Gold Digger

Lottie

“Vicky, why is he doing this?” Felix asked again for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“Just accept it, Moretti,” Harry York taunted from the other end of the conference table with a smirk. “Your company is so shit that you can’t even be guaranteed to invest someone’s money when their sister is your business partner.”

We were at Moretti Harding in the conference room, waiting for Ollie to show up for this meeting. I twisted my fingers together on the table and bit my lip. I enjoyed working here, mostly. Being Vicky’s assistant was great, and I’m not being big-headed when I say I was killing it. My ability to read people was actually one of the most valuable attributes you could have in business. When I started three months ago, I could tell everyone was a little shocked. My lack of qualifications and experience were glaringly obvious and, despite the best efforts of Vicky’s stylist, I didn’t quite fit in with the corporate vibe. But gradually, I’d been gaining respect.

A week into my time there, I’d been at a meeting with Felix and Vicky about the projections for a development they were considering. I was feeling like a bit of a spare part, to be honest, because Vicky didn’t need to suppress any of her abrupt ways in that circumstance; the men we were meeting were trying to convince her to take the deal, not the other way around.

But about ten minutes in, I knew they were lying. The tells were so clear that I couldn’t understand why at least Felix wasn’t catching it. The problem was that some stuff was going to be signed there and then so I had to move fast. I’d squeezed Vicky’s wrist, and she looked at me with a frown, seeing as there was no need for our normal cue. I shook my head side to side before tipping it towards the men on the opposite side of the table. It was a testament to Vicky’s faith in me that she stood immediately and announced that we needed some privacy before signing. Once the men had reluctantly filed out, Felix turned to Vicky and me.

“Vics, what the fuck?” he asked, frustration rolling off him in waves.

Vicky ignored him and turned to me. “Lottie?”

Felix huffed. “You stopped a multi-million-pound deal to chat with an unqualified intern? Vics, honestly, I’ve put up with this situ?—”

“They’re lying,” I blurted out.

“What?” he said, turning to me with both his eyebrows raised.

“Those men are lying.”

His brows snapped together. “What about?”

I shook my head. “Look, I’m sorry it doesn’t work like that. I can just tell that they’re lying. I don’t know what about.”

“Really fucking helpful then. Thanks for?—”

“But it’s something about the land drainage. They react whenever that’s mentioned. So no, I can’t tell you exactly, but I can say they are not telling you the truth , and they’re scared when drainage is mentioned.”

“How the hell do you know this?” he snapped.

“I can read people.”

“Read minds?”

“No, of course not. I just… I’ve always been able to sense how people are feeling, and part of that is identifying whether they’re lying.” I shrugged. “I’ve been like it since I was a child.” It’d served me well in the childhood I had. With every different caregiver came a whole different set of expectations. Anticipating people’s moods, especially people I didn’t know very well, was very important and occasionally essential for survival.

He stared at me for a long moment. “You’d better not be wrong.”

Felix and Vicky turned down the deal despite the men’s dire warnings that other companies were interested and that they were making the biggest mistake of their careers. Felix was a bit frosty towards me until a few days later when he came to Vicky’s office (which we shared – at that point, Vicky was happier if I was there for even her phone calls) and apologised. The men had been lying about the land – the drainage system was illegally installed and was posing a flood risk. The deal would have lost Moretti Harding millions. Since then, Felix was absolutely not averse to poaching me from Vicky whenever he could. And, given my ability to tell if people were bluffing, he said yesterday that no negotiation should ever happen without me.

“Fuck you, York,” Felix muttered. He hated Harry York. The two had been at each other’s throats for years since Harry advised one of his clients against investing in a land development project of Felix’s. And now Ollie had decided to antagonise the situation even more by using Harry for some of his investment portfolio. I was furious with him because I just knew this was a dig at Vicky about me.

Of course Ollie didn’t want me anywhere near him or his family, but with Vicky, it was more. He was protective of her. He saw her differences as something that made her vulnerable and thought I was positioning myself to exploit her. But he had no idea how protective I now was of his sister too. Or that Vicky was my first real friend in the city. Since I moved to London two years ago for Hayley, I’d been working so hard that I didn’t have time to build any connections, not like the ones I’d had back home. It was lonely being left with all the responsibility, feeling like you had to prove yourself all the time, having no family support at all – in fact, the exact opposite.

And I really liked Vicky. I liked that her tells were more difficult for me to interpret, so I couldn’t always decipher what she was thinking. And she never lied, which was refreshing – there are so many small lies in everyday conversations with normal people that I could find it a bit exhausting shutting it all out, but with Vicky it was honesty all the way.

“Well, he’s twenty minutes late. Maybe neither of us are going to find out his plan,” Harry suggested just as the double doors to the conference room opened, and Ollie strolled in. Ignoring everyone else, he moved around the table to his sister, grabbed her hand, pulled her out of the chair and gave her a tight hug. Vicky was good with hugs, especially tight ones. In fact, in stressful situations, a tight hug could calm her down, something her brother clearly understood.

