Sweep Me Off My Feet: Swept Off Her Stilettos / Housekeeper's Happy-Ever-After
Fiona Harper
Sometimes you can find love in the last place you’d think to look…Clothing connoisseur Coreen Fraser’s film-star style never leaves her wanting for male attention. But sourcing costumes for a 1930s murder-mystery weekend stops being fun when she discovers she has to wear a tweed suit and sensible shoes! But her best friend, Adam, has his own plans for the weekend. And one moonlit kiss later, Coreen’s wondering if Adam’s the only man who really knows the girl beneath the skyscraper heels and scarlet lipstick…Ellie Bond's heart has ached ever since she lost her beloved husband and little girl. Now her head is telling her it's time to get her life back on track. Her first small step: answering big-shot music executive Mark Wilder's Housekeeper Wanted ad! Outwardly Mark is powerful and can make or break careers, but is there another side of him that could that's reawakening Ellie's zest for life?Two sparkling rom-com stories from the author of Make My Wish Come True & Kiss Me Under The Mistletoe
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Swept Off Her Stilettos
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ONE
The Girl Can’t Help It…
Coreen’s Confessions
No. 1—In my opinion, a pinkie finger isn’t properly dressed unless it’s got a man comfortably wrapped around it—and I always make sure I’m impeccably dressed.
I GLARED at the man who’d rushed through the coffee shop door. Not only had he almost spilled my caramel mochaccino down my best polka-dot dress as he’d barged past, but he hadn’t even bothered to hold the door open for me.
Not that I was about to admit I was losing my mojo. He probably just hadn’t seen me in his rush to escape from the unseasonable weather.
Left with no alternative, I balanced the two steaming paper cups of coffee I was holding and tried to open the door with my elbow. No good. There was only one thing for it. I sighed, turned one-eighty degrees, and shoved it open with my rear end.
I glanced upwards as I stepped outside onto Greenwich High Street. The sky wasn’t just promising rain but threatening with menaces. What should have been a balmy summer evening was as heavy and gloomy as a December afternoon. Thankfully, I only had a two-minute walk ahead of me, and would be safe and dry inside before the heavens opened.
Rude Man had something else to answer for too. No one would be standing with his hand on the open door, transfixed, as a steady stream of customers flowed past him. No one would be admiring my rear view as I walked away, my head high and my hips swaying like Marilyn’s in Some Like It Hot. I’d watched that movie at least fifty times before I’d got the walk down pat, and the least I deserved was a little appreciation for my efforts.
I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin. Well, I was going to make the journey back to the shop count—rude man or no rude man. There was plenty of traffic passing by to serve as an audience. I placed one red patent stiletto in front of the other and began to walk.
I nipped round the corner into Church Street and then across the busy junction into Nelson Street. However, not even the sight its neat row of cream Georgian buildings lifted my mood this evening. Normally when I passed each shop or boutique I’d smile and wave at the owner as I counted down the door numbers with growing excitement.
On the corner was the all-organic coffee shop—closed now, but mid-morning packed with Yummy Mummies who cluttered the floor space with their high-tech pushchairs and the air with discussions on the merits of the local private nurseries. Next was the second-hand bookshop that did a roaring trade in textbooks for the students at the nearby university campus. After that was Susie’s—a bakery that specialised entirely in cupcakes. The window was full of frosted and glittering towers of different flavoured cakes, delicious-looking enough to cause even the most dedicated dieter to stop and lick her lips. Then there was a Thai restaurant, a newsagent’s, and a shop called Petal that sold just about anything as long as it was pink.
Finally, next door to that, two doors down from the end of the eclectic row, was my shop—Coreen’s Closet—a vintage clothing emporium to rival the best in London.
I was in an even worse mood by the time I pushed the shop door open and flipped the sign to ‘Closed’.
Not a single honk or whistle as I’d made my journey! Another first. I didn’t want to give my recent doubts credit, but this didn’t bode well.
‘What’s got you in a snit?’ Alice said as I plonked her decaff latte on the counter. My business partner was one of those ethereal-looking types—flame-red hair, pale skin, willowy figure. Well, not so willowy at present. She was seven months pregnant, and being such a slip of a thing there was only one way that baby bump could go—outwards. She looked as if, python-like, she’d swallowed my classic VW Beetle for breakfast.
I prised the plastic lid off my mochaccino and blew on it. ‘There’s something wrong with the male population of London today.’
Alice chuckled. She knew me too well.
Despite my best attempts to pout, the corner of my mouth curled up. I took a sip of my coffee, then smiled back at her. She was leaning on the counter for support, circling her swollen ankles.
‘Crikey, Alice! You look dead on your feet.’
She gave me a hooded look. ‘Gee, thanks.’
I put my cup on the counter and trotted off into the back room. When I returned I presented Alice with her umbrella and handbag. ‘You need to get home. Call Cameron. I can manage the stock-take on my own.’
She started to protest, but I wouldn’t allow it. I fished her mobile out of her bag, pressed the button for her husband’s speed-dial and then handed her the phone when I heard it ringing at the other end. Within fifteen minutes her adorably protective husband had picked her up and taken her home to run her a bath, fuss over her, and generally indulge her every hormone-induced whim.
That’s what men are for, really, aren’t they?
Oh, I didn’t mean hormones and morning sickness! I’m not ready for that yet. Not by a long shot. The whim-catering bit? That I’m all for.
Once the door was locked behind Alice, I marched into the office at the back, grabbed my purple glittery clipboard and set to work. It wasn’t usually a chore. I loved my little treasure trove of vintage clothes and accessories. Some days I thought it was a tragedy to unlock the shop door and let other people leave with the fabulousness that I amass in my limited square footage. But a girl’s gotta keep herself in lipstick and stockings somehow.
I worked my way through the clothing racks as the weather-induced twilight deepened outside. Every now and then a group of students trailed past the shop window, off into the town centre in search of cheap food and even cheaper beer, but other than that the street was deserted. The fashionable bistros and wine bars would start to hum in an hour or so, but until then there was no one walking by to marvel at how the beaded handbags and evening gowns in my window display gathered the light from the rear of the shop and threw it back into the street in multi-coloured droplets.
I sat down on the varnished floorboards between the heaving clothing rails, the skirt of my red-and-white polka-dot dress spreading around me in a perfect circle, and pushed away a stray dark hair that had worked its way out of my neat quiff. Shoes were next, and I started checking the pairs on a low rack off my list.
I grabbed a pair of silver platform boots and checked the size and condition. I might have been tempted to adopt them, but although I do dress that way for fun sometimes, really I’m a Fifties girl at heart.
By today’s size-zero culture my figure’s considered too full…too lacking in visibly defined muscle…too pale with not even a hint of spray-on tan. My curves belong to another time—a time when red-lipped sirens winked saucily from the side of aeroplanes, when the perfect shape for a woman was considered to be an hourglass, not an emery board, for goodness’ sake.
Unwisely, I’d tucked one leg underneath myself, and it didn’t take long before it went to sleep. I unhooked it and shook it around. In the quiet shop my net petticoat rustled, drowning out the sound of the rain that had just begun peppering the large plate-glass window.
I put the boots back on the rack, leaving the sparkly purple clipboard and pen on the floor beside me untouched, and picked up a darling evening shoe with a starched bow on the toe. For some reason I just stared at it. Not that it wasn’t stare-worthy, but I was staring without really seeing. And then I realised I hadn’t ticked the silver boots off my list, so I dropped the shoe into my lap and picked up my pen.
I sighed. I wasn’t getting the usual joy this evening from the velvet and satin, from the whisper-soft silk lingerie. What was wrong with me? I’d achieved everything I’d worked for in the last few years. No more standing around draughty market stalls, stamping my feet and cursing the English weather. Coreen’s Closet was bricks and mortar now and, thanks to a rather successful joint venture with Alice’s husband, we were the happening new vintage shop in south London.
As well as the faithful customers who’d followed me from the market stall, I’d managed to attract some of the hot young socialites who thought vintage was cooler than cool, and who’d pay vast amounts for anything by a classic designer. I’d got the best of both worlds, really. Everything I’d planned and scrimped and saved for. So why wasn’t I lindy-hopping round my clothes racks, whooping as I went, instead of sitting on the floor counting the same pair of boots over and over again?
Maybe it was because I usually did this job with Alice. It was kind of quiet in here without her. I missed the gossip and the shared thrill of finding some fabulous skirt or blouse we’d forgotten about, squished amongst the other clothes. But Alice’s absence tonight was just a symptom of another disturbing change in my life.
I once used to be the centre of a large gang of single gals, all footloose and fancy-free, but I was the odd one out now. They were all paired up, more interested in painting nurseries than painting the town red. It could make a girl feel, well…lonely. Left behind. And that was a state I was definitely not comfortable with. I’d seen what Left Behind did to a person.
I wasn’t jealous, though. Really I wasn’t.
I tested myself. I imagined owning a little redbrick house and coming home to the same face every evening, cooking the dinner, paying the bills… No. It didn’t appeal. It was too staid. Too ordinary. People stagnated like that, and there was only one of two ways it could end: either they both numbed themselves to the dreariness and put up with each other, or one morning one of them woke up to discover the other side of the bed permanently empty, a note of dubious apology on the mantel, and a piece of themselves missing, accidentally packed in haste by the departed one, along with the wrong toothbrush and a stray sock.
So, no. I wasn’t jealous. Not in the slightest.
That sounded really snobby, didn’t it? As if I was belittling what my friends had found. But it wasn’t like that. I just wanted…
I didn’t really know what I wanted. I couldn’t identify what the nagging little ache inside me was, but every time it made itself known it reminded me of going into my favourite coffee shop, ravenous and ready to devour something sweet, only to look in the display case stuffed full of pastries and cakes and realise that nothing would hit the spot. It was all very unsettling.
I looked down at my chest, impressively showcased in the sweetheart neckline of my dress. My curves had arrived early in my life, and it hadn’t taken long to cotton on to the fact that men were simple creatures: easily brought to a drooling standstill with the right kind of encouragement. An ample chest and a well-timed pout can get a girl just about anything she wants.
However, I was starting to think I was losing my touch, and the events of this evening had only served to deepen my fears on that front. Because the truth was…there was one man who seemed to be immune to me, even though I’d given him every bit of my best encouragement.
I sighed and stared at the silver boots. The box beside their description on my list remained empty. Tickless.
The stupid stray bit of hair was back again, tickling my cheek and generally mocking me. I shook it out of the way and somehow that small gesture brought me back to reality.
I was being daft. There was nothing wrong with me. Just this morning a man walking behind me had spilled hot coffee over himself as I’d bent down to open the shutter over the front door. That didn’t sound like I was losing my mojo, now, did it?
I grabbed my clipboard, marked the boots off my list and added a little comment about the heel height, and then I got that pesky hair and shoved it under one of my hairgrips, pinning it away and out of sight with the rest of my maudlin thoughts.
I was halfway through my inventory of hats and hair accessories when a tapping on the window magnified, becoming more insistent. At first I hardly registered it, thinking somewhere in the back of my head that it was just the rain, but eventually I realised that even London rain couldn’t be that persistent.
I ignored it anyway. Honestly! It was after seven. The ‘Closed’ sign on the door wasn’t just a hint, you know. But, knowing our internet, everything-at-a-click generation, even that wouldn’t be enough for some would-be customers.
I stood up, brushed my skirt down and prepared myself to make Clear off! and I have a life too! hand gestures. While I understood the obsessive nature of some of my customers—and, to be honest, I shared it a little—not having exactly the right pair of loafers for their Swing Dance class that evening could hardly be considered a 999 emergency.
I minimised my wiggle as I walked to the shop door, hands on hips. This was one time when encouragement would only make things worse.
Over the top of the large ‘Closed’ sign I could see a pair of eyes and a scruffy brown haircut, but it was hard to make out who it was, because he was shielding his eyes with his hand in an attempt to see further into the shop. Great. One of my love-lorn swains—as my friend Jennie calls them—might just have gone all stalkerish on me again.
But then he spotted me walking towards him and pulled his hand away from his eyes and stepped back. Even in the gloom of the false twilight I could make out his broad smile. I could even see the dimples half-hidden by his light stubble.
‘Adam!’ I yelled, and rushed to unbolt the door.
And Adam it was, standing there in the rain with his eyes aglow and a bulging white carrier bag hanging off one of his outstretched arms.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said as I flung myself at him and dragged him inside. ‘I thought you were in the depths of the jungle somewhere!’
‘I was,’ he said, disentangling himself from me, all the while guarding the plain white carrier bag carefully. ‘But now I’m back.’
The smile grew in devilish wattage, reaching its peak in his deep brown eyes. This was the smile that had half my single girlfriends begging me to set them up with him. The other half just fanned themselves down and muttered things like ‘molten chocolate’ and ‘come to Mama’ under their breaths.
Of course I never did get around to setting any of my friends up with Adam. Not that I’m not a good friend, but the situation had the potential to become far too complicated. More than one girl had accused me of being a tad territorial when it came to Adam, but really it was nothing more than good old-fashioned self-preservation—really it was.
I led Adam through to the small back office of Coreen’s Closet. Now he was inside, delicious wafts of warm spice accompanied him.
‘You’ve brought Chinese food!’
He nodded, and dumped the bag in the middle of the desk. ‘I phoned Alice when I couldn’t reach you at home and she told me you were here, stock-taking. I thought you’d probably be famished by now.’
Adam Conrad is one of my favourite people in the whole world. And not just because he has some weird kind of built-in radar which means he turns up with takeaway at the moment I need it the most. Even weirder—it’s always the right kind of takeaway too. He never brings Indian when I’m in the mood for a pizza, or kebabs when I’m craving Thai. I wonder how he does it? It’s a gift. Truly it is.
Adam’s eyes widened as I pulled a garish pink wicker basket down from a shelf.
‘Excess stock from the shop next door,’ I explained as I undid the leather buckles and opened the lid to reveal a perfectly pink picnic set. ‘Daisies or roses?’ I said, indicating the patterned plates. Adam wrinkled his nose. The smile hadn’t completely left his face ever since he’d spotted me marching towards him through the shop door, but now it creased into a grimace before popping back into place. Sometimes I swear his face must be made of elastic. It isn’t natural to smile that much.
