Page 1 of The Princess Trap
Chapter One
Cherry Neita was not the type of woman to voluntarily use stairs.
As far as she was concerned, they were inconvenient, inappropriate, and a public nuisance. Unless she was firmly strapped into a sports bra, with a bottle of Lucozade in hand, Cherry avoided physical exertion like the plague.
Which was why she had perfected the art of pushing into the queue for the lift. And her colleagues here at the Academy made it soeasy. Bless them.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, thank you!” Cherry wiggled her way through the gaggle of men loitering in front of the building’s single lift.
Why the Academy’s senior leadership team was housed with the lowly administrative staff—andwhythe tower they all shared had only one lift—Cherry didn’t know. She avoided wondering about it, too, because poor organisationmade her skin crawl. Honestly, if they’d only consulted her during the bloody planning stages…
“Morning, Cherry, darling,” beamed Jeff, the Academy’s rosy-cheeked Head of Key Stage 4. For a man who spent so much time working with teenagers, he was always remarkably cheerful. Cherry had to admire his fortitude.
“Morning, Jeff. How’s—?” Her response was interrupted by a disgruntled muttering from somewhere behind her. Cherry turned to find Mike Cousins, Head of Geography, giving her a dark look. The sort of look that said,I’ve been waiting here for ages. How didsheget to the front of the queue?
It was the arse-crack of bloody morning, so Cherry’s mood was not the best. But cussing someone out at work for having the audacity tolookat her would be a trifle unreasonable, so she collected the threads of her patience with great effort, and dragged her lips up from a demure smile to a full-on, charming grin. Mike blinked under the force of her dimples, then smiled back, all annoyance forgotten.
The men in this place responded to a pretty face like babies to a bottle. And she was supposed to respect them.
Sigh.
Turning back to Jeff, Cherry continued. “How’s Sandra and the kids?”
“Not bad, not bad.” The lift arrived with ading, and Jeffstepped aside to let her walk in first. What a gentleman. “Little one’s teething,” he went on, “but otherwise well.”
“Wonderful!”
A handful of staff members forced themselves into the lift behind Jeff and Cherry. They faced front like good little soldiers. Cherry, unembarrassed, studied her reflection in the lift’s mirrored back wall. Life was too short to pretend you didn’t want to check your lipstick.
“And how are you, Cherry?”
“Oh, you know.” She fluffed at her hair, as though the mass of dark coils weren’t springy enough already. “Same as usual.”
Ding.
“Well!” Cherry turned away from her reflection with a smile. Just a small one, no dimples. She tried not to unleash them in enclosed spaces. “I’ll see you later, Jeff.”
“Cheerio, love.” He smiled back, genuine as always. Jeff was probably the only senior member of staff who didn’t make her want to be sick. He was sweet, he was honest, and he cared about the kids, so Cherry always had a kind word for him.
The rest of them could get fucked.
She stepped out of the lift and into the safety of the admin floor with relief. It was the only place at Rosewood Academy that felt like something other than a greedy, corporate pipeline.
See, once upon a time, Rosewood had been an actual school.Until a mate of the Prime Minister’s with a background in private education had taken over and ‘academised’—AKAmonetised—the place. Now the kids were pumped through the system like battery hens, and woe betide anyone who fell below industry standard.
Cherry wound her way through the rows of desks and occasional offices that filled the floor, greeting colleagues as she went. She didn’t bother with exaggerated wiggles and dimpled smiles up here. No-one was silly enough to fall for it, or dangerous enough to warrant her Darling Doll performance, anyway. She reached the HR office and paused, reading the sign blu-tacked to the door with a frown.
CHERRY NEITA, KEEP OUT!
With a shrug, she swept into the room.
“Oh! Cherry! What are you doing here?” Inside the office, two women huddled protectively around Cherry’s desk. She struggled to place them. They were in finance, she thought… and the little, dark-haired onemightbe called Julie.
The taller of the two women looked at Cherry as if she were a rampaging bull. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
“No,” Cherry said blithely. “What are you doing at my desk, girls?”
Across the room, seated neatly at her own desk, Rose McCall snorted. She raised one pale, wrinkled hand to her spectacles, peering at Cherry over their half-moon lenses. “What do youthink, darling?”
