Can't Help Falling (7 page)

“Mitchell?” “Mazza” was what the rowing boys called him, but Peter stayed away from nicknames as much as he could. Tried to keep some sort of boundary between coach and team. Even if his brother made it his mission to make it almost impossible.

“Victor's pretty hammered, Coach.” The seasoned international didn't sound impressed. Not that Peter could blame him. The guys took their rowing seriously. It probably killed them as much as it killed him that Victor had the superhuman ability to drink until he was completely trollied and still somehow pull phenomenal times on the rowing machine the next morning.

“I'd let him stay here but honestly last time he did, he made a bit of a mess and my flatmates weren't very happy.”

It was about a twenty-minute walk from Allie's to Mitchell's flat. As much as he'd have liked to tell the guy just to tip Victor out into the gutter and let him sleep it off, he couldn't. Especially since the sod had nicked his car, and Peter needed it in the morning to get to Wallingford for training. No doubt with his brother half passed out in the passenger seat. “Okay, I'll be there in about half an hour.”

Turning, he walked back into Allie's room. “I'm sorry, I have to go.” He tried to keep his gaze from Emelia. If he even looked at her, it would probably be written all over his face how much he didn't want to leave.

Allie gave him the stink eye but didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Her view that he should just leave Victor to fend for himself in situations like this was already well established.

“It was nice to meet you, Emelia.” In trying to not give himself away, he came off disinterested. It was probably better that way. Meeting a girl who intrigued him was not in the cards for this year. There was no time to be distracted. The only thing that mattered was getting back in the game. He could never make up for how he'd failed Anita, but he was going to do everything he could not to break the final promise he'd made to her.

W
EEK TWO
. A
T THE JOB
that, if Emelia got it right, would be her atonement. Or some of it at least.

She'd spent the previous week learning about the charity and her way around the system. Now she was on her own. Emelia straightened the pad of paper on her desktop and picked up a ballpoint pen. Across the top of the page she scrawled
HOW TO SAVE SPRINGBOARD?
in large block letters and stared at the four words.

In nine months she'd have either answered that question or not. If it was the former, she could return to LA with some sense of closure. If not, Anita's legacy would be consigned to the same scrap heap as the many other charities that had tried and failed.

Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.
The quote from
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
flashed through her head. That was basically how she felt about the rest of the year.

“Emelia?” Elizabeth stuck her head in the door. “Great, you're here. Can you drop by my office at nine thirty? I need to introduce you to the board member who's been given oversight of fund-raising this year.”

Great. Just what she needed. Some pompous middle-aged man breathing down her neck. Emelia summoned up a smile about as fake as the color of Pink's hair. “Sure. Who will I be meeting?”

“Of course, his—” The phone in Elizabeth's hand buzzed and she looked down at the screen. “Sorry, I need to take this.” She put her phone to her ear and her gray head disappeared from view.

Oh, well, it couldn't be that hard to figure out. Emelia had done her research on the board before she'd interviewed for the role. There were three men on it. Pulling up the homepage, she refreshed herself on their details. One was a retired lawyer, one a semiretired teacher, and the last a has-been children's author from the nineties. Calling any of them middle-aged would have been generous. She sighed as she closed out of the page.

She doodled on her paper. No point trying to dream up any grand fund-raising plans until she had the measure of what she was going to have to work with. Or, more likely, work around.

Her phone buzzed in her purse. Picking the purse up off the floor, she placed it on the top of her desk and started rifling through it. Unable to locate her phone, she tipped the contents of her bag onto the surface, everything falling out into a messy pile. Her cousin's name lit up the screen of her phone.

“Hey, Lace.” She wedged the phone between her ear and shoulder as she returned her wallet, change, and a handful of pens. A copy of
The Silver Chair
teetered on the edge of her desk. She reached for it but only succeeded in tipping it over the edge. It landed with a slap on the floor. She'd salvage it later.

“I still can't
believe you managed to talk them into it.” Though Lacey's opening line didn't show it, her cousin was a professional schmoozer who excelled at small talk. She just only used it when she had to.

“Clearly a case of desperate times, desperate measures.” Emelia didn't mention that she'd gone out of her way to hide her connection to Mia Caldwell. She already knew what her cousin would think of that.

“So what's it like?”

Emelia cast her gaze over the industrial metal filing cabinet in the corner of her office, the old desk in front of her, and the faded wallpaper. “Let's just say no one is ever going to accuse them of wasting money on high-class office space.” In her mind's eye she imagined Lacey's LA office with its large windows and sprawling view of the city. Her cousin's idea of slumming it would be Starbucks running out of hazelnut syrup for her latte.

“So what's up on today's agenda?”

Emelia let a groan rumble out of her throat. “Apparently I've got some board member who is going to be overseeing my work. I'm meeting him in”—she glanced at the clock—“seven minutes.”

“Oooooooh.” Her cousin was the type who saw romantic possibilities around every corner. Which was also part of the reason she went through men like water.

“You wouldn't be saying that if you'd seen the three options. Go have a look at the website.” She waited a few seconds for her cousin to do just that. Lacey was perma-attached to multiple devices. For her, a high-speed Internet connection was a close second to oxygen.

She knew the instant her cousin had seen the page by the sound of the snort coming from the other end of the line, one Lacey tried to smother by clearing her throat. “Okay, maybe not. But you never know. New city, new possibilities.”

“I'm not here for new possibilities, I'm here to save Anita's charity. That's it. The last thing I need is some British guy complicating things.” She forced her mind away from a very specific British guy in particular. There was no way she could ever mention Peter to Lacey. What Emelia planned to write off as nothing more than a set of random and meaningless coincidences, Lacey would see as some kind of crazy cosmic intervention.

