Golden Opportunity Page 2

  Marigold smiled. “I don’t know how I came to be wonderful but yes, I’m Tiggy’s friend.”

  “You’re wonderful because you’re taking over from her at a moment’s notice.” The woman looked amused.

  “Marigold, meet Sandra, my personal assistant. If you have any questions, Sandra is more likely to know the answer than I am.” With that, Hagen strolled through the door that featured his name added to the title of Business Manager.

  Sandra stood and walked over to the other door, marked Antigone Allbrook. “You’ll find your work station in here. Tiggy left her appointment book on the desk and she says you know your way around a computer. Any problems, call out.”

  Marigold walked into her new office and glanced at the computer, fighting the temptation to run back to her car. She wanted to drive home and stay there, dreaming of her old life where computers only featured for the odd e-mail, the odder address, or occasionally for finding a tradesman.

  She glanced at the appointment book, but she already knew she would be staging a house today. That was within her comfort zone. Barely. She managed single-contract staging for land agents, but she used the client’s furniture fluffed up a little with touches of her own, her homemade cushion covers, or her borrowed furniture. The rest… She warded off a panic attack by concentrating her gaze on Tiggy’s messy desk. Tidying up was a job she could handle. Later.

  After a few moments of deep breathing, she edged back past Sandra’s desk and made her way to the warehouse again. The double doors had been dragged wide open and two men had started shifting a houseful of furniture into a truck marked AA & Co.

  “I’m Marigold, the new stager,” she called over the noise of the rumbling trolley. “I’ll be coming with you. How long will you take to load?”

  “An hour, give or take. I’m Billy Bunter.” A middle-aged man with a squashed nose like an ex-boxer and a perfectly round bald patch on the back of his head, stopped and grinned at her.

  “You’re not!”

  “I’m Jeff Bunter, but I’m called Billy,” he explained, standing patiently with his hands on his hips. “But call me Jeff if you like.”

  She smiled. “I like Billy.”

  “He’s Joe.” Billy indicated the other man with a head of wild dark curls who also looked as if he would be handy in a fight. He nodded at Marigold and grabbed up an armchair.

  The two men worked fast, not like normal furniture movers who were paid for the job. These men worked for the company, like Marigold. She wouldn’t waste time on the job either, mainly because she didn’t know how much time she would need to do the job Tiggy did. She might take twice as long, for all she knew, never having needed to work to a tight schedule.

  While the men loaded, she checked inside the boxes she had seen scattered in the far aisle, wondering where to put them. Bad mistake. The boxes were full of items returned from a previous staging that ought to be sorted before being stored in their rightful places on a shelf somewhere. Since at this moment the shelves had no discernable order system, she busied herself looking under dust sheets and trying to remember what she had seen where. She couldn’t resist shifting a few chairs that appeared to have been filed under tables, to the chair aisle.

  By the time the men got to the smaller props, she began stashing items away in the truck, too. Barely an hour later, she was on her way. The unloading worked in reverse. She took the smaller items off and dropped them in the most appropriate rooms. As soon as the curtain rods had been carried into the house, she matched the sizes to the windows, grabbed the ladder, and looked around for the tool kit.

  “I can put up the curtain rods if I can borrow a powered screwdriver,” she said to Billy, who had dropped a disassembled king-size bed into the largest bedroom.

  “I’ll get them up for you. You could put that bed together.”

  “Okay.” She sat on the floor with an Allen key and the pieces, but she hadn’t assembled a bed before. After a bit of mumbling to herself, she decided which ends fitted with which sides. Then she worked on the slats. Without another job until a mattress arrived, she put together a double bed in each of the two smaller rooms. By this time, the soft furnishings had arrived, and she made up the three beds.

  The next two hours flew by. She wondered what Tiggy usually did about lunch, or a drink. Apparently, AA & Co. supplied the food needed during the job. Joe dumped a cardboard box in the kitchen and pulled out individual meal packs of salads, sandwiches, and fruit. He also took out an electric kettle, a milk carton, tea bags, coffee bags, and mugs.

