Page 3 of Pride and Privilege

He smiled, pretending that his heart wasn’t pounding, that he wasn’t desperate to grab her hand and bring it straight back.

“You imagined, huh?”

She snort-laughed and clapped a hand over her mouth. “No.”

His smile deepened. “And what else did you imagine?”

She shook her head. “Mainly your family’s tax avoidance strategies over the last hundred years.”

“What?”

“Shit. No.”

He sat back, bewildered. She sat back, too, hands braced on the table, looking down at the sticky wood as she said with slow, surprised emphasis, “I. Am. So. Drunk.”

How had Aubrey described his first meeting with Poppy Fields?

Strangest five minutes of his life.

ONE

Poppy Fields—don’t laugh, shecouldn’t help it—Poppy Fields didn’t normally regret the weekend being only two days long. It wasn’t that she loved her job, but time at the office was time away from her terrible flat. And away from her even more terrible flatmate, who was known to her acquaintance as Lecherous Dave.

Time spent at work was also time spent using someone else’s water, toilet paper, hand-soap, electricity, and heating/air-conditioning depending on the time of year. Not that her flat had air-conditioning. Or much heating, come to think of it. And maybe being warmed and hydrated on the company’s coin didn’t exactly save her millions each year, but it had to save something. Which was…well…something.

But this Monday came round far too fast. She was barely over her hangover. And, more to the point,thisparticular Monday followedthatparticular Friday. The one during which she mauled the company prince. Laughed in his face. Then tripped over her feet getting up from the table. He’d had to grab herelbow to stop her from falling. Her memories were hazy, but she knew he had delivered her to a taxi and quietly folded her sloppy, drunken self inside it. Or maybe it was a company car. Something sleek and black and smelling of money and leather polish that had whisked her home through the pouring London rain in safety and comfort. He must have paid for it, too. She certainly hadn’t. She wouldn’t have been able to. At that particular pinnacle of humiliation on Friday night, she had nineteen pounds and forty-two pence left in her bank account, and precisely twenty-two pence in cold, hard cash.

Thatwas what she had spent the weekend thinking about. Not about—

Roscoe Blackton.

She saw him the moment she stepped out of the lift, right there, across the empty office, with his back—thank God—to the open-plan space as he stood looking into one of the rooms along the side. But henevercame to this floor, so why…? Crap, crap… Her limbs froze for a moment, then she scuttled down the other side of the room to Liz’s office, fighting the urge to flee in the opposite direction.

She was furiously hot, heart racing, which was ridiculous. Nothing had happened, and he was only a man, just another one of the rich, privileged, entitled men who were ten a penny in this place, stuffing the upper echelons of BlacktonGold with their posh voices and Oxbridge degrees. Except he was even worse than all the rest of them: the boss’s son, and his whole family actual genuine aristocrats, generations of them, with an enormous stately home and money to make you sick—everyone had read that Wikipedia page, not just her. And yes, he might also be the type of man who got featured inForbesbecause he was some kind of financial wunderkind and destined for greatness—was basicallybornto greatness, had it handed to him on a silver plate—but she didn’t really care what he thought ofher. She was only embarrassed because she had embarrassed herself.

“Can I touch your hair?”

The cringehurt,the memory of mild blue eyes, politely bemused. A movie star jaw, mouth faintly smiling. The soft, silky feeling of his hair…

Could she quit? Run for the lift, never step foot in the building again? Hah. Not a chance. She couldn’t go a day without a job, needed every penny. Dignity was for the rich, anyway. Freedom. Choices. All the liberty money bought. But what she wouldn’t give right now to never see him again…

She was almost at the door to Liz’s office—she shared a little cubicle inside with another admin assistant in George Blackton’s exec team—but she’d be safe there, a door and a cubicle wall between her and the open-plan space where—she risked a glance—Roscoe was still standing across the floor, broad dark-suited shoulder leaning against the door frame. Why was he staring at a presumably empty room?

The lift door opened again, and she jumped at the sound of George Blackton’s voice calling a greeting to his son. She fled into the sanctuary of her cubicle.

Roscoe’s father was very much a traditionalist when it came to his properties. For example, Conyers, their house in the Lancashire countryside, looked much as it had done for the last two hundred years. Even the television in the drawing room was hidden behind a fold-out mahogany panel. And the BlacktonGold offices, though sleek and gleaming and modern, largely eschewed internal glass walls and doors for panelled, pale beech wood. Roscoe suspected his father would have opted for dark oak, if the office’s interior designer had allowed it.In fact, he might have organised the whole building as though it was a Victorian workhouse, row after row of desks with a viewing platform where he could supervise it all, and perhaps swoop down occasionally to whack a flagging worker around the head with a blunt stick. Or perhaps Roscoe was feeling a little bitter, a little petty, as he sat listening to his father in the man’s enormous corner office.

“Don’t get too comfortable in this new role,” he was saying. “I want you taking a more strategic position in the next six to twelve months. Specifically, I want you heading up the new tax advisory department.”

Roscoe glanced out of the window. Metal and glass and an iron-grey sky. The view from his new office was much the same.

“Strategic?” he asked. “Is that why I’m here on the exec floor rather than down on sixth?”

“You like the new office? Much more fitting for your position.”

Did helikehis new office? Room 906—it sounded like a prison number—with a vertigo-inducing wall of glass behind the desk, the whole of London dropping away at his back? Its only view out onto other people was a tall, narrow pane to the side of the door. There would be no Aubrey to keep him company. No bustle and life around him. The perfect room to go quietly mad in.

“My new position is Senior Portfolio Manager,” he tried, keeping his tone light. “I would have thought being down on sixth with all the other PMs—”

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