Girl on the Run (2 page)

‘Bloody
hell
!’ I start attempting the controlled pants my best friend Jess did at her antenatal classes. They are as effective at reducing my anxiety as a high-voltage defibrillator.

I run to the back of the car, hoping against hope that the man I flattened with my back wheels will be sitting up, alive and well.

He isn’t.

I pick up his wrist, desperate to feel a flicker of life, but I can’t find a pulse. There’s nothing.

‘HEEEELLLLPP!’ I cry, my voice echoing round the car park before I realise that not a soul is going to come to my aid.

I hitch up my skirt and fall to my knees to examine him: he’s muscular and broad, with the body of an athlete.

Come
on
, Abby. There’s only one thing for it. You’ve got to do CPR.

YES!

Except I don’t know CPR.

I decide to give it a go anyway and attempt to recall every scrap of emergency First Aid knowledge I have. It amounts to a Girl Guide badge taken in 1989 and last week’s
Holby City
.

Think!

Do I do the kiss of life first or those compression things with the heels of my hands? I think it’s the former. But I need to get him ready for the latter anyway. With fumbling hands I unzip his jacket to reveal a powerful chest, the top two buttons of his shirt undone.

I check his mouth for foreign objects. I’m sure I read that somewhere, though God knows what it is I’m looking for. Some loose change perhaps or an odd sock? Maybe one of those weapons of mass destruction that never turned up . . .

Why am I thinking these things?!

I tip back his head and take a deep breath. Okay. This is it. My mouth moves towards his, my heart thrashing round my ribcage. Finally, I take a gulp of air, close my eyes . . and sink my lips onto his.

At the exact moment that I realise I’ve made an error – I’m meant to have closed his nose – I realise something else. His lips don’t feel anything like those of someone who is unconscious. And certainly not dead.

It takes a second to work out why – and when I do, I get the shock of my life. His lips are moving. His lips are . . . oh my God, we’re kissing!

I jolt back and glare at him with ping-pong eyes.

He’s in his early thirties, absurdly handsome with a tanned, defined jaw and sumptuous lips. His hair is dark, a shade lighter than black, and cropped to disguise the slightest curl.

He bites his lip slowly, as if tasting me, and his eyes flutter open. They’re green. Or brown. No, both – kind of forest-coloured. More importantly, they’re the eyes of someone very much alive.

I watch in astonishment as he blinks and wriggles his jaw from side to side, as if awakening from a deep sleep. He looks at me. And I laugh. I laugh uncontrollably at the sheer joy that I haven’t added manslaughter to my list of achievements today.

‘Oh, thank You, God. Thank You!’ I can’t restrain myself. ‘And thank You again!’

Then I look down and register the stranger’s expression – and realise I have some explaining to do.

‘Do you always reverse your car at forty miles per hour?’

His solid thighs bear the weight of his body as he sits on his haunches, examining his bike. There’s only one thing I know for certain about motorbikes, and that’s that I can’t stand them. But it looks expensive. At least it did. It now looks as if it’s been trampled on by a herd of rhinos.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ I say, trying to retain my cool, ‘but it was nothing like forty miles an hour.’

He turns and glowers. He’s physically imposing, with arms that flex as he yanks a piece of bodywork.

‘It was fast enough to nearly kill me,’ he snaps.

‘Oh, let’s not exaggerate.’ I smile nervously, attempting to lighten the mood.

‘Exaggerate?’ he repeats, making it clear that my attempt was far from successful. ‘I don’t need to exaggerate. You knocked me out cold.’

Despite the circumstances, there’s something about the way he says it that’s mesmerising – he has the sort of voice that floats across a room and wraps you up. Between that and his looks, I can only conclude that this guy fancies himself rotten.

‘This is going to cost a lot to fix,’ he says next. ‘I hope you’re insured.’

My heart plunges at the mention of insurance, bringing with it a tidal wave of other issues such as my cataclysmic premiums and non-existent no claims.

‘Of course,’ I say in my best non-committal tone – the one I’ve taken years to master. ‘Though maybe . . .’ I’m about to offer to cough up and not even consult my insurance company, when I pause, scolding myself for almost falling into such an obvious trap.

