Free Ellie's Return by Bronagh Pierce

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and had told the manager to say she was not there. Ellie’s texts had told her
the flight arrival data and time so she was already aware of needing to look
out. Ordinarily, she told herself, she would have confronted Ellie there and
then and told her about Tom, but the logical conclusion to that would have been
that she came out and told Ellie three years ago that she was in love with Tom
and things had not worked out between him and Ellie so it was fair enough that
they should have their chance at happiness. That’s what she would have said if
any of that had been true, but there were flaws to the tale that Ellie would
have seen through and Tom would have seen through too and it was all she could
do to ensure they did not get to speak to each other, else the game would have
been up a lot sooner. As it was three years had elapsed, Tom and Ellie would be
over each other or still too angry to speak to each other much less talk about
anything as embarrassing as their feelings, and the passage of time would
continue to put a veil over the events that she had engineered.  
    In any case, she could not say that she
was in love Tom, who would ever believe such a thing? He looked the part
alright, he was tall and lean and had a certain kind of pale and haunted charm
about him right now, the ghostly pallor of his more vigorous recent past, but
really, if Lola was going to fall in love with anyone it would not be someone
who was so easily taken in as Tom had been. Tom and Ellie were supposed to be
so deeply in love that even Lola had taken a while to eventually seduce him,
but once she had managed it the whole thing had been so easy that she wondered
how it had taken her so long to work out the right way in the first place.
    Three years ago Lola had discovered Tom’s
gift for making money and realised just how much his property business was
worth, she had decided that she would make him an asset of her own. She asked
him to help her with buying a couple of properties that she could do up and
sell on, just small things at first. That way she got to spend more time alone
with him, positively encouraged by Ellie. She got to find out all sorts of
tricks of the trade that Tom had learnt from the dozen years he had spent in
business for himself as well as the forty odd years of experience from his
father. Tom had been adamant about setting up his own business and going it
alone when he started out, rather than working for the family business. He was
quite determined like that, and it was a shame otherwise Lola could have had
that business off him too and far more easily, without having to marry him to
get it. She had realised after spending some time with Tom that batting her
eyelids, telling him how clever he was and brushing herself up against him were
not going to work with him the way they did with ninety per cent of men she had
to deal with, and that if her charms were ever going to work it was going to
have to mean her being a bit more of a confidante to him, which in turn would
mean having to move Ellie on, out of the picture.
    Lola had started off saying that she
wanted to develop and manage properties, and Tom had said that he was happy to
help get her started but that she already had a lot going on with her three
shops and he knew she was looking to diversify all the time.   Diversifying was good from an investment
point of view but she was looking at having two different types of business,
and both were full time so she would need to decide which business she wanted
more, or would need to employ somebody full time to manage one of the business’s
for her. The alternative was to invest in properties without managing them,
which meant letting somebody else do all the work. A combination of those
things sounded attractive to Lola, and she suggested that Tom work for her. Tom
had laughed at the idea, since his property business was already worth several
million pounds in assets and it provided a substantial income,