Bad Boys and Billionaires (The Naughty List Bundles)

by Synthia St. Claire

  Helena felt a little awkward now she was under the spotlight. “Well, maybe he didn’t. Maybe I got it all wrong. Or I led him on…”

  “Whoa, girl, you stop right there! Don’t make me give you my feminist rant about women who ‘ask for it’ and why it’s all bullshit.”

  “Sorry - sorry. It’s like this. He offered to show me some of the local area. So we went up to see the Fairy Glen, and then he asked if I would like to see Rough Moor, so of course, I said yes. I mean, I thought he was just asking to show me the sights.”

  “It sounds like exactly that. So what happened?”

  Helena took a fortifying gulp of wine. She was afraid of sounding stupid. “Up there, in the middle of nowhere, he suddenly turned to me and told me I had amazing eyes.”

  Vicky bent forwards and peered closely at Helena, blinking in her drunken state. “You do. It’s true.”

  “Er, thanks. Whatever. But then he stepped towards me so I panicked and backed off, and he put a hand out to my arm, so I ran away.”

  There was a silence for a moment as Vicky digested this, and Helena began to feel quite small. Eventually, Helena said, “I over-reacted, didn’t I?”

  Vicky pursed her lips. She was clearly trying to fight the influence of the wine on her brain and she took a moment before she replied. “I think you might have done. But on the other hand, that’s totally out of character for him. I mean, he’s a sworn bachelor. Not as in a euphemism for gay, because I am pretty sure we heard of him having girlfriends, although maybe he was just experimenting. But no, all the gossip is, that he’s sworn to die single and alone.”

  “That’s just crazy talk. He told me that he finds gossip amusing and tries to live up to it. I think he’s playing a game with everyone.”

  “Well, he’s lived alone up there for years and he never entertains and he never goes out. And he’s never made a pass at anyone locally.”

  Helena nodded. “Yeah, I over-reacted.”

  “We all have our moments. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But I have screwed up his support for the project!”

  “Have we still got the office?”

  “Yes,” Helena conceded.

  “Has he taken back his promise to let us pass the cables over his land if we need to?”

  “No.”

  “Then all systems go, Helena!” Vicky picked up a sheet of paper and waved it in the air. “Put that daft old curmudgeon out of your mind. We’ve got a revolution to plan! Well, not quite a revolution, but a fete, which is the English equivalent. Sort of. If fetes had guillotines. Now there’s a thought…”

  “What percentage is this wine?” Helena was relieved the conversation had turned, though she was not sure what the true source of her relief was. She pushed it aside.

  “It’s strong enough to get the proper brainstorming juices flowing! Come on, summer fete to raise funds, what do you think?”

  “I like it.” Helena stretched her legs out in front of the fire and let the warmth cover her in a reassuring and primeval way. “Okay. Chuck us a bit of paper. Let’s plan.”

  * * *

  “Hello mum.” He emphasised the word ‘mum’ but she looked at him blankly, her pale wide eyes watery. A nurse fussed into the room and placed a tray onto the table by the bed. She flitted around, straightening the curtains and plumping up the pillows behind Jemima, Lady of the Manor of Arkthwaite, once Miss Jemima Hudson and society belle. Now, just one more hollowed-out patient in this hospital disguised as a “home” where they were called “residents” and treated like children.

  “She’s had a good week, haven’t we, Mrs Arkthwaite? There we go, nice and comfortable.”

  Richard nodded at the petite nurse and she bustled off. His mother rolled her head to one side on the pillow, and half-closed her eyes.

  “Mum. It’s me, Richard. Shall we have a cup of tea?”

  Her head rolled again and she looked at him. Well, not at him. Just towards where he was. Though he knew she was seeing something else. Someone else.

  “Cup of tea, yes?” He picked up the cup and passed it to her. She took it, in a reflex action of muscle memory. He knew from experience that the tea had to be drunk straight away. The staff would add cold water to the cups, to prevent the residents burning themselves. He’d had too many lukewarm drinks to make that mistake any longer.

  Jemima drank with an uncouth slurping noise, the kind of manners that would have earned him a clout round the head when he was younger. The tea cups were small, and hardly worth having at all. She gulped it down and passed the cup back to him, and finally her eyes focused on his face.

  He knew what was coming but it never got any easier. She said, in a high voice, “Henry. Henry, where have you been? The cats were crying all night. All night!”

  “It’s not Henry. It’s Richard.”

  “Henry!”

  At first, when she’d got so confused, he would spend a long time explaining that his dad had died years previously. But each time, she’d get upset, then accuse him of lying to her, and the distress would inevitably lead to the nurses rushing in, and Richard going home in a black depression. Gradually, he’d come to understand that there was no present for her any more except what he could create for her, and that his duty lay in making that present as happy and peaceful as possible. He always allowed himself one protest, just one insistence that he was Richard, but then he would let it drop.

  “I didn’t hear any cats,” he said.

  “All night!” she told him, reaching for his hand and patting it. “Crying and wailing and goodness knows what else. There’ll be another litter along soon, mark my words, Henry!”