“Hey, Vics,” he said, smiling down at her as he pulled back, still ignoring everyone else in the room.

“Hi, Ollie,” she said. The hug had worked somewhat. There was much less nervous energy rolling off her now.

When Ollie turned to me, his smile was more like a baring of teeth, the soft expression reserved for his sister long gone.

“If the Harding family reunion is quite finished,” Harry said, clearly irritated. “I hope you haven’t called me here just to yank my chain, Buckingham?”

“Yes, Ollie,” Vicky put in as Ollie made his way back around the table via Harry York, clapping the man on the back on the way past by way of greeting and giving Felix a chin lift. “You actually can’t hug people in business meetings.”

His hard expression went soft again when he looked at his sister. “This is my meeting, darling and I can do what the fuck I want.”

“You can’t say the f-word in meetings either,” Vicky told him.

“Fuck that.”

There was more posturing and ridiculous fighting over nothing between Felix and Harry York. I managed to tune them out until Harry York dragged me into it.

“I heard you almost lost a cool ten mill on that dud bit of land the other day, Felix. Apparently, your intern clawed it back for you.” Harry York nodded towards me, and I froze. Ollie’s gaze flew back to me as well, and his eyes narrowed.

“Lottie’s not an intern,” Vicky put in, and I wished for once she’d just let something go and not make everything worse – but if something was incorrect, there was no stopping the woman. “She’s my executive assistant.”

Ollie rolled his eyes and I felt my face heat.

“Ah, sorry,” Harry said, smiling at me and I saw Ollie stiffen. “Maybe we could recruit you to York Evans Investments? Save you the effort of having to bail out these numpties on the reg.” More angry vibes rolled off Ollie which made no sense. Firstly, Harry was married, very happily married if reports were true; secondly, seeing as Ollie hated me, what on earth did he have to be jealous or territorial over?Text property © Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org.

“The fucking cheek of you,” Felix snapped. “You come here, steal my clients, try to poach my staff. Don’t think I haven’t got some shit on you as well, York. You want to get into the weeds about poor client management? We can go there, you tosser.”

“Enough!” Vicky said, that one word cracking through the room, silencing the meeting.

“Will, is that tea on its way?” Felix asked, and Will Brent (one of the executives on the partner track and, in my opinion, a real dick – I still remembered him from that night at the club) – nodded.

“It’s handled,” he said just as the door to the room opened again, and Lucy, Will’s assistant, shuffled in with the tea trolley before freezing like a deer in the headlights when she saw the number of executives sitting at the conference table. Her eyes came to rest on Felix, and I had to hide my smile. The poor girl had the biggest crush on him I’d ever seen in my life. All Felix did was scowl at her, which did nothing for the girl’s confidence, something that was already in her boots. It was a shame because I really liked Lucy but, in truth, I wasn’t sure how much longer she was going to last here.

From there the meeting went the way I thought it would – straight to shit. When Ollie wasn’t scowling at me, he was combative and needling towards Felix, while Harry York seemed to be an expert in winding everyone up. The only thing to break the tension was the squeak of the tea trolley as Lucy pushed it around the room, sporting an obvious limp before peering down at Vicky’s tea colour chart with confusion. To Vicky, providing an actual colour chart for her preferred tea and the exact shade it needed to be according to the time of day was not a tea diva move ; it was providing detailed instructions on how she wanted something done – something Vicky would want from other people – so she couldn’t understand why anyone would think it made her difficult. (“If anything, it makes me easier,” she’d told me in frustration when I tried to explain to her that she couldn’t pull out her chart when she was visiting other companies or, worse , people’s homes and was offered a cup of tea. “I’m providing an objective measurement with which to gauge my tea preference. I would be grateful if someone gave me a colour chart when I was making their tea.”)

Once Lucy had spent an inordinate amount of time making a cup of tea (Lucy was not the most practical of people –in fact, she may have been the worst assistant I’d ever seen in action), she started making her way to our side of the table. That was when Felix noticed the limp, and he lost his mind, interrupting the meeting to interrogate her about her injury. When Slimy Will, Lucy’s direct boss, said, “Felix, let Hop-a-long serve the tea. She’s been limping all morning. She’s fine.” I thought Felix was going to punch him in the face.

“Lucy Mayweather!” Ollie’s deep voice filled the room. He was grinning at Lucy from across the table. “What the fuck are you doing here? Last time I spoke to Mike he told me you never left the village.”

“Er…” Lucy glanced around at all the faces staring at their exchange and blushed. “Hi.” She gave Ollie a small wave, and he grinned across at her. When he got up and hugged her I knew I shouldn’t care, really there was no logical reason for me to care, but that didn’t stop the rush of white-hot jealousy from tearing through me.

By the time the meeting was over, I felt like I’d run a marathon. All I could do was hope and pray that this would be my last encounter with Ollie for a good long while. Because being around him and his animosity felt like it was slowly breaking me.

But my hopes and prayers had never been answered before so I don’t know why I thought they would be now.