The Cinderella Reflex (18 page)

Elaine misread her panicked expression. “Don’t be modest now! My aunt lives in Killty and she read all about it in the paper. She remembered we went to college together and told me all about it.” She frowned, trying to remember the details. “Wasn’t there some controversy about you walking out of studio or something?”

Tess’s head was starting to swim. She couldn’t believe a tiny story in a tiny local paper had spread this far.

“No, that really is enough about me. Tell us about your life, Elaine.”

“Well …” Elaine began, flattered to be asked.

But Chris interrupted her. “Is that true? That you walked out? I only heard the start of that item and I had to go and do an interview myself.”

“Sort of …” Tess racked her brain, wondering how she could change the subject.

“But you must have heard that Atlantic might be going national?” Chris looked at her appraisingly. “Come on! And the real reason you left is?”

Tess finally broke. “Okay! I had a row with my boss over … well, it doesn’t matter what it was about now. The thing is, she sacked me. But,” she added quickly as there was a collective intake of breath, “then my boss’s boss, Jack McCabe – the entrepreneur who is buying the station – he called to see me and said he really liked the agony-aunt slot. But by that stage I had already told him that I was … er … writing a book. Which I am. Of course. But I do need a new job as well so if anybody knows of any openings …”

Tess looked around. She was the centre of attention now. For all the wrong reasons. She swallowed, praying for someone to break the silence. Make a joke. Anything.

Chris rested his chin on his steepled fingers. “My advice is to go back to Atlantic.”

Tess stared at him. Hadn’t he listened to a word she’d said? That she had been sacked and was supposed to be writing a book and exploring her options?

“Tess, they are going national and you said Jack McCabe wants you back. An opportunity like that doesn’t come around every day, you know. You can’t just let it slip through your fingers.”

“Er … I think I already have,” she reminded him.

Chris looked at her, his forehead creased in thought. “Haven’t they just announced a nationwide contest – where the winner gets their own show?”

“I’m sure I’m disqualified on the grounds of being fired from there already!” she joked.

“But you just said Jack liked your agony-aunt slot. Tell him you’ve changed your mind, that you want to come back. That would give you a fantastic advantage over external contestants – you’ll have insider information.”

“I’ve already turned down his offer.” She lifted her chin defiantly. “I’m afraid that particular ship has sailed without me, Chris.”

“Persuade McCabe to take you back!” He was insistent.

“How?”

“Go and find him. Hit him with your elevator speech.”

She looked at him uncomprehendingly. “My what speech?”

“Your
elevator
speech. People use them in Hollywood to pitch ideas for a movie. They only have a short window to sell their ideas to the movers and shakers. So they encapsulate their story right down to a forty-five-second speech. The idea is if you’re ever in an elevator with someone who can help you to progress your career, your pitch is powerful enough and short enough to grab their attention, while you have them as a captive audience.”

“Right,” Tess said slowly. “And how does that relate to me getting my job back, exactly?”

“Lots of people have adapted the idea to use in their careers,” he said.

She stifled a giggle. “And do you actually have to be
in
an elevator with the very important person?” She drank more vodka, beginning to enjoy the mad twist the conversation had just taken. This was what she’d liked about being with Chris – you never knew what he was going to come out with next. She scanned his features for signs of a smile. “You are joking, aren’t you?”

“I’m not. I have used my elevator speech so many times in my career. And with amazing results, if I’m allowed to blow my own trumpet for a moment.”

“Right,” Tess murmured. Maybe he’d gone a bit bonkers since she’d last seen him. Something to do with all those war zones he’d been caught up in.

“And I’ve used other psychological techniques too,” Chris continued seriously. “Like … have you heard of mirroring?”

“Erm … no. But you’re going to tell me about it, right?”

He narrowed his eyes. “This is serious stuff, Tess. It
works.
What you do is mirror people’s actions back at them. So if they move their head one way you copy them. And if they cross their legs you cross yours as well.” He crossed and uncrossed his long legs in demonstration. “They get the idea that you like them – and they like you right back. It’s basic but it works. It’s all about body language, Tess.” He reached out and grabbed her hand in his enthusiasm.

