Daydreamer

Lucy

“Maybe I should just quit,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest so I could tuck my hands into my sides to keep them warm and suppressing another shiver. The futility of carrying on in this environment was becoming painstakingly clear now. I was better off stagnating in Little Buckingham; at least I had some mates there. I was staring at Felix’s tie now. How did you even manage to get a tie to appear so perfect? Everything about this man was immaculate. I was feeling more like a scruffy little nobody by the minute.

“You can’t just quit!” Felix’s affronted tone shocked me into meeting his eyes again. He had pushed away from the desk to fully loom over me. Felix was very good at looming. His expression now was furious. “What kind of attitude is that?”

I frowned up at him. “I thought that’s what you were hinting at? Listen, we’re on the same page about my crapness. I’ve got past form for being crap at stuff. Honestly, I’m surprised you haven’t fired me sooner.”

“I’m not firing you, Luce,” he shot back, a panicked look on his face now. “Don’t tell your mum that I’m firing you. That is not what’s happening.”

My mum had been Felix’s nanny for his entire childhood. We grew up in the same village. Well, sort of the same village: my family had lived in a small cottage right next to the pub in the heart of Little Buckingham; Felix’s lived in a vast manor house with acres of land on the outskirts of the village. And whilst my brother Mike and I went to the village school, Felix had been sent off to a posh boarding prep school miles away. But it was my mum who looked after him when he was home. He spent a lot of time in our tiny cottage, and he absolutely loved my mum and my brother. Mike and Felix were both six years older than me, and although their lives had now gone in different directions (my brother was a carpenter, Felix a business tycoon), they still considered themselves best friends, together with the other third of their trio, Ollie, whose family lived in the neighbouring estate to Felix’s.

I was always fascinated by the beautiful, loud, expressive, glamorous boy who would fill our little cottage with his magnetic energy. I followed him, Mike and Ollie around the village like a puppy back then until my brother would tell me to bugger off. But Felix would argue my case for me. He always let me tag along. I must have been really annoying, but he never got frustrated with me. There’s no denying I was a rare one with my endless stories and quirkiness, but Felix always humoured me. He was always kind.

When my guinea pig died, I insisted on a formal funeral – a directive that my brother completely ignored, but fifteen-year-old Felix turned up in a fitted, designer black suit, looking grave and appropriately sombre. He even gave a brief eulogy for Coco, something along the lines of how he’d always remember the way Coco pooped in Mike’s shoes, that he had a very soft head for stroking, and that he’d only ever bitten Felix’s finger once (which he’d probably deserved as he’d been putting him in Mike’s shoe at the time so that he would poop in there again).

“God, don’t encourage her, mate,” Mike had grumbled. “She’s mad as a box of frogs.”

“Don’t listen to him, Shakespeare,” Felix had said as he ruffled my hair. “The last thing you want to be is normal.”

I sighed. It was clear that grown-up Felix didn’t have the same appreciation of my quirks as he’d had back then. But to be honest, he was quite different now to the boy I’d known. I couldn’t see the Felix of today being happy listening to my crazy stories for hours on end and calling me Shakespeare. This Felix had sharp edges; he was hardened. He only did Very Important Things with Very Important People. He only dated supermodels or famous actresses. He was ruthless in business, cut-throat even. Everyone in the office was scared of him, he never smiled – I hadn’t once spotted his dimple the entire month I’d been working here. This Felix didn’t want some oddly dressed blast from the past haunting his office and dragging down the tone.

But, despite the fact that he was now a billionaire, ran his own multinational property development empire and was one of the top two hundred richest people in the country, he still didn’t want to disappoint his nanny. So he was stuck with me.

“Er… right, well, what is happening then?” I asked in confusion. The last half hour had definitely seemed like he was working up to firing me, and with good reason. “I won’t tell Mum that you fired me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not firing you,” he said again through gritted teeth.

I shrugged. “If you say so.”

“Lucy, for someone who needs this job, you seem very at peace with losing it.”

I sighed. “Felix, I’m crap at this. There’s no getting around it. And I don’t fit in here at all.” I bit my lip before I carried on with the next bit, willing my eyes to stop stinging. I would not cry in front of this man. “It’s not working out. Coming to London might have been a mistake.”

Felix crossed his arms over his chest and stared down at me. I attempted to keep my cool despite the intensity of his gaze. God, he was beautiful.

“You just need more confidence. For a start, you’ll feel better if you’re wearing the appropriate stuff. Hold on.”

He swivelled round and pressed the intercom like we were in a bad movie about an arrogant CEO. It should have been cheesy, but the gorgeous bastard made it work.

“Tabitha, would you mind coming in here, please?” he asked.

“Of course, sir,” said Tabitha in that super-efficient, intimidating tone I was used to from her. A few click-clacks of her heels and she was back in the office. She looked between me and Felix again, probably wondering why I wasn’t already collecting up my stuff and vacating the building.

“Lucy needs some help,” Felix said, and I blinked in confusion. “She needs office-appropriate clothes. A whole re-vamp. And I’m not sure that, left to her own devices, she can manage that much of a transformation.”

Tabitha fixed me with a piercing stare, her eyes raking from my messy bun to my Uggs and back again. She was an expert in disguising her emotions. The only way I knew that she was angry was the twitch in the corner of her left eye. I felt my face flood with heat. I’d always had a terrible blushing habit. I couldn’t experience the least bit of embarrassment without turning tomato red, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been so embarrassed in my life. I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman who clearly could not be trusted to dress myself. When Tabitha didn’t reply, Felix cleared his throat.

