‘Was making everyone terrified of you your aim?’
‘Yes.’
I shook my head. ‘That is not who you are, Nick.’Fuck.I dropped my eyes to the floor mortified. I had promised myself not to get personal with him.
He tilted my chin until our gazes met. His eyes were shining. ‘If they are terrified of me, Oliver can build relationships with them that work on a much better level. It’s a classic good-cop-bad-cop move. Understood? I don’t need them to knowme, Abbey.’
I swallowed at our closeness and nodded. I could feel the warmth coming from his body and I inhaled him deep in my lungs. I almost crumbled and put my arms around his narrow waist under the gorgeous jacket. But then I remembered where we were and who we were now, and I took a step back. Waited for his tea to brew.
‘I want to hold a launch party next Friday night,’ Nick said. ‘Would you mind booking the ballroom and organising an invitation for the staff and their partners? Make it black tie. Give everyone the chance to dress up.’
‘Done.’ I poured him a tea, added a dash of milk and gave it a stir, handing it to him with a biscuit on the side.
‘I don’t need you to make me tea.’ He sipped and then groaned over it. Tea from a pot was a winner. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.
I nodded and left.
***
The first week was done before I knew it. Nick and I had a couple of awkward moments, stepping through doors at the same time and then apologising. An interminable elevator ride.
I had to fight hard against Holiday Abbey. She was my enemy with Nick. She noticed everything about him. She could see stress in his shoulders and wanted to massage it out. She wanted to push his dark curls back off his face and slide into his lap while he drank his fucking tea. Holiday Abbey wanted to ensure he ate three times a day and laughed at least once an hour. Holiday Abbey dreamed of Nick and not just Holiday Nick anymore, and it was terrifying. And what was most terrifying was the knowledge that there was no Holiday Abbey. There was just Abbey. And Abbey wanted Nick.
Still, his brother and I were a bit of a crack team. We got on well, getting through enormous amounts of work and managing to have a laugh occasionally. I don’t know if it was from our time in the resort, but I felt this genuine warmth and friendship from Oliver.
He had a good head for numbers, had a strategy he wanted to see the marketing team employ, and was engaged, with an excellent work ethic. His drive gave him high expectations of people, but they were the same expectations he placed on himself. He was a hard guy not to respect or like. By the end of the week, we were taking turns buying breakfast and making coffee.
I had lunch with Mike on the Thursday and he gave me the lowdown on the week I missed, and we ended up – naturally – talking about the entire company’s current obsessive topic: the Northby brothers.
Mike Malik was my best bud at work. I actually could not even remember when we had first become friends or why, but I think I needed to do a financial report for Eric for some big meeting and Mike had taken pity on me. He was thirty-four and the salt of the earth, with a Pakistani dad, and a mum from Penrith, and he had this gorgeous, rugged poshness about him that got him laid constantly. He was swarthy and handsome, the most adorable human on earth.
‘Let’s talk about the Northbys.’ He pushed my leg as he said this, and his eyes enlarged to the size of planets.
‘Oh, God.’ I shook my head, not wanting to engage. ‘Can we not? Jesus Christ, remember the good old days when we talked about our shared love for Jon Snow.’
Mike ignored me. ‘Sir Brood-a-lot and Prince Charming. They are like a walking, fucking romance novel. I don’t know about you, but I always imagine Englishmen in period costume. Puffy shirts and tight breeches. And, Abs, Sir Brood-a-lot is a Darcy, which is hot once you get past the fact that he’s an arsehole. But Prince Charming, fuck me, I would definitely give that a crack.’
‘I think Oliver is into girls, babe.’
‘How disappointing. Why?’
I shrugged.
‘Right, Abs. Let us talk about frocks for next Friday’s party. I have this emerald velvet tux, which is going to dazzle, hon. What about you? You wanna be my plus one?’
‘Urgh, I don’t think I’m going to make it. Things are a bit tight this week and I have nothing to wear. And I don’t know about mingling, I just … hate shit like that.’
‘You cannot leave me alone at that party, Abbey. We are work wives and we are the only single people on earth.’
Don’t remind me.
I walked out of the office on Friday afternoon feeling fantastic about the fact it was Friday afternoon, but also pleased about what Oliver had achieved that week. This ended when I reached the lobby and saw it was absolutely bucketing down outside. I looked in my handbag and, sure enough, there was the world’s tiniest umbrella, which had not a fucking chance of keeping me dry.
Sydney had two types of rain. The non-existent-for-up-to-six-months-drought kind and the fucking-bucketing-down- total-annual-rainfall-in-a-week kind. This was clearly the latter. I looked out nervously before deciding I had to get home one way or another and stepped out into it in the direction of the train station.
The rain was one thing, the gale-force southerly was another, and five steps into my journey, my tiny umbrella – pink with black polka dots, RIP – blew inside out, dumping more water on me than I could possibly have imagined it could hold. I looked at it and dumped it in the bin beside me.Fuck it.
A honk of a horn next to me had me raise my middle finger.Who the fuck was honking at me?Only a psychopath would have a laugh by honking the horn at a woman who was impersonating a drowned rat, for fuck’s sake.
