The Love Letter Read Online Free PDF Page B

blazing. ‘I don’t need a Vi-spring mattress and plasma television in the bathroom.’
    ‘I thought you deserved pampering. You look so sad.’
    That was the first time he seemed to notice her, his handsome face curiously motionless, as though he was fighting back tears.
    ‘Book a Travelodge. It’s all I deserve.’
    A week later he sheepishly asked her to upgrade him to a Radisson and book him a chiropractor.
    Legs had worked for him tirelessly, often staying late, never complaining when he loaded her with extra duties, knowing that little by little she was becoming indispensible, showing her intelligence and initiative, and earning his trust. She soon even managed to make him laugh, a reward equalling those rare, vivid moments of praise from the man of few words and many million-pound manuscripts. But his laughter was always hard won, and she paid the price for trying too hard.
    Eight weeks after she started at Fellows Howlett, Legs scored a triumph by rearranging a long-planned trip to Frankfurt in a way that gave Conrad an unprecedented afternoon off, an upgraded flight and a first-steal meeting with an American publisher eager to snap up new British talent. He was highly impressed. ‘You should go far, Allegra.’
    ‘Are you flattering me, or suggesting I remove myself to a greater distance?’
    ‘Stick around.’
    ‘I’ll be as sticky as you want me to be,’ she promised naughtily.
    He had flashed that rare smile, as succinct as his speaking manner, but his green eyes remained serious. ‘Flirtation is small arms fire in business; I suggest you drop it from your CV if you want to break through the glass ceiling.’
    After that lecture, she stopped the wisecracks. Yet she had often caught him looking at her through the smoked-glass wall that divided their work spaces, his expression impossible to read. Breaking through ceilings and walls became a recurring theme in her dreams, where she would shatter her way through hothouses, halls of mirrors and observatories to get to his side.
    As the weeks passed, her crush on Conrad had grown in directproportion to her increasing dissatisfaction at home. Her fiancé Francis had a far better job, fast-tracking a route through the editorial department of a blue-chip publishing group, but he despised it. He was tiring of London, he said. He talked obsessively about returning to his family home, Farcombe, and the festival his father had started up. He talked about the wedding as though it was a baptism to a new life. She suddenly saw parallels with Ros abandoning all her musical ambitions, and it frightened her.
    She kept these fears from friends and work colleagues. ‘How’s the wedding shaping up?’ Conrad would ask.
    Eager to cheer him up, Legs embellished plans for fire jugglers and jazz quartets, clifftop pyrotechnics and hosts of performance artists. Despite his warning, she started to made her boss laugh again, continually in fact, and loved the sound, like the surf crashing on Devon shingle. Conrad’s laughter became a new favourite song she wanted to hear again and again.
    Three months after his separation, he made her feel as though she was beginning to penetrate the inner circle when he took her along to an important lunch with a client, a blustery old academic whose strange fictional tomes set in the Sassanid Empire had proven surprisingly commercial, largely because they contained rather a lot of graphic sex. The academic was a terrible old letch and immediately locked onto Legs as bait, making her suspect that Conrad had invited her along purely to sweeten his client’s palate. Polite and professional, Legs had tolerated his attentions, although the temptation to spear him in the groin with her fork every time his hands wandered over her thighs beneath the table was almost overwhelming. Instead, she’d drunk too much champagne, laughed along gamely to risqué jokes and sought distraction during the academic’s long, boring monologues about himself by