Maid for Advertising - Susie Tate Page 0,6
notepad shut. The lyrics were only half done and would sound bloody weird out of context. I managed a smile and he returned it with a wide, white, glamourous one of his own. All the air left my lungs in a sudden whoosh. I didn’t think I’d ever been so attracted to anyone. “Mad Man, how’s it hanging?”
“All the better for seeing you,” he said. Mr Smooth as always. “Mind if I sit?”
“Er, sure,” I said, clearing some of my other manuscripts out of his way and nearly spilling my coffee in the process. It shouldn’t shock me so much to see him in this neck of the woods. The coffee shop was near London Bridge after all. But I’d never seen the man outside of the Dragon’s Den. Never seen him in daylight. In full technicolor he was even more striking than under the bar lights.
“You’re a student?” he asked, tilting his head to the student ID lying alongside my notebook. I nodded.
“Umhmm, Yes.” I decided not to elaborate. I knew that in the back of my mind I’d taken my family’s attitude to my degree to heart. If I were still studying medicine I would have told him, but music . . .
“So you work at the bar to finance your course,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee and clearly mulling something over in his mind before his sharp focus came back to me. “I’m sorry about the other night.”
“You’ve already apologized,” I told him. “And it wasn’t warranted the first time. People can be dicks, it’s fine.”
“It is not fine,” he countered, his expression darkening. “I brought that particular dick there in the first place.”
I shrugged. “You can’t always choose which dicks you do business with.”
He sighed. “That’s not strictly true. I can choose who I make an ad campaign for.”
I laughed. “Only if you own the company,” I joked. He paused for a moment and then laughed along with me.
“Yes,” he said. “Only then.”
It was his pause that gave him away. “You don’t actually own it … do you?” I asked slowly and he bit his lip.
“Maybe?” he said, as if he was asking me if that was the case.
I let out a puff of air and grinned across at him. “No wonder you drop so much cash in the club, swanky bastard.”
“Jack?” A tall blonde approached our table and slipped her hand onto his shoulder. She was wearing a beautifully cut black trouser suit with toweringly high heels and she matched Jack perfectly. I scuffed my worn out, dirty Converse on the floorboards, feeling self-conscious. She looked like the kind of woman who had her shit together, big style. “We’re going to be late to the boards.” He shifted a little and her hand fell away.
“Thanks Stella,” he said, flashing her an annoyed look. “One minute, okay?” Stella sniffed, glanced over at me and then stalked over to the coffee counter. I caught a flash of her red soles as she walked away and I tucked my Converse even further under my chair.
“Look, it’s fine,” I told Jack. “Really, fine. You don’t have to . . .” I trailed off. How do you politely let someone know that they don’t have to talk to you out of guilt over something that wasn’t even their fault? There must have been a thousand other places swanky company-owner Jack needed to be, with other rich and beautiful people.
“Don’t have to what?” he asked.
I sighed. “Don’t have to talk to me because, well . . . look you’re busy. Please consider us cool and go . . . er . . . advertise stuff.”
He stared at me for a moment. “I’m not talking to you because I have to. I want to talk to you. You know that.” His face was so open, so earnest that in that moment I knew he felt it to: our connection. It hadn’t just been me and my wild imagination. I smiled.
“Oh . . . right. Well, good.”
He smiled back and I held back a sigh at how beautiful he was. “Good.”
We grinned at each other like idiots for a few seconds.
“I’ve got next week off,” I blurted out of nowhere and then felt heat rise to my cheeks. Why had I felt the need to tell him that? Maybe it was because I knew that after this week I wouldn’t have an evening free for a long while, and I was kind of hoping that . . .
“Oh, really?”
“Er .