Page 2 of The Tycoon's Ultimate Conquest
‘I’ve only had dealings with her over the phone so far, and of course by email. I could give you my personal impressions...’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Can’t be bought off,’ Harold said bluntly, instantly killing Art’s first line of attack.
‘Everyone has a price,’ he murmured without skipping a beat. ‘Have you any pictures of her at all?’
‘Just something in one of the articles printed last week about the development.’
‘Let’s have a look.’ Art waited, thinking, as Harold expertly paged through documents in his pile of folders before eventually showing him an unsatisfactory picture of the woman in question.
Art stared. Shelookedlike aMs.The sort of feminist hippy whose mission might be to save the world from itself. The newspaper article showed him a picture of the sit-in, protesters on his land with placards and enough paraphernalia to convince him that they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. All that was missing was a post office and a corner shop, but then summer was the perfect time for an impromptu camping expedition. He doubted they would have been quite as determined if those fields had been knee-deep in snow and the branches of the trees bending at ninety-degree angles in high winds.
Whatever the dark-haired harridan had said to them to stoke up public outrage at his development, she had succeeded because the untidy lot in the picture looked as self-righteous as she did.
The picture he was now staring at, ofMs Rose Tremain, showed a woman jabbing her finger at someone out of sight, some poor sod unfortunate enough to be asking her to answer a few questions she didn’t like. Her unruly hair was scraped back intosomething, leaving flyaway strands around her face. Her clothes beggared belief. Art was accustomed to dating women who graced catwalks, women who were best friends with cutting-edge designers and spent whatever time they had away from their modelling jobs in exclusive salons beautifying themselves.
He squinted at the picture in front of him and tried to get his head around the image of someone who looked as though she had bulk-bought her outfit from a charity shop and hadn’t been near a hairdresser in decades.
No. Money wasn’t going to get her off his back. One look at that jabbing finger and fierce scowl was enough to convince him of the rashness of going down that road.
But there were many ways to skin a cat...
‘So, she can’t be bought,’ Art murmured, half to himself. ‘Well, I will have to find another way to convince her to drop her case against me and get those protestors off my land. Every day lost is costing me money.’ With his dark eyes still on the picture in front of him, Art connected to his PA and told her to reschedule his calendar for the next fortnight.
‘What are you going to do?’ Harold asked, sounding alarmed, as if he couldn’t make sense of his workaholic boss taking two weeks off.
‘I’m going to take a little holiday,’ Art said with a slow smile of intent. ‘A busman’s holiday. You will be the only one privy to this information, so keep it to yourself, Harold. IfMs Tremaincan’t be persuaded to my way of thinking by a generous contribution to whatever hare-brained“Save the Whale”cause she espouses, then I’m going to have to find another way to persuade her.’
‘How? If we’re talking about anything illegal here, Art...’
‘Oh, please.’ Art burst out laughing. ‘Illegal?’
‘Maybe I don’t meanillegal. Maybe a better word might beunethical.’
‘Well, now, my friend. That depends entirely on your definition of unethical...’
* * *
‘Someone here to see you, Rose.’
Rose looked up at the spiky-haired young girl standing by the door of the office she shared with her co-worker, Phil. It was little more than a large room on the ground floor of the Victorian house which was also her home but it was an arrangement that worked. The rent she got from Phil and from the occupants of the other two converted rooms—who were variously the local gardening club twice a week, the local bridge group once a week and the local children’s playgroup twice a week—covered the extensive running costs of the house she had inherited when her mother had died five years previously. Well, alongside the sizeable loan she had had to take out in order to effect urgent repairs on the place.
She occasionally thought that it would have been nice if she could have separated her work life from her home life but, on the other hand, who could complain about a job where there was no commute involved?
‘Who is it, Angie?’ Bad time. Middle of the afternoon and she still had a bucketload of work to do. Three cases had cropped up at precisely the same time and each one of them involved complex issues with employment law, in which she specialised, and demanded a lot of attention.
‘Someone about the land.’
‘Ah. The land.’ Rose sat back, stretched and then stood up, only realising how much she’d cramped up when she heard a wayward joint creak.
The land.
No one called it anything else.
Between Phil’s property law side of the business and her labour law,the landhad become the middle ground which occupied them both, far more than either had expected when the business of some faceless tycoon buying up their green fields to build yet another housing estate had reared its ugly head.
Phil was a relative newcomer to the area, but she had lived in the village her whole life and she had adopted the cause of the protestors with gusto.
