Sheer Abandon Read Online Free Page A

was extremely sure that what she did was right.
    Although recently she’d been having just a few doubts…
    Anyway, she had finished now; she had only to get the document typed, complete with its final changes, ready for sign-off. She rang the night secretary, got no asnwer, and rang again. She’d obviously gone walkabout. They were always doing that, gossiping in one another’s offices. Very annoying. Well, it would have to go to the word processing centre. She took it down, told them to call her when it was done, and decided to get her head down for an hour and a half in the overnight room and then go to the gym and come back to the office. With the clients coming in and the deal closing at noon, it was terribly important nothing went wrong now. It was one of the biggest acquisitions she had worked on—one financial services company taking over another, made more complex by the worldwide offices of both and a very quixotic CEO in the client company. And the whole thing had begun as a management buyout that had gone wrong in the other company, and the acquisition was salt in the wound of the main protagonist; he had been dragging his feet, looking for a white knight until the eleventh hour, and raising objections to almost every clause in the contract.
    But they had done it. Sayers Wesley, one of the biggest, sleekest operations in London, had fought a mighty battle on behalf of their client, and won. And Martha Hartley, at thirty-three one of the youngest partners, had been in control of that battle.
    She was happy: very happy indeed. She always felt the same at this point, her muscles aching as if the battle had been a physical one and light-headed with relief. She had sent her assistant home to get a few hours’ sleep and the poor exhausted trainee as well; she worked best on her own in these last-lap hours, undistracted, her head absolutely clear.
    What was more, she had earned a great deal of money for Sayers Wesley, which would be reflected in her salary in due course. Her £300,000 salary. Her dream of becoming rich had certainly come true.
    Her father had asked her, quite mildly, the last time she had gone home, what she did with her earnings; she had appeared, to her irritation, in a list of the up-and-coming women in the city, the new nearly millionaires it had said, and her family had been shocked by the amount she earned. She didn’t tell them it had been underestimated by about twenty thousand.
    “Spend it,” she had said.
    “All of it?”
    “Well, I’ve invested some of course. In shares and so on.” Why was she feeling so defensive, what was she supposed to have done wrong? “And bought that time-share in Verbier. Which you could also call an investment—I let it if I don’t go there.” Which she hadn’t for the past two years, she had been too busy. “My flat was quite expensive”—she hoped he wouldn’t ask how expensive—“and that must be worth at least twice what I paid for it. And I give a lot to charity,” she said, suddenly nettled. “Really a lot. And I’m ready and waiting to help you and Mum buy your retirement bungalow.”
    This was a sore point with her parents. One of the things about being clergy was that you never owned a house, you lived in church accommodation, never had that huge investment most people did nowadays, to cash in on at the end of their lives. Pride had so far kept Peter and Grace Hartley from accepting money from their children, but it was beginning to appear inevitable—and painful. Martha knew that and was as discreet as she could be about it; but there was no very satisfactory way of saying, “Look, Mum and Dad, take thirty thousand, you need it more than I do.”
    She had the money in a high-interest-bearing account; had saved it without too much difficulty over the past five years. It almost frightened her to think she could do that.
    But most of her life was appallingly self-indulgent, and she knew it. Her apartment was dazzling, in one of the