Gold Diggers

14 (#ulink_242313bf-5d2e-5233-b851-1c7fc5f9f21c)

Jilly was worried. After that snake Richard had gone off with the office floozie and Erin had moved out of his apartment, Jilly had fully expected her granddaughter to return to Cornwall immediately. After all, she had no home, no boyfriend, some job answering telephones twelve hours a day; what on earth could be keeping her in London?

‘I just don’t understand it, lovey,’ she said down the phone line. ‘London’s expensive, it’s lonely. Why don’t you come home?’

Erin had to admit Jilly had a point. She’d been in London six weeks and here she was, living in a single room in a Bayswater hotel costing her a hundred pounds a night. She hadn’t any friends to stay with after she’d left Richard’s – she could hardly have asked Adam to put her up for a few days while she found somewhere new to live – and working so hard at the Midas Corporation, there seemed neither the time nor the opportunity to make any new friends. It wasn’t quite the glamorous life either of them had imagined for her; then again, there was something about Midas that made her fizz with excitement, and it wasn’t just her £70,000 pay-packet. She wasn’t quite ready to leave just yet.

‘When you spent four years at university getting a Russian degree, it wasn’t to spend your life making somebody else’s travel arrangements, was it?’ said Jilly. ‘Come home. Finish your novel. That’s you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?’

Erin felt an enormous rush of guilt at the mention of her novel. Jilly could almost read her mind; Erin hadn’t written a word since she had been in London. But she’d started another career now and she couldn’t very well admit defeat so soon and go running home just because Richard was such a rat.

‘Let me give it a week,’ said Erin. ‘This hotel arrangement is purely temporary. If I haven’t got settled in a week, we can talk again.’ She put down the receiver and resolved that she had to find somewhere immediately, if not sooner.

‘Now the next property I’m going to show you is really special,’ said the estate agent with an encouraging smile. Erin groaned inwardly. It was the fourth flat in as many days that this estate agent had shown her. He had kept phoning her up at work, promising her he could find her something amazing, but everything he had shown her so far seemed decidedly overpriced or poky.