Kiss Heaven Goodbye

‘Too late,’ she said, feeling her heart beating hard. ‘I need to see you now.’

‘Sasha, I can’t tonight. I have dinner guests.’

‘Ten minutes of your time, that’s all I need.’

He paused for a moment. ‘At least tell me what it is.’

She was not going to give him the chance to make excuses.

‘I can’t discuss it now,’ she replied with a sense of urgency.

He sighed heavily. ‘If you must. You know the address. And it’s ten minutes, Sasha.’

Long minutes later her car drew up next to one of west London’s most prestigious addresses. Randall owned a huge white stucco house at the Notting Hill end of Kensington Park Gardens. What an incredible place to live, she thought, looking up at the double-fronted building. As she climbed from the car, she wondered how much it would cost her to buy a place like this. Too much, she decided. London might be in a recession, but super-prime properties like these were still selling for sixty, seventy million, fuelled by foreign money and the huge bonuses still awarded to the biggest City players. Light jazz drifted on to the street, and from the shadows of dozens of people at the windows, Randall was having more than a quiet dinner party. As a uniformed maid let her in, Sasha craned her neck to see inside the reception room which was crammed with at least fifty people. Any other time she would have been piqued not to have received an invitation, but for once, she had no desire to socialise.

Randall appeared at the door holding a tumbler of cognac. ‘Sasha, why don’t we go outside,’ he said, leading her on to a terrace at the back of the house. There would have been a time when she would have found this intoxicating; alone with a handsome, successful man in one of the finest homes in London, but now all she felt was anxious and out of control. She took a deep breath.

‘Assad wants me out,’ she said simply.

‘I know.’

‘You know?’

‘He told me yesterday.’

‘Has this always been the plan? To push me out?’

‘No, Sasha. There was never a plan. But there are management issues, even you must admit that. We’re lucky that Assad is even interested in buying the company with a president and CEO wanting to kill each other.’

‘I am not stepping to one side, Randall,’ she said, her voice fierce.

He looked at her for a moment. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ she said with a laugh. ‘Why would I?’

‘Because you’ve been working full throttle since you were twenty-one years old,’ said Randall. ‘Because you’ve made yourself a very rich woman; because you have the respect of the entire industry and should be confident enough to take a break, look at other options, have a baby . . .’

‘A baby?’

Randall pressed on.‘How old are you, Sasha? Thirty-eight, thirty-nine? You are one of the most beautiful women in London, yet you are alone.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Randall.’

‘I’m talking as a friend, Sasha. Why not cash in now, why not make a fortune? Then you’ll have time for a relationship, family.’ His grey brows knitted together with fatherly concern.

‘What I want is this company,’ she growled, feeling her eyes prick with emotion.

She blinked angrily. Now was not the time for a show of weakness. The worst thing was that there was a whiff of truth in what he said. Recently she’d seen a picture of Grace Ashford and her children at the Cannes film festival; the smiling photograph of a successful woman with her two teenage children and glamorous artist partner had filled her with a crushing sense of loneliness that had lasted for days. But she couldn’t let sentiment like that overcome her. She was Sasha Sinclair, one of the contry’s top business-women. She lived for the cut and thrust of business.

‘I’ll fight it, Randall,’ she said, a note of desperation creeping into her voice.

‘Don’t make trouble, Sasha,’ he said. ‘I know how much you love the business and I know how hard it must be to let go, but do the right thing and step aside.’

She left without another word and walked down Kensington Park Gardens towards the High Street. To her left, smoky lilac dusk was setting across the park. Fleetingly she considered speaking to Randall again, but she couldn’t bear the humiliation; she knew they had made up their minds. To them it was just another deal, just another line of numbers on a spreadsheet. They had no idea what she had sacrificed to get to where she was; they had no idea what she had put into that company. And now they were

yanking it out from underneath her. Slowly she walked back to the car.

‘Just take me home,’ she said.