‘Can’t I just eat out of the carton?’ he asked hopefully.
I shook my head, and he flopped down on the ancient chintz sofa on the other side of our staffroom-slash-office. He held a hand over his eyes in mock despair. ‘You choose. Whichever one you think will dilute my pure masculine appeal the least.’
I snorted. ‘I’m giving you daisies,’ I said, with a wicked glint in my eye.
He just raised his eyebrows a little and smiled even harder. That’s the thing with Adam—he’s impossible to annoy. No matter how OTT I get, he’s always his same laid-back, unruffled self. I used to find it annoying that I couldn’t light his fuse—and, believe me, I spent a few years trying very hard to do just that—but nowadays I’m just grateful for his happy-go-lucky nature. I suppose I’m what some people would call ‘high-maintenance’, and in my quieter moments I know that a friend who’ll put up with me twenty-four-seven is a gift from on high.
We dished out copious amounts of food with pink spoons and started to eat it with pink forks, filling each other in on news of the last month or two. We didn’t usually have such a long gap between seeing each other, but he’d been away on business. More like a boys’ adventure holiday paid for on the company credit card, I thought. I mean, who can claim climbing up trees and messing about with bits of rope and wood a legitimate business expense? Adam does it. And he even fills in his tax form with a straight face.
‘Are you all right?’
I looked up. My fork was lying on my plate, a king prawn still speared on it. I didn’t remember putting it down. ‘I’m fine.’
Adam frowned slightly. ‘It’s just…you’ve been unusually quiet. For you. I’ve been managing to speak in whole sentences without being interrupted. It’s very unnerving. And you keep sighing.’
‘Do I?’ Even to my own ears my voice sounded far-off and a little dazed. I decided to deflect him a little. I wasn’t ready to talk with Adam about what was bugging me.
‘Nan said something to me the other day…’ I picked up my pink fork and doused the prawn on the end in sauce. ‘She told me she thought my biological clock was ticking.’
Adam reacted just as I’d hoped he would. He erupted into fits of laughter.
I crossed my arms. ‘Well, it’s nonsense,’ I said, feigning irritation quite passably and hoping Adam would take my rather distracting bait. ‘Even if I had a clock—which I very much doubt—I can’t hear it, and surely I’m the one who counts in this scenario?’
Adam grabbed the paper bag of sweet-and-sour pork balls off the desk and delved inside. ‘That’ll be the ear muffs,’ he muttered, without looking up. I think he was counting the pork balls to see how many he could filch without me noticing.
I frowned and scanned the office. What on earth was he talking about? I should have been grateful, I supposed. At least it had got him off the subject of my sudden attack of glumness.
And then I spotted some—in a torn cardboard box under the desk, which was full of winter stock I hadn’t cleared away properly yet. I reached forward and hooked them with my finger. ‘What? These ear muffs?’ I asked, holding a fetching baby-blue pair aloft.
Adam looked up, his mouth halfway round a crisp golden ball of batter. He bit into it and chewed slowly, not in the least perturbed by the hurry-up-and-spit-it-out vibes I was sending him. He licked his lips. ‘Not exactly,’ he said, keeping eye contact with me, but dipping his hand into the paper bag again. ‘I was talking more about your metaphorical ear muffs—the ones you wear to stop you hearing anything you don’t want to.’
My fingers tightened around the plastic band joining the two balls of fur together.
Adam just gave me a lazy smile. ‘I believe there’s a matching pair of polka-dotted blinkers too. Silk-lined, of course…’
He had to break off to duck out of the way of a flying pair of ear muffs. I quickly leaned forward and swiped a pork ball out of the bag with my free hand before he could stop me.
After a few seconds he narrowed his eyes. I thought he was reacting to my food-stealing counter-attack, but it turned out it was much worse.
‘Just because you can’t hear it, it doesn’t mean the clock isn’t there…that it isn’t ticking…’ he said.
I’d talked myself into a corner, hadn’t I? Time to end this stupid discussion once and for all. ‘Nan was wrong. My biological clock is not ticking,’ I said emphatically.
‘So you say…’ Adam just smiled serenely at me, and then picked up the ear muffs, which had landed just beside the sofa, and jammed them on his head.
I tried to tell him just how wrong he was about this, about all the reasons why I was still the same never-be-boxed-in, never-get-boring-and-predictable Coreen he’d always known, but he just kept nodding and smiling and mouthing, ‘I can’t hear you!’ while pointing to the ear muffs. I was sorely tempted to rip them off his head and ram them down his throat, but there’s no excuse for ruining perfectly good stock, so I nicked his chow mein instead. That’d teach him.
Eventually he pulled the ear muffs off his head and threw them back to me. The impish grin flattened out slightly. ‘Nah. I’m not buying it,’ he said. ‘Something’s up with you, and it’s got nothing to do with ticking clocks.’
I kept my focus on my plate and said nothing.
There was a deceptive carelessness in Adams’s voice when he tried again. ‘If it was anyone else I’d think it was man trouble. But I have it on good authority that there are men all over London who love nothing better than to follow you ’round like adoring puppies and scramble over each other to do your bidding every time you snap your fingers.’
I gave Adam what I hoped was a withering look. ‘Good authority?’
I’d hate to think where he got his information about me. Probably some jealous girl running me down. I get that a lot. ‘You, actually. You very proudly announced that to me…oh…about two years ago. That night Dodgy Dave’s van broke down on the way back from one of those vintage fashion shows you do, and we had to wait hours for the tow truck to turn up.’ Okay, that did sound a bit like the sort of thing I’d say when in a particularly full-of-my-own-praises mood, which I might well have been after a successful fashion show. I just hadn’t expected Adam to recite it back to me verbatim a whole two years later.
It was true, though. All I had to do was click my crimson-tipped fingers and a whole herd of ‘puppies’ came running. It was most satisfying. Sometimes I did it just for the joy of seeing all those eager little faces, not because I actually needed anything.
Adam lounged back on the sofa, resting his head in his hands, his elbows out wide, and gave me a searching look, with a glimmer in his eye that was part amusement, part wariness.
‘What?’ I asked crossly.
I should have stopped there, not risen to the bait, but I’m far too nosy to do something so virtuous.
I folded my arms across my chest. ‘Don’t just sit there staring at me!’
‘It’s all become very clear to me…’ he said quietly.
I had the horrible feeling he’d found me out, that he knew exactly what the problem was, but instead of teasing me about it, as I’d have expected him to do, he turned horribly serious. For once, I actually wanted him to laugh at me. I wanted him to try to suppress that wicked smile and deliberately drag his answer out, making me tap the heel of my red stiletto impatiently on the floor. But he didn’t make me wait at all. Didn’t tease me one bit. He just let me have it.
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding in silent agreement with himself, his expression hardening further. ‘You’ve finally encountered a puppy who doesn’t want to clamber over the elaborate assault course you’ve laid out for him.’
CHAPTER TWO
Put Your Head On My Shoulder
Coreen’s Confessions
No. 2—You’d have thought I’d have got bored with the effect I have on men by now, but I have to say it’s still as fun as it ever it was. The day it gets old, I might as well put on a pair of velour jogging bottoms and let myself go.
ADAM stared at the ceiling, his expression still grim. ‘Now you know what it’s like for the rest of us mere mortals.’ And then he started to laugh, shaking his head.
Normally Adam’s laugh makes me feel warm inside, but this time it sounded dry and hollow and made me all jittery and bad-tempered. I decided he was just being superior and glared at him. ‘Look, I don’t need you to start being all…avuncular with me—’
He just started laughing again. Properly this time.
‘What?’ I said, and my voice went all high and scratchy. ‘It’s a real word!’
I stood up. There was I, practically rigid with tension, and Adam had the audacity to sink even further into the couch, not bothered in the slightest that he was winding me up as far as I would go. I really shouldn’t let him do it, but we often start what seems to be a normal conversation and before long one of us is seething and the other is chortling. And it doesn’t take a massive IQ to work out which one is which.
‘You’re totally wrong, anyway,’ I told him as I sat back down and picked up my fork. I was not going to give him the satisfaction of agreeing with him today.
Anyway, nobody could call Nicholas Chatterton-Jones a puppy. He was sleek and dignified, like one of those lean hunting dogs, the ones with silky grey coats and bloodlines going back generations.
I sighed. Just thinking his name made me melt a little bit. He was the sort of man every girl dreamed of—rich, handsome, debonair. And I was suffering from unrequited something for him. Not sure about the ‘L’ word. That seemed a bit dramatic. But if the symptoms were daydreaming incessantly about him and looking him up on Google on an hourly basis, I thought I was probably halfway there.
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘What?’ I hadn’t been doing anything!
But then I realised my ribcage was deflating with the memory of a sigh. I jabbed the captive prawn in Adam’s direction. ‘Just leave it, will you? It’s none of your business.’
I bit the prawn off the fork and glowered at him.
Adam wasn’t a puppy either; he was a mongrel. Fully grown. Shaggy and adorable, true, but he’d probably give you fleas if you got close enough.
And he’d hit a nerve with his stupid comment.
Nicholas’s sister, Isabella—or Izzi, as she insisted being called—was one of the bright young socialites who’d decided that Coreen’s Closet was the Next Big Thing, and she shopped here all the time. She’d left university a few years ago and was still trying to decide what she wanted to do next, which left her plenty of time to lunch and party and go to spas while she told her parents she was chewing over her options. Izzi Chatterton-Jones had a heaving social calendar, and she was always needing a new frock for something or other. And now she was sending her friends along to Coreen’s Closet too. It was fabulous for business, and Izzi and I had struck up a friendship. Of sorts. We were more than mere acquaintances, but weren’t quite at the full-fledged gal pal stage.
But it did mean that Izzi, after being blown away by a vintage cocktail dress I’d found for her in emerald and jet shot silk, had invited me to a couple of her legendary parties, and that was where I’d first clapped eyes on Nicholas.
Just thinking his name caused all the air to leave my body in a breathy rush.
He was tall—well over six foot—had raven-black hair, and cheekbones to make a girl weep. Like a tall Johnny Depp, minus the Cockney pirate accent. No, when Nicholas talked it was all crisp syllables and long words. I could listen to him all day. In the secrecy of my bedroom I’d tried to mimic that tone, that voice, but I’d been born and bred in south London and my vowels just wouldn’t do whatever his did to make them so smooth and perfect.
He lived in a different world. One I’d decided I belonged in. Right from an early age I’d always dressed as if I was born for a life of beauty and glamour, and it was high time I stopped merely dreaming about it and acquired the lifestyle to match.
And if I ever was going to contemplate a long-term relationship, it couldn’t be with just anyone. I needed a man who’d worship me, yes, but someone who was dashing and exciting too. Someone I could look up to. Someone I wouldn’t get bored with. He’d have to be the man of my dreams, in short, and I thought Nicholas was a pretty good candidate.
We’d met on three occasions now. The first couple of times I’d played it cool. I’d glided around the room, looking aloof and elegant, so he could admire me from afar and ask Izzi who that stunning brunette was. Then last weekend I’d decided it was time to make my move.
I heard a crinkling noise and realised Adam had procured the pork balls again without me noticing. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he just sat there, one hand behind his head, smirking at me as he stole the rest of my share.
Hmph. He seemed to have bounced back to his old self annoyingly quickly.
Okay, so maybe there were two men in the known universe who weren’t inclined to fall at my feet and worship.
But Adam didn’t count. I’d known him since I was eight and he was twelve, and his mother had played badminton with my nan. I leaned forward and snatched the paper bag of pork balls from him before he emptied it, ignoring his grunt of displeasure. Then I picked a warm juicy ball of batter out of the bag—the last one!—and dipped it in the accompanying pot of sauce, before sucking a little bit of the bright orange liquid off and biting into it. Adam, however, didn’t notice, because he had moved on to the sesame prawn toast.
See? Immune.
My lips are my second most frequently stared at body part. They have an almost mesmerising effect on most of the male species. Something I capitalise on, of course. I always paint them red, for maximum visibility and effect. Not that trashy orangey-red. Crimson. The colour of passion and blood. Like the movie queens of old. I’d even seen men dribble watching me eat, and it wasn’t the food they’d been gawping at.
But Adam was unimpressed.
Well, maybe not unimpressed. He was my best friend in the whole universe, so that sounded a little harsh. Maybe unaffected was a better word. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that he’d known me before I’d discovered my inner vixen, when I’d been flat-chested, with no waist to speak of. I suppose I ought to have been annoyed about his lack of puppyish adoration, but I wasn’t. Although we didn’t manage to see each other nowadays as much as we used to he was still my Best Bud. And every girl needs a Best Bud.
He’d been the one to chase away the bullies who’d teased me because I’d lived with my nan growing up. He’d been the one I’d cried on when my favourite boy band had split up, and again when, aged fifteen, I’d cut my own fringe too short by accident. He was the first person I’d phoned the day Alice and I had got the keys to our new shop, and he’d rushed round with a bottle of champagne and all three of us had sat cross-legged on the floor of what would soon be Coreen’s Closet and toasted each other with paper cups. Adam was my cheerleader and my big brother and my minder all rolled into one, and I suppose I could forgive him his lack of puppyishness for that.
However, thinking about puppies had me dreaming about Nicholas again, and the warm glow I’d generated with my Best Bud thoughts frosted over.
Why didn’t he like me? Why?
Last Saturday night had been my latest attempt to catch his eye. I’d gone all out, wearing a strapless red dress that matched my lips and was usually every bit as effective at making men drool. Nicholas had looked straight through me. And when I’d casually joined the group of people he’d been talking to, and had given him my patented eyelash sweep, he hadn’t even stuttered. What was wrong with the man?
Normally, just five minutes of concentrated Coreen had a bloke eating out of the palm of my hand. I just didn’t get it. What was I doing wrong? It was driving me crazy.
I could probably have coped with the blow to my ego if he wasn’t so gorgeous and so blinking perfect. Adam would say it served me right, but that wasn’t fair. Nobody deserved to be this miserable. And I’d felt this way for three whole weeks now. If something didn’t happen to change Nicholas’s mind soon, I’d be ready for those velour jogging bottoms after all!
