I was going to make her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“I’m a real estate developer, and I’m about to start a new project. I thought you might want to work on recruiting the team.”
“You want to use Foster and Associates?” Instead of looking excited, she looked confused. It was the same look Joshua had gotten when I’d asked him if he was going to Vegas for Gabriel’s stag party—as if my question didn’t make sense.
“I think we’d be a great fit. I’ll need to recruit over a hundred people, and I could take the proposition to the partners in your firm and make my business contingent on you getting junior partnership.” She can’t have ever had that many appointments just fall into her lap. No question of negotiating the fee or it being a non-exclusive contract—Stella had the business. Plus working for Wilde Developments would be a feather in her cap. We were a brand people talked about.
“Why would you do that?”
“Lots of reasons. Like I said, I think we’d work well together and from what I hear, you’re good at your job.”
She rolled her eyes as if I were some lecherous old weasel who had just asked her to come upstairs and see his etchings rather than someone who was offering her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’d expected her to be a little more enthusiastic. “Then I suggest you call the office. I don’t deal with real estate.”
Perhaps she’d misheard me. There’s no way she’d be so dismissive if she’d heard me properly. “I’m offering to help you make partner.”
She burst out laughing. Was this girl drunk? This was not going how I’d planned. “As if I care.”
I fisted my hands as my palms started to sweat. Fuck. I’d thought that Stella London was career driven and ambitious. Had I got it wrong?
“You don’t want to be partner?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Why do you care? Who are you?”
“I need a great recruitment consultant,” I said, my brain whirring, trying to get ahead of this conversation.
“Well, I’m not one.” She exhaled and turned to her friend. “I’m not cut out for it.”
If she didn’t care about recruitment then she could just name her price. I was an idiot; I should have had a backup plan. From the article I’d read, I’d clearly made assumptions I shouldn’t have. “I need your help, Stella.” How had I ended up in a place where the goal I’d been working toward my entire life was dependent on whether a stranger wanted a promotion? If this was any other real estate deal, I would have walked away months ago. But I couldn’t give up on this one.
“Seriously, anyone in the office would be glad of the work. Call Sheila. She’s in charge of real estate recruitment.”
Any recruitment consultant wasn’t what I needed. I had to level with her or I was going to lose her. “Yeah, but she doesn’t have what I need.”
She turned toward me. “Which is what? I’m not sleeping with you because you have a staffing crisis.”
I couldn’t help myself—I laughed. “No, that’s not what I mean. I want to talk to you about Matthew and Karen’s wedding.”
She turned the color of freshly fallen snow. “What about it?”
“I was hoping I could go as your guest.”
“Well, you’re fresh out of luck. Because there’s no way I’ll be there and even if I was—you’re a perfect stranger.”
I was jinxed when it came to this deal. “I just need you to hear me out. Give me five minutes.”
She glanced at her friend. “You’re right. I’m not good at putting myself first. I should leave, right?”
Her friend shrugged. “You can always walk away when you’ve heard him out.”
Stella sighed and collapsed back on her chair. “Okay, then be straight with me. Who the hell are you, how do you know me, and what on planet Earth do you want?”
She was clearly out of patience. I normally found that when my back was against the wall, straightforward honesty was the way to go.
“I’m Beck Wilde. I’m a real estate developer. A man called Henry Dawnay holds my future in his hands. He owns a building that I need to buy.”
When I was doing up bedsits in Hackney, before Hackney was popular, exhausted from twenty-hour days and filthy from pulling up floorboards and knocking down walls, every now and then I’d take the tube to Bond Street and wander around Mayfair in the middle of the night to stare at the Dawnay building. It had become an obsession.
I wanted that building. I wanted to buy it so I could demolish it. Rebuild it from the ground up so it was new and better. I wanted to conquer it. Conquer my past.