The Partnership (Callaghan Green Series Book 10)

by Annie Dyer

  Her eyes shone in the faint light as she tipped her head to look at me, and I noticed the red plumpness of her lips. Resisting her was futile, there was no point stopping the movement as our faces closed the gap between us and we kissed, gently, tentatively, as if both of us were unsure if the other would back away like a timid creature.

  Neither of us backed away. She tasted of the wine she’d been drinking, her lips soft and pliant against mine, her mouth opening for me when I demanded. I was intoxicated by her, any whisky would’ve been redundant after that second taste.

  Our lips lingered close to each other’s when the kiss ceased. I hesitated to pull away fully, not wanting the moment to end in case it didn’t happen again.

  “I thought we weren’t going to do that.” She whispered the words as if the whole office were trying to listen, as if the words were butterflies she was setting free.

  I moved a hand to brush her hair away from her face. “We weren’t. I was meant to keep you in the colleague box.”

  “I’ve never been very good at staying in boxes that people put me in.” Her eyes blazed and I wanted their fire to burn me.

  I leaned in for another kiss, the band playing a different tune, laughter floating out of the room and reminding me that we weren’t alone. When the kiss ended this time she shivered with the cold.

  “Time to go inside?”

  Georgia shook her head. “Not yet. Let’s stay another minute.”

  Another minute to keep hold of her and sway with the music. Another minute away from our colleagues. Another minute to pretend that everything was simple.

  We didn’t speak. Her hands were on my shoulders, my lips pressed close to her hair and my arms wrapped around her. This was peace mixed with the biggest rush of adrenaline I remembered experiencing and I didn’t want it to stop.

  “We should go inside.” The words came from me, even though it was the last thing I wanted. There were still a couple of people I needed to see and as much as I didn’t want to let her go, the night wasn’t warm or anywhere near it. “Come with me while I speak with someone about a job.”

  “I need to get going soon. It’s almost pumpkin time.”

  I frowned. “Pumpkin time?”

  “I need to get to bed. You know, up early with the small human I made.” She gave me a sorrowful smile.

  “Come with me and I’ll leave with you. I’ll get the cab to drop you off first.” I held her waist , wanting to pull her closer to where my cock had hardened, not getting the message that this night wasn’t ending in the way it would’ve done months ago.

  I waited for the argument, the statement that she was independent or the brush off, some form of panic that I wasn’t more than a stolen kiss or two and she needed to flee, but it didn’t come.

  “You sure? I hate getting taxis on my own.”

  I wanted to tell her she’d never need to a get a taxi on her own again now I knew, but I was only a man and not the prince I’d pretended I was to her daughter.

  “I’m sure. You good to go in?”

  She nodded. “How’s my lipstick?”

  “I did my job. You’re not wearing it anymore.”

  Forty minutes later, I was holding her hand in the back of a taxi while the driver navigated around the streets of Southwark to take her home.

  “What time will Rose wake up?”

  Georgia thought for a moment before responding. “Liv will have kept her up later, so she sleeps in a little, so maybe seven. I planned to get home about half-nine so I could try to get a lie-in. Usually Miss Rose is awake at five-thirty, but at least now she’ll read a book before she wants me.”

  “You can get revenge when she’s a teenager and wanting to sleep past noon.” I remember my mother waking me up with the greatest of pleasure by vacuuming my room on a Saturday morning when all I’d wanted to do was snooze the day away before going out again that night.

  “I’ll be catching up on all the sleep she’s deprived me of, so she can sleep as long as she likes.” She stifled a yawn. “When Olivia didn’t live with us, Rose would occasionally spend a Friday or a Saturday night with her and sleep over. That was bliss. I stayed in bed the whole morning after, sprawled out.”

  I laughed. “Does she never see her dad?”

  “No.” Her eyes met mine and she gave a deep sigh. “Do you want a cup of tea and I’ll tell you what happened?”

  “Yes. If it won’t keep you from too much beauty sleep.”

  The taxi pulled up outside her home and I followed her in; she was swifter at finding her keys this time, the house silent and still when the door opened, with just a lamp on in the hallway.

  “Don’t be surprised if Liv wakes up and comes down. She’s been midnight feasting since she was about eleven. It’s at the point now where she actually prepares a snack before she goes to bed. I think that’s called acceptance and as long as Rose doesn’t pick up on that habit, we’re good.” She went straight for the kettle, chucking the coat she’d remembered to collect on the way out of the hotel over the back of a chair.

  The kettle boiled while she undid her shoes, breathing an audible sigh of relief when she took them off. “It must’ve been a man who came up with the idea for those things.”

  “Probably.” I was too interested in looking at her legs to formulate a decent response. “Nice shoes though.”

  She laughed, as if she could read my mind and knew exactly what I was thinking.

  “I just wish they were more comfortable.”

  The kettle boiled and she poured the water in to the two mugs she’d grabbed. The quiet wrapped around us like a blanket, and I waited to see if she still wanted to tell me about Rose’s dad.

  “Here.” She passed the mug over to me and then went to sit down. “Although we should probably have a bottle of Jack for this story, not tea.”