‘So…’
Adam leaned forward and offered me a conciliatory prawn toast from the foil container he’d had resting on his knee, catching my gaze with his. I ignored the prawn toast and concentrated on those warm brown eyes.
‘Who’s this paragon of manliness that’s got you all tied up in knots?
I recognised the way Adam was looking at me. He was trying to appear all relaxed and jokey, but there was a glint of seriousness at the back of his eyes. Probably worried about me. That was the minder-slash-big-brother side of him coming out. But maybe that was a good thing. Adam’s shoulders, while possibly not as broad and honed as Nicholas’s, were perfect for crying on.
The only problem was, at present Adam didn’t look much as if he wanted to mop up my tears with his shirt. His expression was guarded again, and his flinty eyes felt as if they were boring holes into my forehead. I didn’t have any sassy comebacks left; my store of outrageous comments was worryingly empty. So I just looked back at him with blinking eyes, as close to begging as I ever came.
Adam’s eyes didn’t exactly soften and melt, but he stood up and rubbed my arm. ‘He’s an idiot, whoever he is,’ he said gruffly.
Then he took my hand and led me to the sofa. He even let me sit on the side where the springs weren’t so dodgy. Once I had arranged my skirt and petticoat carefully, he dropped onto the other side and looked at me.
I sighed, and it was long and heartfelt. There was no point trying to hide it now. ‘The idiot in question is Nicholas Chatterton-Jones. He’s the brother of one of my best customers.’
Adam frowned. ‘Chatterton-Jones? Isn’t he…? Doesn’t he own that investment company? Eagle something or other?’
‘That’s him.’ I could feel myself sinking even deeper into the sofa, but it wasn’t a relaxing kind of feeling. It was as if all the energy was leaching right out of me.
He whistled. ‘He’s the one that almost played rugby for England, but an injury stopped him.’
I just wilted a little further, my head bobbing in agreement. I knew every date and event of Nicholas’s personal history, and quite a lot about the previous three generations of the Chatterton-Jones family. Sometimes an internet connection can be a girl’s worst enemy.
I looked at Adam and took a deep breath. We both knew the game we were about to play. We always did this for each other when one of us was down. Friend A would relay the issue of contention, while Friend B nodded in all the right places and supplied suitably supportive comments, even if those comments were either a) outrageously optimistic or b) patent falsehoods.
‘He’s just not attracted to me in the slightest,’ I said mournfully.
Adam shook his head. ‘What? The guy must be blind!’ He was grinning as he said this, and the cold feeling that had been churning my stomach began to disappear. The truth was that Adam was much better at being Friend B than I was. He always knew exactly the right thing to say to cheer me up, and he always said it with that slightly devilish look in his eye—a sure-fire way to get me to smile. But behind the cheeky look I knew he was also a little bit serious, that despite the jovial nature of our banter he believed in me.
Told you he was my Best Bud.
‘It gets worse,’ I added, almost starting to enjoy moaning about my spectacular flirting flop of the previous Saturday. ‘I made a complete fool of myself.’
‘Now, I find that very hard to believe.’ The sarcastic sparkle in Adam’s eyes made me want to hit him. It also made me want to laugh.
We carried on like that for quite some time. Me relaying a blow-by-blow account of the party and Adam commiserating and commenting with precision and great comic timing. Only the momentary lift from Adam’s sideswipes didn’t improve my mood this time. The more I talked, the more morose I felt. Even Adam seemed to wince slightly with each mortifying detail, and I could tell he was struggling to keep his Friend B smile in place. We both fell quiet, knowing that we were losing our game, not sure that carrying on would salvage anything.
He gave me a softer, less Adam-like smile, and I leaned across and rested my head on his shoulder. It really was a lovely shoulder. Warm. Comforting. Solid. I wanted to believe things were going to work out right, but in my heart of hearts I just wasn’t sure. It might sound big-headed, but being invisible to a man was a new experience for me. I didn’t like the way it brought back flickers of other memories of being passed over, being invisible. Old memories, ones I’d done everything in my power to erase.
‘What am I doing wrong?’ I whispered. Adam was a man. I know he wasn’t the same type of guy as Nicholas, but he had to have some kind of insight. They must have more in common than just shared biology.
That was it! That was the thing both Adam and Nicholas had in common.
I sat up and looked at Adam. ‘Why don’t you find me attractive?’
If I could work that one out, maybe I could find a way to reach Nicholas after all.
Adam looked stunned. I suppose it wasn’t that surprising. We didn’t ever really talk about the fact that he was a boy and I was a girl. I knew he’d rather veer away from this topic of conversation, but I batted my lashes and gave him a look that said Please…
He chewed the inside of his mouth for a few moments. ‘I’ve never said I don’t find you attractive, Coreen. A guy would have to be unconscious not to find you attractive.’
Well, now it was my turn to be stunned.
Adam gave a one-shouldered shrug. His lazy demeanour had returned and he didn’t look at all bothered by what he’d just said.
‘Then why haven’t you…? Why have we never…?’
‘Hooked up?’ he suggested.
I pulled a face. That sounded kind of tacky. Adam wasn’t the sort of guy you ‘hooked up’ with. He was keeper material. And I didn’t like the thought of anyone treating him in such a…disposable manner.
‘See? That face you just made is one of many reasons why.’
I shook my head. He was taking it all the wrong way. The face I’d pulled didn’t mean—
‘And I’ve seen the way you treat men, remember? I’ve never jumped through hoops for you and I never will.’
I gasped. There had never been any hoops! Well…not for Adam.
He read my mind and fixed me with a knowing stare. ‘How did it go? Oh, yes. I remember…’ He did a rather good impression of my eyelash sweep and added an earthy, softer tone to his voice. If I hadn’t been so horrified I might have admitted it sounded quite a lot like me. “Adam, sweetie, would you mind coming along with me to a party this evening? I know it’s short notice, but I could really do with some moral support.”’
And then he flicked some pretend hair away from his shoulder, and I forgot to be horrified and descended into giggles. Adam, strangely enough, wasn’t laughing so hard.
‘When we got to said party I realised my role was more stooge than moral support.’
I stopped laughing. ‘That’s not true!’
He raised his eyebrows at me.
I opened my mouth to protest, but thought better of it. I’d buried that memory—along with a whole host of others from those days—quite effectively until that moment. It all came back to me with searing clarity: Adam’s face, his jaw set. The way he’d stormed from the party. They weren’t moments in my life I wanted to be reminded of.
I bit my lip. Something I hoped would show my contrition. Although—and I honestly did out of sheer habit this time—I knew it made me look very appealing too.
‘That was a long time ago. Back when we were teenagers. Teenagers do lots of stupid things.’
‘Like kissing their best friend in front of the whole room when the current Romeo is being a slightly harder nut to crack?’
Oh, hell. I’d actually done that too, hadn’t I? Not that I’d planned it, though. I’d just got carried away in the heat of the moment.
Adam hadn’t spoken to me for a month after Sharon’s party, even though I’d wheedled and whined and pulled every trick in the book to get him to forgive me. In the end I’d just turned up on his doorstep one day—no tricks up my sleeve, not even any make-up on—and begged him to give me another chance, to say we could be friends again. There’d been a huge Adam-shaped hole in my life. One I hadn’t cared for very much. One I hadn’t thought I could go on living with. Its presence had nibbled away at my very soul.
Adam had forgiven me. Eventually. But since then we’d both tacitly agreed to ignore the boy-girl element to our relationship, and I must have done a pretty good job of it if I’d managed to forget how atrociously I’d behaved.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m such a horrible person. No wonder Nicholas Chatterton-Jones wants nothing to do with me.’ And this time I wasn’t even angling for a compliment. I really meant it.
Adam pulled me close again and let out a long breath. ‘Don’t be silly. You’re fabulous. You know you are. It’s just that I realised that you won’t let the men in your life be anything but “puppies”, and I’m the sort that refuses to wear a collar and lead for anyone—not even you. So for that reason, and probably a few more, I decided we work better as friends.’ And then he kissed the top of my head.
One corner of my mouth tried to smile.
Adam carried on talking, and I could feel his warm breath in my hair. ‘I have to warn you…well…I’m sorry to say I don’t think you stand a chance with this one. You’d better find yourself a different puppy to train.’
Sorry? He didn’t sound sorry in the slightest.
I sat up and looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
He hesitated, and I half hoped he would drop it. Adam and I didn’t have conversations like this. But then, instead of looking down at his battered old trainers, he looked me straight in the eye. I held my breath. Just a little.
‘Guys like Chatterton-Whatsit… Well, sometime less is more. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘You think I’m too…?’ I trailed off, not quite sure how to label myself.
‘Maybe.’
I frowned. ‘But that’s who I am! Nicholas Chatterton-Jones might be a god, but I’m not changing myself for anybody.’
Adam looked rather weary. He shook his head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just that there’s a girl underneath all of—’ he waved his hand to encompass the hairspray, the lipstick, the polka dots ‘—this. Just don’t forget that.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course I brushed the hairspray out and took the lipstick off at night. I knew what I looked like without all of it. It was just that all of this, as Adam had so articulately put it, was how I felt on the inside. I only dressed the outside up to match.
I scowled at him. It felt as if he was criticising me, and I didn’t care for it much.
‘What makes you such an expert at relationships?’ I said sulkily, folding my arms and shifting back to rest against the opposite end of the sofa. ‘You haven’t had a serious girlfriend since Hannah, and that was a good couple of years ago.’
Adam matched my position, folding his arms across his shirt. ‘I’ve been working hard on building the business up. I haven’t had time for relationships. Unlike some people I know, I don’t think it’s fair to toy with people and then drop them when it suits me.’
See? This was why we should have never veered into to this territory. It was all getting horribly messy, and the lovely, smiling, joking Adam I knew had totally disappeared. I suspected that I too was being less than my normal charming self, but I wasn’t about to back down, and I wasn’t about to let my Best Bud analyse me further.
‘You never did tell me why it all fizzled out with Hannah. Did she get fed up with you spending all your time mucking about in garden sheds?’
That was below the belt, I knew. But Adam’s role was to make me feel better, not kick me when I was down, so he’d kind of brought it on himself.
He looked away. ‘My heart just wasn’t in it. I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. And it wasn’t fair to Hannah to keep pretending.’
Blast, Adam! Just when I was all revved up for a cat fight, he had to go and get all honest on me and deflate my nice little bubble of adrenaline.
He looked back at me, an expression in his eyes I hadn’t seen many times before. ‘I hate it when you get like this about my job. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and I’ve been nothing but supportive of you.’
Urgh. I felt like an utter heel. He was right. I was taking cheap shots at my best friend just because some guy had had the nerve not to fall instantly at my feet. I was behaving despicably.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I would have gone on, but there was a lump as big as one of my paste brooches in my throat.
Adam put his hand on top of mine and squeezed. ‘Apology accepted. You’ve really got it bad for this Nicholas guy, haven’t you?’
He looked slightly pained, as if he was sharing my misery. I nodded, and my whole insides started to ache. I don’t normally do the crying thing. Who has the time when liquid liner and three coats of mascara are involved? But I’d got this stinging sensation right up at the top of my nose and I knew I was perilously close.
I didn’t know why I liked Nicholas so much. Apart from the obvious looks-like-a-Greek-god, has-piles-of-cash thing. It was more than that. I never usually let guys get to me this way. Adam was right. Normally I was the one pulling all the strings. But there was something about Nicholas that had called out to me right from the start. I had a feeling he might be the elusive cupcake that would assuage my nagging hunger and satisfy all my sweet-toothed desires.
The stinging got worse. I looked at my shoes. Beautiful red peep-toe creations. But even they made me sad, and I didn’t even really know why.
Maybe Nan was right. Maybe something was ticking inside me. I was almost thirty, after all. But, seeing as I was…well, me, I was obviously going for the full-fledged meltdown rather than the polite tick-tock in the background of my life. Nan always says I can’t do anything unless I make a production out of it.
Adam shuffled closer on the sofa, so his arm was touching mine. He leaned down to try and see into my eyes, and nudged me. ‘Coreen…?’
My bottom lip slid forward. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am too much for Nicholas Chatterton-Jones.’ I shrugged and tipped my head slightly to look at him. ‘It’s a moot point now, anyway. I found out a couple of days ago that Nicholas might be off the market soon. There are rumours about a possible new girlfriend.’
Adam gave me a lopsided smile. ‘That’s never stopped you before.’
I punched him on the arm. ‘That makes me sound awful! I’ve never actually stolen a man away from anyone. I can’t help it if they take one look at me and realise I’m the one they can’t live without.’
Adam pressed his lips together and nodded sagely. ‘That’s what I love about you—your matchless modesty.’
I punched him again. And then I smiled. How did he do that?
He put up his fists and nudged me on the shoulder with one of them. ‘So? Who’s this girlfriend? Do you think you can take her?’
I swatted his hand away, but he kept jabbing me gently on the upper arm, the way boxers did when they warmed up with one of those swinging punch bags.
‘I’m going to take you down in a minute, if you don’t cut that out!’ I said, laughing.
The devilish twinkle was back. ‘Promises, promises,’ he said.
‘It’s that awful Louisa Fanshawe,’ I said, not rising to the bait. And if we were talking fisticuffs, I probably could take her. She was another one of those willowy sorts who’d blow away in a stiff breeze. I wouldn’t risk breaking a nail on her, though, so she was safe on that count.
‘Oh, yes. I’ve heard how awful she is,’ Adam replied. ‘All that charity work…visiting sick children in hospital and campaigning for the homeless. It’s positively disgusting.’
I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. He was supposed to be on my side, so why was he practically bouncing up and down? What had he to be so happy about? I decided to direct my ire at the absent Louisa.
‘When she’s not swanning up and down a catwalk for some pretentious designer,’ I pointed out.
I thought about Louisa Fanshawe and her stick-like limbs and big doleful eyes. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but I’d allow for the fact she was striking—in that understated, slightly duck-faced way some high fashion models were. The women on Nicholas’s arm always looked frighteningly similar. Duck-faced and stick-thin was obviously his type.
I sighed again. Louisa was the less Adam had been talking about. I looked down at my chest. Less wasn’t something I had a lot of. I was doomed.
