And some ways away, she heard her brother’s ghostly, “Flop!”
Eyes firmly shut, Myrtle floated in his direction.
Chapter Five
Jack Meets Lila and Rachel
Jack
Three months later…
Jack saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
He turned his head to see his assistant, Olive, and her short, squat body. She was wearing a heavy tweed skirt even though it was the middle of a very warm summer. One tail of her blouse had come untucked. And her short, naturally grey but dyed peach (for some reason unknown to him) hair was spiked as if she’d been running her hands through it with severe agitation.
Olive Mayfair could singlehandedly plan a successful war with multiple fronts but she wouldn’t be able to do it without displaying a great deal of tremendously disorganised, blatantly obvious stress.
She stood at the windows to the conference room where Jack was sitting in a meeting and she was gesticulating wildly, like she was guiding a plane in to land and didn’t quite know what signals to make so she was making it up as she went along.
Her eyes were wild.
With one look at her Jack knew either the world was coming to an end or there was a toilet backed up in the branch of his bank located in Iowa City, Iowa.
He looked back at the conference table at which he was sitting at the head.
The ten people in the room with him were all watching Olive.
“Excuse me,” Jack muttered, put his hands to the arms of his chair and pushed up. He grabbed his Mont Blanc pen, a present his father gave him when he graduated from Oxford, and his wildly expensive phone which could, if he’d take the time to programme it, likely call Mars, a present from Yasmin.
He pushed through the door, Olive lunged forward immediately, grabbed his arm and dragged him away from the windows.
She tugged him to a stop, looked up at him and, with a grave expression on her face, declared, “We have a problem.”
“You don’t say,” Jack muttered dryly.
“This is Code One!” she announced on a whispered screech.
Jack crossed his arms on his chest and regarded her silently.
“Lila Cavendish and her daughter, Rachel Abbot, are here,” she told him.
Jack felt her words like a sharp, strong jab direct to the gut.
“Excuse me?” Jack asked, hoping he hadn’t heard what he thought he’d heard.
“Lila Cavendish and Rachel Abbot, grandmother and mother to Belle Abbot, are here. In your office. Right now.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed as his temper flared.
Why Belle’s mother and grandmother would be in his offices in London, he could not fathom.
He also didn’t care.
“Get rid of them,” he demanded and Olive threw her hands out at the sides.
“I knew you’d say that and I tried. They won’t go.”
This surprised him. “They won’t go?”
“No. I didn’t even let them into your office. They marched right in. Lila even made herself a cappuccino with your espresso maker.” She paused. “And your milk! Straight from your fridge!” she said this last like it was a crime punishable by death.
“Why are they here?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know. They won’t tell me. They’re demanding to speak to you,” Olive replied.
“Tell them I’m in a meeting and they’ll need to make an appointment,” Jack said.
“I did that already. They don’t care. They said they’d wait ‘until the cows come home’, whatever that means. We don’t have cows in London,” Olive noted unnecessarily.
Jack made a decision and turned toward his office. “I’ll take care of them. Go back to the meeting. Tell them I’ll be five minutes.”
He watched Olive nod and walked to his office trying, not entirely successfully, to control his anger.
The debacle with Belle at The Point had made the papers. How, Jack didn’t know. But considering the number of people who saw Miles prominently displaying Belle on his arm at the party then the next morning all the shouting and finally they watched Belle fleeing the castle, it could be anyone.
Including Miles, a manoeuvre which, if his brother arranged it, backfired.
For an entire month, the media was in fits of glee. They picked every possibility of the Bennett Brothers’ love triangle with an adopted national treasure apart and, Jack had to admit, they did a splendid job of it.
The Bennett Brothers rivalry wasn’t a secret and many people who only remotely knew Jack or Miles were more than happy to discuss it.
Jack and Miles had been depicted as lascivious libertines, targeting a media darling as the spoils of a heinous contest, playing with her affections and using her body for their immoral pleasure.
Belle had been depicted as a fragile, not entirely clever, lamb at the slaughter who fell headlong in love with Miles then Jack or both of them at the same time, depending on the story.
At first, it had been a feeding frenzy, all three of them caught in it. No matter where they went, there were cameras, microphones and prying, insulting questions hurled in their direction.
Jack, Belle and Miles had all kept silent. Jack, because if he let himself react, he’d likely do bodily harm. Belle, because she never spoke to the press. Miles, because he’d drawn the short straw. The press, latching onto his loss in the “competition” for Belle, rubbed his face in it constantly, something he detested.
Miles had finally lost his patience and disappeared not telling anyone, not even Joy, where he’d gone.
Belle, Jack noted with vague concern he would not allow to form fully, seemed to get paler and thinner by the day and she too eventually disappeared which was a mistake as that led to a week of the media speculating that she was with Miles.
Jack didn’t change his behaviour in any way.
Miles had returned six weeks ago when the story was well and truly dead.
Belle, Jack noted distantly (but the press noted it far more assertively), emerged two weeks ago looking paler, thinner and far more fragile.
Jack would not allow himself to care.
Whatever romantic idiocy that had him in its clutches and led him to behave like a besotted fool at her merest smile, her softest giggle, the depth he’d convinced himself was in her eyes, was gone.
Completely.
Time, distance, absence and Belle herself had swept it away.
If his mind turned to his behaviour that night or her unshakable belief that he would abuse her so monstrously, especially after what he thought they’d shared, or her refusal to allow him to explain, or the memory of her walking away from him without even glancing back, the fury would begin.