  I sat down facing her, noticing that her lips were still void of lipstick. “I can afford a good hitman.”

  She laughed. “So can Olivia and she nearly did just that.” She fiddled with her hair. “I started at my previous firm as a trainee and I worked hard. A couple of years after I’d finished my training contract, a new partner started. He was professional, intelligent, a few years older than me and we started a relationship away from work. About nine months in, I found out I was pregnant.

  “When I told him, he was dismissive and suggested I get a termination. That wasn’t something I was prepared to do – although a baby wasn’t in my plans at that point, it didn’t scare me and I figured that after nine months of a solid romance it wasn’t something we couldn’t deal with.” She laughed and tossed her hair to one side.

  “I take it he freaked?”

  There was another sigh and a smile that told me she’d found some kind of peace with this. “Two days after I’d told him that I was going through with it, an announcement was made in the office that he’d just gotten engaged to his long-term girlfriend.”

  I didn’t know exactly what to say. I could call him names or make threats, but these were words that were right for five years ago and were now redundant. I could make his career less profitable by spreading a few discreet rumours, but I’d have no idea on how that would affect Georgie.

  “No one knew?”

  She shook her head. “The other partners, but not the rest of us. He didn’t really socialise with his colleagues, other than the senior partners. I’d assisted on a case with him and we’d spent some time in Leeds together, staying over in a hotel, then continued seeing each other. I’d been to his house, but it turned out he had two, so I’d never had a clue about his girlfriend.”

  “What happened?”

  She was quiet for a second. “We came to an agreement about child support. He pays into a trust fund for Rose, and he signed his rights away, unless she wants to meet him when she’s older. The problem was, his secretary found the paperwork and outed us both – when I started showing it was a bit of a scandal because no one knew I’d been seeing someone, so there were already
rumours about us which I’d denied. When it came out, it got awkward at work and the slurs started about me sleeping my way to the top, and that I’d tried to trap him. A couple of the other women started rumours that I’d slept with half the partners and destroyed another marriage.”

  “How did you deal with it?”

  “By working my arse off and ignoring them. Steve never said anything; he ignored everything including me, married his fiancée and that was that. Rose was born and I kept work and her separate. For all my colleagues knew, I could’ve had her adopted.”

  I thought of the little girl sleeping upstairs, how she loved books and chocolate and fairy tales about handsome princes and wondered how the fuck anyone wouldn’t want to have her in their lives. I thought about how Max and Vic had been desperate for a baby, how Payton, even though it was unexpected, was over the moon to become a mum in a few more months and I wondered again what sort of man it took to say no to loving the life he’d help create.

  I didn’t want to meet him, because the right hook I’d perfected would be used on his face.

  “Does she ask about him?”

  “Yes.” It was a simple answer. “She’s asked what he’s like, so I’ve shown her pictures. And she asked why he doesn’t want to see her, so I tell her the truth. He had another family and chose to stay with them before she was born. Then I explain it’s his loss and we go through all the people that love her.”

  “How do you not want to take up Olivia’s offer about the hit man?” I was considering commissioning one.

  She smiled. “Because I had to get past that, Seph. He’s a waste of my energy. I got the best thing in my life from him and I’m thankful for that. And now I know what a piece of lying shit he is, I’m glad he made the choice he did.”

  I wrapped my hands around the hot mug and squeezed it. “I’m glad he made that choice too.”

  When I left twenty minutes later, opting to walk home to get some fresh air, I imagined what’d happened, how she’d probably been swept off her feet by a man who she worked with, how he could’ve ruined her career. How her little girl had been rejected before she was born by the man who was meant to be her hero.

  How as strong as Georgie was, she needed someone to match that.

  And I wasn’t sure if I could be that strong. Not when I’d spent so many years being a big kid, fucking his way round London and only getting away with making bad decisions because I was clever enough to talk myself out of them later.

  They’d already been screwed over by one man. I didn’t want to be the one to cock up and do it again.

  I stood outside my apartment and looked up at the moon and the stars, clear in the cold early spring night. The world felt bigger now, too big.

  Maybe Georgia and Rose were what I was looking for. I just didn’t know whether I deserved them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Seph

  It now seemed I didn’t need to have alcohol to have a hangover. By Friday, I’d managed to find every excuse under the sun to avoid going into the office, and dodged most of Georgia’s phone calls, responding via email or text.

  I was a coward and I’d already talked myself into a place in hell. Georgia had confided in me what happened with Rose’s father and now I was ghosting her.

  Ava was waiting for me in Amelie’s at lunchtime on Friday, a laptop in front of her with a sample book for materials. It was difficult to believe that the little girl who’d annoyed the absolute crap out of me was now a fully-grown woman, who was just as annoying now, but somehow had managed to create a successful business and was pretty talented too. Her engagement ring twinkled under the lights and every so often I saw her glance at it.

  “Still have time for lunch with your big brother?”

  She grinned up at me and closed the laptop, pushing it to one side. “Always. And it’ll give me some space to think about what this really fussy client actually needs. I don’t know what’s worse: you when you had no idea what you wanted at all, or someone who thinks they know what they want even though it’s the wrong thing.”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea what you mean. Don’t you just go into a house and tell them what would work?”

