She scrambled into her capacious rucksack and extracted her wallet and from that the agency card that she had not envisaged having to use for the next couple of weeks.
She wondered whether he might stay at the lodge, it was big enough to fit a hundred drivers, but that was something he would have to work out for himself. She suspected that she had already stretched Sandra’s limited supply of the milk of human kindness by asking if she could stay overnight in the place.
It was a dog-eat-dog world, she thought. As things stood, she was rock-bottom of the pack. She had been cheated on by her fiancé, a guy she had known since childhood and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she had been cheated on by her best friend and flatmate...
To top it off, she had been told that the reason he had become engaged to her in the first place was because his parents were fed up with his twenty-four-seven lifestyle of living it large and womanising. They had given him a deadline to find himself a decent girl and settle down or else he could forget about taking over the family business that had just opened a thriving branch in Philadelphia and was going places.
Banished from the family fortune and a ready-made job, he would have been faced, she assumed, with the terrifying prospect of actually buckling down and finding himself a job without Mummy and Daddy’s helping hand. And so he had plumped for the slightly less terrifying prospect of charming her into thinking that they really had a relationship, proposing marriage whilst playing the field with her much taller, much skinnier and much prettier flatmate.
His parents had approved of her. She had passed the litmus test with them. She was his passport to his inheritance. She was small, round and homely; when she thought of Robbie and the angular Emily, every insecurity she nursed about her looks rose to the surface at the speed of light.
The only thing worse than catching them in bed together would have been actually marrying the creep, only to discover once the ring was on her finger that he had zero interest in her.
She gazed mournfully at her finger where a giant diamond rock had nestled only a few weeks ago.
Her friends had all told her that it was a monumental mistake to have chucked it back at him, that she should have kept it and flogged it at the first available opportunity. After all, she deserved it, after what he had put her through.
And the money would have stood her in good stead, considering she had jacked in her hotel job so that she could play happy families with him in Philadelphia. It was galling to think that he had had the nerve to tell her that he hoped she understood and that she could count on him if she ever needed anything!
As things currently stood, she was out of a job, banished from her flat until Emily cleared out and with a shockingly small amount of money saved.
And she had no one to turn to. Her only living relative, her grandmother who lived in Scotland, would have sold her cottage had she known about her granddaughter’s state of near penury, but Milly had no intention of filling her in on that. It was bad enough that she had had to pick up the pieces when she had been told fifteen days ago that the fairy-tale wedding was off the cards.
As far as her grandmother was concerned, Milly was taking time off to work as a nanny for a family in Courchevel, where she would be able to do what she loved most, namely ski... She had glossed over the trauma of her breakup as just one of those things, nothing that a couple of weeks in the snow couldn’t cure.
Milly had painted a glowing picture of a cosy family, practically friends, who would be there for her on her road to recovery. It had helped her grandmother to stop fretting. Furthermore, she had embroidered the recovery theme by announcing that she had another job lined up as soon as she was back in London, far better than the one she had jettisoned.
As far as her grandmother was concerned, she was as right as rain, because the last thing Milly wanted to do was worry her.
‘Shall I call...er...the agency and see if you could stay overnight at the lodge...?’ Her better instincts grudgingly cranked into gear and she resigned herself to another awkward conversation with Sandra, who would probably spend a ridiculously long time telling her that being let down was all her fault because she should have just answered her phone, having confirmed that the driver would not, definitely not, be allowed to sully the mansion, no way.
But, no; Pierre, the driver, was a regular at one of the hotels in Courchevel, where one of his relatives worked, and he would be fine there.
Milly was tempted to ask whether being let down by the special family came with the job. Maybe he had a permanent room there for when he got messed around.
She didn’t. Instead, she allowed him to help her with her luggage, the luggage containing the clothes that would never be worn, and he only drove off when she had unlocked the imposing front door to let herself into the lodge.
It was blessedly warm and indescribably stunning, a testimony to the marvels of modern architecture and minimalism. The entire space was open-plan, with two sitting rooms cleverly split by a wall in which a high-tech, uber-modern fire caught the eye and held it. Beyond that, she could glimpse a vast kitchen, and beyond that yet more, although she was drawn to the floor-to-ceiling windows that captured the spectacular views of the valley.
