A Paper Marriage. Jessica Steele

his company. The banks had lent him as much as they could—it had not been enough. Too proud to ask his own father to lend him money—he had approached her father, a well-known businessman, instead.

      The rest was history, Lydie fumed when, after a very fitful night’s sleep, she awakened on Friday morning. Her father had lent Jonah Marriott fifty thousand pounds. Jonah Marriott, her idol for so long, had never paid him back. And Lydie was going to do something about it—this very day!

      Had she experienced the smallest doubt about that, then that very small doubt evaporated into thin air when she went down to breakfast and saw that, while she had slept only fitfully, her father looked like a soul in torment and appeared not to have slept at all.

      ‘And what are you going to do today?’ he forced a cheerful note to ask. And she wished that she could tell him, Don’t, Dad, I know all about it. But her father’s pride was mammoth, and she could not take that away from him. Time enough for him to know when she came back from seeing Jonah Marriott and was able to tell him—if all went well—that Jonah would ring her father’s bank and tell them, hopefully, that he would take on his debt.

      ‘I haven’t seen Aunt Alice in ages,’ she answered, Aunt Alice being her mother’s aunt, in actual fact, and therefore Lydie’s great-aunt. ‘I thought I might take a drive over to see her.’

      ‘You’re picking her up for the wedding next week, aren’t you?’

      ‘She doesn’t want to stay away from home overnight.’ Lydie tactfully rephrased part of what her great-aunt had written in her last letter.

      ‘We, your mother, Oliver and me, are going to a hotel overnight, as you know. Your mother’s idea,’ he muttered, but added dryly, ‘Hilary will be sorry her aunt won’t be staying here.’

      Lydie grinned. She thought Aunt Alice brilliant; her mother thought her a stubborn pain. Lydie was not grinning after breakfast, though. Dressed in a smart suit of powder blue, her dark hair pulled back from her delicate features in a classic knot, she got out her car ostensibly to make the twenty mile drive to her aunt’s home in Penleigh Corbett in the next county.

      While facing that she did not want to make the journey to the London head office of Marriott Electronics, since make it she must, she wanted to be early. For all she knew she might have to wait all day, but if Jonah Marriott was in the building and refused to see her, then, since he had to come out at some time, she was prepared to wait around to speak to him on his way out.

      Her insides had been churned up ever since she had opened her eyes that morning, but the nearer she got to London, the more her churning insides were all over the place.

      When the traffic started to snarl up she found a place to park her car and made it to the Marriott building by foot, tube and lastly taxi.

      But once outside the building she experienced the greatest reluctance to go inside. For herself, perhaps having inherited her father’s massive pride, she would have galloped in the opposite direction. Only this wasn’t for her; it was for him.

      Lydie had to do no more than recall her father’s drawn look at breakfast and she was pushing through the plate-glass doors and heading for the reception desk.

      The receptionist was busy dealing with one person and there was someone else waiting. ‘Mr Marriott’s PA is on her way down to see you.’ The receptionist put down the phone to pass on the message to the suit-clad man she was dealing with.

      Lydie closed her ears to the rest of it, her glance going over to where the lifts were. One started up and, from the changing numerals, she saw that the lift was making its way down from the top floor.

      Without being fully aware of it, Lydie edged over to that lift. When the doors opened and a smart-looking woman of forty or so stepped out, and with a smile on her face went over to the man at the desk, Lydie stepped in and pressed the button for the top floor.

      She knew she could quite well have got it wrong, but if her hunch was right, that had been Jonah Marriott’s PA. If she had just come down from the top floor, then, to Lydie’s mind, on the top floor was where she might find Jonah Marriott.

      The lift stopped; she got out. She felt hot, sick, and knew that this was the worst thing she was ever going to have to do in her life. Instinct took her to the end of the carpeted corridor. With what intelligence her emotions had left her, it seemed to her that the man who was head of this corporation would have his office well away from the sound of the lift going up and down.

      There were doors to offices on either side of the long corridor. Lydie ignored them and at the bottom of that corridor turned round a corner which opened out to show two doors blocking her way. Lydie hesitated, but only for a moment. She was by then starting to feel certain she had got it all wrong. Somehow, churned up, anxious, worried, she had got it all wrong, all muddled; she knew that she had. She went forward and, placing a hand on the handle to the door to the right, she paused for about half a second, then turned the handle.

      Shock as the door swung inwards and she saw a man seated at a desk in front of her kept her speechless and motionless. He looked up, and as colour surged to her face so, his glance still on her face, he rose from his chair and began to come round his desk and over to her.

      She was five feet nine inches tall, he looked down at her and—to her utter astonishment—commented, ‘Still blushing, Lydie?’ He remembered her, her blushes, from seven years ago?

      ‘I’m L-Lydie Pearson,’ she heard herself say inanely from somewhere far off.

      ‘I know who you are,’ he answered smoothly. ‘Come in and take a seat,’ he invited, and as she took a couple of steps into the room he closed the door behind her and touched a hand to her elbow.

      In something of a daze she found she was seated on a chair some way to the side of his desk before she had got herself anywhere near of one piece.

      ‘Haven’t I changed at all in seven years?’ she asked, her head still a little woolly that he had so instantly recognised her.

      ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Jonah replied pleasantly, his eyes flicking a glance over her still slender, but now curving deliciously in all the right places, shape. ‘Elaine, my PA, made a note that a Lydie Pearson phoned last Tuesday. I recalled one black-haired, green-eyed Lydie Pearson with one hell of a superb complexion. It had to be you.’ He paused, and then, while she was feeling a touch swamped that he thought she had a superb complexion, ‘You’re still Lydie Pearson?’ he enquired.

      Having thought she had her head more together, Lydie wasn’t with him for a moment or two. ‘Um…’ she mumbled, then realised what he was asking. ‘I’m not married,’ she answered, and, with a quick glance to his ringless left hand, ‘It doesn’t look as if anybody’s caught you either.’

      His rather splendid mouth quirked upwards at the corners slightly. ‘I have very long legs,’ he confided.

      ‘You sprint pretty fast at the word marriage?’

      He did not answer. He didn’t need to. ‘So, how’s the world treating you?’ he asked.

      Lydie looked away from his fantastic blue eyes and over to his laden desk. He had not been expecting this visit and from the look of his desk was extremely busy catching up on a backlog of work. Yet he seemed to have all the time in the world to idly converse with someone he barely knew, someone he had only ever clapped eyes on once—and that was seven years ago.

      ‘Er—this isn’t a social call,’ Lydie stated abruptly.

      ‘It isn’t?’ he questioned mildly—when she was sure he must know that it wasn’t.

      She experienced an unexpected urge to thump him that surprised her. She swallowed down that small burst of anger, but only when she felt marginally calmer was she able to coldly state, ‘My father seems not to have fared as well, financially, over the last seven years as you yourself appear to have done.’

      Jonah nodded, every bit as if he already knew that—and that annoyed her—before he coolly