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‘Bill!’ Emma protested.’
‘Well, it’s true,’ he said, unabashed.
‘It’s all right, Emma,’ Giselle assured the PA. ‘My chosen profession is architecture, Bill,’ She pointed out calmly. ‘Not prostitution.’
‘You mean it is if you can keep your job. And, let’s face it, you certainly won’t win any commissions with your female wiles,’ he sneered in response.
‘I don’t need to use any wiles, female or otherwise, to keep my job,’ Giselle couldn’t resist coming back at him pointedly, causing him to colour up angrily.
Bill was one of those employees who liked to play the good team player in front of those he thought it would impress, whilst being very much a person who put himself first. Bill liked to use their shared gender to get the other men in the office on side with him, and to exclude her, but Giselle had never seen any real evidence that he was the team player he liked to claim he was.
In the senior partners’ office the atmosphere was thick with a mixture of tension and determination—the tension coming from Mr Shepherd, one of the senior partners, and the determination from Saul Parenti, the man he needed to satisfy that his firm was up to the challenge being set.
‘Yes, of course I accept that you wish to meet and speak with the team who will be working on the changes to the plans you have requested. Perhaps lunch with the other senior partners involved in the plans?’
‘I wish to meet everyone involved in the project—senior and junior,’ Saul stressed briskly.
He did not have time to waste. He was already running late, thanks to the woman who had stolen his parking space and a telephone call from his cousin. Aldo, five years his junior and recently married, might be Grand Duke of Arezzio, thanks to the fact that his father had been their grandfather’s eldest son, and his own the younger, but he still turned to him when he needed financial advice. Saul shrugged inwardly. He had done his best to help his young cousin build up some reserves for the royal coffers of Arezzio, the small country on what had once been the border between the old Austrian Empire and Croatia, but Aldo was not a businessman—he was more of an academic. He did not like the harsh cut and thrust of modern business, and preferred to spend his time cataloguing the rare books in the library of his castle in Arezzio.
Saul was grateful for the fact that his father had not been the elder brother, and that he had been spared the onerous duty of becoming Arezzio’s Grand Duke, being forced to marry and produce an heir. He might not have approved when Aldo had married Natasha, because he didn’t think Natasha loved his cousin, but he would be very pleased when their marriage produced the child that would mean that he would be not just one but two steps removed from the Dukedom. He was, he believed, like his mother. Like her, he loved the excitement and adventure of new challenges and demands on his energy. Her life had been her aid work. She had loved his father, and no doubt she had loved him too, but parenting a child had not been the focus of his mother’s life.
His own view now was that it would be wrong for him to bring a child into the world when he knew how little time he would have for it. He was driven in his work, in his need to explore the outer boundaries of creating the most exciting and enticing of luxurious holiday destinations which at the same time supported the environment and the local population. It was a purpose to which his emotional time as well as his physical time was given over wholly. He would not have a child and leave it to be raised by others, and he did not need or want an heir. When the time came for him to hand over the business he would find the right hands to hold it safe.
Given all that, financing his cousin—and thus in part the country itself—was a small price to pay for his personal freedom.
A personal freedom he never intended to relinquish, either via a public commitment or a private one—of any kind.
Saul could see the senior partner of the architectural firm who had been commissioned to design the complex its previous owner had planned to create on the island did not approve of Saul’s demand. It always irritated him when people failed to grasp why he made the decisions he did and delayed executing the orders that related to those decisions. Their failure betrayed a lack of vision and foresight, as well as poor financial acumen. Which was no doubt why the firm was on the point of bankruptcy—or would have been if he hadn’t just confirmed that he intended to keep them on and go ahead with the redevelopment of the island.
At the back of his mind was the thought that, should he increase his financial interest in such projects, adding an architectural practice to his portfolio of business holdings would be financially beneficial. For now, though, he intended to make it plain that he would not be paying them the kind of fees they had previously anticipated, and he would be keeping a far tighter control of both budgets and plans for the venture. Taking and keeping control was why he was a billionaire, with his fortune growing every day, whilst other rich men were losing money.
‘I wish to see them all because I want to make it clear to them that from now on it is my instructions they will be following and my approval they must win,’ he informed the senior partner. ‘The previous plans were spouting wasted money like a leaking colander.’
‘Our original brief was that no expense be spared,’ Mr Shepherd protested defensively.
Saul gave him a cool look.
‘Which is no doubt why one of your junior staff elected to have the floor of a summerhouse that is open to the weather tiled in handmade tiles that are not frostproof.’
‘An error which of course would have been picked up,’ the senior partner assured him.