  “If only.” She rolled her eyes. “I put forward several different ideas that would work and hope they have the taste to choose one of those. Only this client is determined to have a William Morris theme in a twenty-first century house because she wants, and I quote, ‘a blend of influences’. It’s going to look like an end of season sale’s thrown up all over it. This,” she tapped the book, “is me mitigating a disaster.”

  I laughed quietly. Ava’s life of interior design was one I envied. She tended to have wealthy clients who had money to burn; theirs and her problems were definitely first world ones and escapism for me from the commercial shit I was wading through.

  “Eli’s just found out he’s won that case that’s taken up all his time for the last couple of months. I hear drinks are happening after work.” I sat down opposite her and watched her smile when I mentioned Eli. They’d been together for a couple of years, meeting each other because Eli was a partner at Callaghan Green, although Ava kept her interactions with the company to socialising and if she needed any colour photocopying done.

  I was pretty sure she was responsible for half the times when the copier broke down, it was just that Max hadn’t realised it yet.

  “He messaged me. I’m meeting you there. Looks like we’ll have half the family there too. Shay’s just finished his shift and Lainey’s here for the weekend too.” She smiled brightly, radiating something I wished I could bottle and share, because my little sister only made the world brighter.

  “Shit, Shay off shift is never good.” I wasn’t sure if I had the capacity this week to deal with the sexploits of Shay Green. “Can I stay at yours if Shay wants to use the apartment as a shag palace?”

  Ava choked on the mouthful of coffee and almost spat it out. “Shag Palace? You sound like something from nineteen seventy-five.”

  “I can’t have another night of hearing him entertaining. Seriously, it’s like having a porn site turned up loud, but a really awful one where you hear things you can’t unhear. There was one woman he brought back last week, and she really seemed to like his…”

  “And stop there.”

  I started laughing. “Noise cancelling headphones. I made him buy me some.”

  “Seriously? You realise this is revenge for what we all put up with after Cassie?”

  I stilled at my ex’s name.

  Ava’s face grew serious.

  “You’re not back in touch with her, are you?”

  There was panic in her voice. Fear. I wished I could rewind back three years and make better choices about how it all ended, about the state I’d let myself get into afterwards. I’d fallen apart without the tacky glue that Cassie had used to somehow keep me together.

  “No. Jesus, Ava, no. I did see her on Wednesday though. She was at the function we had to attend.”

  “What level of emotional blackmail did she apply?”

  I managed to chuckle.

  “None. Georgia saved me.”

  “The new partner with the little girl?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, Georgia.”

  Ava folded her arms. Amelie dropped a coffee off for me, not even having asked what I wanted to drink.

  “‘Yeah, Georgia’? That sounds like there’s more to it. Mum said she’s really pretty.”

  I gave another nod and looked away. “How are your wedding plans?”

  “That was a bad dodge, Joseph. Tell me more about Georgia.”

  “She’s about the same age as me. Has a four-year-old daughter. She has a…”

  “That’s not what I was asking. I know all this already. Tell me about you and her.”

  “There is no me and her.”

  Ava tipped her head back and laughed. “I won’t tell anyone. You know I can keep a secret.”

  I knew this and more. As the youngest, all of our sibl
ings thought they had the right to know everything about Ava’s life and tell her exactly what to do. They’d calmed down, mainly because she just outright ignored them and did exactly what she wanted anyway.

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Disagree. I’ve just watched your face as you’ve said her name twice and you had this dreamy look on your face.”

  I remembered the willpower it’d taken not to murder her when she was thirteen and she’d caught me staring at Melissa Powers. I needed that level of willpower now.

  “I’m thirty-two. I don’t have a dreamy look.”

  “You do. In fact, if you say her name again I’ll take a photo to show you.”

  “Don’t even think about it.” I caught her wrist as she reached for her phone.

  “Now, now, brother dear. Tell me about Georgia. Mum said you helped her out when her little girl hurt herself.” She left the phone where it was and placed her arms neatly on the table, looking at me as if she was about to start an interview.

  I inhaled deeply. I’d confided in my sisters when I was a teenager and when I was in my twenties. They’d been there when Cassie and I had finished, helping me get over the wreck she’d left me in, but the last eighteen months I’d not said as much because there hadn’t been anything to say. I didn’t want a relationship. I’d got my rocks off with two night stands and flings with women I knew wanted nothing more than some arm candy with a brain.

  “She’s a single mum and she’s way too good for me. Can we leave it at that?”

  Ava shook her head. “I’m just going to unpick that sentence. What does her being a single mum have to do with it?”

  “If we dated and it didn’t work out, that would upset her daughter.”

  Ava nodded. “But that’s up to Georgia to manage. Not you. Her daughter doesn’t have to know that you’re anything more than friends. About her being too good for you – why do you think that? You’re gorgeous, clever, decent, your sense of humour is okay and sometimes you hold a decent conversation. If Max can get someone like Victoria to marry him, you should be able to sort a few dates with a decent woman.”