She gazed out at the untouched, pristine snow, fast fading as night descended. It had been an excellent ski season so far—good accumulation of snow, which had collected on the roofs of the lodges lower down the mountain and lay there like banks and banks of smooth, marzipan icing.
Having no idea of the layout of the lodge, she decided to take her time exploring. She wasn’t going to be there long, so why not enjoy the adventure of discovery? Her flat was small and poky. More than four people in the sitting area constituted a traffic jam. Why not pretend that this place belonged to her?
She explored each room exhaustively, one at a time. She admired the sparse, expensive furnishings. She had never seen so much chrome, glass and leather under one roof in her life before. Much of the furniture was white, and she marvelled at a couple confident enough to let loose two small children in a space where there was so much potential for destruction.
The kitchen was a wonder to behold: black granite counters, a table fashioned from beaten metal and an array of gadgets that made her culinary fingers itch.
She decided that she was glad she no longer worked at the Rainbow Hotel. It boasted three stars, but everyone there reckoned palms must have been greased to get that rating because the rooms were basic, bordering on the criminally dull, the restaurant should have been updated half a century ago and the two bars were straight out of the seventies but without a cool, retro feel.
Not to mention the fact that she had never been allowed, not once in a year and a half, to do anything on her own, Chef Julian, whilst only dabbling in the actual cooking, had specialised in peering over her shoulder and picking fault with her cooking whenever he got the chance.
Here, she could have let her imagination go wild—within the constraints of the various faddy food groups they did and didn’t eat, of course. She trailed her hand over the gleaming, spotless counter and brushed a few of the marvellous gadgets, none of which bore the hallmarks of anyone ever having been near them. When she checked the fridge, it was to find that it was fully stocked, as were the cupboards. A horizontal metal wine rack groaned under the weight of bottles, all of which bore expensive, fancy labels.
Absorbed in her inspection of the kitchen, daydreaming about what it might feel like actually to have enough money to own a place like this as a second home, Milly was unaware of anyone approaching.
‘And you are...?’
The deep, cold voice coming from behind crashed through her pleasant, escapist fantasy with the unwelcome force of a sledgehammer and she spun round, heart pounding.
Her brain, which had been lagging behind, caught up to point out mockingly that there was a stranger in the house and she
should be looking for something handy with which she could defend herself.
Because the man could be....dangerous...
Her mind went blank. She forgot that she should be scared—terrified, even. She was in a bloody great rolling mansion packed full of valuables and the owners weren’t there. The man standing in front of her, all six foot something of him, had probably broken in. She had probably disturbed him in the middle of ransacking the place, and everyone knew what happened to innocent people when they happened to interrupt a robbery.
But, God, had she ever seen someone so beautiful?
Raven-black hair, slightly longer than was conventionally permissible, framed a face that was, simply put, a thing of perfection: a wide, sensual mouth; chiselled features; eyes as dark and as fathomless as night. He was in jeans and a T-shirt and was barefoot.
It seemed unusual for a robber to take his shoes off to make off with the silver, but then it occurred to her that he had probably removed them so that he could sneak up on her unannounced.
‘I could ask you the same thing!’ She tried to keep the tenor of her voice calm and controlled—a woman in charge of the situation, someone who wasn’t going to be intimidated. ‘And don’t even think of taking a single step closer to me!’ Idiot that she was, she had left her mobile phone lying in her rucksack, which was currently reclining on the kitchen counter. It was infuriating, but how could she possibly have anticipated something like this?
In stark disobedience of her orders, the man took a couple of steps closer to her and she fell back, bumped into the counter and spun round to grab the nearest heavy thing to hand—which happened to be the kettle, a glass concoction that didn’t look as though it could stun a flea, never mind the muscled man who was now only a metre away from her and had folded his arms, cool as a cucumber.
‘Or else what? Don’t tell me you have plans for using that thing on me...?’