‘Of course. But I prefer those who work for me not to make such errors in the first place.’ Saul looked at his watch, and this time the senior partner stood up.
‘I believe all our staff are in the building. I will arrange for all those who worked on the plans to be summoned,’ he said unwillingly.
‘I have a better idea,’ Saul told him. ‘Why don’t you show me round the office instead, and introduce me to them that way?’
It often paid to see what people were working on. Fortunes could be built—and destroyed—by such means.
The whisper had spread through the office. ‘The project’s going ahead and he’s keeping us on.’ And naturally everyone’s mood was upbeat and buoyant, with all the staff relieved to have the worry of the last couple of months, when they hadn’t known whether or not they would end up being made redundant, finally removed.
Giselle was as relieved as everyone else. She’d worked hard to get where she was, to qualify for and get a job that would enable her to support herself all through her adult life—because she would have to support herself. She knew that. There would never be a man, a partner, a husband who loved her and whom she loved in turn to share the burden of providing a roof over their head with her. How could there be when—?
The door to their office opened, and everyone fell silent as Mr Shepherd, one of the senior partners, came in—an unheard-of event. But it wasn’t the sight of him that had driven the colour from Giselle’s face, leaving it bleached of colour as she stared into the face of the man accompanying him.
It was the man from the car park. The man whose space she had stolen—the man who was now their most important client, Giselle recognised as she heard the senior partner introduce him.
‘Mr Parenti wishes to meet all those who have worked or will be working on the plans for the island project,’ the senior partner announced.
‘Saul,’ their new client corrected the older man. ‘Not Mr Parenti.’ Respect, as far as he was concerned, was something that was earned, not bestowed, and he had no doubt at all about his ability to earn the respect of others.
Whilst he was speaking he was studying the occupants of the room, his gaze cold and analytical, giving nothing away—until he saw and recognised Giselle. On her he allowed his gaze to rest just that little bit longer, so that she would be aware of his recognition of her and be forced to recognise the mistake she had made when she had stolen his parking spot.
Giselle felt the anger in his gaze scorching her conscience, but years of forcing herself never to appear outwardly vulnerable had her lifting her head and meeting his gaze head-on.
She was daring to challenge him? Saul was a recognisably formidable man, whom no one defied—especially not someone who was in the wrong, and especially not when that someone was financially dependent on him, as this woman most decidedly was. He was used to women attempting to bring themselves to his attention because they desired him and his wealth, not so that they could challenge him.
Twice now she had angered him, which meant that she now had two debts to repay—and he would see that she settled up, Saul decided as the senior partner began to introduce his junior architects to him.
Why, why, of all the men parking their cars in London had she had to steal the parking spot of this man? Giselle agonised inwardly. There was no point in telling herself that her behaviour had been out of character and born of desperation—that would not mean anything to the man slowly making his way towards her.
One by one he spoke to all the juniors, asking them which part of the plan they had worked on. Bill, of course, immediately went into his ‘I’m a team player and I get everyone onside with me’ routine, whilst at the same time managing to send a look in her direction which said that she was not part of that team. Little did Bill know that he had no need to try to make their new client have doubts about her. She’d already done a wonderful job of that herself.
Her stomach tense with apprehension, Giselle waited, and waited, knowing that retribution was going to fall, and knowing too that he was enjoying drawing out her torment.
And then he was standing in front of her, the powerful magnetic quality of his personality causing her to take a step back from him
‘And you, Ms…?’
‘Giselle,’ Giselle answered. ‘Giselle Freeman.’
‘And your contribution to the plans was…?’
‘Cold storage, wasn’t it?’ someone laughed, but Giselle ignored them.
‘I worked on the air conditioning, with an ecological brief to be incorporated,’ she said stiffly.
‘A brief which I think I am correct in saying is currently running over-budget?’ Saul pointed out as he allowed his gaze to slide slowly and thoroughly over her.
He’d picked up on the look Bill had given her and had guessed that she was as unpopular with them as she’d made herself with him. That would mean that she was not an effective team player, and that would hinder work on any project in which she participated. He was surprised that the practice kept her on.
Giselle’s heart pounded with fear. She’d been transferred to work on the air conditioning because it had run over-budget and because she was known to be good at working within budget—but she could hardly say so when not even Mr Shepherd had come to her defence.
Saul Parenti was playing with her, she knew. He was going to ask for her to be removed from the project, she could tell, and then she would probably be sacked. A cold sweat began to break out on her skin, and her stomach was churning with nausea. She couldn’t lose her job. She mustn’t. And beneath her fear was an angry contempt for this man who was using his power to torment her that she dared not let him see.