“You can take the company credit card. No spending limit.”

“Fine,” she said, turning her attention from me to Felix and smiling as if it was no problem whatsoever to take a socially backward and fashion-challenged loser out for a shopping trip. “When would you like us to go?”

“You can both go now,” he said, waving his hand through the air.

“But it’s the meeting with Anderson Corp – don’t you need me there?”

“Don’t worry, I can handle Nick Anderson. And John can fill in for you.”

“Right.” Her smile was fixed now and looked like it might actually be hurting her face. Her eye twitch was going crazy. The woman was furious.

“Er, this is… a lot,” I said. My voice was muffled by the pile of clothes that Tabitha had just dumped into my arms and which came up above my mouth. “I don’t think I’ve ever tried on this many clothes before in my life.”

“Clearly,” she snapped, gesturing towards me and my general attire, her lip curling just slightly. “Could we hurry this along, please? You may not care about your job, but I was integral to the Anderson deal, and I don’t appreciate being chucked out of the office to baby you through a bloody shopping trip so that fucking prick John can take all the credit.”

“Oh no,” I said as my stomach dropped. “I’m so sorry. That’s really shit of Felix. I–I can manage on my own. You might catch the meeting if you hurry back now.”

She narrowed her eyes at what was visible of me behind the pile of clothes. “Are you really this dense?” I swallowed. My throat felt thick, and I had a terrible feeling I was going to cry. Tabitha hated me now, and I couldn’t blame her. She was the only person I’d had much contact with since joining the office (apart from Will, but he didn’t count), and it was clear she was not going to be open to a friendship. I blinked rapidly, hoping to push back the tears. Tabitha sighed again. Her expression had softened, just a tad.

“Look, if I go back now, I’ll arrive at the meeting late. That’s worse than not showing up at all.” She moved to me, laid one hand on each of my shoulders and turned me around towards the changing room then gave me a little shove forward. “But I would very much like not to miss the rest of the working day, so if you could hurry it up, that would be great.”

“Yes, sure, of course,” I said, rushing forward, glad that I was now facing away from her, and it didn’t matter that a tear had made it down my cheek.

What followed was an exhausting hour of ruthless efficiency. I’d been poked and prodded and forced into all manner of outfits. When I almost fell arse-over-tit in the heels Tabitha picked out for me, she conceded that I might need to go down by an inch or two.

“But you can’t go too low,” she warned me. “You’re short.”

I blinked at her – okay, five foot two is not exactly supermodel height, but I wasn’t a total pee-wee.

“And any lower than three inches would look out of place.”

She was right there. But weren’t women supposed to be liberated now? Why were we still forced into these contraptions, making walking an exercise in balance and stamina?

When it was time to pay, Tabitha brought out the company credit card, but in an unusual display of assertiveness, I made her put it away, insisting on paying for everything myself and then wincing at the cost. But there was no way I was letting Felix absorb the financial burden of replacing my crappy wardrobe. Even if I hadn’t wanted said crappy wardrobe replaced in the first place.

On the ride back to the office in Felix’s town car, I swallowed down my nerves and attempted to break the stony silence.

“So, um… do you like working at Moretti Harding?” I forced myself to ask in a small voice. Tabitha spun around from staring out of the window and levelled me with a condescending glare.

“Like it?” she asked in an incredulous tone.

I cleared my throat and bit my lip. That had been the most innocuous question I could think of, but it was still being met by open contempt.

“You don’t like a job like mine,” Tabitha said slowly as if she was explaining how the world worked to a backward five-year-old. “You work your arse off, claw your way through the shit, put up with all manner of crap to drag yourself up the corporate ladder.”

“Oh, er… right. That sounds… fun.”

Her eyebrows were in her hairline. “Fun? Are you insane? Of course it’s not fun. I work with no natural daylight; the entire office staff is poised on the edge of a panic attack the whole time. I have to fight constantly against the horrific boys’ club culture. Fun does not enter into it.”

“Maybe you could suggest some changes? Brighten up the space a bit? Doesn’t the company have a whole interior design team? Maybe there’s a way of bringing in some light from⁠—”

“Lucy,” Tabitha said in a dry tone, cutting me off. “Stick to staring off into space and squeaking like a little mouse when someone asks you a basic question, okay? You know nothing whatsoever about business.”

“Okay,” I whispered, feeling small and stupid again. Forgetting that my old jumper was now stowed away in one of the many shopping bags, I tried to pull the sleeves down to cover my hands and push my thumbs through the small holes. But encountered the cuffs of the silk shirt I was wearing instead and had to sit on my hands for the rest of the car journey to keep them warm.

I shivered. This clothing experiment was all well and good, but if I died of hypothermia it would all be a big waste of time. I envisaged Felix looming over my dead body, berating me for my inefficiency and lack of ambition as I slowly turned blue. My snort of suppressed laughter was met by a glacial look from Tabitha, so I shrank further back into my seat to avoid angering her further.

Not for the first time I wished I’d never agreed to this plan. But Mum had been absolutely insistent that I work for Felix.

“Such a lovely boy,” she’d told me.

Hetty Mayweather might be the last human being in England to call Felix a lovely boy. As one of the most ruthless and intimidating men in London, he was anything but lovely or a boy.

“He’ll look after you in London,” Mum had assured me. Yeah, right. If you could call looking after someone criticizing them for their many shortcomings daily and forcing them into a load of uncomfortable, cold clothes, then Mum was right.