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Was that all her life had been? Pretending? Pretence? And she hadn’t realised it until she’d come face to face with Jace Zervas.
Stop, she told herself yet again. Stop thinking, feeling. Another breath. Somehow she made herself nod as she wrote another note on the pad of paper. ‘Very well. Now—’
‘Look,’ Jace exhaled impatiently, ‘I don’t really have time to go over every detail. I came here as a favour, and I have a lot to do. I’m only in New York for a week.’
‘A week—’
‘I need the party to be this Friday,’ Jace cut her off.
Eleanor’s mouth dropped open before she quickly closed it. That hadn’t been on the memo. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. Venues are booked, I have a complete client list—’
‘Nothing is impossible if you throw enough money at it,’ Jace replied flatly. ‘And I chose your company because I was assured you could make it happen.’ His gaze, cold and contemptuous, raked over her. ‘I was told the top event planner would see to me personally. I suppose that’s you?’
Eleanor merely nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
‘Then email me a list of details to go over by tomorrow morning.’ Jace rose from his chair. ‘You’ve done very well for yourself, Ellie,’ he said softly. ‘I wonder how many people you had to climb over to get to this lovely little spot.’ He glanced out of the window at her view of Madison Square Park, the leafless trees stark against a grey winter sky.
His comment was so blatantly unfair and unwarranted that Eleanor could only gasp. And fume. What right did he have to make such a judgment? If anyone should be judging—
Jace headed for the door. ‘I don’t think I’ll need to see you before the party,’ he said, and somehow this bored dismissal stung her more than anything else had.
He was going to leave, just like that, after raking up the old wounds, after asking about her baby—their baby—
‘It was a girl,’ she burst out, the words like staccato gunfire. Her chest burned, and so did her eyes. Her fingers clenched into a fist on her desk. Jace stilled, his hand on the door. ‘A girl,’ she repeated tonelessly. ‘Since you asked.’
He turned around slowly, lip curled in an unpleasant sneer. ‘So I did,’ he replied. ‘But actually I really don’t care.’
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
‘ELEANOR? Did Jace Zervas just leave the office?’
Eleanor jerked her head up to see her boss, Lily Stevens, standing in her office doorway. Under her glossy black helmet of hair her eyebrows were drawn together sharply, her mouth a thin red line. The elegantly disapproving look reminded Eleanor of her mother, which was unsurprising since Lily and her mother had been business partners until five years ago.
‘Eleanor?’ Lily repeated, more sharply, and Eleanor rose from her desk, trying to smile. How long had she been lost in her own miserable reverie? ‘Yes. We just concluded our meeting.’
‘That was fast.’
Eleanor moved around her desk to put Jace’s coffee cup—barely touched—back on the tray. ‘He’s a busy man.’
‘Jill said things seemed tense when she came in here.’
Of course Jill would run to her boss, Eleanor thought with resentment. What a frenemy! This business could be cut-throat, and everyone was trying to claw a way in or up. She gave a little shrug. ‘Not really.’
‘I don’t think I need to tell you,’ Lily said, her tone making it clear she thought she did, ‘that Jace Zervas is a very important client? His holdings are worth over a billion—’
‘You don’t need to tell me.’ She didn’t need Lily telling her how rich and powerful Jace was. She’d known that already. When she’d met him as a twenty-two-year-old exchange student in Boston, he’d been from money. Rich, entitled, spoiled.
Except he’d never seemed spoiled to her… until he’d left. Then he’d seemed rotten right through.
‘I want you to do everything in your power to make this party a success,’ Lily told her. ‘I’m releasing your other clients to Laura for the week.’
‘What?’ Eleanor heard the outrage in her voice, and strove to temper it. She had several clients she’d been working with for months, and she knew Laura—another frenemy—would be eager to scoop up the contacts and run with them. Eleanor gritted her teeth. This business could be brutal. She’d toughened up a lot in the last ten years, but it still made her weary. She also knew there was nothing she could do about it.
