has been cancelled.’
It took a few seconds for that to sink in. Milly had been busy being distracted by the unfortunate turn of events that had catapulted her life from sorted and happy to humiliated and up in the air.
‘Did you hear what I just said, Amelia?’
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? Please tell me that this is a joke.’ But Sandra King was not the sort who had a sense of humour. Any joke, for her, would be foreign territory.
‘I never joke,’ the other woman said, on cue. ‘The Ramos family has pulled out at the last minute. I only took their phone call a few hours ago and, if you had picked up your phone instead of letting it ring, you would not have wasted your time travelling.’
‘Why? Why is it off?’ Visions of slinking back into the flat she had shared with Emily, risking bumping into her one-time best friend clearing her stuff before she took off to America with Robbie, were so horrifying that she felt giddy.
‘One of the kids has come down with chicken pox. Simple as that.’
‘But I’m only half an hour away from the lodge!’ Milly all but wailed.
They had left the exclusive village of Courchevel behind and the car was wending its way upwards, leaving the riff-raff of the lower slopes behind as it entered the rarefied air of the seriously rich. Hidden, private lodges with majestic views; helipads; heated indoor swimming pools; saunas and steam rooms by the bucket load...
There was an elaborate sigh from the end of the line. ‘Well, you’ll have to tell the driver to swing round and head back, I’m afraid. Naturally, you will be compensated for your time and trouble...’
‘Surely I can spend one night there? It’s getting dark and I’m exhausted. I have a key to the place. I can use it and make sure that I leave the lodge in pristine condition. I need to sleep, Sandra!’
She couldn’t get her head round the fact that the one thing that seemed to be working in her favour, the only thing that had worked in her favour for the past couple of horrific, nightmarish weeks, was now collapsing around her feet like a deck of cards, kicked down by one of the odious rich kids from the family who had bailed at the last minute. A wave of hopeless self-pity threatened to engulf her.
‘That would be highly irregular.’
‘So is the fact that my job here has been cancelled at the last minute, when I’m fifteen minutes away from the lodge—having spent the past eight hours travelling!’
She could see the lodge rearing up ahead of them and for a few seconds every depressing, negative thought flew from her head in sheer, wondrous appreciation of the magnificent structure ahead of her.
It dominated the skyscape, rising up against the blindingly white snow, master of all it surveyed. It was absolutely enormous, the largest and grandest ski lodge Milly had ever seen in her life. In fact, it was almost an understatement to classify it as a ‘lodge’. It was more like a mansion in the middle of its own private, snowy playground.
‘I suppose there’s little choice!’ Sandra snapped. ‘But for God’s sake, Amelia, pick up when you hear your phone! And make sure you don’t touch anything. No poking around. Just eat and sleep and make sure that when you leave the lodge no one knows you’ve been there.’
Milly grimaced as she was abruptly disconnected. She leaned forward, craning to get glimpses of the mansion as it drew closer and closer to her, until the SUV was turning left and climbing through private land to where it nestled in all its splendour.
‘Er...’ She cleared her throat and hoped that the driver, who had greeted her at Chambery airport in extremely broken English and had not said a word since, would get the gist of what she was going to say.
‘Oui, mademoiselle?’
Milly caught his eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Yes, well, there’s been a slight change of plan...’
‘What is that?’
She sighed with relief. At least she wouldn’t have to try and explain an impossible situation using her limited French, resisting the temptation to fill in the gaps by speaking loudly. She told him as succinctly as possible. He would have to stay overnight somewhere and return her to the airport the following day... Sorry, so sorry for the inconvenience, but he could phone...
She scrambled into her capacious rucksack and extracted her wallet and from that the agency card that she had not envisaged having to use for the next couple of weeks.
She wondered whether he might stay at the lodge, it was big enough to fit a hundred drivers, but that was something he would have to work out for himself. She suspected that she had already stretched Sandra’s limited supply of the milk of human kindness by asking if she could stay overnight in the place.
It was a dog-eat-dog world, she thought. As things stood, she was rock-bottom of the pack. She had been cheated on by her fiancé, a guy she had known since childhood and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she had been cheated on by her best friend and flatmate...
To top it off, she had been told that the reason he had become engaged to her in the first place was because his parents were fed up with his twenty-four-seven lifestyle of living it large and womanising. They had given him a deadline to find himself a decent girl and settle down or else he could forget about taking over the family business that had just opened a thriving branch in Philadelphia and was going places.
Banished from the family fortune and a ready-made job, he would have been faced, she assumed, with the terrifying prospect of actually buckling down and finding himself a job without Mummy and Daddy’s helping hand. And so he had plumped for the slightly less terrifying prospect of charming her into thinking that they really had a relationship, proposing marriage whilst playing the field with her much taller, much skinnier and much prettier flatmate.
His parents had approved of her. She had passed the litmus test with them. She was his passport to his inheritance. She was small, round and homely; when she thought of Robbie and the angular Emily, every insecurity she nursed about her looks rose to the surface at the speed of light.
The only thing worse than catching them in bed together would have been actually marrying the creep, only to discover once the ring was on her finger that he had zero interest in her.
She gazed mournfully at her finger where a giant diamond rock had nestled only a few weeks ago.
Her friends had all told her that it was a monumental mistake to have chucked it back at him, that she should have kept it and flogged it at the first available opportunity. After all, she deserved it, after what he had put her through.
And the money would have stood her in good stead, considering she had jacked in her hotel job so that she could play happy families with him in Philadelphia. It was galling to think that he had had the nerve to tell her that he hoped she understood and that she could count on him if she ever needed anything!
As things currently stood, she was out of a job, banished from her flat until Emily cleared out and with a shockingly small amount of money saved.
And she had no one to turn to. Her only living relative, her grandmother who lived in Scotland, would have sold her cottage had she known about her granddaughter’s state of near penury, but Milly had no intention of filling her in on that. It was bad enough that she had had to pick up the pieces when she had been told fifteen days ago that the fairy-tale wedding was off the cards.
As far as her grandmother was concerned, Milly was taking time off to work as a nanny for a family in Courchevel, where she would be able to do what she loved most, namely ski... She had glossed over the trauma of her breakup as just one of those things, nothing that a couple of weeks in the snow couldn’t cure.
Milly had painted a glowing picture of a cosy family, practically friends, who would be there for her on her road to recovery. It had helped her grandmother to stop fretting. Furthermore, she had embroidered the recovery theme by announcing that she