Good Girl or Gold-Digger?

‘Only because she’s lined up yet another suitable woman for me.’ Felix sighed. ‘Look, Toni, I’m not interested in getting married. I’m never getting married.’

‘Don’t try and con me that you’re not interested in women. I saw that picture of you in the gossip rags the other week, with a certain actress draped all over you. Or are you going to tell me you’re just good friends?’

‘No. It was a…’ He compressed his mouth and shook his head in irritation. ‘Toni, for pity’s sake, you’re my little sister. I am not discussing my love life with you.’

‘The lack of it, more like. Your women never last more than three dates.’ She sighed. ‘You know that Mummy just wants you to be happy. We all do.’

‘I am happy.’

‘Settled, then.’

‘I have a nice flat in Docklands and a successful business. That counts as settled in most people’s eyes.’

‘You know what I mean. Settled with someone.’

‘I’m allergic to women with wedding bells in their eyes.’ He paused. ‘I just wish our mother would get off my case.’

‘If you hadn’t got cold feet over poor Tabitha, you’d be safely married off by now and Mummy would be happy,’ Antonia pointed out.

Maybe, but Felix certainly wouldn’t have been. His marriage would have been an utter nightmare. For a moment, he wondered if he should’ve told his family the truth about Tabitha. But then they would’ve been even worse, treating him like a victim, crowding him and pitying him, and he would’ve hated that even more than he hated their constant attempts to fix him up with someone. On balance, it was better that they thought him a heart-breaker who just needed the right woman to tame him.

Except he didn’t need anyone. He was perfectly happy with his life as it was: with a job that fulfilled him, and dating women who understood right from the start that he wasn’t looking for long-term, just for fun. Because he was never, ever going to put himself in another situation like he had with his ex-fiancée. He would never let his heart be that vulnerable again. ‘Maybe,’ he said.

‘Come on, Felix. It won’t be so bad.’

Oh yes, it would be. His mother must have introduced him to every single blonde with long legs in the whole of Gloucestershire, because she thought he liked leggy blondes.

Well, he did.

He just didn’t want to get married to one. Didn’t want to get married to anyone.

‘Toni, I really am busy, so I’ll call you later, OK?’

She sighed. ‘OK. But you’d better, or I’ll ring you.’

‘Message received and understood. Bye, sweetie.’

He put the phone down and leaned back in his chair, frowning. Time to find a cast-iron excuse to avoid his parents. The sad thing was, he would’ve enjoyed a weekend in the country, had it been just the family there. He liked his parents and his sisters, and even his brothers-in-law were good company. But Sophie Gisbourne had decided that her only son needed to be married, so she always insisted that weekends at their Cotswolds estate would involve a house party. And every time she invited a ‘suitable’ woman to be his partner at dinner—with the subtext being that she would be a suitable partner for life as well.

Sometimes Felix thought that his mother had been born two hundred years too late. She would’ve made the perfect Regency mama, brokering marriage and offering advice to friends. But in this day and age it was just infuriating. He went into the small kitchen and made two mugs of coffee, adding sugar to his PA’s mug before returning to the office. ‘Here you go, Mina.’ He noticed that his PA looked uncharacteristically upset. ‘Are you OK? What’s wrong?’

Mina flapped a hand at him. ‘Don’t mind me, it’s silly.’ There were tears in her eyes. He perched on the edge of her desk. ‘Talk to me. Someone’s ill? You need time off?’

‘No, nothing like that. Mum sent me this.’ She handed him a sheet of newspaper that had clearly been folded neatly and sent through the post:

VANDALS PUT FAIRGROUND MUSEUM IN A SPIN

‘She used to take me there when I was little. It’s a really magical place.’ Mina’s mouth compressed. ‘I can’t believe vandals would wreck it like that.’

Felix skimmed down to the picture of a woman sitting on an old-fashioned fairground ride, looking heartbroken. There was something about her, something that made him want to see what she looked like when she smiled.

Which was crazy. You couldn’t make decisions on the basis of a photograph of someone you’d never met. He wasn’t that reckless.

Besides, she wasn’t his type. For the last three years he’d dated mainly tall blondes with long legs, plus the occasional redhead. But petite and brunette was definitely out: it would remind him too much of Tabitha.

But it seemed that the fairground needed rescuing. That was his speciality: rescuing businesses before they went to the wall. And this was a business with a difference, something that might give him the challenge he felt that his life had lacked lately. It wouldn’t hurt to take a look.

When he’d finished reading the article, he looked at Mina. ‘Do you know the Bells?’

She shook her head.

‘Can you get me the manager’s number?’ He smiled at her. ‘This looks as if it could be an interesting opportunity.’ And if he checked the place out for himself at the weekend, that gave him a valid excuse to avoid his mother’s latest ‘suitable women’ onslaught without hurting her feelings.

Just perfect.

Chapter Two

‘SO THAT’S us,’ Bill said with a smile. ‘Well, me, anyway. You really need to meet my number two.’

Daisy Bell: the woman from the photograph, according to the article. Deputy manager of the fairground.

Felix was annoyed with himself for being so keen to meet her. For all he knew, she could be married or involved elsewhere. And he wasn’t in the market for a relationship anyway.

But her face had haunted his dreams for the last week, and his heart rate speeded up a notch at the thought of finally meeting her.

‘She’s supposed to be here, but she’s obviously forgotten the time,’ Bill said.

How on earth could she forget a meeting that might make the difference between the museum being a going concern or heading straight for bankruptcy? This really didn’t gel with the picture of the devastated woman in the paper. Or had it been a set-up? Drag in a pretty woman with tears in her eyes to give a human dimension to the piece and the saps would be flocking here in droves, wanting to protect her and invest in the fairground…

No, he was being cynical, letting his past get in the way. William Bell seemed genuine enough. And Daisy had been dressed in trousers and a plain shirt, not a floaty dress and impractical heels. She wasn’t the frivolous, frothy type that Tabitha had been. Just because Daisy was petite and brunette, like his ex-fiancée, it didn’t mean that she shared the same personality traits: shallower than a puddle and a liar to boot.

But, now he’d started on that train of thought, he found it hard to stop. Why wasn’t she at this meeting? Maybe the fairground wasn’t really that important to her. Or maybe she didn’t pull her weight, and her uncle put family loyalty before sound business practice and let her get away with it because she batted her eyelashes at him and told him he was her favourite uncle. Well, Felix was good at pruning dead wood and giving more able people a chance to prove themselves. If he was going to invest in the museum and turn the business around, and Daisy turned out to be a liability, he’d give her her marching orders. Very, very quickly. Pretty or not.

‘It’s going to be quicker to fish her out of the workshop,’ Bill said. ‘And I can show you round a bit at the same time.’

Felix’s expectations hit a new low as they reached a single-storey building with breezeblock walls and a corrugated-iron roof. What was Daisy doing in the workshop—chatting up the mechanic when she was supposed to be working?

But as Bill opened the door Felix could hear someone singing—a female voice, giving a surprisingly good rendition of ‘I Can See Clearly Now’.

‘I thought as much,’ Bill said with a wry chuckle. ‘Her work’s going well and she’s lost track of time. You can always tell, because she sings. It’s when things go badly that she’s silent.’

‘What’s going well?’ Felix asked, mystified.

‘Work on the engine.’ Bill looked puzzled. ‘Didn’t I tell you she’s my chief mechanic as well as my number two?’

‘No.’ Felix blinked. It hadn’t been on the website, either, or in the article. ‘Mechanic?’

‘A word to the wise: she’s a bit touchy about sexism,’ Bill said. ‘And she gives as good as she gets—it comes from having three older brothers.’