‘I am not happy with the car parking arrangements for the complex,’ Saul continued, turning back to the senior partner and breaking the tense silence that had gripped the room. ‘Perhaps Giselle should work on those, whilst someone with more experience takes over from her with the air conditioning.’
Giselle could feel her face burning. He had both insulted her professional ability and scored a point over her for her morning run-in with him. He had humiliated her publicly, she admitted helplessly, as the senior partner hastily assured him that, yes, indeed, she could do exactly that.
As Saul Parenti left the office with Mr Shepherd, Giselle lifted her chin. She wasn’t going to let anyone, least of all him, know how hurt and afraid she felt.
She was still daring to challenge him, Saul thought furiously as he saw her lifted chin. Well, she’d soon learn that that was a dangerous mistake. Dangerous for her.
CHAPTER TWO (#u935075c7-d8a9-5842-a5d5-fcaa5b0e7f97)
SEVERAL hours later, still seated in one of the senior partners’ offices, whilst they thrashed out the details of the revised plans, Saul found that his thoughts were still straying irritatingly to Giselle.
It was unheard of for any woman to occupy his thoughts when they should be focused on more important matters, and turning this project from the disaster it had been heading for into a financially successful venture was important to him both on a business and a personal level. His success as an entrepreneur had brought him plenty of competitors who resented his success and would be happy to see him fail.
But he was not going to fail—as he had already been making plain to the senior partners via his caustic condemnation of the excesses proposed by the island’s previous owner and what Saul considered to be the firm’s lax attitude to the control and costing of the plans it had been responsible for drawing up.
‘I do not have the time to sift through every detail of each part of the plan and its costing to ensure that your people are doing what I have instructed them to do,’ Saul pointed out acerbically. ‘And yet it is essential that they do exactly that if this project is to be successful and ultimately financially viable.’
‘I accept that.’ Mr Shepherd nodded.
‘Good. To ensure that my wishes are carried out what I propose is that you second to me one of your best junior architects—someone who would be directly responsible to me for ensuring that the plans adhere to my requirements, and for alerting both me and you should they fail to do so.’
‘That sounds an excellent idea,’ the Senior Partner agreed.
‘I shall require someone well qualified and able to carry out such a role,’ Saul told him warningly.
‘Of course—and I think I know exactly the right person. You met her earlier—Giselle Freeman.’
Saul looked sharply at the senior partner to assure himself that the other man was not attempting some kind of ridiculous joke. The last person he would want for such a role was Giselle Freeman. The older man’s expression, though, was completely serious and free from humour, leaving Saul to battle with a variety of unfamiliar emotions. It was very rare for him to be caught off-guard, and even more rare for him to find that he was in a situation he did not wish to be in and could not easily get out of. Shepherd might not be joking, but Saul’s suspicions were aroused that he could be trying to offload an unwanted and ineffective member of his staff off on him. He certainly wasn’t going to allow that to happen, and thankfully—because of his suspicions—Saul could now see a way of rejecting the other man’s recommendation.
‘Yes. I remember. She’s been working on the air conditioning plans. I gained the impression that she isn’t very popular with her colleagues. Anyone seconded to me in the role I envisage will have to be able to work well with other people.’
‘There is some hostility towards Giselle in that office,’ the senior partner agreed. ‘But it is not her fault.’ He sighed, and then continued, ‘The truth is that Giselle is far better qualified than her colleagues. She graduated with honours and won an internationally acclaimed prize for her final-year project. She’s a dedicated, hardworking professional with the qualifications to have a glittering career in front of her. The reality is that because of the downturn we simply don’t have the work for her here that would put her skills to their best use. She’s extremely loyal, though. An exemplary employee. I happen to know that in her first year here with us she was approached by two different headhunters working on behalf of international concerns. One job offer was in the Arabian Gulf, the other was in Singapore, but she chose to stay with us. She’s only been working on the air con plans because the chap who was doing so before made such a complete hash of things that we had to move him on to something less demanding.’
Saul’s expression had grown more grim with every word of praise the senior partner had given Giselle. Praise for her was not, after all, what he had wanted to hear—but now that he had heard it, and if she was as good as the senior partner was claiming, it would look decidedly odd and unbusinesslike if he refused to have her working for him. Saul was too good a businessman to allow his personal feelings to affect his business decisions. She might not appeal to him as a woman, but as an architect she was apparently very much ‘best in class’. And he simply did not have time to waste sifting through a whole raft of possible candidates with potentially inferior abilities. The reality was that the project needed to get underway and be completed with some speed if he was to make the profit he wanted from it.
