The Morning After the Night Before: Love & Lust in the city that never sleeps! (2 page)

On that piece of comeback brilliance, she turned and slammed out of the glass door of Mitchell's office—everyone in the place had probably lip-read the entire discussion anyway—and crossed straight back to her desk,
slumping into her comfy chair, where she did her best thinking.

Infinitely better than whenever she was caught up in Harry Mitchell's orbit, anyway.

Autocrat.

No one
in this office was spewing out works of sublime prose in the endless reports he tasked them to produce. Maybe, once, she'd been about the technique of it all but she was all about bottom lines and pound symbols now. The facts and only the facts, because that was what got the job done and the salary paid, right?

Her shoulders slumped.

Since when was
adequate
enough for Isadora Dean? She hated that her
malaise
was clearly starting to leak through in her work but she absolutely loathed that it was Harry Mitchell calling her to attention on it.

As if he needed anything further to pick at.

She glanced around the office at all her fellow employees doing a dreadful job of pretending they weren't interested. Mitchell was right: they all brought their documents to her for a quick check over. Because she was good.

But good did not automatically equal happy.

No matter how many times you did the maths.

She flicked the little ornamental hedgehog on her desk and sent its head nodding madly. Then she snapped off the ID card pinned to her jacket and stared at it. At the bright, optimistic, enthusiastic, first-day-in-a-new-job face that stared back at her. And she remembered how she'd once felt about what she did. How grateful she was to have a good job at such a prestigious firm. How she'd totally ignored her parents' concerns when they'd replied to her emailed news. How drunk she'd got with the girls to celebrate.

What
had
happened to all that enthusiasm?

She clipped her ID card back on her jacket. Next to the hedgehog, her phone dinged to let her know she had a message. She absently flicked it open and scanned to the top.

The whole building pitched as if London were built on a fault line, and her free hand clutched the edge of her desk. But, with those few typically supercilious and irritating words, something indefinable shifted in Izzy's brain.
Everything just went…left…an inch and a half, and she saw her life more clearly than she had in years.

This wasn't petulance. This was pure, unadulterated misery.

Mitchell was right. She had lost her mojo. And she didn't even notice it going.

No one wanted a lacklustre employee on their hands. Maybe she should just suck it up and go in there and promise to do better. Work on ways of getting a bit of reward back in this job.

Her phone dinged again.

She lifted her focus past her colleagues and straight to Mitchell's office. All six feet of him leaned, ankles crossed, on his desk-edge, his phone still in his hand, those blazing eyes fixed steadily on her. And, as it always did, his regard boiled her blood even as it heated less willing bits of her, too. And she realised that
this
was part of why she even bothered coming to work.

The daily zing she got from sparring with
Prince Harry
through the glass of his high-altitude corporate eyrie. Or on email. Or in team meetings.

Like a caffeine hit for her soul shooting straight through the numbness of the eight-till-six grind.

Reminding her that she was, in fact, still alive.

Part of his job involved telling her how to do hers. It wasn't personal. So why was she making it that way? Yes, he was a pain and, no, he wasn't the most supportive leader she'd ever had but it was hardly Mitchell's fault that she'd cast him as her own personal defibrillator.

For the numb days.

Maybe she could work
with
him instead of
against
him and find a happy place again deep within the relentless wheel of corporate finance.

Maybe he'd make a better ally than enemy?

But, as she stared, something in the way she was regarding him—or the reluctant acceptance he could see in her, maybe—caused three little lines to appear between his brows and he pushed away from his desk slightly, one hand half reaching towards her.

Almost beseeching.

Her gaze dropped to her phone.

Her fingers began trembling immediately and she eased the phone onto her desk before it slipped onto the plush carpet.

So much for allies…

Then, as she sat there, seething, the most brilliant idea bloomed to life in her mind.

So brilliant, she couldn't for the life of her think why it hadn't struck earlier. She'd wasted so much time and energy.

And all the time she could be doing this!

She pushed to her feet a little unsteadily, smoothing her pencil skirt demurely down her thighs, and lifted her gaze back up to Mitchell's. Then she channelled every bit of Scarlett Johansson she could muster into the slow-motion glide over to his office and up the carpeted steps to the glass wall where he still stood, tense with irritation, and she stopped the toes of her strappy heels directly in front of his Italian leather. So they'd be touching if not for the glass divider.

She held his gaze the whole way.

Every person in the room watched her, not least Harry Mitchell, whose frustrated annoyance had been replaced by suspicious confusion. And something else. He'd watched her Scarlettwalk with incredibly satisfying interest.

Izzy wet her lips, knowing he was the only one who could see, and then leaned more closely into the glass and let her breath mist over on it.

Mitchell's voice box lurched.

She lifted her index finger to her lips and sucked it gently into her mouth, then dragged it back out down her full, moist bottom lip.

His chest rose and fell. Blue eyes remained riveted on hers. Full of the usual heat. Full of new speculation and anticipation.

And she wrote seven letters backwards in the mist on the glass.

Just two words.

One of them bad. One of them
very
bad.

Mitchell's smouldering gaze flickered down to the glass and then flared as he read her backwards statement.

‘I trust that is prosaic enough for you,
sir
,' Izzy said without raising her voice.

His left brow arched high. No question that her latest written submission was unambiguous in its brevity. And no question that she was through at Broadmores regardless of whether she'd just quit.

Which she had.

