What on earth was she going to do?
The phone had been ringing off the hook. There were two men with cameras outside her house, lounging by a car, smoking and waiting for her to emerge from where she had now been in hiding for the past day.
She felt as if she was suddenly under attack on all sides, and she had no idea what she was going to do.
The first call, from one of her colleagues at work, had alerted her to the fact that she was suddenly in the spotlight andnewsworthy.
‘Hey, girl, what’s going on?’
Ellie had heard Trish’s sing-song voice but, before she’d been able to fill her in on the successful outcome of her trip to Barbados, she had been pinned to the spot by a series of good-natured questions that had left her reeling.
The second she had hung up, she had found the tabloid headlines on her phone and had watched her whole life begin to unravel with sickening horror.
Of course, Ellie had known that James was the darling of the tabloid press. A billionaire, ridiculously good-looking, and with the gravitas and money that came from the complex and cut-throat world of business.
He was also courteous towards reporters. He always seemed to recognise that they were doing a job and, as long as they didn’t go anywhere he didn’t want them to go, he was unfailingly co-operative. Hence he graced the covers of magazines and newspapers with predictable regularity because of the transitory nature of his relationships and the high profiles of most of his exes.
But now...
Nowshewas the woman...the one who had finally‘snared the country’s most eligible bachelor’...The quiet little secretary who had‘worked her magic from the side lines’...The one who had‘managed to get the ring on her finger and the date set for a walk down the aisle’...
Of course, in a week’s time this would all be history, and the reporters would be busily finding someone else to pin to the wall, but for now...
For now, she was trapped in her own house and when she did emerge, which she would have to in the next day or two to return to work, she would have to hope and pray that the furore would have died down.
Usually, Ellie would have taken a deep breath and cheerfully told the lot of them that it was all just a ridiculous mistake. If you ploughed your way through a problem, it was usually the fastest way of dealing with it, but there was now the added complication of her mother.
Every problem seemed to open a door to a new one. She cradled a cup of tea, frantically trying to work out how on earth she was going to deal with the accumulated lot of problems.
Her train of thought was interrupted by the frantic ringing of the doorbell. At six thirty in the evening this was the last thing she wanted and she ignored the piercing summons until her mobile phone began ringing as well, and up popped his number.
James.
Her heart stopped and she sank back against the chair and closed her eyes for a second.
Through all this, she hadn’t stopped thinking of him. Would news of this have reached him in Barbados? He only read the broadsheets, but the gossip grapevine that did the rounds at work would surely have reached him?
She reluctantly took the call and braced herself to be upbeat when all she wanted to do was hide away until the whole mess blew over.
‘Open the door, Ellie!’
‘James...’ Her voice petered off.
‘Open the door! I’m outside.’
‘Outside?’
‘Standing on your doorstep, to be precise.’
‘I don’t want to go outside. There are people there.’ She heard the sound of tears in her voice and cleared her throat.
‘I’ve got rid of them.’
‘You have?’ Relief washed over her, and for the first time in her life she weakly discovered what it felt like to have someone there to have her back and pick up the pieces.
Taking no chances and not stopping to be concerned that she was clad in nothing more than an old tee shirt, a pair of tight leggings and some gaily patterned bedroom slippers, Ellie went to the front door and unlocked it just enough to make sure that he was really there.
He was.