I was about to point this out to Adam, but when I looked up at him he was paying an inordinate amount of attention to the last of the prawn toasts. I think he felt me looking at him, because he offered me the foil tray. I shook my head. ‘You have it.’
He demolished it in one bite, and then turned to look me straight in the eyes. ‘Like I said…’ The seriousness there made my pulse kick. ‘The guy’s an idiot.’
I felt a smile start somewhere deep in my chest and work its way up to my mouth. ‘I love you, Best Bud,’ I said, and wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close.
For a long time he was silent and he just held me, soothing me with the rhythmic warmth of his breath on my neck. Then the inhaling and exhaling stopped. Seconds and seconds seemed to drag past before it started again, and when the next breath came there were words floating on it.
‘It’s hard not to,’ he whispered into my neck.
And then I hit him again.
CHAPTER THREE
The Very Thought of You
Coreen’s Confessions
No. 3—You’d think that someone as vain as I am would enjoy looking in the mirror, but sometimes I just can’t face it.
I CONTINUED to mope around for the next few days, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe Nan was right about something ticking inside me.
Of course I didn’t tell Nan that I might be on the verge of getting serious with someone when I visited her the following Sunday. She’d have had me up at the church to book a date so fast my head would’ve spun. Baby steps. Just thinking about being with one man for a considerable chunk of time was about as far as I wanted to go at present.
No, when I visited Nan we did what we always did—ate roast dinner, drank tea, and planed to watch an old black-and-white movie on the telly. After lunch I observed a further ritual. I went into the spare bedroom, opened the rickety wardrobe, and looked at all the dresses hanging there in their clear plastic covers.
They had been my mother’s. She’d died about ten years earlier, in a shabby little bed and breakfast in Blackpool, killed silently, invisibly and senselessly by a faulty boiler spurting carbon monoxide. And when she hadn’t turned up to go on stage that night at the club they’d just slotted another singer into the bill and carried on. It shouldn’t be that easy to replace someone, should it? People ought be remembered for their unique qualities, even if the choices they made in life weren’t ones you respected, or even understood.
As I did most weeks, I pulled out just one of Mum’s stage dresses and studied it more closely. This one was all shoulder pads and sequins, probably from around the time she’d met my dad. I could imagine Mum, her big Joan Collins-style hair stiff with half a can of hairspray, singing a soft rock ballad into a microphone, her eyes closed and her heart on her sleeve. She’d had a lovely voice. I had a few cassette tapes at home, but I didn’t play them much—too scared they’d warp or wear out.
Her voice had been rich and husky, able to catch every nuance of emotion in a song, whether she was belting it out or making the audience hang on every note. By rights she should have had more success than she did. And maybe she would have done if she’d put all the energy she’d wasted trailing round the country after my father into her career instead.
Despite my love of vintage, I never tried on these clothes. The eighties weren’t my thing, for a start. I knew the dresses would probably fit, but I didn’t want to look in the mirror and see my mother staring back at me. I didn’t want to see that same broken hopelessness in my eyes.
‘Go on—take them down to that shop of yours and get a few quid for them,’ Nan said from behind me.
I hadn’t heard her come in the room. I shook my head, carefully put the dress in its place on the rail and shut the wardrobe door. Nan gave me a sympathetic smile.
‘Cuppa? And that Dirk Bogarde film starts in a few minutes.’
I shook off the sadness that had collected like dust on my mother’s abandoned clothes and smiled back. ‘That would be perfect.’
I loved my Nan. I’d never seen her feathers ruffled, and for someone who’d produced two generations of drama queens she was as sensible and grounded as they came. I hadn’t minded living with her when I was a kid. There had always been cake and cuddles at Nan’s little terraced house. And Nan made everything seem warm and cosy. She never got that far-off look in her eyes that made you feel as if she was thinking of someone else, wanting to be somewhere else, while you tried to tell her about the gold star you’d got for your school project.
It had been easy to fall into the trap of believing I lived with Nan because Mum was always up and down the country, singing in clubs and pubs, or off on cruise ships. While there was a certain amount of truth in that, after her death I’d started to see another reason for her not giving up the club circuit and settling down. Leaving that life behind would have meant giving up hope—hope that she’d bump into Dad, hope that he’d fall in love with her all over again and come home. While she sat in a never-ending succession of grubby backstage changing rooms, putting her false eyelashes and sequins on, she could still deny the truth, pretend that day still might come, when really the dream had expired many years before.
But I didn’t like to think of Mum like that, sad and alone, pining for a man who would never love her the way she had loved him. I liked to remember the happy times. Like when she came home and stayed in the spare room at Nan’s. When I was really small I used to come over all shy at first. I’d be awed by the glamorous lady sitting on Nan’s old-fashioned brown sofa. But it hadn’t taken me long to get all loud and demanding, to be clambering all over her and tugging her to my bedroom to see my toys. I even used to make her hold my hand while I went to sleep.
My favourite memories of her were the times she’d let me dress up in her clothes. She’d even backcomb my hair and put silvery eyeshadow on me. And then I’d clump around the spare bedroom in her shoes, singing one of her songs, doing all the actions, and she’d fall back on the bed and laugh until she cried. My mum had a lovely laugh.
‘Custard Cream?’
I looked up to see Nan offering me a battered tartan tin that, back in 1973, had once contained Christmas shortbread. I’d been so lost in my memories that I’d followed her into the living room and sat down in an armchair on automatic. The titles of the film were staring to roll, so I nabbed a couple of biscuits, balanced them on the arm of the chair, and prepared myself to slip into a world where men were noble, women had impossible eyebrows, and violins expressed every emotion while the actors stayed stiff-lipped, clenching their fists. I quite liked the idea of standing motionless at a moment of crisis, all elegant and dramatic, while an orchestra swelled around me.
I looked down at my floral Capri pants and red suede ballet pumps. Not sure I’d like to live in black and white, though. I’m a Technicolor kind of gal, I suppose.
We were ten minutes into the film when my mobile rang. Nan tutted, but didn’t swerve her gaze from Dirk, looking all square-jawed and beautiful on the screen, so I picked up my cup of tea and walked into the kitchen to answer it. ‘Oh, God, sweetie! I’m so relieved it didn’t go to voicemail!’
I’d recognise those upper-class tones anywhere. Unlike her brother, whose rich voice was even and restrained, Izzi Chatterton-Jones had a dramatic delivery that made booking a table at her favourite restaurant sound as if it was a life-and-death event. If Izzi had been a character in a novel, her dialogue would have been riddled with italics.
‘Hi, Izzi. What can—?’
‘I’ve had the most fabulous idea, darling, and you’ve simply got to help me with it.’
Knowing Izzi, whatever she was planning would be probably be last minute and extremely stressful to say yes to. On the other hand she was bags of fun, and I might even get to see Nicholas again.
‘I’m going to host a country house party!’ Izzi squealed. ‘Mummy and Daddy are going to the South of France for the whole of July, and they’ve said I can borrow the house for an entire weekend. Isn’t that the most super idea ever?’
She paused, probably waiting for me to recover from swooning with excitement. Only I wasn’t. I couldn’t think of anything worse—mud, rain, horsey laughs, everyone dressed in drab tweeds and shooting anything that twitched? Count me out. I was eternally grateful that Nicholas seemed to spend most of his time in London, in his tall white house with black railings in Belgravia. Now, I wouldn’t object to spending a weekend there, given half the chance.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Izzi asked, a hint of impatience in her tone.
‘Super,’ I said, borrowing her vocabulary. None of the words I had in mind would have gone down well. ‘But what’s this got to do with me?’
‘It’s a murder-mystery weekend!’
Okay. I know that compared to the Chatterton-Joneses I’m merely a commoner, but did I really look like the kind of girl who knew how to do someone in? It must be the accent. Although mine was a lot softer than true Cockney, Izzi and her sort probably thought I knew the East End like the back of my hand and was distantly related to the Krays or descended from Jack the Ripper.
‘I…er…don’t think I’ve ever been on one of those,’ I said. ‘What’s involved?’
‘I want to do the whole caboodle—costumes and everything—and that’s where you come in!’
Oh, goody.
‘I can’t abide those fancy dress shop monstrosities,’ she added airily.
I stifled a giggle. The thought of Izzi in a padded Superman outfit, complete with six-pack and biceps, had sprung to my mind, and it made it very hard to listen properly.
‘…so if you can sort all of that out it would be fabulous.’
Huh? Oh, dear. I’d wandered off again. Thankfully I have a full range of phrases tucked away at the back of my head for such eventualities. Sounding very serious, I said, ‘Could you be more specific?’
Izzi launched into a long spiel about wanting authentic thirties clothes for her Agatha Christie-type murder-mystery weekend, and I swear if I had been a cartoon my eyeballs would have been spinning round in my head and dinging like cash registers. Daywear, eveningwear and accessories for eight people! And Izzi only likes the very best stuff. I didn’t care that I was missing Dirk smouldering on Nan’s ancient telly for this. If things went well in the next year or two I was thinking of opening another branch of Coreen’s Closet, somewhere closer to the West End, and Izzi’s connections would really speed things along.
‘It’s going to be such a hoot!’ Izzi said. ‘We’ve all got characters to play. I’ll e-mail you details of every part so you can start hunting for suitable clothes.’
‘What’s your budget?’
Izzi made a dismissive noise, as I’d suspected she would. ‘I care more about it being right than I do about the cost,’ she said, and then she giggled. ‘I have the most fabulous part for you!’
I raised my eyebrows. I’d been hoping she’d say I was on the guest list, but hadn’t wanted to assume. This could have just been a business transaction, after all. I grinned to myself.
Izzi started telling me about the different characters the organisers she’d hired had outlined to her—lords, ladies, parlour maids and debutantes. And then she started reeling off the guest list. When she said Nicholas’s name my heart started to skip.
‘I can’t wait,’ I said softly. I wasn’t just being excited for Izzi’s benefit now. I really meant it. This was my opportunity! I’d be able to relax and mingle with Nicholas outside of a hot, crowded cocktail party. I’d be able to dial things down a bit—just as Adam had suggested—and Nicholas would be able to see my relaxed, fun side. I could see it all so clearly: languid cocktails in the drawing room before dinner, fresh, misty country mornings…
Izzi developed a stern edge to her voice. ‘And I need you to bring a man!’
I’d been deep in a fantasy where Nicholas and I had been strolling though a secluded bluebell wood. I had stepped in a rabbit hole and twisted my ankle, and he’d swept me into his arms and carried me back to the house as if I weighed nothing. (This was a fantasy, after all.) I could almost smell his woody aftershave as I laid my head against his chest…
‘What?’ I said, a little too sharply.
‘It’s a dealbreaker if you can’t,’ Izzi said. ‘I’m desperate! Jonti broke his leg bungee jumping, and is stuck in New Zealand, and Jonathan refuses to miss some horrible cricket match. You’ve got to bring someone!’
The bluebells, the rabbit hole, the lovely feeling of being safe in Nicholas’s arms? They all disappeared into that mist I’d been daydreaming about. I was glad Izzi couldn’t see me, because I felt my eyebrows clench together and my jaw tense.
The last thing I wanted to do was bring a date on Izzi’s weekend! It would spoil everything. While Adam had pointed out that I hadn’t been above being seen with another man to spark a potential conquest’s interest in the past, I’d learned my lesson on that front, and I’d never get any time alone with Nicholas if I had a lovelorn swain lolloping around after me all weekend. Also, I didn’t want to encourage any of them needlessly. The only man I was interested in at the moment was Nicholas, and it wasn’t fair to give any other impression.
What was it that Adam had said about toying with people the other night? Hmm. I decided I must be maturing.
‘It’s a bit short notice,’ I muttered to Izzi, but she just laughed.
‘I can’t believe you haven’t got a hundred men ready to fall over themselves for a weekend with you. You’ll manage it somehow.’
I pouted. Sometimes having a reputation like mine was not a good thing. Not that I’m a floozy. I might get a lot of male attention—I might even enjoy it—but I do try not to encourage it unless I’m interested. And I’m actually quite picky about who I go out with. There have been far fewer men in my life than most people think.
Flip. What was I going to do? I really needed this weekend to be a success for me—in more ways than one. I supposed I could fob Izzi off, hoping she was just blowing hot air about it being a deal breaker, but what if she stood her ground if I called her bluff? And she just might. One of the reasons I liked Izzi was that she was unpredictable and prone to sudden whims, just like me. If I caught her in the wrong mood when I let it slip I would be coming alone, she might just pull the plug on me. It’s the sort of thing I might have done in her place.
And then an idea struck me. Beautiful in its simplicity—except for the fact the man in question would never go for it. But Izzi was right: I’d manage it somehow.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said cheerily. ‘I have the perfect guy in mind.’
‘Why do I have the horrible feeling there’s a catch involved?’ Adam asked me from the other end of the rowing boat. I couldn’t see him properly. We were under tall sycamores on one corner of the boating pond and I couldn’t make out his features because the aggressive June sun was behind him, causing me to squint. However, even though he was just one big, soft blur, I knew there was a twinkle in his eyes.
Adam’s twinkle is a really good sign. It usually means he wants to say yes to whatever I’m trying to get him to agree to, but is just having fun with me in the meantime.
I adjusted my parasol. ‘Why would there have to be a catch?’ I said sweetly.
‘Oh, I dunno…’ The oars swept out of the water and propelled us forward in an exhilarating little jerk. ‘Maybe because you invited me out for an afternoon stroll in Greenwich Park—rest and relaxation, you said—and I end up doing all the work while you sit there licking an ice cream cone.’
‘I said I’d get you one when our time is up,’ I replied. I couldn’t see what he was fussing about. A little bit of delayed gratification is good for the soul.
The oars hit the water again, and I couldn’t help noticing the fine hairs on Adam’s forearms as we emerged into the sunshine again. Hairs that shifted and shimmered as the muscles underneath them bunched and relaxed. There’s something very captivating about watching a man row. I’d have to make sure that I ended up in a boat with Nicholas at some point during the country weekend. There must be a lake somewhere on the Chatterton-Joneses’ estate. It’s that kind of place.
I decided to get in some practice and attempted to drape myself fetchingly at my end of the boat, doing my best to look elegant and ethereal.
