Helping Sarah

Chapter 10

Michael

The sudden question from the doorway startled me to my feet, sending my chair flying into the wall behind me, and I stared at the tall woman standing there through my hair that had flopped down over my eyes. But Lisa wasn't looking at me. Yet.

She was, as usual, glowering at Alistair. I have no idea where their animosity stemmed from, it had been there from the first time they had met here when Alistair had visited my office. It usually didn't last long, though. In a moment she would dismiss him and focus all her considerable – and somewhat scary – attention and energy on me. It wasn't my doing alone that my insulin level had dropped from the verge of diabetic or that I had lost twenty-five pounds since Christmas.

Sure enough, I didn't have more than a few moments before my PA planted a hand at her side and turned her fiery gaze on me. "Michael," she demanded, "what is it you don't want me to find out about?"

"Er." I scratched my jaw.

"Michael's met a woman he likes." The smug laughter in Alistair's voice was drowned out by Lisa's groan and the whack when she slammed the stack of papers she'd been carrying down on the corner of my desk.

"Don't tell me, another Bridgette?"

My head reared back. "Of course not. I'm not that stupid."

The experience of Bridgette was not one I was willingly going to submit myself to ever again, no matter how desperate I was, and I still blame the article in the local newspaper.

I had only agreed to talk to the reporter to get Brian Gillett, the Chief Marketing Officer at Zen Media and the biggest pain in my arse, off my back. He was still miffed that I refused to work as much as I had before I'd sold them my firm, even though I had explicitly explained during the negotiations why I was selling. Brian had told me the article would focus on Capra Games as a local Cambridge success story and the new opportunities for my firm after the sale, but when the newspaper had come out, the headline on the front page had proclaimed in capital letters how much I had sold Capra Games for.

I have no idea who revealed the amount to the reporter, I certainly hadn't though he'd repeatedly asked, and the next day Bridgette had stumbled into me just as I had gotten my coffee at the coffee shop down the road from the firm. The collision had caused coffee down her short, white dress, which I had of course offered to have cleaned. Which had resulted in another meeting and a thank you that had for some reason necessitated lots of touches on my arm and pressing her cleavage against my side, and then before my mind could agree I had suggested a dinner, and somehow, before I knew it, I had found myself in a relationship.

Bridgette was sweet and charming and attentive, and everything wonderful. At least to a guy who had worked a minimum of seventy hours a week since university and had very little experience with interested women or how to socialize with them.

The attentiveness had lasted until she'd learnt exactly what buttons of mine to push to get her way, the charm only until she'd gotten what she wanted, usually something expensive, and the sweetness had swiftly evaporated when I had stared horrified at her when she'd mentioned marriage two months after our first meeting.

The word had been a like a pin to a balloon, bursting the dazed haze I had lived in for two months of near constant Bridgette company.

It had taken three waiters and the chef to get her out of the posh restaurant she'd chosen to propose in, to the dumbfounded stares of the other guests, the dishwasher and the bartender, and I had carried a scratch down my cheek from her long, acrylic nails for a week after.

Unfortunately, she hadn't given up on getting her claws back into my wallet, as evidenced by her numerous calls and visits to my house at all times of the day.