She erased the misty evidence with her jacket sleeve and turned from all the sex simmering between them, ignoring the open-mouthed stares of her stunned colleagues, and crossed back to her desk on winged feet.

Three bits of scrunched-up paper tumbled out of her upended waste-paper basket and bounced across the floor only to be replaced with her phone, keys, hand lotion, still-nodding hedgehog and a photograph of herself, Tori and Poppy at school.

And then she just…walked out.

There was no ovation from her fellow downtrodden, and if anyone said goodbye she didn't hear it through the furious rush of blood past her eardrums.

She stepped into the lift and turned to the front, giving her a direct view of Harry Mitchell, still standing, agape, in his glass fishbowl, staring at her with a complicated mix of creases on his face.

Disappointment—the kind she was used to from her parents.

Stunned disbelief—the kind reserved for anyone who stepped off the rooftop of their career as she just had.

Loss—the kind…

She frowned. The kind she felt right now, for something she couldn't begin to understand, as the lift doors whispered shut on everything she'd thought she'd wanted from life.

‘What am
I?' Izzy murmured, wedging her shoulder and elbow in closer to the mirror propped up next to the tiny boxroom window to finish applying her mascara. ‘A flipping boy wizard?'

She wouldn't mind a few magical skills if it meant she could just wave a wand to make herself beautiful in moments. Or her boobs bigger. Or her bank balance bigger. But the only part of the whole wizarding deal she had was the ‘tiny room under the stairs' thing where, up until three days ago, she and her sibling flatmates had kept their miscellaneous junk.

Never mind that they were quite fancy stairs leading up to a delightful mezzanine floor she'd once adored. Never mind that it had, in fact,
been an
actual
room before it was their boxroom. It was unquestionably tiny.

A poor girl's room.

Bad enough that she'd had to ship most of her belongings to her parents' council house back in Chorlton, but her impulsiveness had put everyone out because Poppy and Alex had to relocate their thirds of the overflow, too, and couldn't move it into Izzy's old room because that now needed to be let to meet the repayments.

Sigh. Her room… Her beautiful room.

Someone else's soon.

She swapped the mascara to the other hand and tried for a better result from the left.

‘The price of freedom,' she reminded herself aloud.

And of self-respect. Everything she'd done in her life was about treating herself with more respect than the world had ever treated her.

‘Izzy…' Poppy rapped on the door then stuck her head in, skilfully avoiding taking an eye out on the various clothes hangers hooked over the door frame. ‘How much of your own party are you planning on missing?'

Was
all of it
a wise thing to admit?

She normally loved a party, loved being the centre of attention—she had a lifetime of
non-existent parties to make up for—but
Congrats, you're unemployed
was not her preferred theme. Even if Poppy had typically gone with the more positive,
Congrats, you're out of the job that was draining your soul.
There certainly was something to be said for spin. Izzy pushed back from the ridiculously ornate dresser wedged awkwardly between the wall and the single bed.

Single…

This was what she'd become—a half made-up pauper sleeping on a child's bed.

The price of freedom.

‘Did I hear Tori's laugh?' Izzy quizzed, brightly. And by ‘laugh' she meant the carillon of flirtatious bells that was their best friend's weapon of choice. ‘How long has she been here?'

Poppy arched a single, elegant brow. ‘I think the more pertinent question is how long have
you
been in here? It's just gone eight.'

‘Oh.'

The boxroom was too crowded for a clock and Izzy never wore a watch. ‘Time to come out, then.'

Why on earth had she thought being unemployed was worth celebrating?

Because that decision had been made two days ago. Today she'd changed her mind. Two
days from now she'd probably feel differently again. Par for the course with her wildly swinging thoughts lately.

Wildly swinging, dissatisfied thoughts.

So dissatisfied that she'd even considered ringing her mum to talk things through. Until she remembered that she didn't do that anymore.

‘Come on, Iz,' Poppy urged, reading her expression and holding the door wide. ‘You'll enjoy it once you get out there.'

She certainly wouldn't without a champers in hand. One look at the thronging mass in their flat reinforced that. All friends, but somehow still overwhelming. Would it be rude to go to a movie instead? To reward the kindness of all their friends who'd rallied for her with her absence?

She paused in the doorway. They wouldn't be the first kind people she'd abandoned.

But tonight was not the night to be thinking about her parents or her dysfunctional childhood. Tonight was a night for stoic smiles and fellowship.

She followed Poppy into the kitchen, keeping her eyes down until she had the familiar
comfort of a glass in her hand. ‘Please tell me there's Lanson.'

‘Dunno. Brother dearest ordered the booze.'

There was—thank God—and Izzy polished off her first glass while rinsing the used party glasses already accumulating in the kitchen. She took care of a second while chopping up a platter of out-of-season veg.

Their extended circle of friends fell like Brighton seagulls onto her choppings.

‘God, I love this stuff,' a tall brunette cooed, scooping a big dollop of dip onto some capsicum and then shoving the lot into her mouth and speaking past the crunching mess. ‘Yours?'

‘Speciality of the man of the house,' Izzy said. And, no, dip wasn't an odd thing for a military man to be good at. No more odd than Alex's weirdly nocturnal habits, anyway.

‘Tash, Sally.' She nodded, extending the platter for their grazing pleasure. ‘Thanks for coming. Hi, Richard.'

‘Love the pauper's catering, Izzy,' he gushed, drowning a sprig of broccolini in dip. ‘Very on-theme.'

Huh. If being poor was so entertaining why hadn't she smiled more as a kid?