The Darkest of Shadows (2 page)

He nodded in acceptance of my explanation, and moments later we moved back out of the crush and off to a quieter area of the crowd. I’d been brushed against far too many times in the last few minutes, so I was thankful for the space.

“I’ll try and introduce you to the high-level guys here tonight,” he told me. “You’ll get to know them a lot more over the next few months, but it’s important that you make time to see them tonight. Politics.” He shrugged apologetically.

Politics I got. I didn’t always like office politics, but I understood the necessity of it and how the intricacies of it allowed the office environment to function. “Politics I can do,” I assured him with a smile. It made me more comfortable to be there, if we could treat it more like work. In that arena I was confident and sure; but personally I was a mess, which was why I wanted desperately to not be here. This party was more like a private function than I had been prepared for.

Patrick seemed to know everyone, which upped him in my estimation, because while he happily introduced me to one manager after the other, he also took time to talk to anyone who stopped him. Line workers, carpenters, and even the kitchen lady were introduced to me and made to feel comfortable in his presence.

“You’re very good at this,” I told him quietly, as we left Judy Nunn, an older lady who had been with the company for thirty years and was responsible for ensuring all the kitchen stations were fully stocked. What an intriguing job.

“Judy is priceless,” he assured me, and from the small amount of time I’d just spent with her, I had to admit that he was probably right. She was small, ancient, and just beautiful. She was one of those people who called everyone “darling” and saw the world through rainbow-colored glasses. I wished for a moment that I was able to see anything, even the smallest thing, with that amount of color.

“Patrick,” a voice called through the crowd. Patrick sent me an apologetic look and whispered quietly, “Sorry about this. Just hang in there, you’re doing great.”

What the hell does that mean?

“Patrick, are you going to keep this lovely lady to yourself all evening?” a voice asked from behind me.

“Ashlan.” Patrick drawled the name. “We were just looking for you.”

“I bet you were,” a smug voice replied.

“Lilly.” Patrick turned me around to face the newcomer. “Allow me to introduce you to Ashlan Moroney, our Design and Engineering Manager— and all around sleaze and womanizer, so don’t believe a word he tells you,” Patrick surprised me by adding.

“Hey.” Ashlan looked offended. “You can’t go telling her that. What chance do I have to convince her that I’m God’s gift to women if you prejudice her like that?” He grinned wickedly at me, and as much as these two were friends, I could also tell that Patrick meant every word.

I hadn’t met Ashlan yet. When I started with the company, he had been away at a conference in the States. Clearly, he was now back.

Patrick and Ashlan were both tall, well over six feet tall. Patrick had brown curly hair that he kept relatively short, and his body was toned and strong, at least what I could see of it under the suits that he always wore. Ashlan, on the other hand was tall and thin, not gaunt by any means, but I doubted that he had ever seen the inside of a gym. He was just a naturally thin person, with an engaging smile that encouraged women to approach him. Patrick was more reserved, calmer. Ashlan was trouble, that much was easy to see.

“Ashlan Moroney at your service,” he said in a beautiful English accent, and I couldn’t hide the smile at his antics. Women had no chance against this man.

“I could only imagine,” I responded with a grin. I liked him already. He and I could have fun, and both of us would know that whatever we said wasn’t real. I liked to flirt, or I had a long time ago, but now I didn’t do it—it was too dangerous and gave men the wrong idea. But Ashlan, he wouldn’t take it seriously, not at all.

He had a twinkle in his eyes as he offered me his arm, and I surprised myself by taking it. “Allow me to show you around the more interesting of our employees.”

“Behave, Ashlan,” Patrick warned as he followed in our wake. “I want her to come back on Monday, remember.”

Ashlan definitely had a different spin on who he thought I should be introduced to, and strangely, there were probably a few of them that would come in useful later on.

“Lillianna, this industrious fellow is Bill.” I shook hands with a short, heavyset man who looked surprised to see us. “Bill is a master locksmith and can get you into any office you want to break into.”

I burst out laughing. “It’s a pleasure to meet you Bill,” I assured him. “I certainly hope that I never have need of your particular skills, but you never know.”

“Now this fellow,” Ashlan continued on through the crowd. “This is Mitch, and Mitch is an exceptional carpet cleaner. He can get any stains out of carpet, and most importantly he can get the smell of vomit out of a room. And let me assure you, that is a true skill.”

Mitch grinned stupidly at me and I smiled in welcome. That indeed was a talent. I was beginning to see that Ashlan was something of a party boy.

I turned to Patrick, waiting quietly behind us. “Am I going to have to call on that particular service very often?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “That depends whether Ash here throws up in his office or mine.” That had an alarming amount of truth to it, I was sure.

“Nice to meet you, Mitch, but I sincerely hope I won’t have need of your services,” I said.

“I think Lilly has met enough of your ‘friends’, Ash.” Patrick gently extricated my arm from Ashlan’s, but was quick to drop it afterwards. “It’s time for you to find someone else to play with.”

“Hurtful.” Ashlan mocked heartache with a hand over his chest. “I was only trying to be of assistance.”

“Go assist someone else,” Patrick instructed, and with a wicked grin, Ashlan slipped off into the crowd.

“Sorry about him.” Patrick shrugged. “He can be a bit much sometimes, but he really is brilliant.”

“I like him.” I admitted. “He’s very original. True to himself.”

“He’s definitely true to something.”

My phone beeped a message. Patrick pretended not to notice as I glanced at the short text.

“I’m just going to the bathroom.” I told him, as my body rippled with a shiver. “Then I think I’ll get going.” It was closer to midnight than I had expected, and there was no way I was going to be here when the clock ticked over to Christmas Day. I needed to get going. Surely I had fulfilled the required duration of attendance.