I read an article recently reinforcing the importance of
never
admitting liability in the heat of the moment, no matter how tempted you are to start apologising. It struck me at the time that this is possibly where I’ve been going wrong – as well as causing all the crashes in the first place, of course, but we won’t dwell on that.

‘Did you say something?’ he asks, fiddling with another knob on his bike. He looks up with brooding eyes.

I smile sweetly. ‘No.’

‘Right.’ He stands and brushes his dusty palms against his thighs. ‘Well, if we could exchange details, I can speak to my insurance company as soon as possible.’

‘O-kay,’ I say cagily. ‘You’re assuming I’m responsible then?’

His expression darkens again. ‘Of course you’re responsible.’

‘Well,’ I reply, sucking my teeth, ‘I think it’s up to the insurance companies to decide that.’

This doesn’t go down well.

‘Let me get this straight: I’m minding my own business, wheeling my bike through a car park, and the next thing I know, the back end of a Citroen C4 is hurtling towards me—’

‘If I
could
explain . . .’

‘You didn’t consider the possibility that something or someone might have been in the way. In fact, from what I saw beforehand, you were too busy talking to yourself to consider anything.’

‘I wasn’t
talking
to myself, I was practising—’

‘You just slammed your car into reverse, and off you went. At forty miles an hour.’

We lock eyes.

‘It was
not
forty miles an hour,’ I fire back, through gritted teeth. ‘And as for the talking to myself thing . . . fine.’ I cross my arms. ‘I
was
talking to myself. So what? It was a significantly more pleasant conversation than this.’

A second passes and I’m sure his lip almost twitches into a smile.

‘Look,’ I say, deliberately breaking eye-contact, ‘I already said I was sorry.’

‘Did you? I don’t remember that.’

‘As I recall,’ I say patiently, ‘my exact words were:
I’m sorry. So very, very sorry.
’

He looks genuinely perplexed. And it hits me: he was unconscious when I said that. ‘Look, perhaps we could get things moving,’ I say hastily. ‘I need to be on my way.’

‘Get what moving?’

‘Swapping phone numbers.’

‘It’s nice of you to offer, but I’m busy for the next couple of weekends. Besides, I already have a girlfriend.’

‘I meant for insurance purposes! Not because—’ I stop halfway, realising he’s winding me up. ‘Have you got a pen?’

‘Not on me.’ He pats his pockets. ‘You?’

‘Wait here.’ I return to the car, where I look for a biro in my handbag, but have to make do with my new Bobbi Brown lip pencil. As I straighten up, I can feel his eyes on my legs and spin round. But his glance has shifted and I can’t work out if I imagined it. Or whether I want to have imagined it. I start writing, but pause almost immediately.

‘What’s up?’ he asks.

‘I can’t remember the name of my insurance company,’ I tell him – truthfully, stupefied by the development myself. I’ve dealt with them on three separate occasions in the last year; I can tell you the names of at least six members of their call centre staff – and most of their children too. I was actually invited to someone’s Silver Wedding Anniversary last year.

‘You’re kidding?’ he says.

‘Look, here’s my address – and email address. Drop me a line and I’ll forward you the details.’ I thrust a business card into his hand, with my home address written on it. As he takes it from me, my skin brushes against his and I blush, cursing myself again. The thought of fuelling the ego of somebody who (a) clearly doesn’t struggle to attract the opposite sex and (b) is about to take me to the cleaners on my insurance, is almost painful.

‘Thank you,’ he says curtly, taking another card from me and writing his own email address on it. My lip pencil now looks like it belongs in a four-year-old’s colouring box. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

‘Great,’ I mutter sarcastically.

This apparently isn’t the right thing to say.

‘I didn’t ask for this,’ he informs me coolly. ‘For someone to drive into me, almost write off my bike, and nearly kill me.’

Anger rises in my chest. ‘I did
not
nearly kill you.’

‘What’s a little concussion between friends, eh?’

‘We’re not friends,’ I say flatly.

He heaves up his bike and looks at its crumpled remains. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘We’re not.’

I make it to the offices of Max Crane Law with a minute and a half to spare. Which would be fine if I looked respectable, but my hair in particular looks horrendous. It was already too long (down way past my shoulders) and not blonde enough, thanks to my having no time recently for a trip to the hairdresser’s. Now the exertion of getting here has left it looking as if it was styled with a leaf-blower.

