Unfinished Business with the Duke. Heidi Rice

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СКАЧАТЬ business had dried up completely. The three grants they’d applied for had been awarded elsewhere, and all her sponsorship requests had come back negative. She’d spent the week frantically cold-calling a new list of potential but even less likely donors, while also arranging the schedule for a season of plays that would probably never go into production. And the boiler had sprung another leak. Not a problem in the height of summer, but come autumn it would be another major expenditure they couldn’t afford. Assuming they still had a theatre to heat.

      ‘That was the bank manager,’ Maxi muttered.

      Issy’s heart sank to her toes. Okay, that was worse.

      ‘He’s demanding payment of the interest in ten working days. If we don’t find the thirty thousand to cover the payments we’ve missed, he’s calling in the bailiffs.’

      ‘What the—?’ Issy shouted.

      Seeing Maxi flinch, she held on to the swear word that wanted to fly out of her mouth and deafen the whole of Islington.

      ‘That toerag,’ she sneered. ‘But we paid something. Not the full amount, I know, but something.’ Her fingers clenched so tightly on her pen she felt as if she were fighting off rigor mortis. ‘He can’t do that.’

      ‘Apparently he can,’ Maxi replied, her voice despondent. ‘Our last payment was so low it amounts to defaulting on the loan. Technically.’ She huffed. ‘Toerag is right.’

      ‘Remind me not to send Mr Toerag any more complimentary tickets,’ Issy replied, trying to put some of her usual spirit into the put-down. But her heart wasn’t in it, her anger having deflated like a burst party balloon.

      This wasn’t the banker manager’s fault. Not really. The theatre had been skirting the edge of a precipice for months; all he’d done was give it the final nudge into the abyss.

      Issy crossed to the office’s single dust-covered window and stared at the back alley below, which looked even grottier than usual this morning.

      Maybe a broken leg wouldn’t have been so bad. Three weeks laid up in bed on a morphine drip with excruciating pain shooting through her entire body couldn’t make her feel any worse than she did at this moment.

      She’d failed. Utterly and completely. How was she going to break the news to everyone? To Dave their principal director, to Terri and Steve and the rest of their regular crew of actors and technicians, not to mention all the ushers and front-of-house staff? They’d worked so hard over the years, many of them offering their time and talent for free, to make this place work, to make it a success.

      They’d have to stop all the outreach projects too, with the local schools and the church youth group, and the pensioners’ drop-in centre.

      She pressed her teeth into her bottom lip to stop it trembling.

      ‘Is this finally it, then?’

      Issy turned at the murmured question to see a suspicious sheen in her assistant’s eyes.

      ‘Are we going to have to tell Dave and the troops?’ Maxi asked carefully. ‘They’ll be devastated. They’ve worked so hard. We all have.’

      ‘No. Not yet.’ Issy scrubbed her hands down her face, forced the lump back down her throat.

       Stop being such a wimp.

      The Crown and Feathers Theatre wasn’t going dark. Not on her watch. Not until the fat lady was singing. And until Issy Helligan admitted defeat the fat lady could keep her big mouth shut.

      ‘Let’s keep it quiet for a bit longer.’ No point in telling anyone how bad things were until she absolutely had to. Which would be when the bailiffs arrived and started carting away crucial parts of the stage. ‘There must be some avenue we haven’t explored yet.’

       Think, woman, think.

      They had two whole weeks. There had to be something they could do.

      ‘I can’t think of any,’ Maxi said. ‘We’ve both been racking our brains for months over this. If there’s an avenue we haven’t tried, it’s probably a dead end.’ Maxi gave a hollow laugh. ‘I even had a dream last night about us begging Prince Charles to become our patron.’

      ‘What did he say?’ Issy asked absently, eager to be distracted. Her head was starting to hurt.

      ‘I woke up before he gave me an answer,’ Maxi said dejectedly, giving a heartfelt sigh. ‘If only we knew someone who was loaded and had a passion for the dramatic arts. All our problems would be over.’

      Issy swallowed heavily, Maxi’s words reminding her of someone she’d been trying extra hard to forget in the past seven days.

       Not that. Anything but that.

      She sat back down in her chair with an audible plop.

      ‘What’s the matter?’ Maxi asked, sounding concerned. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet.’

      ‘I do know someone. He’s a duke.’

      ‘A duke!’ Maxi bounced up. ‘You’re friends with a duke, and we haven’t approached him for sponsorship yet?’ She waved the comment away as she rushed to Issy’s desk, her eyes bright with newfound hope. ‘Does he have a passion for theatre?’

      ‘Not that I know of.’ And they weren’t exactly friends either.

      Heat rose up her neck and her nipples pebbled painfully as the memory she’d been trying to suppress for a week burst back to life.

      No, they definitely weren’t friends.

      ‘But he is loaded,’ she added, not wanting to extinguish the excitement in Maxi’s gaze.

      Or she assumed Gio was loaded. She had absolutely no idea what he did for a living, or even if he did anything. But he was a duke. And he kept a room at the swanky gentlemen’s club. And hadn’t he said something about renovating Hamilton Hall? Surely it made sense to assume he must be loaded?

      Issy crossed her arms over her chest as her breasts began to throb. Something they’d been doing on a regular basis for days, every time she thought about Gio and his hot, insistent lips…She shook her head. Those thoughts had been coming a lot thicker and faster than she wanted to admit. And not just those thoughts, but other ones—which involved his lips and tongue and teeth and hands on the whole of her naked body, driving her to untold…

      Issy squeezed her pulsating breasts harder as all her nerve endings started to tingle.

      ‘When are you going to see him again? Can you contact him today?’

      She tensed at Maxi’s eager question.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ Maxi asked, the light leaving her eyes. ‘You don’t look all that enthusiastic.’

      ‘It’s a long shot, Max. At best.’

      More than a long shot, if she were being totally honest. She’d told Gio she detested him, for goodness’ sake. Like a spoilt child. And, while it had given her some satisfaction at the time, and she doubted СКАЧАТЬ