‘Very well,’ he agreed, before warning, ‘but if I find she isn’t up to the job then I’ll expect you to take her back and supply me with someone else.’
Having dealt with the senior partner, Saul resolved grimly that if Giselle was to be seconded to work for him then there was one thing she would have to be taught—and speedily. The rules he made she would have to obey, or face the consequences.
‘I imagine you will want the secondment to commence as soon as possible?’ said the senior partner.
‘Yes,’ Saul confirmed. He suspected that Giselle Freeman would want to work for him as little as he wanted her to, and that would certainly afford him a certain amount of cynical satisfaction—that and making sure she knew just how much she had transgressed by stealing the car parking space for which he had been waiting so patiently. He already had a plan to make sure she knew that, though. He had already confirmed that the Human Resources department held copies of the keys to all the company cars, and now the spare keys to Giselle’s car were in his pocket.
Not that he should be wasting his valuable mental energy on Giselle, Saul warned himself. He had far more important things to think about—one of the most pressing of which was the financial problems currently being experienced by his cousin.
Normally Saul enjoyed problem-solving. He thrived on juggling a variety of problems and then finding solutions to them. Doing just that had been his way through the bleakness of his despair in the long months after his parents’ death, when he had struggled to cope with their loss.
They had been killed when a building had collapsed on them after they had gone to the aid of victims of an earthquake disaster in South America. The pain his parents’ death had brought him had shocked him. Like their deaths, he hadn’t been prepared for it. His overwhelming emotion initially had been anger—anger because they had risked and lost their lives, anger because they had not thought of how their deaths might affect him, anger because they had not loved him enough to ensure that they would always be there for him. It had been then that he had recognised the effect the loss of parental love and simply ‘being there’ could have on a child—even when that child was eighteen and officially an adult.
He had sworn then that he would never have a child himself, in case he unwittingly caused it to suffer the pain he himself was suffering. That was when he had also fully recognised just how glad he was that it was his younger cousin who was heir to the family title and lands and not him, that it was on his cousin’s shoulders that the responsibility to do his duty would rest for putting their small landlocked country before his own desires.
Aldo wasn’t like him. He was a quiet, gentle academic—no match for the scheming daughter of a Russian oligarch who was now his wife, and with whom he was so obviously and desperately in love. Poor fool.
Saul did not believe in love. Desire, lust, sexual hunger—yes. But allying those things to emotion and calling it love—no, never. That was not for him. He preferred his emotional freedom and the security it gave him—the knowledge that he would never again suffer the pain he had experienced when he had lost his parents.
Where Aldo thrived on tradition and continuity, Saul thrived on mastering challenges. And the Kovoca Island project was turning out to be a very considerable challenge indeed. Under-funded and over-budget, the original project had contributed to the financial downfall of the island’s previous owner—who, it seemed to Saul, had wanted to outdo Dubai in his plans for the island.
Saul had already drawn a red line through his predecessor’s plans for an underwater hotel, complete with a transparent underwater walkway, and for a road connecting the hotel and the island to the mainland. Just as he had drawn a red line through an equally over-ambitious plan to turn the island’s single snow-capped mountain into a winter ski resort, complete with imported snow.
It was a pity that for now at least he could not draw a similar red line though Giselle Freeman’s involvement in the project.
Everyone else might be celebrating the fact that the new owner of the Kovoca Island had given the go-ahead to the previous owner’s project and was keeping them on as its architects, and were keen to show their commitment by working late into the evening, but Giselle had another client to deal with—which was why right now she was on her way to the car park to collect her car. She would drive over to the shabby offices of the small charity which, having been left a plot of land, was now keen to develop it into a community centre and accommodation for homeless people. The charity had appealed for architectural help with the project and Giselle had taken it on as a non-fee-paying commission, in her own free time, with the agreement of her employers that she could use their facilities.
It was important not only that the new building blended in with its surroundings and provided the facilities the charity wanted, but also that it would be affordable to build and to run, and Giselle had spent a great deal of her spare time looking into various ways of meeting all three of those targets.
Then tonight when she got home she would have to e-mail the matron of the retirement home in which her great-aunt lived to see if her aunt had recovered from her cold yet.
Meadowside was an excellent facility, and its elderly residents were really well cared for, but it was also extremely expensive. The invested money from the sale of Great-Aunt Maude’s house paid half the monthly fees and Giselle paid the other half. It was the least she could do, given what her great aunt had done for her—taking her in, looking after her and loving her despite everything that had happened.
