Silence Is Golden (Storm and Silence 3)

My mind was frantically going through possible ways of trying to get Mr Ambrose to leave the country and take me with him.

Inventing an imaginary business conference in Belgium?

Forget it! He’d see through it in an instant!

Just asking him politely, with a nice ‘please’ at the end?

Are you crazy?

Telling him I loved him passionately and wanted to elope with him to Gretna Green?

You really are crazy if you think that’ll work!

There really was only one thing I could do to get him to take me out of town: get him to make a trip that would be financially profitable. Profit was Mr Ambrose’s god and patron saint. For profit, he’d walk a thousand miles, or probably even sacrifice his firstborn son, if he had one.

Clearing my throat, I glanced over at Mr Ambrose - who was already finished with about twice as many papers as my good self.

‘Mr Ambrose, Sir?’

He didn’t look up. ‘Yes, Mr Linton?’

‘I’ve been thinking…’

‘What an astounding feat.’

‘I was thinking about-’

‘Let me guess. Italy?’

‘As a matter of fact, no, Sir.’

I waited for him to ask what I had been thinking about, if not Italy. He didn’t.

‘Don’t you want to know what I was thinking about, Sir?’

‘Not particularly, Mr Linton.’

‘Well, I’m going to tell you anyway!’

‘Indeed.’

‘I was thinking about whether we might be taking another trip soon.’ Now he did glance up at me. The temperature of his gaze was enough to cause frostbite on the tip of my nose. ‘Not a pleasure trip,’ I explained hurriedly. ‘Strictly business, of course! It would be an absolute strictly one hundred per cent business trip!’

‘I see. And what, Mr Linton, would be the purpose of this absolute strictly one hundred per cent business trip?’

‘Um, well…business. Making money. Lots and lots of money. Stuff like that.’

‘And how had you envisioned making lots and lots of money on

a trip the destination of which you do not seem to know yet yourself?’

‘Err…I don’t know, Sir.’

‘I thought not.’

He sent me another nose-freezing look. ‘There is no reason to leave the metropole at the current moment. All my business operations around the globe are running smoothly.’

‘Are they?’ Bloody, stinking hell! ‘I’m so happy to hear that, Sir.’