CHAPTER ONE
GEORGIE eyed the glass building staring her in the face and decided right there and then that this was positively the very last time she would let herself be guided by impulse. Even if the impulse had its roots in all the right reasons.
The only halfway decent part of her tortuous trip from Devon had been the taxi ride from the station and even that had ended on a sour note with an unnecessarily disgruntled taxi driver dumping her outside the security barrier, not paying a scrap of attention to her very reasonable plea that he hang on just a few minutes in case her party wasn’t inside.
Now she had no idea how she was going to run the wretched man down to ground. The building looked as though it was riddled with security guards and CCTV cameras, all aimed at making sure unwanted riff-raff didn’t intrude their ridiculously overpriced premises.
As if anyone in their right mind would actually want to invade a gym. Most of the people she knew spent the majority of the time working out how they could avoid one.
Plus it was cold.
Plus the last time she had eaten had been approximately four hours ago, a miserable sandwich she had grabbed on the hop, and her stomach was making all those churning noises that suggested it needed feeding and quickly.
She took a deep breath and breezed up to the revolving doors. At seven fifteen the place seemed to be populated by men. Short ones, tall ones, fat ones and, needless to say, none of them her quarry.
There was a huddle of young, fit people behind the circular reception desk, guarding the turnstile gates like Rottweilers, Georgie thought unpleasantly, and she approached them with care.
Despite the fact that they didn’t seem to be doing anything at all urgent, it was still a few seconds before one of them, a young girl with very blonde hair pulled back into a high pony-tail and sporting the look of a highly trained cheerleader, arched one eyebrow and asked if she could be of service.
The look on her face as she gave Georgie the once over suggested that her finger was probably on the Emergency button even as she asked the question.
‘I…yes, I hope so…’ I am a fully trained primary school teacher, Georgie thought, and a pipsqueak of a girl in a tight Lycra outfit isn’t going to intimidate me! ‘Actually…I…’
‘Are you here to enquire about joining? If so, I can tell you straight away that our books are completely full for the next eight months.’
‘No, actually, I’m not here to join…’
The arched eyebrow rose fractionally higher. ‘Then?’
‘I’m looking for someone…one of your members, actually…’
The blonde exhaled one long, impatient sigh and glanced at her watch. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you with that. Our members come here to relax in very exclusive surroundings. The last thing they need is to be pestered by people they may not want to see. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’ She swung her head around to her supervisor, who was an older version of her, and Georgie realised that she was now probably going to be accosted by the full pack of Rottweilers.
‘I’m afraid I must insist on being allowed in to find Mr Newman,’ Georgie addressed the older thirty-something blonde, fishing out her best teacher voice, the one that implied dark and dastardly punishment if her orders weren’t obeyed immediately. It never failed to work on her four year old protégés and, sure enough, the older woman stiffened slightly.
Georgie realised that it wasn’t the voice, more the name that had generated this reaction.
‘Would you mean Mr Pierre Christophe Newman?’
‘I’m surprised you can recall his name off hand considering your club is so oversubscribed,’ Georgie couldn’t resist saying. Really, she wasn’t surprised at all. Pierre Christophe was not the sort of man people usually overlooked. Well, not unless you had pretty much grown up with him. Then, she thought loftily, his impact wasn’t quite the same!#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#
The older blonde woman seemed suddenly flustered but still she managed to drag her sales patter out of the hat, informing Georgie that Highview wasn’t oversubscribed, that they merely maintained a firm control over the number of members, as exclusivity was what they aimed for. ‘Some of our members are extremely important and extremely wealthy individuals,’ she elaborated smugly. ‘We aim to make sure that they can come here knowing that they can relax away from their busy schedules. The gym facilities are never overcrowded, nor is the pool and all the other things we have on offer. We prefer, in fact, to think of here more as a very exclusive retreat than anything else!’