If Lily was going to make that kind of executive decision, so be it. He wasn’t worth her jeopardising her career; he wasn’t worth anything. She would work on Jace’s damn party for a week. And then she would forget—again—that she’d ever met him.
Lily’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that going to be a problem, Eleanor?’
Eleanor bit the inside of her cheek. She hated that tone, that silky, dangerous, warning tone that her mother had always taken with her as a child. Funny, how she’d ended up in a job just like her mother’s, with a boss just like her mother.
Except there was nothing remotely funny about it, or even coincidental. Every choice, every decision had been intentional, a way of distancing herself from everything she’d been or believed in. A way of reinventing herself.
And it had worked.
Now she turned to smile sweetly at her boss. ‘Of course not. I’m absolutely thrilled—and honoured, Lily—to be working with Mr Zervas. Getting his account is a coup for the agency.’
Lily nodded, seemingly satisfied. ‘So it is. Are you meeting with Zervas again?’
‘I’ll email him the particulars tomorrow.’ Eleanor shuddered inwardly to think what that meant. She’d be tied up in begging calls for the rest of the day, recalling favours and currying some more so she could make this thing happen.
The idea that she would have to slave away all for Jace burned in her gut, her heart. It was just wrong.
But she wasn’t about to lose her job over this, or even her cool. And, Eleanor told herself, there could be some sweet, sweet satisfaction in showing Jace how he hadn’t hurt her at all.
Even if he really had—and horribly at that.
She spent the rest of the day immersed in work, planning Jace’s party while refusing to think of the man himself. A call to Atrikides Holdings yielded some interesting—and unsurprising—information.
‘It all happened so fast,’ gushed the staff member Eleanor had been connected to when she asked to speak to someone about details. Eleanor leaned back in her chair and prepared to hear some gossip. ‘One minute everything was fine—it’s a family business, you know—and the next he swooped in and took over. Fired half the people.’ The woman—Peggy— lowered her voice to an awed hush. ‘They had to leave that very day. Pack their stuff in boxes. Even Talos Atrikides—the CEO’s son!’
‘Well, hopefully this party will go some way to smoothing things over,’ Eleanor replied. She could listen to the gossip, but she wouldn’t indulge in it herself. She knew better.
Still, as she hung up the phone, the conversation left her a little shaken. She’d fallen in love with Jace Zervas when he’d been just twenty-two years old, charming, easy-going, carefree and careless. She hadn’t realised just how cold—and cold-hearted—he’d been until he’d walked away.
And hearing about his actions with Atrikides Holdings today confirmed it. He really was that man.
The other one—the one she’d fallen in love with—had been nothing more than a mirage. A lie.
It was nearly midnight by the time Eleanor finally stumbled out of the office, exhausted and eyesore from scanning endless sheets of paper with their myriad details. Still, she had the basis of a party to propose to Jace—via email—tomorrow. Massaging her temples, she headed out into the street, the only cars visible a few off-duty cabs. It looked as if she would have to walk.
It was only a few blocks to her apartment in a high-rise condo on the Hudson River, a gleaming testament to glass and steel. Eleanor didn’t particularly like the modern architecture, or the building’s fussy, high-maintenance residents, but she’d bought it because her mother had said it was a good investment. And she didn’t spend much time there anyway.
Sighing, Eleanor nodded hello to the doorman on duty and then headed in the high-speed lift up to the thirtieth floor.
Her apartment was, as always, dark and quiet. Eleanor dropped her keys on the hall table and flicked on the recessed lighting that bathed the living room with its modern sofa and teakwood coffee table in soft yellow light. Outside the Hudson River twinkled with lights.
Her stomach rumbled and she realised she had skipped dinner. Again. Kicking off her heels, she went to the galley kitchen and peered in her near-empty fridge. It held half a carton of moo shoo pork and a yogurt that was—Eleanor peered closer—two weeks past its sell-by date. Neither looked appetising.
