Page 3 of Elijah
Amy
aged 28
“Please tell me that truck does not belong to who I think it does?” I hissed at Claudia, my assistant.
“It doesn’t belong to who you think it does,” she deadpanned.
“It fucking is his, isn’t it?” I stopped walking up the long, cobbled drive and threw my portfolio and handbag onto the ground, stamped my foot and thrust my hands – fisted ones, I should add – to my hips.
“You told me to tell you it wasn’t.” Claudia sighed and bent down to retrieve my discarded portfolio. “So, I did.”
“It was a rhetorical question, not a statement.”
“Sorry. Yes, it’s Elijah Cooper’s truck.”
“Fucker!”
“What happened to the quiet little Amy that I once knew?” Claudia asked.
“I had laryngitis and couldn’t speak, it hardly made me a different person.” I took the portfolio from Claudia and picked up my bag.
“You tricked me by conducting my interview using mime and a wipe board and I only took the job because I thought it’d be nice and quiet.”
I threw her a glare and continued up the driveway, feeling my intestines knotting themselves together at the prospect of seeing Elijah again. It had been over five years, but it didn’t make it any less painful.
“We may as well get it over and done with,” I muttered, pulling my bag higher on my shoulder and then smoothing down my tight, black pencil skirt.
“He may just be visiting or dropping a quote off. It doesn’t mean he’s got the job,” Claudia offered.
“No,” I sighed. “He’s got the job. I’ll bet my Fendi handbag on it.”
“It’s bloody hideous anyway,” Claudia said. “So, it’d be no loss.”
“I know but I bought it with his money, so it was well worth it.”
With a wink at Claudia, I took the last few steps and stopped in front of the huge, wooden, double front door. I was here to do a job and I’d damn well do it, whether Elijah was here or not.
I was an interior designer, a job that I adored, and was bloody good at, with a steadily growing list of clients. I’d originally worked for a very exclusive department store, in London, the green one that rhymed with…well it didn’t rhyme with anything, but you know which one. Let’s just say I’d helped design interiors for Kings, Queens, rich oil Sheiks, and Premier League footballers. Three years living in London however, was, I’d say, one too many. I was absolutely knackered by it all and towards the end was sleeping for almost thirty-six hours of a forty-eight-hour weekend. Hence, I’d come back home to the North West and set up my own business. I hadn’t moved back to my hometown, choosing to rent an apartment on the outskirts of Manchester, but when my Dad had another heart scare, which luckily turned out to be a false alarm, I realised I needed to be near my family. About two months ago, I bought a small town house a ten minute drive from my parents.
Luckily, when I first started my business, an old friend, Holly, wanted some help designing a new interior for the hotel she owned with her husband, Liam, and their business partner, so I had my first client. It all snowballed quickly. Liam was friends with a couple of members of the band Dirty Riches and one of them was building a house to sell on, and as he and his wife were too busy, he employed me to do the interior design. After that, the work rolled in and after only a year, I employed Claudia to help me. Eight months on from that and I’d landed the job of designing the interior of a house built for the Premiership Footballer, Faustino ‘Tino’ Grimaldi and his wife Sophie. Apparently, as Sophie was seven months pregnant and still working as a solicitor, she’d insisted Tino employ someone to decorate all the interior of the large, Italian Renaissance style house that he’d had built for them, their two, soon to be three children, and two llamas. There was seemingly a story attached to the llamas, but I was still to find out what it was. The designer they’d originally employed had let them down only three days before, so I’d been brought in to save the day, and this was only my second time at seeing the house. Lucky for them I’d had a cancellation - a banker in Didsbury whose wife had decided decorating the house wouldn’t save their marriage.
As the house had been built between farmland and woods, the garden was…well there wasn’t one, the only part of the grounds that had been completed was the driveway up to the house, which was, I assumed, why Elijah’s truck was parked there. He was a landscape gardener and once upon a time, we’d dreamed of going into business together – him transforming the outside, while I beautified the inside. It never happened and now it looked as though I was going to have to work with him after all. I supposed I should have counted myself lucky I hadn’t bumped into him before in the last few months. I guess it was because I’d barely socialised since I’d come back home and any spare time I had was spent working. Now though, I had to deal with finally seeing him.
“If I go to grab something heavy, take it off me,” I told Claudia, over my shoulder. “I don’t want to be arrested for assault.”
“Yep, no problem.”
Claudia only knew what I’d told her about Elijah, but safe to say there wasn’t much good in there, so I was pretty sure she’d let me have a ten second head start before she stopped me from maiming him in any way.
Letting out a long breath, I lifted my hand and knocked on the door, using the ornate knocker shaped like a llama’s head.
After a few seconds it flung open and I was faced with Tino, looking a little like a country squire. He was wearing tweed trousers, a checked shirt, and a tweed jacket – none of which matched.
“Amy, bella. You are ‘ere. Come in, please enter my ‘ome.”
Tino ushered Claudia and I into the huge hall with its bare plaster walls and concrete floor. Cables were hanging down from the ceiling and light switch points and the wood of the impressive wood and glass staircase was untreated – I had a bloody huge job on my hands with this one. Usually there were at least lights and switches already in place.
“Sophie, she want to be ‘ere to see you,” Tino said apologetically. “But she ‘ave, what you call them…the piles, that is it. ‘Er arse it really ‘urt.”