‘Now you’re just rubbing it in,’ Adam muttered.
I closed my eyes and smiled, my face turned up to the sun. The twinkle was still there. I could hear it.
‘All I’m asking for is one lick,’ he said softly, and I belatedly realised we were drifting rather than see-sawing through the water. I opened my eyes to find Adam much closer than I’d thought he’d be. The twinkle was there, all right, but there was something behind it, something hot and bright. That aggressive sun reflected in them, perhaps. I shifted my parasol. I must have let it slip back when I’d had my eyes closed, because I could feel my cheeks heating now.
For some reason I couldn’t find the words to refuse. He leaned closer and closer, a lazy smile spreading across his face. The chocolate in those eyes began to melt. I couldn’t help but watch it swirl and warm, filling my vision until it was almost the only thing I saw. It was odd, because we were hardly moving it all, yet it was at that moment I felt a quiver of seasickness in my tummy.
Just as he was close enough to lick my ice cream, as we were cocooned under my parasol and it seemed we were the only two beings in the whole of Greenwich Park, I felt a tug on my fingers and the cone was eased from my hand. There was a sudden lurch and a splash, and I found myself sitting alone in the rowing boat while Adam waded through the knee-deep water to the edge of the stone-lined pond, eating my ice cream in big gulps and laughing as he went.
I was so surprised I nearly dropped my parasol. And then Adam really would have been in big trouble. It was made of exquisite cream lace, and I hadn’t seen another one to rival it in years. I caught it just in time, and snapped it closed. Then, still listening to the sound of Adam chuckling from the safety of dry land, I swapped seats and picked up the oars.
I’ll bet you thought I couldn’t row. Well, I can. I’m rather good at it, actually. Boating ponds were cheap entertainment when I was a kid, and Nan and I used to come here all the time when it was sunny.
It was just as well I was facing away from Adam, because I was seething under my breath. The sight of me rowing expertly towards him just made him laugh harder, for some reason. I wanted to kill him.
Only I couldn’t. I needed him to do me a favour, didn’t I? A pretty big one. And if that meant sucking up my pride so I could further my business and snaffle the man of my dreams, so be it. I could be the bigger person while Adam continued to act like a kid. I could.
I reached the stone lip of the boating pond and marshalled my features to show none of my irritation. By the time I’d neatly nipped out of the boat—blowing a kiss at the scruffy teenager in charge of the pond so he’d come and fetch it instead of making me row it to the proper place—I was the pinnacle of elegant calm. I had a picture of Grace Kelly in my head, and I was determined not to lose it.
I caught up with Adam at the ice cream van, where he handed me a replacement cone, complete with chocolate flake and strawberry sauce. I snatched it from him and walked away.
‘Now you owe me,’ I said. To his credit, he didn’t disagree. Well, not straight away. We both walked, giving our attention to our ice creams until we were halfway up the hill.
‘I don’t think half an ice cream really equates to a whole weekend in the country dressed up like a wally.’
He might have a point there, but I was hardly going to acknowledge that, was I? ‘These are very good ice creams,’ I said, as I pushed the last of mine into my cone with my tongue. Adam went quiet. I looked up to find him swallowing. Hard. He had a strange look on his face, and I had a horrible feeling he was about to say something I wouldn’t like, so I started off up the hill again.
He caught up to me fairly quickly. ‘Come and see my latest project and we’ll call it quits,’ he said.
I sighed. ‘I’ve visited everything you’ve constructed for years.’
He shook his head. ‘Not for quite some time, actually. You’d be surprised at what I’m doing now.’
I wasn’t convinced. A summerhouse was a summerhouse, and a shed was a shed, after all. Not that I’m not proud of him for turning his hobby into a business that keeps him afloat, but it’s hardly glamorous. Wherever you find wood like that, there are inevitably spiders. And I’m not big on spiders.
‘And this thing you’ve being doing down in Kent is wildly different, is it?’
‘I finished that months ago. I was talking about the hotel project in Malaysia.’
I almost choked on the last of my cornet. ‘I can’t afford the airfare for somewhere like that! I need all my spare cash for Coreen’s Closet.’
There was a hard edge in Adam’s voice when he replied. ‘I wasn’t asking you to pay,’ he said. ‘I was asking you to come.’ He picked up speed, and I had to scurry after him in my crimson slingbacks. I tugged at his shirtsleeve.
‘Okay, I’ll come,’ I said, at once trying to work out how I could talk myself out of flying thousands of miles to look at a few treehouses in the jungle without actually breaking my word. I don’t like jungles. At least I don’t imagine I would. The nearest I’ve been to jungle is the palm house in Kew Gardens, but I got all hot and sticky and my hair started to frizz. Don’t care to repeat the experience unless I really have to.
Adam stopped walking and gave me a long, searching look. I tried not to squirm. He knew I would try and wriggle out of it, and I knew that he knew. And he knew that I knew that he knew. It was all very tiring. And embarrassing.
I don’t like letting Adam down, but seriously…a trip to a frizz-inducing jungle in exchange for a weekend at an idyllic country estate? Now who was being unfair?
Adam started walking again. This time his steps were slow and measured.
‘Even if I come, I’m not going to help you snag this Nicholas Chatterton-Jones. I’m not sure I like the sound of him.’
I huffed. There he was, going all big-brotherish on me again. But I supposed I could put up with a bit of sibling protectiveness if it meant I got what I wanted.
I lifted my chin. ‘I don’t need you to help me,’ I said airily. That part I could do all by myself. ‘I need you to help keep Izzi sweet. It’s a good business opportunity, and I need this to be a success. If Izzi decides I’m out of favour, I might as well kiss my expansion plans goodbye. She has a very wide circle of influence, and I want that influence working on my behalf, not against me.’
Adam nodded. ‘Why me? Why not one of the puppies?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Because you have the uncanny knack of getting on with everyone and fitting in anywhere, and I need someone who knows, not just thinks, that I’m fabulous.’
And there it was again. The laugh. Why couldn’t this man ever take me seriously?
I cleared my throat and gave him a superior look. ‘Will you do it?’
He turned to look down the hill over the Thames to the odd mix of elegant Georgian buildings and silvery skyscrapers. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
These Foolish Things
Coreen’s Confessions
No. 4—I only ever wear red shoes. It started off as a coincidence, but then became a choice. Now it’s a divine ordinance.
A WEEK later I found myself standing in a leafy square in Belgravia, outside a tall white house. I took in a breath and held it. I’d e-mailed Adam six times, with gentle little messages asking if he’d meet me here, and whether he’d decided to come to the murder-mystery weekend in a fortnight’s time, but I hadn’t got a reply as yet.
He had sent me a link to an online video showing a yappy little dog worrying the life out of a bone, though. I didn’t get why. Sometimes Adam’s sense of humour can be a little…strange.
Anyway, if Adam wasn’t going to come, I was going to have to do this all by myself. No problem. Nan always says that a sense of style and good manners will help a girl fit in anywhere. Okay, Nan only really mentions the good manners, but the rest feels true. I turned my attention back to the house.
The Chatterton-Joneses had made their money in the early nineteenth century, bringing silks back from India, although none of them worked in the importing business these days. Nicholas could have decided to rest on the well-padded family laurels, but he was the successful and intuitive head of an investment group, wealthy in his own right.
I looked at the large sash windows, the freshly painted black wrought-iron railings, and swallowed. I’d spent most of my life living in Nan’s tiny terraced house in Catford, the whole floor space of which could probably fit into the entrance hall of this quietly elegant home. No time for nerves, though. I was here to perform a function, and it was time to show Nicholas just how slick and sophisticated I could be. ‘Darling, what are you doing standing in the street? I almost took you for a stalker.’
I turned to see Izzi coming to a halt beside me, looking effortlessly classy in a cream trouser suit and matching coat. Large sunglasses covered half her face, protecting it from the bright summer morning. Now that Izzi had arrived, the riot of petunias that I’d been admiring only moments before in the square seemed a little brash.
I’d aimed for ‘classy’ myself, but I was suddenly aware that my dark grey suit, made more than fifty years ago by a competent home seamstress copying a Lilli Ann design, wasn’t quite in the same league. And it wasn’t just clothing that separated us. She exuded the kind of casual elegance that only generations of confidence could breed, whereas I was more a combination of Nan’s Blitz Spirit, my mother’s need for drama, and something that a clipped-voiced character in a black-and-white film would call ‘pluck’.
But it was all I had to fall back on, so I was just going to have to make it work for me.
Izzi linked her arm through mine and swept me up the short flight of steps towards Nicholas’s glossy black door. ‘I’m sorry my brother is being pig-headed about getting himself measured for his outfits, and for dragging you all the way over here on your day off to give us all a fitting, but I want this weekend to be a success, and with only a fortnight left I don’t have time to deal with his tantrums.’
I smiled gently. No one in their right mind could ever imagine Nicholas Chatterton-Jones having a tantrum! He was far too inscrutable for that. Snarling like a panther, maybe…
‘I’ve texted him three times!’ Izzi was saying. ‘He just keeps saying he’s too busy to mess around with tape measures, so here you are! If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed… The rest of the gang should be here within the next half-hour, but I thought you’d like to get Nicky done first.’
I suddenly got a sinking feeling—as if I’d swallowed Nicholas’s big lion-head brass knocker and it was now settling in my stomach. Nicholas did know I was coming, didn’t he? But before I’d had a chance to check Izzi hadn’t sprung a trap on him she’d rapped the ring the lion held in its mouth against the door and turned to me.
‘You do have your tape measure, don’t you?’
I was far too nervous about what was happening behind that big black door to do anything but reach into my alligator handbag and produce it with a flourish.
Now, I knew some people didn’t like the idea of me carrying real reptile skin around with me, but be fair! I’d had nothing to do with the unfortunate beast’s demise, and the very least a kind soul could do after all it had been through was show it a little love and tenderness, and I certainly gave it plenty of that.
Besides, it matched my burgundy heels perfectly.
Just as the door creaked open I heard footsteps behind me, pounding down the pavement, and I turned to see a rather out-of-breath Adam darting up the steps to Nicholas’s front door. He gave me a quick grin and fell into step behind us as we entered the cool and silent hallway. Once inside, Izzi peeled off her glasses and turned to look at Adam.
‘So you’re the man Coreen found,’ she said loftily.
I started to glare at her. Just because Adam builds sheds and treehouses for a living, it doesn’t mean that he’s not in their league. Adam just plays by his own rules. I opened my mouth to say as much, but then Izzi’s lips twitched and her eyes roved all the way down to his toes and back up to his open, smiling face.
‘You’ll do,’ she added, with a hint of a purr in her tone.
I wasn’t sure I liked that reaction any better, to be frank, but it wasn’t the time to get into that.
Of course Adam just grinned all the more, so I aimed a well-timed jab with one of what he likes to call my ‘pointy little elbows’. He dodged it, and I gave him the please behave yourself stare he usually aims at me.
I didn’t have time to play games. In just a few moments I’d be seeing Nicholas. In his house. In the house I might one day want to become my house. My heart began to do the mambo. And not in the slow, sexy way they did it in Dirty Dancing. There were odd rhythms and missed beats all over the place. I captured some air, swallowed it down, and smoothed my skirt with my hands.
We were greeted by a well-groomed, discreet-looking man who conversed with Izzi in hushed tones. He nodded upstairs and I looked up the wide marble staircase to where Nicholas must be. When I looked back again the man was gone, and Izzi was answering a call on her phone.
‘You came,’ I said out of the side of my mouth to Adam.
He nodded and gazed nonchalantly around the room. ‘Looks like it.’
I resumed the behave frown. I hate it when Adam gets like this. He knows I’m buzzing with curiosity about something, yet he refuses to be anything more than vague. However, I wasn’t about to give up.
‘What made your mind up?’
He shrugged and looked up the marble staircase, which was lined with art I probably couldn’t afford and definitely didn’t understand. ‘I decided I’d better check out this Nicholas chap in person.’ He squinted at an abstract painting made up of squares in varying shades of beige. Without looking ’round he added, ‘To see if he’s good enough for you.’
My irritation melted like a chocolate bar left on a hot car dashboard. I was suddenly very glad Adam was here, and not just because it saved me from Izzi’s displeasure if I hadn’t come up with a willing victim. It was moments like these when I realised what a treasure Adam was. I hadn’t steered the conversation or fished for that compliment; he’d produced it all on his own. No string-pulling on my part whatsoever. And the warmth it gave me was twice as sweet as if I’d wrung it from one of my lovelorn swains. My heartbeat steadied into four-four time, and I was about to hug his arm when a horrible thought occurred to me. ‘You are coming on the weekend too? You’re not just here today to spy, are you?’
Adam reclaimed the please behave look and I instantly mumbled an apology. I should have known better. Adam is an in-it-for-the-long-haul kind of guy—probably why he puts up with me—and he wouldn’t have turned up today if he wasn’t going to go through with the whole thing. I was just nervous. What was taking all this time? Was Nicholas even at home?
The discreet man, who must have been a butler of some sort, reappeared and waited patiently while Izzi finished her call and slid her phone into her handbag. I’d half-heard the end of it and gathered she’d been chivvying her girlfriends along, telling them to prise their tiny backsides out of bed and get down here pronto.
‘Your brother is ready for you in the drawing room,’ Mr Discreet said in a silky voice, then disappeared again.
I was tempted to shudder. If I ever got to be a significant part of Nicholas’s life, I wasn’t sure how I’d cope with him. He seemed to vanish in and out of thin air, and, frankly, manners that good are just plain creepy.
Izzi started off up the marble staircase and nodded for us to follow. With each step my head grew lighter and lighter. By the time I reached the top I was verging on dizzy. It was all so elegant, so refined and understated. And in comparison I felt I had all the subtlety and grace of a kids’ cartoon. I suddenly wished I’d tried harder to eradicate the Cockney edge in my accent. I’d given up too quickly, frustrated that when I tried to emulate Izzi’s effortless drawl I always ended up sounding like a parody of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.