Dispiritedly Eleanor closed the fridge. It was hard to believe she’d once baked cookies and muffins by the dozen, had dreamed of owning her own café. She’d been unbearably, determinedly domestic, and now she could barely feed herself.
She grabbed a handful of rather stale crackers from the cupboard and went back to the living room. Funny, she hadn’t thought of her old café dream in years, yet when she’d known Jace she’d spent hours embroidering that daydream, how it would be a little bit of everything: coffee shop, bakery, bookstore, gallery. Warm, cosy, bright, and welcoming. The home she’d never felt she’d had. It—everything—had seemed so possible then, so bright and shiny.
And now having Jace back in her life so suddenly, so surprisingly, brought it all back. The dreams, the disappointments.
The despair.
Eleanor thrust the thought away as she munched another cracker. Her stomach rumbled again. Perhaps sleep was better. She was exhausted anyway, and at least when she was asleep she wouldn’t feel hungry. Neither would she have to think—or remember.
Dropping her uneaten crackers in the bin, Eleanor turned towards her bedroom.
Yet as she lay in the darkness of her room, the duvet pulled up to her chest, sleep didn’t come. She was exhausted yet her eyes were wide open and gritty. And despite her best effort for them not to, the memories came, slipping into her mind, winding around her heart.
Lying there in the dark, she could almost feel the late autumn sunshine slanting onto the wide-planked wooden floors of her college apartment. She saw herself, tousle-haired, young, laughing, holding out a cupcake to Jace. They weren’t lovers then; they hadn’t even kissed. Yet. He’d invited himself over to taste the treats she’d been telling him about when he’d come into the café where she worked for his morning latte. And high with anticipation, Eleanor had invited him in, revelling in the charged atmosphere as he took a bite of the cupcake right from her hand, and then, laughing, pulled her close for a kiss.
It had been so easy, so right, and she’d gone without even considering another option, a different choice. He’d tasted like chocolate.
She closed her eyes, her throat tight and aching. She didn’t want to resurrect these memories. She worked hard never to remember them. Yet they came anyway, so sweet and yet so bitter for what came afterward.
The empty apartment. The disconnected cellphone. The bounced emails. The cold, cold despair when she’d realised just how alone she was.
Groaning alone, Eleanor turned on her side, tucking her knees up to her chest, and clenched her eyes shut as if that could keep the memories from coming and consuming her.
The blip of her baby on the monitor. The hard, sharp edge of the examining table, the cold slime of the gel on her tummy, and the endless silence of the technician, frowning, as she stared at the scan.
What’s wrong?
Eleanor bolted up in bed and went to the bathroom for a herbal sleeping pill. She might have faced down Jace today, but she couldn’t face the memories at night. They tormented her in a way even he never had. Their stark truth remained lodged in her gut, in her heart, like a stone. Nothing would remove it, or take away the bleak knowledge that she could never—
Eleanor closed her eyes again, tightly, and to her relief she finally slipped into a sleep made sweet by its absence of memories or dreams.
Despite her bad night, Eleanor was at her desk by eight o’clock in the morning. She saw Lily walk past her office door, nodding grimly, and she knew she’d been right to hurry to her desk that morning. She’d email the party plans to Jace, and then she’d put him out of her mind for ever. Or at least until he emailed back.
It took her nearly an hour to compose the email; it was aggravatingly difficult to strike the right tone, professional yet personable. She didn’t want Jace to think for a second that she was affected by him. That she’d been hurt. Yet she hardly wanted to seem too friendly, either; that smacked of desperation.
Too tired to tweak the email any more, Eleanor just ended up sending a rather boring list of details, explaining in dry terms the choice of venue, the seating plan, the floral arrangements, the menu.
Then she determined ly pressed send.
Two minutes later her phone rang.
‘This is completely unacceptable.’
Dumbly Eleanor stared at her computer screen, with its ‘your message has been sent’ confirmation still visible. It seemed impossible that in the approximately one hundred and twenty seconds since she’d pressed send, Jace had read her entire email and deemed it all unsuitable. Unacceptable, even.