  “We can always do with more good ratters.” He guessed that another resident was distressed in the night, and this incident had been made anew in his mother’s mind. Playing along was difficult and he felt guilty for it, even though her face was more relaxed as she spoke with him on her own terms.

  “When is Richard coming to visit?”

  He hated this part of things most of all. “He’s busy with his studies.”

  “Oh Henry, Henry, we should have done more to stop him! London! Why?”

  “To study what he wanted to study.”

  “But he works, Henry, he works and why did he go to London? Cambridge, Oxford. But no. Oh Henry, what did we do wrong?”

  Richard swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. This was a new plea and he didn’t want to hear any more. Now was not the time to hear his mother’s regrets. Why did dementia strip one’s mind so indiscriminately? If it had to take one’s personality and memories, why could it not just take the bad and leave the good? “He’ll come home soon,” he told her. “He will come around.”

  “But the manor…”

  “Don’t worry.” Richard rubbed her hand, but he couldn’t look at her any more. He stared at the vines and flowers on her quilt, trying to see the beauty in their twisting, strangling stems. “He won’t fail his duty when it really counts.”

  * * *

  “Ingholme’s not bad, really,” Vicky said as she led Helena down a very steep street. Cars were parked bumper-to-bumper all along the pavement, making it seem impossible for anyone to be able to drive away without making a thirty-point turn. It was dusk, and drizzling with light rain. In fact, it had rained all week and Helena had let it influence her mood. Nothing had really moved forwards on the project, in spite of their drunken plans and schemes.

  Helena had gone up to the office at the manor house once, taking the scribbled sheets of ideas with her, and spent a long hour arranging them and re-arranging them into pointless piles. She’d looked up at the door every time she heard a noise, half-expecting Richard to pop in.

  But he hadn’t. She knew he was around because there were lights on in the house, and at one point a shadow had crossed the yard, making her jump and start out of her seat.

  She could admit to herself, now, that she wanted to see him again, because she felt awkward about her reaction on the moorland and she
wanted to apologise for it. Hindsight had worked wonders and she was happy to admit that she had misinterpreted his actions. After all, why would he be remotely interested in her? That was sheer arrogance on her part.

  The uncomfortable truth was that she had no evidence to suggest he was making a move on her, and even more uncomfortable was the knowledge that she had reacted like her mother would have done. Her mother was continually under the impression that she was a beautiful, desirable woman and that every man she met was secretly pining for her.

  Of course, Helena’s mother was a beautiful woman - God knows, she ought to be, with the amount she spent on beauty treatments and make-up. And, Helena suspected but had no evidence for it, not a little surgery.

  Helena did not like the fact that she had fallen into that trap. She had thought Richard was attracted to her! She could look back and cringe about it, now.

  And poor Richard didn’t deserve to have his well-meaning compliment flung back at him. So she had waited and pretended to work in the office, hoping he might stroll in so that she could make things better.

  There was no heating in the office and she soon grew too cold to do any work; not that she had managed anything meaningful, anyway. Eventually she had been forced to splash home dejectedly and try to put it all out of her mind.

  The rest of the week had become hectic, as Clive had been taken ill with a severe chest infection and the day to day running of the branch had defaulted to Helena. With the support of the men in the warehouse, and Bet at the end of a phone line, she had muddled through but the long days had taken their toll and by Friday, she was a stressed out mess.

  She’d struggled through the final afternoon on a continual chain of coffees, brought to her desk by Jason. She’d been driving in so that she had longer to spend at work, and she missed taking the bus. On the way home that night she swung by a fast food restaurant and never had a greasy collection of sugar and lard tasted so good. She was planning a night of cosiness, beginning with a hot bath and ending with her laptop in bed, watching DVDs, although she thoroughly expected to be asleep by eight o’clock.

  But Vicky was on her doorstep when she got home. “Hey there, I was just giving up on your! Working late?”

  “Unlike you teachers, yeah.”

  Vicky grinned and waved a fist at her in a comedy way. “Don’t make me hurt you. Anyway, I was wondering, would you like to come to a moot tonight? I meant to call you yesterday but there was a meeting after school and then there was dance-ercise in the hall and someone was sick, I mean proper vomiting, and the caretaker had gone home, and I was working late in the office so I stepped in. Well, I actually stepped in it, but that’s another story. So I didn’t ring you.” She stopped and looked expectantly at Helena who blinked and re-ran the speech in her head, hunting for the appropriate response. Her brain was sluggish and it took her a moment to grasp it.

  “Oh - a moot! I don’t know.”

  “You said the other night you’d never been to one, but that you were interested.”

  “Well…okay then.”

  And now they were standing outside an unremarkable three-storey terrace on a road that appeared to be a one-in-two incline, and waiting for the door to be answered.

  It was funny how tiredness could be swept aside when needed, Helena thought. She was aware of a general fogginess at the back of her mind, but the excitement of meeting new people had kicked in, and she was looking forward to the evening. They were welcomed into a perfectly normal living room and she gazed around at the magnolia walls, beige carpet and dark-wood sideboard with a strange sense of disappointment. She’d been expecting something like Vicky’s house with its random stuffed owl on the toilet cistern and the hologram picture of a faun, two feet high, halfway down the stairs.

