Yes, Emerald decided, all in all it had been a most successful evening.

Ollie straightened up, stretching his back in the cramped confines of his small darkroom as he looked at the prints he had just developed with growing excitement. It had still been light when he had returned from the birthday party he had been summoned to attend and capture with his camera by one of the Kray twins’ stalwarts, not so much an enforcer, this one, as a fixer, although he still knew how to handle himself. Ollie had remembered sparring with him in the gym when he had been in training. Heavily built, with a typical ex-boxer’s broken nose, he had delivered the twins ‘request’ in an affable enough manner but Ollie had known better than to suggest that he had another engagement for that afternoon.

In the event the party had been a chance for him to mix with a crowd of once familiar faces, including that of his younger cousin, Willie, who had ignored his advice and who had been strutting around obviously considering himself very much a part of the twins’ ‘task force’.

It wasn’t the Kray brothers or the photographs he had taken of their distant cousin’s seventieth birthday party that had been responsible for him working in his darkroom until the early hours of the morning, though.

He looked at the images again, a wide grin of delight creasing his face. There was no doubt about it, he was good, and one day–soon–he would be the best. The photographs he had taken of Josh cutting Rose’s hair, snapping frantically as he tried to catch each movement, were a bloody work of art, even though he said so himself. If he had any sense about him he’d charge Josh a fortune for them and no mistake, ’cos they would pull in the chicks wanting their own hair cut like Rose’s like no one’s business. There was no point in thinking of what he could charge Josh, though. His friend was as skint as he was himself, living virtually hand to mouth, hoping to keep going in the precarious world of self-employment in which they were both taking their first faltering steps.

On the other hand, if he could get Vogue interested…Not that the posh commissioning editors who worked there were likely to welcome him acting off his own bat. They had their own ideas about the images they wanted and they were quick to reject his ideas if they conflicted. Still, it was worth a try, seeing as he would be going to Venice with the art director, the fashion editor and the models who had been hired for the feature he had been commissioned to photograph on ‘The Fabled Train Journey to Venice on the Orient-Express’, as well as in Venice itself.

It was the largest commission he had received from Vogue, and it would be worth toeing the line just to get the money. The trouble was that once he got behind his camera he almost always had trouble reminding himself of the need to earn money and instead became totally lost in his own imagination.

God, but he rated what he had done with Rose and Josh. Sometimes he could hardly believe himself what a genius he actually was.

He couldn’t wait for Josh to see what he had done. He looked at his watch, frowning in disbelief and shaking his wrist when he saw that the time was four o’clock, thinking that the watch must have stopped during the afternoon, and then realising that it had not and that it actually was four o’clock in the morning.

He was tired and hungry–very hungry. Stifling a yawn, he padded barefoot across to open the door.

The place he was renting was the first he had had all to himself. He had seized on it because the single large room that, along with a long narrow bathroom, comprised the flat, had access to the roof space, and he had been able to persuade the landlord to let him turn part of it into a darkroom.

When he could afford it he planned to move into somewhere where he could have a proper studio, but that was still just a pipe dream at the moment.

In his living quarters, he opened the food safe and removed several rashers of bacon, dropping them into the blackened frying pan, which he then put on top of his single-ring gas cooker, turning the heat up high and adding a dollop of lard. Whilst the bacon sizzled and spat noisily, depositing fat on the double row of tiles stuck haphazardly onto the bright yellow painted wall behind the cooker, Ollie removed an already started loaf from the breadbin on the tin dresser that held his meagre supply of china and kitchen utensils. The dresser was a gift from his mother, who had nearly cried when she saw what her son had given up his room in her lovely immaculate terraced house to live in, denouncing the flat as ‘a hovel’.

Cutting himself a couple of thick slices, Ollie buttered them generously and then removed the rashers of bacon from the frying pan, flattening them firmly between the thick wedges of bread.

By the time he took his first bite he was practically drooling with hungry anticipation. A bacon butty, there was nothing better. Except the sweet taste of success. It wa

s something he hoped would become a regular event for him now.

Chapter Eleven

They were travelling from the Vogue office to pick up the boat train to Paris, where they would transfer to the Orient-Express, and Ella had naturally been up early, checking her small case over and over again in nervous anticipation. This trip meant so much to her–the opportunity to be noticed, to be given a senior assignment. She had everything crossed it would all work out as well as she hoped.

She didn’t have to be at Vogue’s offices until ten, but she was too anxious to sleep, sitting instead in the kitchen in her dressing gown, her feet tucked into her slippers whilst she sipped a cup of tea. The thought of eating made her feel even more nauseous.

She could hear Janey and Rose coming down the stairs. Soon it would be time for her to leave. She stood up, carrying her now empty cup over to the sink as Janey burst into the kitchen, complaining about the cold floor.

From the minute she had seen Rose’s new hairstyle on Saturday, Janey had not stopped demanding that Rose tell Josh that she wanted her own hair cutting in exactly the same style, and she was still doing so now, only breaking off to say to Ella enviously, ‘Lucky you, going to Venice, where the sun will be shining and it will be warm.’

‘I shall be working, not sunbathing,’ Ella pointed out, checking her watch. Yes, it was definitely time for her to leave, but first she must make one last check of her handbag, just to make sure that she really hadn’t forgotten anything.

Seated on the opposite side of the heavy old-fashioned mahogany partners’ desk in Mr Melrose’s office, Dougie tried hard not to stare too obviously at Emerald’s mother.

Physically she presented no surprises to him. He had not worked for Lew for several months without learning something, and it hadn’t taken him much effort to source some reasonably recent newspaper photographs of Amber. If he had been asked to describe her in one word, that word would have been ‘classy’. From the top of her elegantly styled chignon to the toes of her navy-blue leather shoes, Amber almost glowed with a special patina of good looks, good manners and a gentleness that spoke of the kindness that Dougie was sure he could see in her eyes.

It was that softness and the kindness allied to it that had surprised him. It hadn’t been obvious from the press photographs he had seen, and it had taken him off guard. All the more so because Emerald was her daughter. How could two women so closely related be so very different?

Amber eyed the young Australian seated opposite her sympathetically. She had warmed to him instantly, feeling rather sorry for him as he explained the chain of events that had led to him being orphaned. It had been interesting to learn about his life in Australia. He was a wealthy young man in his own right, and from one or two comments he had let drop, it had been plain that he had been brought up to look unfavourably on the British upper class, with its archaic practices.

‘I’ll admit that when I first got your letters I didn’t altogether like the thought of me being this duke bloke,’ he had told them.

So what had made him change his mind, Amber wondered. He had told them that he worked for a society photographer and the young Australian had admitted himself that he often felt ill at ease amongst the upper-class set. His admission had increased Amber’s sympathy for him, reminding her of how out of place she herself had sometimes felt as a young woman growing up amid wealth but not aristocracy. Despite his rough edges, though, Dougie had a natural pride in himself that Amber admired, even whilst she acknowledged that if he did prove to be the duke he would need a lot of help getting used to his new role.

He would, she felt, bring a freshness to the dukedom, like a clean gust of air blowing into a dusty room that had been closed up for too long. Robert would have liked and approved of him, she thought, considering her late husband. Jay would like him too. They would be able to talk together about farming matters. As those thoughts formed, Amber knew that she had already accepted him as part of her extended family, and equally that she already felt a maternal sense of protectiveness towards him.

He was obviously used to standing up for himself and living his own life, but he would be vulnerable in his new role, and the sharks that would swim close to him would not always be easily recognisable. He would need support, and who better to provide that, Amber decided, than the family he already had.

Tags: Penny Jordan Billionaire Romance
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