  “Wow, this is organization,” she said to the two men. She neatly covered the dining table with a sheet of packing paper and set the meals in front of the chairs.

  Billy grinned. “It’s pretty good. Anyone who works for AA knows a great deal when he sees one. No one ever leaves voluntarily. But they get more work out of us in the deal, first, because we want to keep the job, and second, because we don’t have to waste time finding shops when we’re on a break.”

  Marigold nodded. When she had an interesting task to do, she didn’t like wasting time to prepare food. This system suited her down to the ground. As soon as she had finished her cup of tea and rearranged the table and chairs, she skedaddled back to the master bedroom.

  Tiggy’s choices were perfect. She had been doing this job since she had been given her degree in design, and she was someone Marigold wanted to learn from. Tiggy had even boxed accessories for each room, though Marigold was tentative about using them in a house that would be up for public inspection. Bearing in mind that Tiggy would know best, she placed a mirrored jewelry box on the tall dresser with a couple of framed photos of anonymous people.

  She had finished styling the house when she left with the men a little after four. Tomorrow, while she researched the next job, noted in Tiggy’s book as the interior design for the old school, she would begin sorting out the warehouse.

  * * * *

  Hagen walked into his home through the gym attached to the garage, and switched on the main lights. The soles of his shoes clipped over the white marble floor to the main hallway. He took the pristine, white-painted stairway, heading for his white bedroom, where he swapped his suit jacket for a black knit. The dull chime of the old grandfather clock downstairs was the only sound in stark silence.

  He remembered all over again that he now lived alone, and that the house would remain silent—no more Mercia clattering around in the kitchen, no more Mercia opening or closing doors, turning her music up loudly, or talking to him from obscure rooms.

  Sighing, he pattered down the stairs to the kitchen at the back, through a house that was set at the perfect temperature, and he strode into the stark severity of the white room. Mercia would never return to clutter the marble counter tops with her piles of food that would not be eaten before the use-by date. She liked to be prepared for any event and consistently over-catered.

  He spotted his evening meal, a pasta dish of some sort, left by his daily help, who also tidied his house and ironed his shirts, except on weekends. Duly, he put the plate into the microwave, and poured himself a glass of wine.

  One place had been set in the adjoining dining room, a massive space, mainly white, softened by a pale gray carpet. The biggest, whitest chandelier imaginable, bar the matching one in the entrance hall, hung over the white dining table. He sipped, the timer rang, and he carried his meal and his glass to his set place.

  After he had eaten and finished his wine, Hagen strode into his study off the main hallway, a room with French doors that opened out to the side garden. He had fought with Mercia about the furnishings in this room, a Persian carpet in blue and gold, a comfortable tan leather couch, and his gigantic antique desk with a walnut patina he could never resist running a palm along. He did so again before sitting in his creaky, swiveling desk chair and checking his mail.

  Mercia hadn’t liked him bringing his work home,
but he was the business manager of his father’s large company and had been for three years, since the age of twenty-six. Rather than let the world assume he owed his position to his father, he was determined to prove he had earned his job on merit. Even now he still insisted on proving himself, and this fact wouldn’t have entered his mind but for seeing Marigold Reynolds again.

  Obstinate, confident Marigold with the marigold hair had grown into a wary, self-possessed woman. She hadn’t lost that quick tongue of hers, but he had lost his ability to laugh. Apathy had stolen his mind, and beside her he acted slow and sluggish. Perhaps he had been that way when he had met her, over ten years ago, when Tiggy had first brought her home, but he had never taken much notice of his sisters’ giggly chums.