I decided then that being cool, aloof and businesslike—namely, keeping my mouth shut unless absolutely necessary—would probably be in my best interests. Men like a woman who’s mysterious, don’t they? And this approach would give me another fortnight to work on those vowels of mine before the murder-mystery weekend. I’d dazzle Nicholas with my witty banter then.
Izzi led us into a large drawing room with tall, almost floor-to-ceiling sash windows, and elegant yet somehow minimalist furnishings in neutral tones. I held my breath and hovered by the doorway, overcome by uncharacteristic shyness. Nicholas was there, gazing out of the window on the right and looking all lean, sexy and slightly irritated, in dark grey trousers and a shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Even in casual attire he oozed class.
I knew at that moment that if I had a future with Nicholas I would never again have to fear the spectre of the velour jogging bottoms. Not only would I not have to worry about being old and lonely and sad, but I’d become all I’d been training myself to be for all these years. I wouldn’t be dressing up any more. I’d rightfully inhabit a world of glamour and elegance, sliding into it with the ease of Cinderella trying on that glass slipper. I’d finally be able to look myself in the mirror without having to blink a few times to erase my mother’s eyes.
Nicholas turned to face his sister, the frown he was wearing only making him seem more broody and Mr Darcy-ish.
He spoke in a low voice, but unfortunately for him his gorgeous high ceilings carried his words over to where Adam and I were standing by the door. ‘I thought you were joking when you said you were bringing “the gang” over for a fitting for this weekend of yours.’ He hardly glanced in my direction long enough to register my presence, let alone see how cute I was looking in my pretend Lilli Ann suit with the flared jacket.
Izzi just kissed him on the cheek and waved his objections away with an airy hand. ‘Well, we’re here now. So you might as well get it over and done with. If you shoo us away, you grumpy old thing, we’ll just have to come back another time.’
To his credit, I saw a flicker of indulgent amusement in his eyes as he nodded grudgingly at Izzi, then strode across the room to greet us. He held out his hand for mine.
‘Nice to meet you again…’
That pause—the one meaning he couldn’t quite remember my name—almost finished me off. I felt like one of those buildings that you see getting demolished on the evening news. For a few slow-motion seconds it felt as if nothing was happening, and then everything inside me started to slide downwards. I grinned widely, hoping the shockwave wasn’t showing on the surface.
‘Coreen,’ I said, doing a pretty good job of sounding nonchalant, actually. ‘Coreen Fraser. We met at Izzi’s birthday bash.’
A pinprick of recognition registered in his eyes, and it was just enough to delay the almost inevitable collapse of my crumbling spirits.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said slowly. ‘You’re the girl who sells Izzi all those second-hand dresses she raves about.’
‘Vintage clothing, actually,’ a gruff voice beside me said. ‘Coreen is an innovative and successful businesswoman.’
Nicholas’s eyebrows raised and he turned his attention to Adam.
Seriously, what is it about men? Sometimes you get two of them into a room together and they have to turn everything into a competition for who’s got the most testosterone. Of course Adam’s surly interjection hadn’t helped things. I really was going to have to have a word with him about this big brother protectiveness thing. It was starting to make him behave most strangely at times.
‘Adam Conrad,’ he said, thrusting his hand forward.
Nicholas looked across at me, and then back to Adam. I knew that look. It was a jumping-to-conclusions kind of look, and it seemed as if I was going to have to intercept swiftly before he got the wrong idea.
‘My very good friend,’ I added sweetly, before Nicholas had a chance to put two and two together and come up with a million and six. He didn’t, however, look either pleased or relieved, as many men did when they found out Adam and I were nothing more than pals. His features hardly moved as he shook Adam’s hand. There might have been a slight squaring of his shoulders, but who wouldn’t when Adam was giving off such confrontational vibes? I was feeling a bit like standing taller on my heels and punching Adam on the nose myself.
Adam released Nicholas’s hand, a hint of a satisfied smirk sparkling in his eyes, and Nicholas flexed his fingers almost imperceptibly. If we weren’t in such elegant company I would have delivered that punch. Or at the very least put one of my pointy elbows to good use. I’d only chosen Adam for this weekend because I’d thought he’d be a help, rather than a hindrance, but I was starting to see the problem with not enlisting one of my ‘puppies’ instead. Mongrels have a nasty habit of having a mind of their own.
How strange. I realised as I saw the two men standing next to each other that I’d thought Nicholas was much taller than Adam, but they were practically eye to eye, and instead of seeming younger and scruffier and more laid-back in comparison to Nicholas, Adam looked rough around the edges, yes, but in a masculine, slightly dangerous way. I suddenly understood why my single girlfriends—and some of the not-so-single ones—had begged me to set them up with him.
Although Adam and Nicholas had stopped squashing each other’s hands in a show of masculine strength, there was still an atmosphere of tension in the room. Probably all those male pheromones floating in the air. Unfortunately, I’ve always been a little susceptible to the stuff, and I felt my neck grow warm and the little hairs at the back of my neck tickle. I blinked to snap myself out of it. Now was not the time to get all hot and bothered over Nicholas. I wanted to be cool and poised and professional, remember?
But even with my eyelids shut I could feel myself reacting to his nearness. My skin got too warm as the heat at my neck began to spread. My jacket suddenly felt a little too fitted. I decided that keeping my eyes closed, even for a second or so, was just magnifying the sensations, so I snapped them open again. Only, as everything swam back into focus, I discovered that it wasn’t Nicholas I was standing opposite but Adam.
How odd. Nicholas must have moved.
Izzi flitted round the three of us like a somewhat demented butterfly. ‘Oh, this is going to be so much fun,’ she gushed, dragging us all into the centre of the room. ‘You first, Nicky!’ she said, and shoved me at him. Thankfully I kept my balance.
Nicholas looked at me now, waiting, so I delved into my alligator bag, half expecting it to bite back, and produced my tape measure—not so much with a flourish this time as with a fumble.
Nicholas was looking down at me, a faint look of concern in his eyes. His gaze drifted to the tape measure and stayed there. ‘How are you going to…? I mean, where do you want to…?’
It was the first time I’d seen him anything but slightly bored-looking, and it was actually quite sweet. I got a little carried away with the idea he might be just as affected by the idea of me getting my hands on him as I was, and I totally blame the resulting adrenaline surge for what I said next.
I grinned back at him, forgetting the whole aloof plan entirely. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, my voice coming out even huskier than usual. ‘No need to do a striptease. I’m very experienced in doing it both dressed and undressed.’
See? That came out totally wrong. And for some unfathomable reason every time I tell a joke or make a funny comment it always brings out the Londoner in me. In our supremely elegant surroundings my words clanged off the walls, sounding crass instead of playful. I blushed and busied myself getting my notepad and pen out of my bag.
Izzi just hooted with laughter, and said something about it being ‘classic Coreen’. I didn’t look at Adam. He ribs me mercilessly when I put my patent heels in my mouth, usually both at once, and I didn’t want to set him off and give Izzi even more encouragement. I concentrated on being belatedly poised and professional instead.
Finally I managed to get something right. I took all of Nicholas’s measurements swiftly and efficiently. Well, not all. I took his word for it on the inside leg. And my hands didn’t shake even once. I was very proud of myself. In fact I couldn’t have been more composed if I’d been measuring up Gladys and Glynnis, the two second-hand mannequins that live in Coreen’s Closet.
I moved onto Adam next, since I was in a man-measuring frame of mind, and that was when the delayed reaction hit. My ears began to tingle and I kept dropping my tape measure and forgetting the numbers so I had to start all over again. Thankfully Nicholas was deep in conversation with Izzi by then, and didn’t see a thing.
Hmm. I stared at my notepad and compared figures. It seemed Adam’s shoulders were as broad as Nicholas’s. Broader, in fact. Just goes to show how appearances can be deceptive.
Once I’d got started with the measuring, I didn’t stop. The rest of Izzi’s friends arrived while I was doing her bust measurement and she dashed off to greet them, almost taking me with her, connected by the tape measure, but I managed to wiggle free in time. There were a couple of floppy-haired ex-public schoolboys called Julian and Marcus, Izzi’s best friend Jos, and, to my horror, mouldy old duck-faced, stick-thin Louisa Fanshawe. Nicholas suddenly stopped looking as if he was a caged lion pacing backwards and forwards, smiled microscopically, and sent for coffee and croissants.
I noticed when they arrived that Louisa only nibbled hers.
I hate girls who nibble things. Don’t trust them. In my book, if you want to have a cake or some chocolate you should just have it. None of this gnawing at it like a hamster, pretending it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d wolf down in one go if you were on your own, and then leaving it half eaten because you’re supposedly too full up. My reasons for not having a croissant were purely professional, of course. It had nothing whatsoever to do with not wanting to look piggy. I mean, I could hardly leave greasy, flaky marks on everybody’s clothes as I measured, could I?
I could tell as I was doing the last of the measuring that Izzi was revving up to something. She kept giggling to herself and pressing her fingers over her mouth. She’d announced earlier that she’d tell us which parts she’d assigned us today, and I was dying to know who I’d be.
As I wound my tape measure I let myself dream about playing the part of the debutante. The whole murder-mystery thing was to be set around a family gathering on a country estate, as far as I could tell. I guessed that Nicholas would probably end up as the heir to the family fortune, and I was desperate to play his devoted fiancée. I even had a midnight-blue floaty chiffon dress picked out that would really set off my colouring.
Izzi made a big show of gathering us all on two vast sofas that faced each other near the fireplace, and produced a little notebook and silver pencil from her bag.
‘Boys first!’ she exclaimed, and fixed her eyes on Julian.
It turned out he was going to play the carousing younger brother. Marcus slapped him on the back and almost made Julian choke on his coffee. ‘That means you’re actually going to have to talk to a girl!’ he bellowed. Poor old Julian just blushed and stammered something about talking to girls on a fairly regular basis, actually.
Marcus was going to be the layabout best friend of the son and heir, to which he merely said, ‘Nothing new there, then!’ and slapped Julian twice as hard on the shoulder. He’d better be careful. From the looks Julian was giving him there might be a second murder at Izzi’s weekend. An unplanned one.
When Izzi said that Adam was going to play the cousin, who happened to be a vicar, I almost snorted my coffee out through my nose. Oh, I was going to have such fun with him! I wondered if he’d let me give him false teeth and a bald wig.
That meant, of course, that Nicholas was to be just who he should be—Prince Charming, for want of a better description—and I was more than willing to step into the shoes of his devoted princess. I sighed and reached for a pain au chocolat, completely forgetting myself.
If I’d thought Izzi was excited at dishing out the ‘boy’ parts, as she called them, she notched it up a gear when it came to us girls.
‘I’m going to be Lady Southerby,’ she said, clapping her hands loudly and waiting for us to all hoot and exclaim. ‘Isn’t it going to be wild! I’m going to be a crusty old matriarch and you’re all going to have to do as I say!’
‘Not much change there, then,’ Marcus said again, as he rammed half a croissant into his mouth and sprayed crumbs everywhere.
Izzi was far too pleased with herself even to give him one of her withering looks. And then she turned to me.
My heart began to pound. I clasped my hands together on my knees and looked at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
‘You’re going to love your part, Coreen,’ she said. ‘I guarantee it’s absolutely perfect for you.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps…
Coreen’s Confessions
No. 5—I’ve worn red lipstick every day of my life since I turned seventeen.
‘I STILL can’t believe Izzi did that to me!’ The corners of my mouth tugged downwards and made my bottom lip protrude slightly. ‘I thought we were friends!’
Adam glanced over at me, but kept his attention on the road. Just as well, really, since we were hurtling around the M25 in his Range Rover. ‘It’s been two weeks, Coreen. You need to let it go.’
Okay, I may have mentioned my displeasure regarding the matter to Adam a few times already.
‘It is what it is,’ he added, with an annoying air of superiority. ‘Sometimes life doesn’t hand us what we want, so we have to find a way to make what we have got work to our advantage.’
I folded my arms across my chest and stared at the number plate of the car in front. ‘Thank you for that bit of priceless wisdom, Socrates.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Adam had lifted one eyebrow. I decided his character for the murder-mystery weekend was going to his head. He was being annoyingly serene in the face of my abject distress.
‘I don’t need you to get all philosophical on me,’ I said sulkily. ‘I need you to be…to be my…’ What was the word I was looking for? It wouldn’t dislodge itself from my memory banks.
‘Your back-up?’ he suggested.
Exactly! I told him as much.
His mouth straightened out of its ever-present smile. ‘Always,’ he said quietly. ‘You know that.’
I sighed loudly and let my folded arms drop into my lap. Yes, I did know that.
Adam indicated and swiftly changed lanes to overtake a van. I held my breath, wishing I was behind the wheel instead. Adam might be steady and reliable in most aspects of his life, but none of that seemed to rub off on his driving. If my car had had a bigger boot we wouldn’t be having this problem, but unfortunately my treasured Beetle didn’t have the space for all this lovingly pressed vintage clothing.
He saw me tense up and chuckled under his breath. ‘Just because I’m here this weekend to be your “back-up”, it doesn’t mean I can’t have a little fun along the way too.’ And he pressed harder on the accelerator, reaching a speed my poor little Volkswagen could only dream about.
‘Mongrel,’ I muttered, as I dug my fingernails into the edge of my seat.
‘Drama queen,’ he shot back.
I didn’t have much of a defence to that, so I slumped back into the comfortable leather seat and tried to smooth down the little catches I’d made with my nails only seconds earlier before Adam noticed them.
‘When did you get rid of Dolly?’
Dolly had been Adam’s old Land Rover. Older even than my little car. He’d had her ever since I could remember. But when he’d come to pick me up that afternoon he’d arrived in a gleaming new Range Rover, with a glossy black exterior and parchment-coloured leather seats. It was almost sexy—at least as sexy as a giant hulk of a machine like that can be.
‘Oh, I haven’t got rid of the old girl,’ Adam said, smiling to himself. ‘But I need something a little more…confidence inspiring…when I go to meet clients. And a vehicle that doesn’t backfire rust and can get from A to B without the help of a recovery truck tends to help with that.’
I trailed a finger along the immaculately stitched seam on my seat. Dolly Mark Two was certainly very impressive. And rather expensive, I’d have guessed. How on earth had Adam managed to afford her? I hoped he hadn’t sold a kidney or something.
