I jabbed the button to hang up the call with enough force to shove the phone six inches across the meeting table.
“That man has the commercial initiative of plankton.”
Opposite me, Bingley’s CFO raised her eyebrows, already gathering up her papers and files into her arms ready to return to her own desk. “That actually went better than I was expecting. You got more concessions out of him in that one call than Bingley or I have managed in the last six months.”
With a company the size of the Pemberley Group behind me, I generally found bank managers were eager to make themselves useful to me. I was glad to be able to lever some of that influence in my friend’s favour, although I wished Bingley had let me step in to help sooner.
“Will you tell Bingley what’s been agreed or shall I?” Priya asked.
“I’ll fill him in later. We’ll be having daily catchups until he’s back from Edinburgh.” I stood up with her and opened my office door, following her out as I made my way to my next meeting, already five minutes late. We crossed the communal breakout area, and I held open the next door as well.
Priya thanked me and stepped through, only to do a quick two-step backwards, laughing as she cried, “Oops, sorry!”
“No, no—my fault,” came a familiar voice, and then before my brain had time to react, Elizabeth Bennet was walking past us. Her hands were also full, hers with two takeaway coffees. “Thanks, Priya,” she said cheerfully. Her eyes landed on me, but she only smiled her gratitude rather than voicing it a second time as she kept a steady pace down the corridor.
She didn’t look back as she walked away, and I wasn’t sure what induced me to watch her go. The way she’d looked at me, perhaps. Her smile was a mysterious thing; it held secrets. Just as it had the first night we met, it made me think there was far more going on under the surface than her mildly polite greeting revealed.
Shaking my head, I turned back to Priya, only to discover that she’d gone, and I was holding the door open for nobody. I exhaled loudly and continued on my way.
For the next eighty minutes, my attention was fixed solely on the brand transition strategy the marketing department were working up. It was a strong proposal, but not without areas that needed improvement, and I was preoccupied mulling it over as I strolled back to my office.
Not so preoccupied that I didn’t spot Elizabeth through the glass wall of Meeting Room 2 as I passed it. She was presenting, though what and to whom, I didn’t linger to find out. I barely had time to register how assuredly she talked, or that she did so without notes, before I was out of sight of her again. I tried extremely hard to forget the picture, to not be impressed by her obvious confidence, or so acutely aware of how rapt her audience had been.
It was the fourth time I’d seen her today. The first had been that morning, outside on the pavement. In a crowd of a hundred strangers, she’d stood out—the only person who’d stopped to help a woman lift her pram over the kerb. The second had been midmorning, when she’d walked past me as I spoke to Bingley’s assistant outside my office. She’d been engrossed in conversation with a colleague, their heads bent over the phone in Elizabeth’s hand as they discussed whatever was on the screen.
She hadn’t seen me either time, which was for the best, since Bingley had asked me to stay out of her way until he was back in the office, worried I was going to give her the same grilling I’d given him about workplace relationships. He ought to have known that was a line I would never cross, but I’d given him my word anyway. I preferred to avoid her, because every time I caught sight of her, the same prickle of panic assailed me at how pretty she was.
I hated that I’d noticed. Bingley had gone out with plenty of pretty women, but I hadn’t been attracted to any of them. Until now. It was an attraction that needed to die as quickly and definitively as it had sprung up, and staying the hell out of her path was definitely the best way to ensure that it did.
I returned to my office and put the matter from my mind. There was too much work to be done to waste another second worrying about it. I’d stay in my office for as much of the rest of the week as I could. Bury myself in paperwork. Not allow the exasperating awareness that had me noticing her everywhere I went to take root. By the time Bingley got back, I would be well and truly over any fleeting attraction I might feel towards Elizabeth Bennet.
