Secrets In The Boardroom. Fiona Brand
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Way to go, Lilah Cole. Living up to the family crest. Abandon all thought of responsibility until it’s too late. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed now.”
He folded his arms over his chest, his gaze cool. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Not if she could help it.
Lilah closed her bedroom door behind her, relieved that she was finally alone. She checked the bedside clock and an unnerving sense of disorientation set in. It wasn’t yet one o’clock. Barely thirty minutes had passed since Zane had walked through the door. Thirty minutes in which her life had drastically altered.
She used her en suite bathroom to freshen up, this time hardly noticing the gorgeous fixtures. Instead of climbing into the elegant four-poster, she changed into jeans, a cotton sweater and sneakers, her fingers fumbling in their haste to get into casual, everyday clothes and restore some semblance of normality.
When she was dressed, she rewound her hair, which had ended up in an untidy mass, into a coil, stabbed pins through to lock the silky strands in place and systematically packed. Twenty minutes after entering her room, she was ready to leave.
Forcing herself to calm down, she sat on the edge of the bed and listened. She had heard Zane’s shower earlier, but now the suite was plunged into silence.
Taking a deep breath, she walked to her door and opened it a crack. The sitting room was in darkness. There didn’t appear to be any light filtering under the door of Zane’s bedroom or flowing out on to the terrace, signaling that he was still awake.
Lifting her bag, she tiptoed to the door and let herself out into the hall. She was almost at the elevator when Spiros loomed out of an alcove and stopped her.
His fractured English almost defeated her. When he picked up his cell and she realized he was going to call Zane, she summoned up a breezy smile, as if the fact that she was sneaking out in the middle of the night was all part of the plan. “Nessuno.” She jabbed at the call button and carefully enunciated each word as she spoke. “No need to call Zane, he’s sleeping.”
He frowned then nodded, clearly not happy.
Forty minutes later, Lilah paid off the taxi that had delivered her back to her apartment and walked inside.
She checked the messages on her phone. They were all from tabloids and women’s magazines wanting interviews. She had expected that Spiros, who had been uneasy about the fact that she had left at such an odd hour, would have caved and woken Zane up. Clearly, that hadn’t happened, because there was no message from Zane.
Feeling oddly let down that she hadn’t heard from Zane, she deleted them all.
Pulling the drapes tight, just in case someone was lurking outside with a camera, she changed into a spare chemise in pitch darkness and fell into bed.
She slept fitfully, waking at dawn, half expecting the phone to ring, or for Zane to be thumping on her door.
She got up and made a cup of tea, collapsed on the couch and watched movies. By ten o’clock, when Zane hadn’t either called or come by, exhausted from waiting, she dropped back into bed and slept until two in the afternoon.
When she got up, her stomach growling with hunger, she checked her phone. There were a string of new messages but, again, they were all from reporters.
Stabbing the delete button, she erased them all and finally decided to put herself out of her misery by taking the phone off the hook. On impulse, she checked her cell phone, but it wasn’t in her bag. She must have left it in Zane’s suite.
To keep the cold misery at bay that Zane didn’t appear to have any interest in contacting her, she opened a can of soup and made toast. Evan knocked on her door, wanting to return her spare key and check that she was okay. At four o’clock a second visitor knocked.
A courier. He handed her a package and requested she sign for it.
She scribbled her name, closed the door then ripped the package open. Her stomach dropped like a stone as her fingers closed around her cell phone.
From the second she had left Zane’s suite, she realized, she had been waiting for him to come after her, to insist that he wanted her back. That what they had shared had been as special for him as it had been for her.
That clearly wasn’t the case.
Zane hadn’t even bothered to include a note with the phone. All he had done was return her property in such a way that made it clear he no longer wanted contact.
Feeling numb, she put the phone on charge. Almost immediately, it beeped. Crazy hope gripped her as she opened the message.
It was Lucas, not Zane. He wanted her to call him.
Using the cell, she put the call through. Lucas picked up immediately. The conversation was brief. Thanks to her boosted media profile, she had just won a prestigious design award in Milan, which would give Ambrosi an edge in the market. A week ago, she had applied for the job of managing the new Ambrosi Pearl facility, which was to be constructed on the island of Ambrus, one of the smaller islands in the Medinian group. If she wanted the job, it was hers.
The job was a promotion with a substantial raise in her salary plus a generous living allowance. If she took it, paying her mother’s mortgage would no longer be a problem. She would even be able to save.
The only problem was, Zane lived on Medinos. Although, with the amount of travel he did, most of it to the States, she doubted their paths would often cross.
A bonus would be that she could leave Sydney and all of the media hype behind. She would have a fresh start.
Away from her latest sex scandal.
Taking a deep breath, she took the plunge and affirmed that she would take the job.
Lucas rang back a few minutes later. He had booked a flight, leaving in two days. Her accommodation, until a house could be arranged, was the Atraeus Resort on Medinos.
Reeling from the sudden change of direction her life had taken, Lilah rang her mother and told her the good news, carefully glossing over the bad parts.
After she had hung up, she cleared her answering machine and disconnected the phone. She also turned her cell phone off. She didn’t know how long it would take the media to discover that Lucas had offered her a job on Medinos, but given the added hype behind the Milan award, she didn’t think it would take long.
Too wound up to try and relax again, she decided to take one of her finished paintings to the gallery that handled her work.
When she walked into the trendy premises, the proprietor, Quincy Travers, a plump, balding man with a shrewd glint in his eyes, greeted her with open arms.
With glee he took the abstract she’d painted and handed her a check for an astounding amount. “As soon as I saw the story in the paper I contacted some collectors I know and put an extra couple of zeroes on the price of the paintings. I sold out within thirty minutes.”
“Great.” Lilah’s delight at the check, which was enough to pay off her mother’s mortgage and still leave change, went into the same deep, dark hole that had snuffed out her delight at the Milan award and her promotion.
She shoved the check in her purse. Just what she needed to brighten her day. Like her jewelry design, any value her art now had was tied to her notoriety.
Quincy propped the painting on an empty display easel and rubbed his hands together. “No need to put a price on this. I’ve got buyers waiting. Sex sells. What else have you got, love? You could scribble with crayons and we’d still make a fortune.”
“Actually, I’m leaving town for a while, so that will be the last one for the foreseeable future.”
Quincy looked crestfallen. “If I’d known that, I would have asked more for the other paintings.” He rummaged beneath his counter and came up with a battered address book. “But all is not lost. If the buyers know this is the last one, they’ll