As well as that, and the sausage-pink tone my complexion has taken on thanks to all this exertion, my knees look as though I’ve tried to shave them with a rusty scalpel.

Checking I’m alone in the Ladies, I hoist up my skirt and jam my leg in a frosted-glass basin – frantically splashing off traces of blood and grit with lavender-scented hand cleanser – when the door springs open. Standing there is Letitia Hooper, Head of Business Development and Marketing – aka Ms Big. At least as far as today’s pitch is concerned.

Letitia, who I frequently bump into at networking events, is only thirty-seven, but dresses like the headmistress of a girls’ boarding school, so much so that each time I see her I expect to be put in detention.

‘Oh, Letitia!’ I whip round my leg and spray water across her face. She blinks twice, dislodging beads of hand mousse from her eyelashes, and looks me up and down. ‘Sorry about that.’ I hobble barefoot to the paper towels. ‘How are you?’

I begin ripping towels from the receptacle and pat dry my legs.

‘Fine, thank you, Abby,’ she replies. ‘I bumped into one of your employees at a luncheon last week – Heidi Hughes?’

‘Oh Heidi.’ I smile, pleased at this development – I know she won’t have let me down. ‘She’s been with the company almost since the start.’

‘Impressive young lady,’ says Letitia. ‘She certainly did a good job of promoting your services.’

I make a mental note to thank Heidi when I see her, though this is absolutely typical of her, and is one of the reasons why I promoted her to Chief Designer a few weeks ago.

Heidi’s first day at work, more than a year ago, wouldn’t have impressed a Human Resources manager.

It wasn’t Heidi who was the problem. Heidi’s never been a problem. It was her boss, who’d recently embarked on a roller-coaster ride of a career move that was
bound
to calm down soon.

As I opened the door to our office on the fourth floor on that first day, I noted Heidi’s eager smile and open, friendly face. She was a pretty twenty-five-year-old with strawberry-blonde hair, a cherubic mouth and a smattering of freckles on her nose.

She’d arrived early and responded to my chit chat with high-speed babble, betraying nerves as we walked the eight flights upstairs. I’d thought at the time that she’d gone the extra mile with her chic smoky-grey skirt-suit because it was day one, but now I know she always dresses like that for work.

‘It’s nice,’ she beamed, glancing round the office, a well-located broom cupboard in Liverpool’s business district. Her interview had been in a coffee shop across the road so this was the first time she’d seen her new workplace. ‘Where will I be sitting?’

I’d rather hoped that this wouldn’t come up.

‘Eventually . . . there.’

I pointed to an empty stretch of carpet. She frowned.

‘This is a bit embarrassing,’ I said apologetically, ‘but your desk and computer are being delivered tomorrow. It’s my fault – I was late ordering them. I’ve had so much on and, because I’ve been on my own until now . . . look, I won’t bore you with the details. I’ve got to dash out soon, so you can sit at my desk.’

I swept aside a mountain of paperwork and Revels packets, muttering more apologies. She hid any concerns well.

Heidi’s CV had been great. She’d gained a decent degree and had worked for a big marketing agency – just like I had. But her CV wasn’t what had got her the job; she was enthusiastic, unassuming, pleasant and, I’d hoped, full of initiative.

When I returned to the office later that day, she’d researched our current clients, produced a list of potential clients, drawn up suggestions for new office equipment and tidied the stationery cabinet, which had previously looked like the scene of a WBA title fight between two chickens. I’d only been gone four hours.

I must admit, it struck me at the time – rather uncharitably – that Heidi might be too good to be true. There were only the two of us in this office and I didn’t want a Stepford Employee. I wanted someone to have a laugh with too.

At the end of the day, I had to tell her it was time to go home.

‘Thanks for a brilliant first day,’ she grinned, standing to put on her coat. ‘I’ve really enjoyed it.

‘No – thank
you
. It’ll be easier tomorrow when we don’t have to perch at the same desk together. Hey, how about a quick drink?’ I suggested.

Her expression suddenly looked earnest. ‘Does the company not have a policy on alcohol?’

I laughed, but was a little scared she wasn’t joking. ‘Not so far. Why? What do you think the company’s policy on alcohol should be?’

‘That it should be compulsory.’