The clock on the dashboard said twenty to three. Only fifteen minutes more and we’d be at Inglewood Manor. Everyone else was due to arrive around four, to get ready, but Adam and I were getting there early so I could hang the outfits in each of the guest’s rooms and check that every last cufflink and clutch bag was present and correct.
Ugh. Thinking about what everyone was wearing just made me remember the fashion monstrosities that I was going to have to wear over the coming weekend, and that brought me both down to earth and back to square one.
I closed my eyes, shook my head and let out a loud huff. ‘I still can’t believe that Izzi—’
‘Get over it, already!’ Adam half-yelled, half-chuckled, cutting me off. I clamped my mouth shut and resumed my pout.
I suppose Izzi hadn’t sabotaged my plans on purpose. She was just dying to get out of her glamorous clothes and play against type. She must have thought I’d be game for a laugh, ready to do the same. I really shouldn’t be cross with her, but I had to be cross with someone, and she was the only one in the firing line at present.
Adam performed another bit of outrageous overtaking and then looked over at me. I grimaced back.
‘Okay…’ he said in conciliatory kind of voice. ‘Maybe you have got a little bit of a point.’ I didn’t like his tone, for all its sympathy and understanding. When Adam stopped bantering and talked to me that way it only meant one thing—trouble.
He let out a soft chuckle as he clocked a large blue road sign up ahead. ‘What was Izzi thinking when she cast a girl who changes her mind every ten seconds as Constance?’
I was too depressed to box his ears or give a witty comeback. I just sat in silence as Adam turned off the motorway and headed in the direction of Inglewood Manor.
Yep. That was my role for the whole weekend: Constance Michaels. The dowdy, frumpy sister of Adam’s country vicar. Not a hint of silk or chiffon in Constance’s wardrobe—oh, no. That was all going to rotten old Louisa. I was stuck with tweed and dreary floral prints. Sensible shoes and good, clean living. It was going to be dire. The only consolation was that as the Reverend Harry Michaels’s sister I’d be able to give Adam all the ear-flicks and Chinese burns I wanted, and he wouldn’t be able to complain.
As we turned off the main road and through an imposing set of gates I sat up straighter in my seat. We were finally there. But, rather than the sweeping drive through open parkland that I’d imagined, the road to the manor was lined with fir trees. I could half imagine that they’d picked up their skirts only moments before and run to stand on the edges of the drive, eager to see the approaching guests. Through their dark branches I glimpsed clipped lawns, rose gardens and finally a vast redbrick house.
It wasn’t until we were almost directly in front of Inglewood Manor that the drive widened and split to circle an oval-shaped lawn dotted with miniature firs in the most beautiful assortment of shapes and sizes.
I’d seen pictures of Inglewood Manor before, of course. Had known that it was grand and elegant. But now that I was actually there I realised that this vast multi-roomed house was also very pretty, even though it rose to three storeys. The windows were long and perfectly proportioned, and the unusual parapet of stepped battlements and cones, along with twisting redbrick chimneys, gave the house a fairytale air.
It struck me that Nicholas Chatterton-Jones was a man with a very attractive guarantee. Generations of tradition cemented his feet to the ground; he’d been bred to stay put, to build a family not to tear it apart. Chatterton-Jones men didn’t do runners. Never would. So why did that realisation make me feel more nervous, instead of more convinced I’d pinned my hopes on the right man?
Adam brought the car to a halt, switched it off, and turned his body to face me. ‘Raring to go…Constance?’
I jabbed him in the shoulder with a fingernail. ‘Just you remember that Socrates met a very nasty end. Poison, if I remember rightly. And this is a murder-mystery weekend.’
The corners of Adam’s eyes crinkled. ‘I hear the deadly draught was self-inflicted in that particular case.’
I ignored him. ‘Bring the clothes in, will you?’ I said, waving towards the boot, and then I opened the door, exited the car with an elegant sweep of my legs and walked off to the huge wooden front door, channelling every bit of Marilyn I could.
‘Starting to understand what drove the poor bloke to it,’ Adam muttered as he pulled his key out of the ignition and jumped out of the car.
The rest of the afternoon went in a bit of a blur. Before I’d even unpacked all the clothes the hordes descended, and rather than being able to concentrate on making what I’d got to wear work to my advantage suddenly it was, ‘Coreen, can you do this zip up?’ or ‘Coreen, how do I put spats on?’ Or a million and five other stupid questions.
I hardly had time to notice the lovely wood-panelled landing between the various bedrooms, or lose myself in the ornate plaster ceilings, elegant furnishings and antiques.
Izzi had decreed that no one should see anyone else before the Great Unveiling Ceremony. Under no circumstances were we allowed to fraternise before six o’clock cocktails, when the murder-mystery rigmarole was going to commence. As a result, I was the only one allowed to see anyone in full costume before the allotted hour, and I was rushed off my feet running errands, pinning hair, finding lost gloves. Marcus even had the gall to pat me on the bottom and ask me whether I could fetch him a cup of tea. I gave him a look that left him in no doubt as to where I would insert that cup of tea if I ever returned with it.
I was most miffed with Izzi for laying down the law in this way. I had hoped I’d get at least half an hour to remind Nicholas just how gorgeous I was before Constance had to put in an appearance, but Izzi was into her character right from the get-go, cracking the whip and generally making sure we did nothing to spoil her elaborately planned fantasy weekend. I was starting to think the whole idea was more trouble than it was worth.
Finally, when I’d sorted out all the last-minute fashion glitches, I managed to scamper back to my room, close the door behind me and slump against it for a few seconds’ rest. This was the sort of room you saw in posh interior decorating magazines, and I could hardly believe I’d get to sleep in it for two whole nights. Everything was elegant cream and muted duck-egg blue. There was even a magnificent mahogany four-poster bed, so at least I could imagine I was a princess between midnight and dawn, if nowhere else this weekend.
I took in a few deep breaths, drinking in the serenity of my surroundings. I needed it. There was only a quarter of an hour left for me to get myself ready, and it was going to take half of that time to de-Coreen myself.
Taking off the fifties garb was easy enough, although I had a moment of mourning when I slid my feet out of my heels and sank them into the thick carpet. I looked at myself in the mirror. My suspicions had been right. My usual style of bra definitely had too much va-va-voom for a tweedy female missionary wannabe, and I had to replace it with something much plainer.
I left my make-up until last. I’d never gone anywhere in broad daylight without my liquid liner ‘wings’ and my Crimson Minx red lippy. Not even to the corner shop on a late-night chocolate run.
I stared at myself in the mirror for a few seconds. Really stared. This would be the last time I’d look like me until late Sunday afternoon. Constance was going to take over until then. I could already hear her tutting at the crimson lipstick, so I held up a tissue to wipe it away. The tissue hovered less than a millimetre from my lips and then my hand dropped to my side.
I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t wipe that last piece of myself away with just a few swipes of a tissue.
The eyes would have to go first instead. I wouldn’t have to watch myself. The liner needed a thorough scrub with a lotion-splodged bit of cotton wool, and I had to close my eyes to make sure I’d got into every corner. Once that was done I opened my eyes again and had another go at eradicating the Crimson Minx.
Another false start.
Another tissue dropped straight into the bin with not even smudge of red on it. I had a feeling I could have gone on like this all afternoon, but noises on the landing jolted me out of my repetitive loop. Voices. From what I could make out, the others were now all ready and impatient to show off their glad rags.
After taking a deep breath, I plucked another tissue from the box on the dressing table and did what I had to do without letting myself stop to think, scrubbing hard with the tissue until there was no Minx left, just smooth, soft pink skin.
I looked up. Met myself in the mirror. It wasn’t a pretty sight. There was black grit in the corners of my eyes and a faint red tinge to the skin around my lips, making it seem as if the ghost of a clown hovered about me. And she was there. Looking back at me. Pleading with me.
I turned away quickly, unpinned my hair and brushed it through, then put on the ghastly olive-green tweed suit I’d intended to force on Louisa and slipped my feet into a pair of sensible brown lace-ups. I then picked up my compact and got to work on my face, not making eye-contact with myself again until I was finished. Until I was Constance, with her severe bun and pinched expression, and the reflection in the mirror was safe again.
I walked away from the dressing table and surveyed the damage in the full-length mirror in the en-suite bathroom. I dared myself to take every detail in, to face what I had made myself. Well, if Nicholas wanted ‘less’ he was certainly going to get it from me this weekend. And, since Louisa Fanshawe definitely was the ‘more’, that should put me at an advantage, shouldn’t it? As I kept staring in the mirror I realised it wasn’t so bad. I might be prim and proper and prissy on the outside, but now I’d recovered myself I could see my inner minx was alive and well and blazing out through my eyes.
There was a knock at the door and I almost jumped out of my skin. ‘Who is it?’ I called back.
‘Me,’ came a lazy rumble I couldn’t help but recognise. Adam’s voice always makes me think of long Sunday lie-ins and rumpled sheets.
I took one last look at Constance in the mirror, thinking I’d show her a thing or two this weekend, and then went to open the door.
I hadn’t seen Adam at all since I’d starting primping and preening the other guests. I’d offered to help him, but he’d said that I bossed him around enough when he was fully dressed and he didn’t need me doing it while he was in his boxers too. Impossible man. I was sure I wasn’t that bad really.
When the door swung wide I don’t know why I was so shocked. It wasn’t as if I’d expected to see Adam in his soft, worn denim jeans and his usual just-fallen-out-of-bed hair-style, but even though I’d picked out his clothes myself—the dove-grey suit, the brogues and dog-collared shirt—I wasn’t prepared for the transformation. Too busy thinking about my own, I suppose.
I stepped backwards, letting Adam pass me and walk into the room. I’d always thought that vicars were supposed to be safe, almost gender-neutral kinds of creatures, but even with a nice suit on and his wayward hair smoothed down there was still a hint of…wickedness about him. Not helped by the mischievous smile he wore as he looked me up and down.
The warmth in his eyes deepened. ‘You look gorgeous,’ he said, doing a credible job of keeping a straight face.
I rolled my eyes. ‘I look like an over-stuffed olive,’ I replied, gesturing with my eyes towards the jacket buttons straining at my chest. When I’d chosen this outfit I’d imagined Louisa looking really frumpy, with the too-large jacket hanging off her bony shoulders. It didn’t look quite the same on me. I’d been particularly pleased with the thick pair of round-rimmed—
Glasses!
I’d almost forgotten them.
‘Just you wait until you see the finishing touch!’ I marched across to the dressing table, picked up the tortoiseshell specs and slid them on carelessly. One hinge was a little loose, and they wobbled precariously on the bridge of my nose. I turned and gave Adam a defiant look, daring him to contradict me.
He just ambled towards me, stopping when he was only inches away. Slowly he pulled his hands from his pockets and straightened the specs with a tiny nudge of his fingers at either edge, all the while smiling into my eyes. He must have got them at just the right focal length, because suddenly everything that had been blurry and off-kilter snapped into focus and I noticed for the first time how the warm conker in the centre of his irises melted into dark chocolate at the edges. He dropped the softest kiss on the tip of my nose and stepped back.
‘I’ve always had a thing for girls who wear glasses,’ he said in his Sunday morning voice.
I wanted to grin back at him, to thank him for knowing the right thing to say to make me feel better about my horrible tweedy costume, but my lips were temporarily glued shut.
At first all I’d wanted was for him to join me in my tweed-related ranting, but he’d sidestepped my invitation and done the opposite, making me feel warm and confident. He’d given me what I needed before I’d even known it myself. Just like the takeaways he brought me. But even as warmth seeped through me, I shivered a little too. Adam’s unusual gift for cheering me up was lovely, but it was out of my control. Something I’d never be able to coax or tame. Something he could deprive me of if he wanted to. And on that level I didn’t like it much.
‘Ready?’ he asked, and offered me his arm in an exaggerated formal manner.
I stood tall in my sensible heels, lifted my chin and placed my arm in his. This was no time to get maudlin.
‘Born that way,’ I said as we stepped through the door and headed downstairs.
I had a light-headed feeling as I walked down the vast carved oak staircase with Adam. I was aware of my laced-up feet treading on each broad step, of my hand skimming the banister, but I felt oddly disconnected from those sensations, and the excited murmuring of the other guests drifted up from the hall below in a muffled fog.
At the half-landing there was a tug on my sleeve. Adam’s fingers lightly gripped my upper arm and he steered me to look over the banister.
‘Look,’ he whispered, his breath warm in my ear. ‘Look at what you’ve accomplished.’
I blinked and was instantly back in my own body, totally aware of the warm pressure of his fingers on my arms and suddenly his words made sense.
Down below the rest of Izzi’s party had gathered, all dressed top-to-toe in the outfits I’d put together. Outfits I’d scoured the markets and auction houses of London for. Clothes and accessories that had kept me awake into the small hours of the morning as I matched and paired and mentally sorted them. And when I’d finally drifted off I’d had weird convoluted dreams about pearl buttons, Oxford trousers and hat pins.
‘Oh…’ I said.
Just for a moment I had the strangest feeling I’d been catapulted eighty years into the past and was spying, ghost-like, on a real nineteen-thirties house party. Were these really the same people I’d measured and had breakfast with only a fortnight before?
I spotted Izzi first, her grey crimped wig drawing my eyes instantly. She was holding an ebony cane, but every time she got excited she forgot to lean on it and started gesticulating wildly instead.
My gaze only lingered on her for a second, because I instantly searched the group for Nicholas. He stood out, taller than the other two men, looking all dark and handsome and dashing. I can’t say he looked an awful lot different. But what was I expecting? One could hardly expect perfection to improve upon itself.
Julian and Marcus had scrubbed up well, looking very dapper in their single-breasted suits, sharply creased trousers and stiff white collars. I’d done a good job. Satisfied, I moved my attention to the females of the group.
Jos was bobbing around in her maid’s uniform, and flirting with Nicholas in a manner that would certainly get her sacked if she really was the ‘help’. I tried not to look at Louisa. The bias-cut dress in burgundy silk I’d picked out for this evening looked far too good on her slender figure, and the finger waves framing her face just served to emphasise her amazing cheekbones, which even I had to admit were her least duck-like feature.
