Jessica Steele - Temporary Girlfriend

Elyss was still feeling shaken herself when, by a most circuitous route, involving changing transport several times, she made her way to her place of employment. At the end of her working day, she took a similarly tortuous route back home again.

She was late getting in, but was pleased to see that Nikki, though still puffy-eyed, seemed a lot calmer. Elyss saw no point in causing her to get into a state again by revealing that she was shortly going to see Mr Saul Pendleton.

Truth to tell, Elyss was feeling in something of a state herself as she hurriedly showered and changed into an elegant dress of deep blue. As rain was pouring down outside, she topped it with her full-length raincoat.

She was certain it must be the wettest May on record, and it was cold with it. She did not want to arrive at Saul Pendleton’s house looking like a drowned rat, and left her room seriously considering the expense of a taxi when Victoria chirruped that she was going out herself. ‘Want a lift?’ she volunteered.

Louise had already told Victoria about her appointment with Saul Pendleton, Elyss discovered, and they discussed the accident and the state Nikki was in on the way.

‘If it goes on like this much longer, we’re going to have to persuade her to see Dr. Lowe. Perhaps he’ll prescribe something to calm her down,’ Victoria said. ‘I’d like to get my hands on that Dave!’ She pulled up at the smart address Elyss had given her. ‘How the other half live!’ she exclaimed admiringly as Elyss got out. ‘Best of luck!’

‘Thanks. And thanks, too, for the lift.’

Elyss squared her shoulders and pushed a smart, glass-panelled door open—and discovered she was going nowhere until she had given the uniformed security man behind a desk in the foyer her name and that of the person she was there to see.

She told him she was Elyss Harvey, and she had come to see Mr Saul Pendleton, and waited while he went to the phone and relayed the information. Then he put the phone down to tell her pleasantly, ‘Mr Pendleton is expecting you, Miss Harvey. If you’d like to...’

He saw her over to the lift and was already on the way back to his post as the lift doors closed. Saul Pendleton knew she had arrived!

Elyss had eaten very little that day, a fact she was now glad of as her insides churned, and she wished the next fifteen minutes over. The lift stopped. She got out and at once found the door she was looking for.

She swallowed hard, squared her shoulders again and rang the bell. After a short while the door opened and a dark-haired, grey-eyed bachelor in his mid-thirties stood there.

Elyss was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, like Nikki, and it had been dark when that crash had happened. They were about the same height, and both slender. So why, as the grey-eyed man silently studied her, did it not now seem so simple to make it appear that she and Nikki were one and the same person?

‘Good evening, Mr Pendleton.’ Elyss did her best, realising that she was supposed to know him, while she kept her fingers crossed that he was Saul Pendleton—if he wasn’t, she had fallen at the first hurdle.

‘Miss Harvey,’ he replied, with a look of toughness there in his eyes that suggested ‘Don’t tangle with me unless you’re up to it’. ‘Come in,’ he invited.

She crossed over his threshold and he closed the door. She waited and then followed him from a most elegant hall into his drawing room, which was the last word in elegance—and she’d thought the apartment she shared was smart!

‘Do you want to take your raincoat off?’ he enquired. She didn’t want to stay that long—but suddenly she was feeling hot.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and shrugged out of her coat, handing it to him. He draped it over a nearby chair.

‘Take a seat,’ he suggested when she stood in the middle of his plush carpet wishing she could remember just one sentence from any of the dozen or so she had been rehearsing for most of the day.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured again.

‘How did you get here—by taxi?’ he enquired as she settled herself on one sofa and he did likewise on one opposite.

‘A friend gave me a lift.’

‘Boyfriend?’ he enquired, but she could tell from the stern look of him that he wasn’t particularly interested in her answer.

‘No,’ she replied, and left it at that. She could see no reason to waste further time. ‘I’m very sorry about the accident,’ she began for starters.

He observed her silently for a few moments. Then coolly remarked, ‘It’s something that you admit liability, I suppose.’

Oh, heck—was she not supposed to do that? Not that it mattered; Nikki had said that it was all her fault. Elyss hesitated. The state Nikki was in, perhaps she’d got it a little wrong.

‘Are you saying that you’re a little to blame?’ Elyss enquired hopefully. Even if she had to pay only half it would be a tremendous relief.

‘I’m not saying anything of the sort!’ Saul Pendleton replied sharply. ‘As well you know—if you remember that right turn I endeavoured to make at the traffic lights last night.’

So much for tremendous relief, Elyss mused unhappily, not liking to have her head bitten off for her trouble. Though she took heart that, by the sound of it, he believed that she was the blonde who had crashed into him.

‘Who could forget a thing like that?’ she murmured. For some unknown reason she was feeling in need of an excuse. ‘You know how it is; when the lights changed to green, all I could think of was getting over them before they went to red again. Er—you weren’t hurt?’ she thought to enquire of this man who was fully in charge and didn’t appear to have a thing wrong with him.

‘I fared better than my car,’ he answered drily.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Elyss said. ‘About your car, I mean.’ And, getting a bit fed up with having to continually apologise—especially for something which she had not done—she enquired politely, ‘Have you been able to get an estimate for repairs?’ At last they were getting down to the nub of the whole issue.

‘Not yet,’ he replied, his eyes on her richly blue ones. ‘Though, as you’d expect, it will be in the region of at least two thousand pounds.’

Oh, no! Elyss wasn’t sure that she didn’t lose some of her colour. ‘As much as two?’ she asked faintly.

‘A minimum of two thousand, I’d say,’ he replied confidently.

The words trembled on her lips to ask him to get it done somewhere cheaper, but she realised from his clothes, his home, the very manner of him, that he never had anything done on the cheap. ‘When is it likely to be finished—repaired?’ she made herself enquire. With luck it would take all of a year to get the spare parts.

‘The car has been transferred to a specialised garage today. But it will depend on whether parts are available here or whether the garage will have to send to Italy for them. Then they’ll be fitting, painting—sorting out the electronics...’

Oh, heck, it was, she saw, going to cost all of two thousand pounds. By the sound of it, though, it could take quite a while—but nowhere near long enough for her to be able to scrape the money together.

‘Meanwhile, I’ve been able to hire a car until—’

‘You’ve hired a car?’ she cut in in a rush, a note of strain in her voice. This was something she just hadn’t thought of. Oh, her stars! The cost of hiring a car would be down to her—she just knew it! She prayed he had hired a small, everyday run-about. But, even as she asked, ‘Er—a Ferrari, I suppose?’ she knew the answer.

‘You suppose correctly, Miss Harvey.’

She started to feel light-headed. Her mind just would not cope with how much it must cost to hire a Ferrari—and the length of time Saul Pendleton was going to need to keep it.