  Luckily, the six people sitting on the overstuffed sofa seemed reassuringly different and exotic, in spite of the fact that they were all clutching teacups with rich tea biscuits balancing on their saucers.

  Helena felt a wave of nervousness grip her stomach. She smiled brightly but looked sideways to Vicky.

  Within moments she’d been introduced and in her trepidation she managed to forget everyone’s names instantly. She was settled onto the sofa between a man who had the wispy chin-beard of a goat, and a skeletally thin woman in crushed black velvet. The man leaned towards her and asked, “What path do you follow? I’m a chaos magician.”

  “Oh shut up, Boris. Just because you keep losing your car keys does not mean you work with the agents of chaos.” The host, a willowy woman in a purple jumpsuit with three necklaces of wooden beads around her neck, waggled her finger at him, and smiled apologetically at Helena. “Boris is terrible. Ignore everything he says.”

  “Oh - I, er, will.”

  “Charming,” Boris said with glee. He appeared to be unconcerned with the insult. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to us. We probably look like a bunch of weirdoes. But as you get to know us, you’ll realise that in fact, we are a bunch of weirdoes.”

  “I will feel right at home, then,” Helena said. “I ought to say that this is my first, um, experience… and I don’t have a path. I mean, I read a lot, and I like being outside, but I don’t think I’d really call myself a… you know.”

  “A pagan?” The willowy woman shrugged. “That’s fine. Tonight is just a social. We’re here to chat about things; social issues, green activism, that sort of thing.”

  “Whether it’s more environmentally friendly to be cremated or to be buried.”

  “Boris!” another person exclaimed. “What exactly are you planning?”

  The talk turned to matters of death, cemeteries, and humanist burials. It was fascinating and Helena soon found herself taking part in the debate. Much more tea was drunk and three more packets of biscuits were consumed before a hush finally fell on the room.

  Helena was surprise to see that it was ten o’clock, and the awareness of the time triggered a wave of tiredness. She stifled a yawn and looked around. Others, too, were falling silent.

  She thought it was time to go, but then the host, who she now knew as Jess, stood up, and everyone looked at her expectantly. Boris gathered up the cups and saucers and took them through to the kitchen while Jess laid out a cloth on the central low coffee table. Then she pulled a box out from underneath it and began to assemble various objects on the cloth.

  When Boris came back in he flicked the lights off. Candles had been burning all night, and it was dim but just about all right to see by. Helena felt nervous as a short blade, like a stunted sword, was laid on the cloth next to a bowl and a bunch of flowers.

  Jess looked around. “Eight of us. Well that works out nicely - two for each quarter.”

  They all stood up, and Helena followed suit. She wanted to ask what was going on, but a reverential hush had fallen over the gathering and they moved to their places with practised ease. Vicky pulled Helena along with her, to stand at one end of the room. “We’re East,” she whispered.

  “But what do I do?”

  “Nothing. Just… be.”

  Helena was tired and the stress of the week made her feel cranky. She didn’t like not knowing what was going on. She’d read enough to feel certain that they weren’t about to drop their clothes, sacrifice a goat or perform unspeakable acts upon one another with the dagger and the bunch of flowers, but even so, it was unsettling to be the only one who didn’t have a clue. She fought back the urge to demand an explanation. She had to trust Vicky, but there were going to be some strong words between them in the car on the way home.

  Each pair at each quarter stepped forward and spoke about the guardian elementals, then everyone chanted something about “sky above and earth below.” Helena started to feel ridiculous. She had loved the discussion about serious things, but this felt like play-acting. That said, she felt like that when she’d attended church services too. It was frustrating. She wanted there to be something more, out there, but she had a sneaking suspicion that she was alone in the universe. />
  It would be nice to feel a connection with the divine, she thought, as Jess raised the dagger and wafted it about in a flame before plunging it into the bowl, but I don’t get that when I’m standing in someone’s living room and there’s a man who looks like a goat opposite me. The last experience I had that was even slightly spiritual was out on Rough Moor… and look how that ended.

  Another man stepped forward and placed two tiny figurines on the cloth. “The Lady and her Consort,” he intoned. “I bring them here for blessing.”

  Are we blessing them, or are they blessing us? Helena pondered as water from the bowl was applied to the heads of the small models. She had completely lost track of what was going on. Someone spoke at length about spring and renewal and tides, which was all well and good, but standing between a coffee table and a sofa, spring and its tides felt rather removed.

  She was tired, too tired, and felt herself sway. The next thing she knew, they were all holding hands and walking in a slow circle, “raising energy”. I could do with some of this energy.

  Then there was the passing of some cake around, and the people who were not driving were offered mead. Finally there were handshakes, exactly like at the end of a church service.

  “You look shattered,” Jess remarked as she moved around the room, back in her role as good hostess.

  “I’m sorry, I am. I didn’t expect a ritual. I hope I didn’t ruin it.”

  “Of course not! The more the merrier. It wasn’t really a ritual. Just a little circle to reaffirm our relationship with the spirits and the gods.” As she spoke, Jess picked up the two tiny figures, and weighed them thoughtfully in her hand. She half-closed her eyes and appeared to be whispering to herself.