Desired By The Boss. Catherine Mann

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СКАЧАТЬ that she’d done it all by herself, without using her family name to leap to the front of the queue.

      Ugh.

      That would’ve been rather sickening, wouldn’t it? As if someone as privileged as her was in any position to present herself as poster girl for grit and determination.

      Well, she certainly couldn’t post a little snapshot of her life right now. It had been an effort to photograph her hands without accidentally including a glimpse of the peeling walls, or the cheap laminate floor, or the battered beds and bedside tables. She’d actually ended up using a pretty plum velvet cushion she’d retrieved from one of Hugh’s ‘donate’ boxes to lay her manicured fingers artistically across—after asking permission from Hugh via email, of course.

      Take anything you want, he’d said.

      Hugh...

      He hadn’t come up to the main house on Friday. There’d been no need with nothing for him to sort through.

      Which was for the best, she’d told herself. Firmly.

      And yet her realisation that there was no need for her to see Hugh that day had been tinged with both relief and disappointment.

      She’d finished up in the front reception room and was now up the stairs, working on the front guest bedroom. It wasn’t quite as packed with boxes as the first two rooms, although it was definitely a marginal thing. The first few boxes had been full of beautiful manchester—a word she’d discovered was actually a term for bedlinen used only in Australia and New Zealand when she’d provided her summary to Hugh and subsequently confused him.

      See? She was learning so much from her move to London. April grinned. Just not exactly what she’d expected.

      Sitting, as she was, on the cheapest doona—duvet, she’d learnt, in the UK—she’d been able to find at her local supermarket, she questioned her decision not to take one of the beautiful, soft vintage white linen covers she’d found on Friday.

      But she couldn’t. As hard as she was trying to live as if she wasn’t, she was an heiress—with a mammoth trust fund. Someone shopping at the local charity shop deserved an expensive doona cover far more than she did.

      What was she doing?

      In London? Living in this dodgy shared house? Working for Hugh?

      Based on her current progress, in another month she would have paid off her credit card. Only another month of two jobs, rice, beans, two-minute noodles and tins of soup.

      And then what?

      Would she quit her night job? Start applying for jobs back in her own field—or at least her field of study? Eventually move out of this place to some place on her own?

      She didn’t know.

      If she did that she’d definitely need to shut down her social media profiles. There was no way she could continue to use them for the Molyneux Foundation all the way over here.

      The idea felt unexpectedly uncomfortable.

      Because, surely, her social media profile represented all that had been excessive in her life? Shouldn’t she be glad to be rid of it? Glad that she’d be leaving that version of herself behind?

      But...

      It also represented how successful she’d been—how well she’d connected with her followers and how seamlessly she’d incorporated her sponsors. It represented how much money she’d raised for the foundation by being social media savvy and putting all that Molyneux privilege to good use.

      She had over a million followers, and she’d worked hard for every single one of them.

      It was only logical reasoning to suppose that those followers were unlikely to care about her new, unglamorous life, but that didn’t make the idea of deleting her accounts seem any more appealing.

      She wasn’t entirely sure what it said about her, but she wasn’t ready to give her followers up.

      Not yet, anyway.

      On Tuesday, April found more photos to add to the ‘Hugh’ box.

      This time it was a bunch of birthday photos, all stuffed into a large white envelope that had become deeply creased and soft with years of handling.

      She carried it downstairs to the kitchen, leaving it on the kitchen bench while she turned on the kettle for her morning tea break.

      The photos she’d scanned with Hugh still remained in the ‘Hugh’ box, atop the benchtop. They hadn’t worked out the finer details after he’d left so abruptly, and she hadn’t seen him since. Was she supposed to keep on scanning the photos she found? Or would he? Or would he not even bother now and just keep the photos...?

      She should just put them into the box and let Hugh decide.

      Instead she found herself pulling up one of the bar stools and settling down with both her coffee and the envelope before her.

      Even as she slid the photos out she questioned what she was doing. There was no need to look at the photos, really. And so to do so felt...not quite right. But that was silly, really. It was her job, after all, to go through everything in this house. That was what she was doing.

      And so she did look.

      Like the images from Hugh’s first days at school, these birthday shots were across all of Hugh’s birthdays. The envelope was chock-full of them—several from every year. The classic ‘blowing out the candles’ shot, breakfast in bed with unwrapped presents and always a photo of Hugh with his mum. The very early ones also featured his father.

      His mum, of course, had been stunning. April had thought so when she’d first seen her in those school photos. She’d had dark hair and eyes, like Hugh, but her face had been rounder and her eyes and lips had looked as if they always smiled, not just in photos. She’d worn her long hair mostly loose, and had alternated year to year from having a fringe and growing it out.

      These photos were different from the school ones, though, which had all been taken outside Hugh’s kindergarten or primary school. These were taken indoors. And not all in this house, which surprised April.

      For some reason she’d assumed this was the house where Hugh had grown up, but the photos showed she was wrong. Silly of her, really, given she’d known his mum hadn’t had much money, and Islington was decidedly posh.

      April took a sip from her coffee, and then shuffled back to the beginning again.

      Outside, it had started raining, and the occasional fat droplet slapped against the kitchen window.

      The first photo had a chubby Hugh sitting on his mother’s lap, reaching out with both hands for a birthday cake in the shape of a lime-green number one. Standing at his mother’s shoulder was—April assumed—his father. A tall man, but narrower in the shoulders than Hugh, he had dark blond hair. He was handsome, but his smile looked uncomfortable.

      They sat at a dining table with a mid-nineteen-eighties swirly beige laminate СКАЧАТЬ