  He rested his chin on the knuckle of his fist, staring blankly at his computer screen. The summer before his last year at school—the year he had turned eighteen—he and his sisters had been allowed to invite one friend each to stay with the Allbrook family for Christmas at their beach house. He had invited Brent Adams, a member of his swimming team who was also interested in sailing. Any eighteen-year-old with two younger sisters would want to escape them for the summer, and Hagen’s plan had been to set up his yacht and spend most of the days sailing with Brent. That or go surfing. Calli had invited one of her nerdy friends, and Tiggy had invited Marigold.

  As soon as Brent spotted Marigold he had another plan. With her neatly contained curly red hair and her awful clothes, she looked like an easy conquest, or so Brent had said. As soon as he discovered she wasn’t interested in him, he got snarky. He mumbled about her to Hagen, who wouldn’t have bothered trying to change her mind the way Brent did, which was to niggle at her.

  “Ignore her. She’s too young anyway,” Hagen had said with all the confidence of his eighteen-year-old self.

  “I’ll ignore her at school, that’s for sure.”

  Hagen didn’t have that luxury, since his sisters hung on her every word, but Marigold annoyed the hell out of him that summer. She had a habit of staring a challenge right into a person’s eyes. Despite dressing in the charity shops’ rejects, she had poise and an innate confidence he hadn’t seen before in a kid her age. She knew who she was, and she didn’t think much of Hagen and Brent.

  And then when they got back to town, she and his sisters, then in tenth grade, had shifted into the senior school. A senior himself, he had been appointed the school captain that last year, as well as being the captain of the football team and the captain of the swimming team. Marigold joined the swimming team.

  Her swimsuit was the only piece of her school uniform that suited her. Her skirts and blazers looked weary and her hems had been let down. Clearly, she wore the same uniforms from a couple of years back. His sisters had new uniforms each year as they grew. Yet again, she marked herself out as being poor. And he wouldn’t have minded if she hadn’t had a way of making him feel inferior.

  She spoke better than he, using a drawling upper-class accent. And she threw out challenges faster than he could pick them up. Primarily, he was an athletic scholar with rich parents. She was a socially connected, scholarship student with a single mother who worked as a dental nurse. Never the twain should meet. And yet she swam like a fish on steroids. As the year progressed, her body grew curvier and her speech more diplomatic. They won the interschool championship that year. He was the golden boy, and she was a smart-mouthed sixteen-year-old.

  Back then, he had tried not to notice her. However, she taught him his final lesson six years ago, which he had tried and failed to understand. Fortunately, this had motivated him to stay away from her. He didn’t plan to let himself get involved with her again. She would be gone in three months, and good riddance. Meanwhile, he had schedules to plan, meetings to attend, and a whole lot of forgetting to do.

  And yet, when he awoke in the morning, Marigold’s presence in his workspace was the first thing to enter his mind. Tiggy had told him Marigold would be taking over for her when she had informed him she would be toddling off for three months. He should have told her to find someone else. Instead, she had left him with the only person in his life who had completely and utterly rejected him.

  He arrived in the staff car park directly behind Marigold, as would naturally happen when he wanted to avoid her. He took his named spot, and she drew up in the general area. She, of course, drove a small car of obscure make. He couldn’t walk off without acknowledging her and so he waited. She, of course, stared his car up and down without a word.

  “I know I should drive a twenty-year-old homemade car, but I prefer speed and comfort,” he said, using his bored voice.

  “I didn’t say a word, and if I had, it wouldn’t be about your beautiful car. Don’t doubt it, if I had less class and more money, I would buy one of those, too.”

  He blinked at her. She didn’t smile but her whole face expressed hope. Her eyes sparkled and her mouth pursed. He eked out a reluctant laugh, possibly for the first time in a year or more. “Words you might wish had remained unspoken.”

  “Oh? Was I making one of those comments that make me sound like an envious snob?”

  He put his hand to the back of his neck and considered. “That sounds like something I might once have said.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? And I might have said something about the high proportion of village idiots who owned fast cars. But I also might have grown up a little.”

  “Since school days? I know,” he said with emphasis, staring straight into her eyes. He began to walk with her to the loading bay door.

