Bedding His Virgin Mistress. Penny Jordan

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      ‘Come back!’

      ‘Jules!’

      ‘So, how did last night go?’

      Carly grimaced expressively. ‘Well, let’s just say that the tabloid journalist who snapped Mike Lucas with one hand down the front of the Honourable Seraphina Ordley’s Matthew Williamson frock and the other gripping my far less worthy, five-year-old second-hand Armani silk-clad breast will by now have realised his mistake. “Thou shalt not photograph the niece of one’s rag’s major shareholder in a pose more suited to a failed contestant from Big Brother”.’

      ‘Ordley?’ Jules mused. ‘So she’s a Harlowe, then.’ As she was an earl’s granddaughter, Julia knew Burke’s Peerage inside out. ‘It has been said that the Harlowes’ motto should be “As in name, so in action”. It’s a Charles II title,’ Jules explained. ‘He handed them out like sweets to his cast-off mistresses. You aren’t smiling,’ she accused Carly.

      ‘Neither would you be if you had been there last night.’

      ‘Oh. As bad as that, was it?’

      When Carly made no verbal response, but instead simply looked at her, Jules grinned. ‘Okay, okay, I apologise. I should have been the one to go with them, I know, and I backed out and left you to do it for me…Did he really grab your boob, Carly? What did you do?’

      ‘I reminded myself that the evening was making us a profit of £6,000.’

      ‘Ah.’

      ‘And then I dropped a full bottle of Cristal on his balls.’

      ‘Oh!’

      ‘It wasn’t funny, Jules,’ she protested, when her friend started to laugh. ‘I love Lucy to bits and most of the time I’m grateful to her for including me in her plans—like when she decided to set up this business. But when it comes to events like last night’s…’

      ‘It was one of Nick’s, wasn’t it?’

      ‘Yes,’ Carly agreed tersely.

      ‘And the weekend—did you manage to get time to see…them?’

      Carly frowned. The three of them were so close that there were no secrets between them, but even so the habit of loyalty was ingrained deeply within her.

      Jules—or the Honourable Julia Fellowes, to give her her correct title—touched her gently on the arm, and Carly shook away her own reticence.

      ‘It was dreadful,’ she told her simply. ‘Even now I don’t think they’ve really taken it in. I felt so so sorry for them. They’ve lost so much—the estate and everything that went with it—and the prestige living there gave them was very important to them. And now this.’

      ‘Well, at least thanks to you they’ve got a roof over their heads.’

      ‘The Dower House.’ Carly pulled a face. ‘They hate living there.’

      ‘What? When I think of how you’ve beggared yourself to get a mortgage and buy it from the estate for them—oh, honestly, Carly.’

      ‘I might not be able to afford a designer lifestyle, but I’ve hardly beggared myself. Thanks to you I’m living rent-free in one of the poshest parts of London. I’ve got a job I love, all the travel I could possibly want…’

      She had balked initially at Jules’s generous offer that the three of them should share her flat—the three of them being Jules, Carly, and Jules’s notorious ‘I’m having a bad day and I need to shop’ habit. Other people ate chocolate, or rowed with their mother; Jules bought shoes.

      But who was she to mock other people’s security blanket habits? Ever since she could remember she had saved: pennies, and then her allowance…comfort money. Not that it was bringing her much comfort now. Thanks to the needs of her adopted parents, her bank account was permanently empty.

      ‘…and a weight round your neck that no one should have,’ she heard Jules telling her protectively.

      Ignoring her comment, Carly said, ‘I wish I could have stayed for a bit longer. I felt guilty leaving them.’

      ‘You felt guilty? That’s crazy. Carly, you don’t owe them anything. When I think of what they did to you!’

      ‘You mean like giving me a first-class education?’ Carly offered her quietly.

      It was at times like this that she recognised the huge gap that existed between herself and the other two. Despite their shared education, they had been born worlds apart.

      ‘You’ve had to pay for it,’ Julia told her protectively.

      Carly made no response. After all it was true—but not in the way that Julia had meant. The payment she found unbearable was the knowledge that she was destined always to be an outsider, someone who did not quite fit in—anywhere.

      Julia gave her another hug.

      Pretty, brunette Julia, and gentle, tender-hearted blonde Lucy—Carly had envied them both, just as she had envied all the other girls at school: girls who knew beyond any kind of doubt that they were taking their rightful place in their own world. Unlike her. She had known she had no right to be there in that alien, wealthy environment. Everything about her had screamed out that she did not and could not fit in. She had felt so out of place—a fraud, a pauper, a charity case, someone whose life had been bought! And, of course, very quickly everyone had known just why she had come to be there.

      ‘Sometimes I wonder what on earth I’m doing in this business.’ Lucy exhaled as she came to join them.

      ‘Only sometimes?’ Carly teased her.

      Lucy grinned.

      ‘We’ve got a major client scenario about to take place. Nick is on his way over with him right now.’

      Carly looked away discreetly as she saw a small shadow touch Julia’s eyes. It had been Julia who had introduced Nick to Lucy, and sometimes Carly wondered if Nick, with his flashy pseudo-charm which she found so unappealing, hadn’t perhaps made Julia as vulnerable to him as Lucy had been. Was she being overly cynical in worrying that Nick had married Lucy more for her trust fund and her family’s social position and wealth than because he had genuinely fallen in love with her? For Lucy’s sake she hoped it was the latter, but it had all happened so quickly—too quickly, Carly felt. And now here was Nick, a man she didn’t like or trust, taking a very prominent role in the business.

      ‘How major?’ Carly asked.

      ‘Jules, call over one of the girls, will you?’ Lucy begged. ‘I’m dying for an espresso! Absolutely huge. Apparently he knows Marcus—and you can imagine how I feel about that!’

      Marcus Canning was Lucy’s bête noir: a family friend who was also one of her trustees and who, against Lucy’s wishes, had insisted on being kept fully informed of every aspect of the business before he would agree to Lucy investing her trust fund money in it. Personally, Carly thought that Marcus Canning, with his well-known reputation for astute financial dealings, was a good person for them to have on board, and she had felt both proud and pleased when he had СКАЧАТЬ