Chapter Twenty-Nine
GEORGINA
“George: outside, this instant.”
Holy moly! What now?
Just when everything was nice and cushy; okay, so even though she had him all to herself, romance had unofficially died, and she was all out of ideas as to how she could reignite that again. The short skirts and occasional flash of her backside when she bent over – which was with an embarrassing frequency, her desperation for some flirting forcing her to throw napkins, straws and spoons in all directions – making no odds at all to the frustrating secret loyalty of River’s eyes.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with you. Alice claims you told her that you’re pregnant, and that’s what that whole episode upstairs was about the other weekend.”
That rotten cow! How dare she resume contact?
Georgina smiled sweetly and quickly, her brain sharp enough to realise he wouldn’t believe a lie, not like this, so she’d change the story slightly.
“I had,” she paused to inhale deeply, “a miscarriage, actually, River… if you must know. Not that my private life is any concern of yours nowadays. Happy now?” She lowered her head for effect.
Oh, the magic of her zippy calculating mind to have this wrapped up in seconds as per usual.
“So you’re suggesting that Alice has a hearing problem?”
He was unbelievable. Georgina was stunned that this hadn’t silenced him, let alone not had his conscience firing off questions as to his potential involvement.
“I’m suggesting,” she brought her head up now, eyes flitting between his and her stomach which she covered protectively, “that you take a very large hint and ask me no further questions. You’ve no idea what I’ve been going through, no idea at all.”
“I don’t know what to think any more, really I don’t.” He bit his lip, shook his head and then stopped to sweep a hand through his hair. “If it wasn’t for your dad and my mum, I’d have asked you to kindly move on already. You’re not a team player, George. I took you on in good faith… albeit under regrettably sordid circumstances… circumstances which suited the both of us at the time. But things are different now. We’ve had our fun, we’re colleagues and the bar is growing. Al’s back on board for as long as it takes to find her a decent job elsewhere. You’re just going to have to accept that and frankly muck in or check out.”
“Well that’s just charming! Do you talk to all your staff like that when they’ve lost a baby, your baby… as if I needed to make it any clearer, to spell all the letters out for—”
“I’ve heard enough, Georgina!”
River cut in, hand in the air now as if to halt any remaining flurry of words.
“If that’s the truth then I’m sorry, for my part in it, really I am. But firstly, you assured me you were taking the pill… and you… well, you’re just something else altogether, aren’t you? I mean never mind the boy who cried wolf…” he paused to take a breath, to gather his next flurry of words. “In any case, it’s over now, and this dialogue totally redundant. A child, between the two of us, just no… as insensitive as this is going to sound, I’m going to say it: what life would it have had?”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, had she truly been pregnant, oh, how those words would have stung. But more than anything, she couldn’t believe that an annoying little waif had more front than she herself did, straying just a little while to fool her, but now here she was back again from Cali-flippin-fornia, presumably, for Round Two. Well, you know what, ‘Al’ – and since when had he started calling her Al? – bring it on. And bring it on with bells on, the jinglier the better.
And as for that love rat who had made her fall in love with him, well, he was taking absolute liberties now in every sense of the word. Whereas most when they were in trouble would cringe deeply at the mention of their full name, Georgina felt her buttons pushed when anybody dared to shorten it; it was like they’d cut off her significance or something, diminished her universal existence with the chop of a knife through a particular arrangement of the alphabet. River Jackson had not only dared to do it.
But he’d dared to do it twice.
All of which seemed to be the natural conclusion to the end of their affair, and goddammit, she was the one who terminated the contracts in that department; which was precisely why Operation Payback would officially start that very night.