“Well, yes, he’s an unreasonable pain in the arse. I’d be the first to agree with you there. But, luckily for you, he’s not the one you have to deal with. We try to keep Max’s interactions with other humans to a minimum. Now, what was the problem with the curved wall?”
I’d managed to eek small grins out of some of the contractors with my savage (but accurate) assessment of Max’s character, and as we started to unpick the difficulties presented by the design they slowly softened to me. It took a while, but eventually we’d come up with a compromise (at least I’d managed to talk them into thinking it was a compromise – in reality it was me getting exactly what I wanted for the design). Yes, contractors will always want to work to designs that are essentially boxes with no curves at all. Yes, the design we’d come up with for this side of the building was annoying. But no, I would not be accepting any sort of halfway house when it came to the vision Max and I had for this project.
“You’re a good negotiator.”
I spun around to see Harry leaning against his flash car with a grin on his face, looking edible in his suit and tie with his arms crossed over his broad chest.
“Well, I’ll admit, I’m better than Max,” I replied, as he pushed away from the pavement and took his long strides towards me. When he reached me, he wasted no time, closing his arms around me to haul me towards him, and laying his mouth over mine with a brief, hard, claiming kiss. I blinked up at his smiling face, still in the circle of his arms and tried to muster the correct amount of annoyance through my Harry-induced haze.
“You can’t kiss me in front of everyone on site,” I managed, taking a half-hearted swat at his shoulder which just made his grin wider.
“Hello, Harry,” he mumbled under his breath. “I missed you, Harry. You mean the world to me and I’m only too glad to kiss you on site seeing as I’m your girlfriend and that means you can kiss me whenever you like.”
I rolled my eyes, even though a warm feeling had spread out from my chest at the sound of Harry calling me his girlfriend. “You know you’re a weirdo, right hedgehog? That muttering thing should have stayed way back in your teens where it belongs.”
Harry smiled down at me and nodded, unrepentant about that too. I sighed, suppressing a smile.
“You can’t kiss me here. It undermines me. I have to deal with these men, and they need to respect me.”
He tilted his head to the side with a bemused expression. “Verity, I doubt very much you could lose any respect here. Whenever I’ve seen you interacting with anyone in the board room, or out here on site, you pretty much own the situation. A kiss from me isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference. You’re a total boss. This is well known. Now it’s well known that you’remyboss.”
That warmth spread with his assessment of me. “You’re such a caveman. The whole site doesn’t need to know I’m yours.”
His eyebrows went up into his hairline. “Uh… yes, yes they do. Now, when can I take you home?” Movement beyond Harry caught my eye as I opened my mouth to reply. I froze when I saw my family’s lawyer approaching us. Registering Mr Crawley’s grim expression, a feeling of dread sank to the pit of my stomach, and I pulled away from Harry.
“Mr Crawley,” I greeted him, taking a couple of steps away from Harry, who reluctantly let me go.
“Ms Markham,” Mr Crawley returned in his croaky voice. He must have been pushing eighty. He’d been my father’s solicitor for decades. I’d met him a handful of times over the years, and he’d always been polite, distant and straightlaced. He wasn’t one of my parents’ friends who had gone to their parties. Even before he’d basically admitted as much when he informed me of my father’s death, I had a feeling my parents vaguely disgusted Mr Crawley to be honest. My mother used to call him a stuffy old bastard, but I got the impression the man could manage money and their affairs better than anyone else. My father trusted him. And while my father had been many things – most of them repellent – he was not a fool. “If you could spare me a moment of your time.”
I tilted my head to the side and frowned at him. “You couldn’t have emailed?”
Mr Crawley glanced at Harry, who was closing in on my side, then back to me before giving his head a quick shake. “Given my long association with your family, I thought it best that I came in person. It’s about your m–”
“Stop!” I surprised myself and Mr Crawley by the volume of my voice, but it did have the desired effect. He snapped his mouth shut.