Giselle felt her stomach muscles starting to tense. It was always like this whenever she was forced to think about the past. She knew that she would never be able to forget what had happened. Even now if the squeal of car tyres caught her unawares the sound had the power to make her freeze into immobile panic. The memories, the images were always there—the wet road, the darkness, her mother telling her to hold on to the pram containing her baby brother as they turned to cross the road. But she hadn’t held on to the pram. She had let go. She was starting to breathe too shallowly and too fast, her heart pounding sickly. The sounds—screams, screeching tyres, breaking glass—the spin of the pram’s wheels as it lay there in the road, the smells—petrol, rain, blood.
No!
As always, the denial inside her was silent, as she had been silent, digging her nails into the palm of her hand. The hand that should have been gripping the pram handle—the hand which she had pulled away, defying her mother’s screamed demand that she stayed where she was, holding onto the pram.
Giselle could see her mother’s face now, and hear her screamed command; she could see her fear, and could see too the sleeping face of her baby brother where he’d lain in the pram just before it had left the pavement, straight in the path of an oncoming lorry.
It was over…over…There was no bringing back the dead. But it could never really be over—not for her. But at least no one else apart from her great-aunt knew what she knew.
Initially after the deaths of her mother and baby brother Giselle had continued to live with her father, an overworked GP, with a kind neighbour taking and collecting her from school along with her own children. That time had been the darkest of Giselle’s life. Her father, overwhelmed by his own grief, had shut her out, excluding her, not wanting her around—as she had always felt—because she’d reminded him of what he had lost. His emotional distance from her had increased her guilt and her own misery.
And then her great-aunt had come to visit, and it had been arranged that when she returned home Giselle would go with her. She had longed for her father to insist that he wanted her to stay, just as she had longed for him to hold her and tell her that he loved her, that he didn’t blame her. But he hadn’t. She could see his face now—the last time she had seen it—as he’d nodded his head in agreement with her great-aunt’s suggestions, gaunt and drawn, his gaze avoiding her. He had died less than six months afterwards from a fatal heart attack.
As a child Giselle had felt that he had chosen to die to be with her mother and brother rather than live and be with her. Even now sometimes, in her darkest and most despairing moments, she still thought that. If he’d loved her, he’d have kept her with him…But he hadn’t.
Not that she’d been unhappy with her great-aunt. She hadn’t. Her great-aunt had loved and cared for her, building a new life for her. Of course it had helped that her great-aunt had lived nearly a hundred miles away from the home Giselle had shared with her parents and her baby brother.
Giselle started to walk faster, as though to escape from her own painful memories. Even now, after nearly twenty years, she couldn’t bear to think about what had happened. Her great-aunt had been wonderfully kind and generous in taking her in, and Giselle wanted to do everything she could to make sure the now very elderly lady was well looked after. Without her job it would of course be impossible for her to find the money needed to keep her aunt in her excellent retirement home. And that meant that, no matter how much she might personally resent Saul Parenti and his attitude towards her, she had to be grateful for the fact that he was continuing with the project and keeping the firm on. These were hard times, and to lose such a valuable source of income would have meant redundancies.
Giselle had never imagined when she had been studying and working so hard for her qualifications that there would be such a deep downturn in the economy—one that would affect the construction industry so badly. She had chosen architecture as her career in part because she had believed that she would always be able to find work. Work—and getting paid for it—were vitally important to a woman who had already made up her mind that she would have to provide for herself financially all her life, because she was determined never to share her life with a partner. And in part she had chosen it because she had fallen in love with buildings—great houses and other buildings owned by the National Trust which her great-aunt had taken her to visit so often whilst she had been growing up.
Engaged in her own thoughts, Giselle headed automatically for her parked car, but as she approached the bay instead of seeing her own car all she could see was the highly polished bonnet of a much larger vehicle in the space where hers should have been. Automatically her walking pace slowed, and then she stopped as she looked round, wondering if she had been mistaken about where she had parked. The click of a car door opening caught her attention. She turned in the direction of the sound, her heart plummeting as she saw Saul Parenti getting out of the car with the long bonnet, the one that was parked where she’d expected to see her own car, and coming towards her.
Her reaction was immediate—a gut-deep instinct that went beyond logic or reason, making her confront him and demand, before she could think about the recklessness of doing so, ‘Where is my car? What have you done with it?’
For sheer blind arrogance he doubted she had any equal, Saul decided, listening to her and witnessing her immediate hostility.
Her response confirmed every judgement he had already made about her, and reinforced his growing determination to put her in her place.
‘I had it removed from my parking space,’ he told her meaningfully.
‘Removed?’ Giselle felt the file she was holding slip from her grasp as the shock hit her, disgorging papers as it fell. ‘Removed?’ she repeated ‘How? Where to?’
