Midnight At Tiffany's Read Free Page B

of peaceful contemplation was over.
    “Chase!” Two men and a woman approached, but before the predictable flow of conversation could begin there was a massive crash from behind them as one of the waitresses dropped a tray of champagne. The sound echoed around the cavernous room and was followed by an appalled hush and a lone female voice.
    “She’s
ruined
my dress!”
    Everyone turned and stared. A few people moved closer and Chase pondered the darker side of human nature that meant they were so often drawn to gloat over another’s disaster.
    He turned away, unwilling to feast on someone else’s embarrassment, and stared down the glittering canyons of Broadway and Seventh Avenue to the darkness and shadows of Central Park, that lush urban oasis that offered New Yorkers a world beyond glass and steel.
    At the moment he was living in the penthouse of the apartment block his company had built, but not for one moment would he have called it home. The media had salivated over that particular project, and every unit had been sold before hitting the open market.
    Chase was ready to sell but hadn’t yet decided where hewas going to live once he did. His day was so busy it left him no time to think about it.
    Taking advantage of the commotion, he turned and strode out of the room without looking back.
    One phone call would have summoned his driver, but that would have meant being trapped inside a car. Tonight he was going to walk. Walking would clear his head.
    Better to be alone and be himself than be someone else with a bunch of strangers.
    Because that’s what they were. All of them. Even Victoria. Strangers. They didn’t know who he was and they weren’t interested.
    Unobserved, he walked out of his own party without looking back.
    M ATILDA FOUND HER BAG , pulled out the emergency dress she always carried and dragged it over her soaking wet legs. It was nothing more than a long T-shirt, but it rolled into small spaces and was perfect for situations such as this.
    The champagne had been vintage, apparently, so expensive that she was tempted to bend over and lick her own legs. It was the only way she was ever going to get close to champagne of this quality again.
    Fired.
    She’d been fired.
    Crap.
    It was bad enough that she’d lost her job, but worst of all she’d lost her chance to meet Chase Adams and engineer a way of sliding her manuscript onto his brother’s desk.
    Maybe if she’d paid more attention to her surroundings and less to exactly what Lara would have been doing to Chase Adams in the bedroom, she might have seen thewoman with the huge feathers sticking out of her dress. They’d caught the edge of a champagne glass and toppled the lot, like dominoes, only a great deal wetter.
    The woman’s rage had been almost as great as Cynthia’s, not least because being showered in champagne had turned her dress see-through, exposing support underwear. If the woman’s wrath was anything to go by, the need to wear support underwear wasn’t something she’d wanted broadcast.
    Matilda tugged the stretchy dress over her damp body, stuffed her uniform into a bag and left it for Cynthia. It was an ignominious end to her time with Star Events.
    She knew Paige and the others would be looking for her, but she couldn’t face seeing them. Couldn’t face the fact that she’d let Paige down. She’d recruited her when no one else would give her a chance, and now she’d screwed up. And all because she was clumsy and dreamy.
    Dragging her damp, miserable, humiliated self to the elevator, Matilda stepped inside, relieved to be on her own.
    But it seemed she wasn’t going to be granted even a moment of respite.
    As the doors started to close, a strong male hand clamped the edge of the door and it slid open again.
    Matilda watched gloomily, reflecting on the fact that if she’d done the same thing, the doors would have snapped shut on her hand. There would have been a hideous crunching of bones and she would have spent the