Beggar Bride by Gillian White

home, but she couldn’t afford the membership fee and to get past the desk was impossible. She frequently telephoned Fabian’s home only to be told by some secretary or other that he wasn’t taking calls that evening, he was otherwise engaged, he was not available, he was out of the country, he was in a meeting, entertaining, working, not to be disturbed, on some other line.
    Hopeless. He was guarded as well as an Arab sheikh. His minders were security mad.
    She rooted through his dustbins at night feeling ashamed and disgusting, to see if she could discover the most miniscule, the slightest clue that might help her in her quest to suss out his whereabouts. She considered trying for a job at his company or one of his homes, until Billy reminded her rightly, ‘Stupid cow—if either of us could get a job then we wouldn’t be bothering to do this, would we?’
    But the awful thing, the thing that drove her, was that Ange was almost sure he would talk to her if he knew who she was. There’d been some attraction that magical night, she could swear there’d been something there !
    ‘This is getting sick,’ said Billy, when he heard of her shameful scavengings. ‘Give it up, Ange, before you crack up completely. This is just never worth it.’
    But funnily enough it was at the dustbins two weeks later that she met her Prince Charming. He nearly caught her sorting through the envelopes and papers that had slimy bits of egg all over them. She’d only just time to withdraw her hand when she heard the door open and Fabian himself, in his shirtsleeves, came down the steps carrying a couple of empty wine bottles.
    She was quick enough to exclaim, ‘Oh my God, you made me jump!’ And then the corny, ‘Isn’t it Sir Fabian…?’
    ‘Sorry,’ he peered at her in the gloom. He was very surprised. His brown eyes opened wide. ‘Do I know…? Oh, it’s you, Angela. I’m so sorry, I can’t remember your surname but I do remember Covent Garden. Where on earth are you…?’
    ‘I was visiting a friend nearby,’ says Ange quickly, wiping her sticky hand on the back of her coat. ‘Suddenly your door burst open—and well—here we are.’
    ‘Here we are indeed,’ said Fabian like a dark-eyed hero from a Mills and Boon, smiling all over his rugged face.
    ‘I don’t drive,’ Ange tells Fabian on this, their fourth meeting since the dustbin incident.
    Since then she has been forced to take even greater risks in order to finance her nerve-racking operation. She shook like a terrified child as she waited in the cubicle of the ladies’ lavatories at Dickins and Jones, waiting to pluck up courage to creep out and grab one of the tempting handbags resting on the shelf by the mirrors. Hit and run. But could she run fast enough? Taut with cunning she crept out, moved closer behind the fur-coated, bejewelled woman applying more rouge to her crinkled cheeks—and pounced.
    And fled.
    The woman was so absorbed in her task she couldn’t have realised her handbag was gone. There was no hue and cry as Ange scurried out of the store. Well she shouldn’t be wearing a fur coat should she?
    Serves her right…
    Ange was lucky. Luck is walking with Ange at the moment. There was enough money in that one handbag to pay for the jacket-fleece she is wearing, in russet-red with a black trimming, over fifty pounds at Lilian’s Bayswater emporium, so what the hell would it cost new?
    It looks expensive. So do her boots, her bag and her leggings, every item paid for in sweat and fear. Since her expensive haircut it has been easy to recreate the flattering evening style if she needs it, while during the daytime, like now, with her black hair loose and sweeping her shoulders, the cut itself proclaims elegance and style.
    A flock of fat, precocious pigeons waddle around their feet.
    ‘Because I was in the back of the car when both my parents were killed.’ She shrugs off Fabian’s horrified look. ‘Oh no,’ she assures him, ‘it wasn’t like