Whatever the phone call Saturday night was about, it had made him leave the party at full speed. She'd lasted another hour, the time simply a blur of names and faces as Allie had been on a mission to introduce her to people. Stupidly, she'd stayed that long hoping Peter would come back. Which was about as crazy as climbing into strangers' wardrobes.

“Are you sure you want to be doing this?” Her cousin's question jolted her back to the present.

“I have to do this.”

“I worry about you, Meels. I worry about what will happen if this doesn't work out.”

“Don't. It's going to work.” It had to. She didn't know how she'd live with herself if it didn't. The clock on her screen changed to 9:27. Time to find out if she was being paired up with googly eyes, bad teeth, or rampant facial hair. “Gotta go, Lace. I'll talk to you later.”

Closing out the call, she stood and smoothed down her navy knee-length wool skirt.
You can do this, Emelia.
She gave
herself a pep talk as she exited her office and headed down the hall.
You have charmed the world's crankiest misogynistic men to get a story. And this is more important than any of those stories ever were.

She approached Elizabeth's door, which stood ajar. From inside the office, a male voice came. Clipped, frustrated. Emelia's hand froze just before it knocked, as she registered what he was saying.

“. . . an American? You know what they are like. Loud. In your face. Treading over everyone's toes. They offend people even when they don't mean to.”

Loud? Offensive?
Emelia felt her face flush.

“Well, it wasn't like I had much choice.” Elizabeth's voice came back low and terse. “For what we were offering we're lucky we got any applicants at all. I grant you, it's not ideal, but at least she had some charity experience in LA. The one other applicant may have had the right accent but she was so witless she couldn't have organized a drink in a brewery. Anyway, it's done. She's been hired and will be here any minute now.”

Googly eyes, or whichever he was, heaved a sigh. “I think we're making a big mistake. Americans seem to think everything can be solved with a GoFundMe page. Putting someone in charge of saving SpringBoard who doesn't even know how the English do things? I agreed to help out with supervising, not babysitting.”

Babysitting?
At that Emelia lost all sense of self-preservation and pushed the door open. Her gaze first landed on Elizabeth's startled face, before she pivoted to face her self-christened “babysitter.” “I can promise you, I don't need any—”

Then she registered the agape mouth and green eyes staring at her. Oh. No. It couldn't be. “Peter?”

T
here was no way. There was absolutely no way. Except there was. The American he'd just been so vehemently deriding, who'd overheard presumably every word he'd spoken, was the same one he hadn't been able to stop thinking about since their first meeting.

“Do you two know each other?” Elizabeth tilted her head, scrutinizing him.

“Um, yes. We've met.” Peter managed to force the words around a chest that felt like he'd just rowed 5K at full stroke.

Elizabeth's gaze bounced between the two of them. Peter had no doubt he'd turned as white as the snowflakes drifting from the sky outside. Emelia's blue-gray eyes were so large they dominated her face.

The only person in the room who was taking things in her stride was the calm executive officer. “I see. Is this going to be a problem?”

Peter opened his mouth to say no, but no matter how much he tried, he was unable to force the word out. Emelia seemed to be waiting for him to take the lead.

After a couple of seconds of silence, Elizabeth took control of the situation. “Emelia, can you give us a few minutes? I'll come and find you when we're done.”

Emelia didn't say a word as she stepped backward and closed the door firmly behind her.

Elizabeth waited for the door to click before crossing her arms over her red cardigan as she leaned against her desk. “Care
to tell me what that was about?” Even though he had a good foot and forty kilos on her, Peter felt like a six-year-old boy summoned into the headmistress's office to be told off.

Peter looked down at the résumé he held in his hand. Emelia's résumé. He hadn't even opened it. All he'd heard Elizabeth say was that she'd hired an American and he'd gone off. For no good reason. At least none that was related to the matter at hand.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” Without waiting for an answer he sagged into the seat behind him. It creaked under his weight, the arms pressing his legs together.

He sucked in a breath.
Pull it together, Peter.
Emelia,
Emelia
, of all people, was SpringBoard's new fund-raising coordinator.

“It's nothing, Elizabeth. Really.” It still felt weird calling her Elizabeth. Since he'd been ten he'd known her as Greg's mum. “Mrs. Bradman” or “ma'am” whenever a designation beyond that was required.

She snorted. Loudly. He couldn't have been more surprised if the ladylike, conservative Elizabeth Bradman had started dancing a jig. “Peter, whatever that was, it was not nothing. And I need to know exactly what it was. Is she an ex? A one-night stand? Some rowing groupie you took home once and now there's a voodoo doll with your face on it stabbed with a hundred pins sitting on her dresser?”

“What?
No!
”

“Well, then
what
?” Her fingernails tapped on the desk beside her.

“We just met at a party on Saturday night, that's all.”

“Really.”

What was he supposed to do? Tell Emelia's boss they'd met when she'd
fallen out of a wardrobe onto him? That at the party she'd been hiding in another one? Mrs. Bradman had always seemed like a good sort but who knew how she'd take that. “Look, I think we were both surprised to see each other here. That's all.”

Mrs. Bradman—Elizabeth—sighed. Gave him a look that said loud and clear she knew there was far more to it than that. “Peter, you aren't getting this. I have an employment issue here. I've hired Emelia. On her second week she has just overheard one of the board members openly doubting her ability to do her role. And not just any board member, the one whom she is meant to be working with. Putting aside the fact that she's an American, do you have any kind of knowledge, or evidence, that Emelia is not fit for this position?”

“No.”

“Well then.” She said the two words with a sense of finality.

Well then?

“You're going to be the one to step down.”

Step down? His shock must have shown on his face because she quickly added, “Not from the board. But you can't be the member in charge of fund-raising. We'll have to ask one of the others to do it.”