‘Excuse me?’
Over the phone Eleanor heard Jace exhale impatiently. ‘This is all very standard, Ellie—’
‘Don’t call me that,’ she said sharply. He ignored her.
‘If I wanted a run-of-the-mill upscale do, I could have gone elsewhere. I came to Premier Planning because I was told you’d give me something extraordinary.’
Eleanor closed her eyes and prayed for patience. For mercy. She counted to ten, all the while listening to Jace’s impatience, hearing it in those short little exhalations of breath, and then said coolly, ‘I assure you there will be nothing run-of-the-mill about this party.’
Jace made a sound of disbelief that came close to a snort. ‘Salmon pâté? Gardenias? Champagne? Standard luxuries.’
‘That’s an oxymoron, if ever I’ve heard one—’
‘All of it is run-of-the-mill, Ellie.’
‘I told you, don’t call me that,’ she snapped.
‘Then impress me.’
That was the last thing she wanted to do. Why would she want to impress the man who had treated her like dirt, who had ground her heart into dust? Was her job really worth that much, worth her own dignity and pride?
Of course it was. It had to be. For the last ten years her job had been just about the only thing she had valued, the one thing she’d poured herself into. She wasn’t risking it for Jace. He’d already done enough damage in her life.
‘You gave me less than twenty-four hours to come up with an entire event,’ she finally ground out. ‘Of course I haven’t worked out all the details yet—’
‘I expected better than this.’
‘Funny, I said that ten years ago,’ Eleanor snapped. Then she closed her eyes. The last, the very last thing she wanted was to drag the past—their past—into this mess. And from the taut silence crackling along the phone lines, she had a feeling Jace felt the same.
‘You have no idea,’ he said coldly. ‘Meet me at my office building for lunch, twelve o’clock sharp.’ And then he hung up.
Eleanor cursed aloud, just as Lily poked her head in her office door and smiled narrowly.
‘Everything all right, Eleanor?’
‘Fine,’ Eleanor replied thinly. ‘I just got a paper cut, that’s all.’
Jace hung up the phone, massaging his knuckles as if he’d been in a fight. That terse conversation had not been a satisfactory outlet for his anger, for from the moment he’d walked into Eleanor Langley’s office and seen her cool little smile that was what he’d been feeling. Rage.
He was furious that she seemed so unrepentant, that she’d attempted to foist another man’s baby on him and didn’t even possess the decency now to admit it or apologise. Yet what had he really expected of a woman who was willing to sink so low, to lie to someone she’d said she loved?
He didn’t want to feel so angry, hated how it made the control he’d guarded carefully these last ten years slip away, so he hardly even knew what he was going to say or do. Or feel.
He’d never expected to feel so angry. He’d thought he’d got over Eleanor Langley and her betrayal, had put it far, far behind him. Now it felt fresh and raw and that made him even angrier. He didn’t want Eleanor to affect him this much. He didn’t want her to affect him at all.
Sighing impatiently, Jace turned back to the papers on his desk. Atrikides Holdings was a mess and he had plenty to occupy both his mind and his time. He didn’t need to waste either on Eleanor Langley, not even for a second.
All he wanted from her was a party. That was the only reason he was inviting her to lunch, why he was even bothering to see her again. He’d make it clear just what kind of high standard of service he expected. He’d put her in her place. His lips curved in a humourless smile as his sense of calm return to cloak him in reassuring coldness. All he wanted from her was a party, and by God he’d get one.
Three hours later Eleanor stood in front of the dark gleaming skyscraper that housed the offices of Atrikides Holdings. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then resolutely headed for the door.
After she was cleared through security she took the lift to the building’s top floor and stepped out into a room of elegant, old-style luxury with a stunning view of Central Park. She stared at the yawning rectangle of green, surrounded by concrete, the trees stark and bare above, as the elderly assistant pursed her lips before pressing a button on her telephone.