Patrick nodded. “I’ll meet you by the exit.” He nodded toward the left of the rooms. “The bathrooms are down that corridor.”

It’s amazing how much of a buffer a powerful man can be in a room full of people. You get just the required amount of space when you are with him, just enough to keep the undesirables away, those people who don’t really have any business talking to you but are just curious.

I already knew the other three Managing Director’s Personal Assistants: Noreen, Sally, and Rachel. I had spent time with each of them over the last few days, enough that I could greet them warmly when we had passed through the room previously. However, there were a lot of other people throughout the organization, and I knew none of them. The instant that I escaped from Patrick, it was open slather on personal introductions.

I hadn’t made it halfway across the room before I had fielded half a dozen introductions, and these people didn’t want me to know about them; they wanted to know all about me. Who I was, where I was from, what was Patrick like, was that Ashlan they saw me talking to. There was a prejudice in large organizations that seemed to draw a line between lower-level and higher-level management. There was a no-go zone that said that you couldn’t approach anyone higher than your own boss.

It was all a bunch of crap, in my opinion. If they were that interested in knowing about Patrick and Ashlan, then they should have grown enough balls to go and introduce themselves to the men in question. I wasn’t swapping tales with anyone, and I wasn’t about to hang around being friends with any of them, not when every minute took me closer and closer to midnight.

So I kept a smile plastered to my face and gave up on the idea of the bathroom—I could wait. I changed direction and went straight to the door, not waiting for Patrick, who stood speaking with someone just inside. I slipped out and, after retrieving my coat, waited just inside the main doors for the valet to call me a taxi.

“Lilly.” Patrick’s voice, close beside me, surprised me enough to have me jump slightly. “You’re leaving?” He sounded disappointed.

“Sorry. I have to get home.” I wondered how long the taxi would take. I had twenty-two minutes till midnight. I needed to be inside my apartment before then.

“No worries. Look, thanks for coming. I know it’s a bit daunting to be dropped into the middle of something like that when you’re just new. But you did great tonight.”

“Thanks.” Just then the valet returned, holding the door open for me to go out and meet my taxi. “I’ll see you Monday.” Christmas Day fell on a Wednesday this year, and we all had Wednesday and Thursday off, but Samuel had given everyone Friday off as well, so we weren’t due back into the office till Monday. I would need every one of those days before I would be ready to venture back into society. “See you.”

Without waiting for a response, I scurried out the door and slipped into the waiting taxi.

Breathe, breathe.

Nineteen minutes.

By the time the taxi pulled up outside my apartment, I had just minutes to spare. I wasn’t able to talk; breathing was difficult enough. I paid the driver and disappeared inside my unit.

Doors locked quietly and securely behind me. Blinds drawn against the sun that would come through them sometime in the early morning, windows shut against the noise.

Phone off, alarm off, lights off, everything off.

Clothes off. I finally climbed into my bed and watched as the clocked ticked over to the hateful date.

December 25. Christmas Day.

There was no joy, no merriness. Only pain. A deep, drowning sadness that never faded. There were a few days of the year that really hurt, deeply and soulfully, and today was the worst.

I allowed the pain to take me to a place where I couldn’t feel the world around me anymore. I slept, lying basically comatose for long periods. I didn’t eat; I didn’t drink. I couldn’t, because those functions would have required thought; and if I thought, then I felt the pain. So I did nothing.

The hateful day passed, and the one after that. It was Friday before I could manage to crawl from the bed and begin to function again. I could allow the ice to thaw from my body and let the world around me back in. It was slow and painful, but like every other time before this, eventually I did recover.

.

Two

A Personal Assistant takes her place in an organization from her manager, and in my case, Patrick was pretty much as high up as you could get. There were nearly five hundred employees in our company, and at least half of them were in our building alone, so there was a pretty secure hierarchy already in place when I started.

Patrick’s last assistant hadn’t been very good at her job. She was young and flighty and had spent more time worry about her own social calendar than what Patrick was doing, or so the other PAs told me. It didn’t take her long before she fell in love with a ski instructor and followed him off to Switzerland. Match made in heaven, apparently.

Needless to say, I didn’t have a lot to live up to with regard to expectations, but as a PA, I was really good at my job. Probably the main reason was that I had nothing outside the walls of this company to distract me. Patrick was my only priority, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If he needed to me to stay late or start early, I did. If he needed me to work on weekends, that was fine too.

Out offices were on the sixteenth floor of a renovated building, ours being the highest of the office levels. The two floors above us were corporate apartments, used by visiting clients and also by the GM and the MDs when they worked late and didn’t want to travel to their own homes outside the city.

My desk sat in a small antechamber just outside Patrick’s doors. I shared the space with Sally, Ashlan’s PA. Patrick and Ashlan’s offices stood side by side, their entrances coming off the room that Sally and I shared. It made it easier to share with her, because Patrick was away a lot, and to have that space to myself would have eventually driven me insane. Ashlan, on the other hand, was in the office a lot more often, and he kept us both entertained.

I liked Sally, she was smart and funny, about the same age as I was, but that’s where the similarities ended. She was shorter, rounder and had a husband and young boy who she adored more than life itself. She was nothing like me.

By the end of the first two months, I knew more about Patrick than just about anyone in his life. I knew where he liked to eat, I knew what clothes he bought, where he got them laundered, how often he called his mother and sister—and I knew he was getting divorced from his wife.

If I had known his marriage was on the rocks before I started, there would have been no chance of me taking the job, but he managed to keep that fairly secret. The only reason I learned the truth was that he engaged his lawyer to draw up divorce papers. Every e-mail Patrick got came through me, so it was hard to miss when it came through late one evening.