  “Though I’m still wearing hand-me-downs. Well, that might change in the near future. You will be pleased to know that for three months I will be earning more than the average wage. I might even buy something smart.”

  He glanced back at her, concentrating for the first time on the clothes she wore. If they were hand-me-downs, he wouldn’t have guessed, not that she wore the type of clothes Mercia used to buy, which he knew were expensive and seen only a few times before she loaded her dressing room with her next buys. Marigold wore a plain blue shirt with a black skirt and jacket. She looked like any businesswoman of his acquaintance, except for her light golden-red hair, which she had tangled into a knot at the back of her head. As ever, the soft curly tendrils around her face had escaped. He thought she didn’t wear much makeup. Her eyelashes, long and spiky, seemed to be her own, but what would he know? “How did you manage yesterday?”

  “Pretty well, I think, but Tiggy had everything organized for me. I see the next on the list is to design the interior of a building that has been renovated for sale. I gather I decide which style.”

  He nodded. “Based on the area and the age of the building, though not necessarily. For example, I have an old house, but my wife wanted a modern interior.” Whatever he had planned to say next didn’t eventuate when he noted her wary gaze.

  “I’m sure it’s very beautiful.”

  “Most people think so.” He stiffened his shoulders. “She’s dead. My wife,” he said, wishing he hadn’t felt the need to explain a fact that Marigold doubtlessly knew. “A car accident.”

  She nodded. “I know it’s hard. My mother died a year ago, and I have only recently thought about having her room painted. It seemed sacrilege to wipe out memories of her with a paint color. But in the end, a room is only a room and she would have liked another color if she had lived.”

  “Does that mean you are alone now? I recall you didn’t have much to do with your father.”

  “Or my half brothers.” She made a wry face. “They went to our school, you know, but they were in the junior school while I was in the senior school so I hardly ever saw them. Once my father had sons, he was happy to forget his daughter existed.”

  He already knew that she had younger brothers who barely knew her and a father who chose not to. Hagen might have attitude himself if either of his parents had been so uncaring. Instead
he had a bright mother, a somewhat severe but loving father, and two smart sisters. He had based his later reactions toward Marigold on his mistaken assumption that he was one of life’s winners, but he doubted that any other hormonally driven bonehead would have been any more sensitive to the nuances than he. He needed to think of himself less often rather than think less of himself.

  He parted from her at his office door, realizing that his tone when he mentioned his house must have given her a hint that he didn’t admire the modern décor; the cold, impersonal, disposable furnishings; and Mercia’s deliberately conspicuous spending. As soon as he could motivate himself, he had every intention of wiping out the memory of her with a change.

  The only room he liked was his study.

  Chapter 2

  Marigold wandered into the workroom glad that she and Hagen had made peace at last. The unspoken issue between them had lurked for six years. I know. Naturally she was never going to apologize for pricking his male ego, but at the time she had hurt herself as well. She’d had no choice.

  Now that he had also been hit with the reality of life and death, and he quite clearly suffered the loss of his wife, she experienced a tad of contrition. From now on, she would treat him with the respect any boss would expect from an employee.

  With a release of pent-up breath, she sat at Tiggy’s desk and fingered the notebook clearly meant for her. The cover had been illustrated with a garish orange pencil drawing of a flower, which looked roughly like a marigold, but the best hint was “Marigold” written with a black marker pen. She smiled and moved the pad aside, glancing at the paint cards, color swatches, scraps of paper, pencils, pens, a length of black ribbon, two feathers, a packet of mints, a scalpel, a pencil sharpener, and a desk calendar. Okay, all were essential items, but not on a working space. Tiggy had left this in as great a mess as the furniture bay.

  Before Marigold could begin, she needed to make Tiggy’s desk into her own: neat and tidy. She opened the top drawer, noted a caddy, and she dropped the pens, pencils, sharpener, and scalpel on top. Paper and notebooks appeared to belong in the second drawer, and everything else went into the bottom drawer, whether it belonged there or not.