“Right.” She looked down at her small hand enveloped in his large one.

“It’s difficult to explain it here.” He was looking at her with his intense stare again. “I’d need to show you how it all works with role-play. But I can’t do it here. We’d need somewhere more private.”

Tess looked around the bar. Katie and Elaine were now engaged in a giddy ‘Do you remember?’ game and everyone else was also deep in conversation.

“I have a room here at the hotel,” she said slowly.

“Really?” Chris stroked the underside of her wrist with his thumb.

“Really,” Tess said decisively.

She had wanted to lay to rest the ghost of Chris Conroy for a long time now and she was going to do it tonight. She had to admit he had a strange chat-up line nowadays.
Come up and let me role-play my weird job-seeking techniques with you.
But then he had always been a strange sort of guy. Charismatic, but strange.

She drained her glass and got to her feet, wobbling a bit on her heels. She scribbled her room number on the side of a damp beer mat.

“Follow me up in a while and don’t make it obvious,” she instructed.

She slipped away before anyone noticed. Once in her room, she threw off her shoes and sat on the end of the unfamiliar bed, her heart fluttering a bit too fast. Some part of her realised this probably wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had.

There was Chris’s ‘
It’s complicated’
Facebook status to consider. And the fact that he had dumped her before and had never tried to contact her in the intervening years. But how else was she going to do the closure thing, she asked herself, a bit drunkenly. How else was she going to quit thinking of Chris as The One Who Got Away?

The knock on the door made her jump off the bed. She padded across the room in her stocking feet and hesitated for a few seconds before twisting the doorknob and pulling it open slowly. And then it was as if ten years and a lifetime of ‘What Ifs?’ had disappeared and she was back to the star-struck girl she had once been.

Chris Conroy looked crazy, dirty, sexy.

“Come in,” she said quietly and walked across to the window. “There are drinks in the minibar,” she called over her shoulder.

Chris pulled out a bottle of beer and two miniature bottles for her – vodka and tonic, which he mixed expertly in a glass he took from her bedside locker He walked over to join her, handing her the vodka, and taking a swig of his beer straight from the bottle

Tess sipped her drink and pressed her forehead against the windowpane, taking in the cityscape below them. The reflection of the streetlights illuminated the scene outside: the lovers walking arm in arm; a tramp across the road on the corner settling in for the night with his piece of cardboard and blanket; a gang of young women, dressed in pink hen-night tack, holding each other up as they tottered along on their spindle heels, laughing uproariously.

She was aware of Chris standing behind her, so close she could feel the feather touch of his breath on the nape of her neck. She shivered and turned around to face him, lifting her face slightly to his. She had forgotten how blue his eyes were. Like cornflowers, she used to think.

“So, Tess,” he said softly, “about the elevator-speech script …”

Tess snapped her head downwards. He
actually
wanted to talk about an elevator speech? She turned away, so he couldn’t see the expression on her face.

“Look, Chris, I’m sure this sort of thing goes down well in Hollywood or London. Possibly even here in Dublin. But … Killty is small. And kind of … quaint. It’s not an elevator-speech sort of place.”

“Everywhere’s an elevator speech sort of place, Tess. Besides, you won’t always be stuck in Killty.”

The way he said it made Tess want to jump contrarily to the town’s defence. But then he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face him again.

“I have a hunch about you, Tess Morgan. And my hunches are hardly ever wrong. So – trust me on this one – you need to go to Jack McCabe and pitch him the idea that you want your job back and why he should give it to you. You owe it to yourself. Promise me that you’ll at least try?”

“I’ll try,” Tess agreed. She tilted her chin upwards again, convinced he was finally going to make his move. But he moved her to one side, placed his beer on the window-ledge and bounded across the room.

She watched, bewildered, as he hunkered down at the bedside locker and pulled out a notepad with the hotel’s logo on it and a tiny pen attached with a string. He came back, brandishing the stationery like a weapon.