I knew that whatever he was here to tell me would not be good. An escalation like this had been coming formonths. I was the one who was kept informed about family matters by Mr Crawley, not Heath. I was the one who kept the lines of communication open to prevent her from going directly to Heath after Mr Crawley informed me of her threats. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t allow much contact – but I knew that if she didn’t get to dig her claws in once in a while then we’d have a shit show on our hands. Ice trickled through my veins, and I felt myself go numb as I took in Mr Crawley’s sombre expression. If I could shut everything down this would be easier. I’d be able to take on most of the crap, protect Heath, sort out what needed sorting. I just had to stay numb. I flinched when Harry’s warm hand closed around mine.
“Are you okay, love?” he asked, his voice careful like I was fragile. Well, I wasn’t fragile. I was strong. Ihadto be strong. And I couldn’t do it with Harry here. He had no real idea about my parents. When we were younger, we were so completely ashamed of the situation at home that Heath and I didn’t tell anyone. Concerned nannies were fired, that was until we were deemed old enough to look after ourselves (around the age of five or so). Teachers were fobbed off, including Harry’s father. The only adults outside our family to ever come close to knowing what went on at home were Max’s parents, seeing as we spent quite a few holidays with the Hardcastles when our parents neglected to pick us up from the boarding school we all went to together. But even they didn’t realise the full extent of it, not until our father died and they saw the house for themselves. Although I suspected they knew more than they let on. Mrs Hardcastle was always piling our plates with more food than we knew what to do with when we stayed with them, and at any mention of our parents her mouth would pull into a thin, disapproving line.
So there was no way I was going to be telling Harry anything more about my childhood. Over the last two weeks we’d talked a lot abouthisfamily – his dad still taught maths and his older brother John was also a teacher who was, according to Harry “a stubborn bastard who refuses to take financial help”. Harryhadmanaged to buy John a house, telling him it was a business write-off and to stop being such a stubborn git. John only gave in when Harry enlisted the help of John’s wife, Steph, (having had a third child and still stuck in a two-bedroom house Steph was very ready to move) but she made Harry promise never to miss another Christmas for work or they’d give the house back. His parents, however, had refused to move from the tiny, terraced cottage. All their friends lived on their road, the local pub was walking distance – they didn’t see what more they needed out of life.
I’d managed to extract a lot of information about Harry’s family whilst revealing very little about my own, but then I had years of experience deflecting curious people. It really wasn’t that hard to turn questions around. When people love their own families, they’re only too happy to talk about them and don’t always notice when their questions get invariably turned back at them. Anyway, from what Harry implied, Heath had already given too much away about my family and what went down back then. I wasn’t about to add to that.
“I’m fine,” I said, pulling my hand from his and taking a step away. “Listen, Harry, I’m sorry but this is officialMarkhambusiness, and I need to deal with it on my own.”
Harry frowned, no doubt confused by my cold, business-like tone. “Okay, if you’re sure you’re alright.”
I sighed in annoyance and hardened myself to his concerned expression. “I’m perfectly fine,” my cut-glass accent sharpened as I morphed into Verity-the-aristocrat mode, deliberately trying to wind Harry up and push him away, “and I don’t appreciate you hovering. The complexities of the Markham estate are actuallyprivate.”
Hurt flashed across his features before he quickly masked it with a cool expression I was familiar with. Harry was shutting down on me, his barriers were going back up. Well, as far as I was concerned, that was for the best. Nobody needed to be with me when I was like this – unable to feel anything, numb, empty. I had to deal with what was to come on my own. I didn’t need Harry there with me. I didn’t needanybody. That deep, deep shame was always there bubbling under the surface. On some level I knew it was irrational, but I just couldn’t cope with Harry knowing all the grim details of my family.
But then childhood trauma isn’t rational, is it? Being unwanted as a child is not a reality that can be easily processed. The child will always assume that there is something wrong with them. That they’re the one at fault. There must be a reason they’re unwanted. And the last person I wanted to know that was Harry.
.
Chapter18
The whole bloody point
