’t returning to Cheshire until late on Sunday and he had insisted on picking her up later so that they could have a drink together, a drink that would lead to them sharing dinner, Janey suspected.

‘Cindy never paid us our wages yesterday, and she hasn’t been in at all today,’ Fiona complained.

Janey’s heart sank. She was naturally finding it difficult to work with Cindy at the moment, and wished that they’d agreed on a month’s mutual notice, not two. For the last week Cindy had been working from her flat, and Janey had been relieved by her absence. There were only another three weeks to go now before the partnership was finally ended.

‘I’m sorry,’ Janey said to Fiona. There’d obviously been a mistake of some kind. After all, Cindy wouldn’t deliberately not pay the shop assistants. ‘I’ll go to the bank now and draw out some money for the wages.’ She looked
at her watch. ‘I’ll have to go now before they close, and you’ll have to find out how much everyone is owed.’

Fifteen minutes later, Janey was sitting in a chair in her bank manager’s office, and trying desperately not to act like a baby and burst into tears as she listened to the manager explaining to her that she could not draw any money out of the shop’s account because there was no money in it.

There had been a mistake. But it wasn’t Cindy who had made it. It was her.

‘But there must be some,’ she protested. And not just some but surely rather a lot, because only ten days ago, at Cindy’s urging, she had transferred a huge amount of money from her own personal account into the business in order that they would be able to pay for the manufacture of the new season’s orders. Cindy had told her that she’d been able to negotiate an extra discount from their supplier if they paid early.