“We’d be better off with index cards but this will have to do for now. So, Tess … what five words would you use to describe your best qualities?”

Tess had had enough. She put her drink down beside his on the window ledge and looked at him.

“Hot. Sexy. That’s two.”

He looked at her, his mouth opening in surprise. She took the notepad and pen out of his hands and heard them fall with a soft thud on the thick, beige carpet.

“Adventurous.” She slipped her hands into his navy jacket, inching it down his arms until it too fell to the floor.

He closed his mouth again and gave her that lazy smile she remembered.

“Spontaneous.” She opened the top button of his white shirt, letting her fingers flicker over the hollow in his throat.

He arched his head back. “What else?”

“Uncomplicated.”

He laughed out loud at that.

She smiled too, wondering which of the five words were the most inaccurate.

“You’ve changed, so.” He slid one hand up her short red dress.

“It’s been a long time, so that’s entirely possible,” she murmured.

He turned her around and pulled down the zip of her dress. He slid it down along her body, over the curve of her hips and onto the floor. She stepped out of the flimsy strip of material and turned around to face him again.

His eyes swept over her, standing there in her bra, panties, and her vertiginous, skyscraper shoes.

“Tell me some more words,” he challenged.

“Powerful,” she said at once. That one was true; she did feel a sense of her own power right now. She’d taken control of a situation that hadn’t been going the way she wanted it to and turned it around.
Go, her!

“Daring,” she added, unfastening the second button of his shirt.

Chris bent his head to whisper in her right ear. “I think I like the new you, Tess Morgan.”

She smiled. She didn’t think Chris had changed, any more than she had. But right now she didn’t care because she was about to have sex for the first time in so long it hurt to think about it. And with a man she’d never really given up on.

She slipped out of her skyscrapers, giving Chris an extra six inches height advantage and in response he bent down, lifted her up and carried her towards the bed.

Chapter Twelve

Helene wasted no time in devising her strategy to win the contest. She’d slotted herself into
This Morning
for a series of reports on her
Ten Years Younger
efforts, determined to get her talent recognised by Jack McCabe. She decided that he couldn’t know she was having an affair with Richard because he would have let her go by now.

She was finally starting to appreciate why Richard had insisted on keeping their relationship secret. Of course Rachel Joy’s poisonous postscript to her report in the
Killty Times
was a cause for concern. Helene twirled a strand of hair around her finger, wondering if there was anything she could do to stop the journalist from naming her in a future edition. The phone on her desk rang and she was jolted back to reality.

“Hello, may I speak to Helene Harper?”

“Speaking …” Helene said cautiously, trying to place the voice.

“Oh! Well, look, my name is Grandma Rosa and –”

“You!” Helene remembered. It was the old bat who had phoned in to the ill-fated agony-aunt slot.

“Er … yes, it’s me. I’m phoning with an idea I have for the radio?
The Psychic Granny Show
.”

Despite Helene’s worries, she found herself smiling. “I’m afraid we’re fighting a constant battle at Atlantic 1FM to attract younger listeners, Mrs …?”

“Grandma Rosa will do.”

“Okay then, Grandma Rosa. I have to say
Psychic Granny
is a great title, but I’m afraid it’s not really us.”

“But it’s young listeners who will like this slot the most!” Rosa persisted. “Think about it! They’re the ones who are building careers, dealing with debt, looking for a partner, juggling children or else the idea of children. It’s all happening for them at the same time – they
need
advice.”

Tell me about it, Helene thought wryly. She had always thought her life would be sorted by forty. But here she was fighting to keep her job and having relationship difficulties all at the same time. Richard hadn’t been in touch with her since the press conference and she was dismayed to find that she was missing him like crazy. She tapped her foot under the table. How was it she and Richard weren’t getting along any more? She remembered Annie, the therapist at the spa, saying her throat chakra was blocked. Maybe that was it – she couldn’t communicate her feelings to him properly because of the blocked chakra. Her heart quickened as a thought occurred to her. What if Grandma Rosa could unblock her chakras?