Izzi spotted Adam and me as we reached the bottom of the staircase and let out a squeal. ‘Oh, look at you!’ And then she shoved her cane into Julian’s unready hands and raced across the marble-tiled hall to inspect us more closely. A rather unbecoming smile for an elderly lady crept across her mouth as she looked Adam up and down. ‘Well, hello, Vicar,’ she purred. ‘Remind me to come and confess all my sins to you later. I’m afraid there are rather a lot. You won’t be too shocked, will you?’
Adam grinned back. ‘I’ll do my very best not to be, but it depends just how naughty you’ve been.’
The eyelash bat and pout that Izzi gave him pushed things a little too far for my liking. I thought we were supposed to be in character, but she looked ready to dribble down the black high-necked dress I’d found her. I coughed, partly to draw her attention away from Adam, but mostly to save the taffeta from drool marks.
Izzi dragged her eyes from the Reverend Michaels and started to walk around me, plucking at my tweed jacket and inspecting every little detail. ‘The transformation’s amazing!’ she muttered. ‘I would hardly have recognised you!’ As she came round to the front again, she spotted my glasses and let out another squeal. ‘Isn’t it a hoot?’ she said, grabbing my hand and dragging me towards the rest of the group.
‘I’m practically an owl,’ I replied, rather dead pan.
‘I just knew you’d be a good sport about this,’ she half-whispered, half-giggled into my ear.
I didn’t do anything to disillusion her. I needed to keep on Izzi’s good side this weekend, didn’t I?
Now we were all gathered, Izzi introduced the murder-mystery weekend organisers she’d hired, who were playing the parts of Lord Edward Southerby, Izzi’s character’s husband, and the housekeeper. They gave us a brief introduction to the weekend, which I mostly ignored, and then handed us large white envelopes with our characters’ names on them.
We were then led through into the drawing room. I could see why Izzi had decided to ‘borrow’ the family home for the event. It was perfect. The Chatterton-Joneses’ drawing room was chockablock with antique furniture, and stern-faced portraits were everywhere on the moss-green walls. The room was so huge that there wasn’t only one seating area but various groupings of sofas and chairs, the largest of which was in the centre of the room, close to the stone fireplace. They were upholstered in a deep plum jacquard, half hidden by a million tapestried cushions in all shapes and sizes. Anywhere else this decorating style would have seemed haphazard and messy, but in the drawing room of Inglewood Manor it just softened the effect of the vast fireplace and the grand plasterwork ceiling, making the space seem both elegant and comfortable at once.
I eyed my white envelope suspiciously. I had a horrible feeling that whatever instructions were inside were going to send my plans into reverse. I already didn’t like what I’d heard about the reason for our characters to be gathering this weekend. We were supposed to be celebrating the engagement of Rupert and Frances—Nicholas and Louisa’s characters.
‘Robert will serve us cocktails while we take a little time to read our character packs,’ Izzi announced, then dropped into one of the plum armchairs and got straight into being Lady Southerby by fixing us all with her beady eyes.
‘What would you like, miss?’ a silky voice asked from behind my right ear. I almost jumped straight out of my tweed suit. I turned to find Mr Discreet from Nicholas’s house standing there. I pressed a hand on top of my thumping heart and gave him a long hard look.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ I said, frowning. ‘I thought you worked in the London house, anyway.’
Mr Discreet—or Robert, as I know knew he was called—didn’t let his weariness with the whole situation show anywhere but his eyebrows, which drooped a little at the outer edges. ‘Sir thought I might enjoy a weekend in the country and a chance to…’ He paused, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to utter the words. ‘To dress up and have a bit of fun.’
The eyebrows said otherwise. I suddenly felt a pang of sympathy for the poor blighter. I glanced across the room to where Nicholas and Louisa were standing by the fireplace. He was pointing out family photographs of when he was younger and she was cooing over them.
‘What have you got that’s got a bit of a kick to it?’ I asked grimly.
I could have been mistaken, but I thought I saw a hint of a twitch in Robert’s left cheek. ‘Perhaps madam would care for a Gin Sling?’
‘That sounds lovely. A Gin Sling it is.’
Robert gave a nod of approval, but before he’d got two steps away Izzi, who was still holding court from her armchair, announced, ‘Oh, no. That won’t do at all, Robert! We can’t have the vicar’s sister tipsy on hard liquor.’ An evil glint appeared in her eye. ‘None of the demon drink for you, Constance, dear!’ she added loudly. ‘You’ll just have to have something virgin!’ And then she collapsed into a fit of giggles, as if it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said.
Of course everyone else had stopped their chatter when she’d raised her voice, and now they all chuckled along with her. Even Nicholas. I just pushed my horrible tortoiseshell glasses up my nose and pretended I didn’t mind at all. The last thing I was going to do was let it show that her judgement of me had stung. Somehow, without my heels and my lipstick on, I couldn’t bat the comment away as I could have done if I’d been ‘me’.
I suppose I should have been grateful. I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of chat-up lines involving filthy-named cocktails in my time. At least this was a joke in the other direction. But the joke was still on me, and I didn’t want anyone to think that the idea of me being anything but a floozy was hysterically funny. Just because I normally look the way I look, it doesn’t mean I’m…easy.
Adam suddenly appeared at my side and put his arm round my waist. ‘Well, if we’re drinking in character,’ he said, looking in Izzi’s direction, ‘I think you should hand that champagne to me and replace it with a tomato juice cocktail.’
I had to give Izzi her due. Whether it was class or privilege or cold hard cash that kept her armour-plated self-confidence intact, it was doing a terrific job. There wasn’t even the hint of a dent in it as she laughed back at Adam, downed her champagne, and then ordered the tomato juice from Robert, who was still standing beside me, waiting for my revised order.
‘Whatever you bring me is fine,’ I told him.
‘How about a Maiden’s Prayer?’ he said smoothly.
Izzi grinned and clapped her hands. ‘Oh, yes! That sounds much more suitable.’
I ignored her and nodded my appreciation to Robert.
‘Thank you,’ I whispered to Adam, and then deposited myself with as much grace and dignity as I could muster at the end of one of the sofas.
I looked across the room at Louisa, all slender elegance and perfection. Nobody would have made that crack about her. She had that otherworldly kind of beauty that made men think of medieval princesses and cherubic waifs. Whereas I was an easy target. Blessed with a figure that meant I was always labelled the same way—even in tweed, for goodness’ sake!
For a long time I’d thought my sex appeal was the source of all my power, but just then, just for the tiniest moment, I started to wonder if it might be a curse, if I might always be the object of lust but never of devotion…
No. That was stupid. Of course I inspired devotion. I had my puppies, after all. And what could be more devoted than a gorgeous little puppy? And with that thought I squashed the nasty, wriggling feeling of insecurity away and sat up tall.
Stupid stuffed-olive suit. It was messing with my head.
So I imagined myself out of my suit and into Louisa’s dark blood satin. I imagined my lipstick back on and four-inch heels on my feet, and instantly I began to feel better. Things improved even more when I tasted the Maiden’s Prayer that Robert brought me. One sip and I knew the drink hadn’t been named for its innocence. More likely because supplication would be the only way of saving oneself after two or three of these little babies.
My envelope was still unopened in my hand, so I decided to delve inside and see what the rest of the weekend might be about. When I leafed through the sheets of paper I had to stop myself from groaning. Izzi, in her mad-doggish fever about her project, had timetabled the weekend to within an inch of its life. How was I going to convince Nicholas how low-maintenance and laid-back I was if we didn’t get any down time to mingle?
Along with a lengthy itinerary of activities—both indoor and outdoor—designed to promote clue-solving, was a full character profile of Constance, a brief summary of the other house party guests and some personal objectives for the first part of the evening. I had one thing I needed to keep secret and another thing I needed to find out: why Harry, my big brother, had become so overprotective of me in the last few weeks.
I let out a sharp little laugh at that bit. Talk about life imitating art…or was it the other way ’round?
Adam had just plonked himself down beside me, in the space I’d mentally reserved for Nicholas, and he leaned over to try and read my sheet over my shoulder. ‘What’s so funny?’
I quickly rolled my papers up so he couldn’t see anything. ‘No peeking!’ I told him, looking over the top of my little round specs.
‘With those glasses on you’re actually quite cute when you’re being bossy.’ Adam didn’t sound chastised at all. ‘I might just let you order me around a bit more when we get home—if you promise to keep them.’
See? There was no winning with Adam. He was, and always will be, completely untrainable.
Since my character notes were still rolled up in my hand, I swatted him on the nose with them. ‘You’re not taking this seriously,’ I said. My gesture had the desired effect and he backed away, rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘You can’t talk like that to me. It didn’t sound a bit like how a brother would talk to his sister.’
Adam came as close to frowning as I’d ever seen him. ‘Suppose I don’t want to be your brother?’
I sighed and fixed my eyes on Nicholas and Louisa over by the fireplace, toasting their pretend engagement with champagne cocktails. ‘Tough. We’ve got to make what fate’s given us work to our advantage…remember?’
Adam’s gaze followed mine and then he sank heavily back into the sofa cushions. ‘What idiot told you that?’
I grinned at him. Strangely enough, he didn’t grin back instantly, as he normally did. But I’m pretty persistent. I just kept going until one corner of his mouth tilted a tiny fraction.
‘So…brother of mine…I’m supposed to be finding out why you’ve gone all prison warder on me in recent weeks. Care to spill the beans?’
Adam shook his head and waved his own big white envelope at me. ‘Can’t tell you. It’s supposed to be a secret.’
‘Adam Conrad! You’ve never kept a secret from me in your life!’
‘But I’m Harry, remember?’ He rubbed his nose again and I started to regret whacking him there. An awkward Adam was twice as infuriating as the regular one. He planted his feet firmly on the Persian rug and stood up. ‘And, actually, Adam does know how to keep a secret—even from you.’
I shook my head and let out a low, disbelieving chuckle. ‘No, he doesn’t!’
His expression clouded over. ‘If you knew about it, it wouldn’t be a secret any more, would it?’
Before I could quiz him further, to find out whether he was actually pulling my leg or—rather alarmingly—telling the truth, he glanced across the room to where Jos was standing with Robert. By the look of Robert’s eyebrows he wasn’t too enamoured with his partner in crime.
‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ Adam said loftily, ‘I have to go and weasel some family secrets out of Ruby Coggins the parlour maid.’
CHAPTER SIX
Wishin’ and Hopin’
Coreen’s Confessions
No. 6—You know some people say they can’t see the wood for the trees? Sometimes I can’t even find the flipping forest.
I ENDED up being seated between Julian and Marcus at dinner. Nicholas was far, far away at the end of the ridiculously long table, deep in conversation with an enraptured Louisa. After the first two courses I still knew absolutely nothing about Julian, and was more familiar than I could ever wish to be with Marcus’s rugby injuries. I didn’t even have Adam to joke with, because he was being monopolised by Jos further down the table.
I toyed with the last of my lamb. I wasn’t actually hungry, but pushing it around my plate helped distract me from a lengthy and rather too-graphic account of Marcus’s latest shoulder surgery. When I did look up briefly I caught the eye of the party organiser who was playing Lord Southerby. He glanced at Marcus, then gave me a sympathetic smile.
Dinner was so dull I was about to jump up on the polished walnut table and do the Lambeth Walk, just to entertain myself. Thankfully, that rash plan was scuppered before I could make a fool of myself, because the lights suddenly went out and, with no big-city light pollution to provide a warm glow at the windows, the whole room was plunged into utter darkness.
One of the girls screamed. Someone—I could tell it was Izzi—chuckled with barely restrained glee, and the great rubgy-playing oaf next to me started making childish ‘spooky’ noises.
I ignored all of that, too busy working on rash plan number two. I was trying to calculate if, under the cover of darkness, I had enough time to sprint ’round to where Nicholas was sitting, plant a smacker on him, and then make it back to my place before the lights came back on again. Unfortunately, just as I scraped my chair back and hitched up my skirts, the inevitable happened, and we all sat there, blinking at each other and looking around.
And then we saw it. Him.
Lord Southerby, face down in his lamb cutlets, with a dagger sticking out of his back.
We all gasped together, as if we’d shared the same intake of breath. Well, everyone except Louisa, that is. Now I knew who the screamer of the bunch was. I turned to give her a scornful look and found her clutching on to Nicholas, so close she was almost sitting on his lap. Before I looked away in disgust, unable to watch my dream man being all gentlemanly and protective, stoking her back with the flat of his long-fingered hand, I saw a flicker of smug satisfaction pass across her features, just before she burrowed her face in his shoulder and he put his arm round her.
Thinking murderous thoughts, I focused once again on the supposedly deceased Lord Southerby. The drama of the occasion was ruined slightly by the fact that, from my ringside seat, I could tell he was still breathing. The intermittent puffs of air from his half-submerged right nostril were making ripples in the port gravy.
Izzi tried to get an appropriate wobble in her voice as she asked Robert to call the police, but it was obvious she was far from distraught at her fake husband’s death. In fact, she seemed to be enjoying herself immensely.
The actress-slash-party organiser who was playing the housekeeper entered and suggested we contaminate the crime scene as little as possible, then asked if we would like to retire to the drawing room for after-dinner drinks. Once we were all assembled there we were each handed a second white envelope, containing further information and objectives.
I discovered I was supposed to learn if Rupert’s fiancée was just a gold-digger, why Rupert had been out-of-sorts recently, whether Lord Southerby had left me anything in his will, and why Giles…
I looked up and spotted Nicholas standing in the large bay window that led onto the terrace, momentarily separated from Limpet Louisa while Julian quizzed her on whatever list had been in his envelope. I watched as Adam walked over to him and they began talking.
There was a large, brass-horned gramophone nearby and I drifted off into a little fantasy…
An old seventy-eight was playing on the gramophone, a sentimental thirties love song made only more romantic by the rhythmic crackle of needle on vinyl. The French doors at the centre of the bay window were open, giving a tantalising glimpse of a moonlit terrace. Nicholas would come over and ask me to dance, offering his hand, and I would graciously accept. How we’d actually end up on the shadowy terrace was a bit fuzzy, but eventually we would be dancing cheek to cheek in the moonlight. Barely moving. Definitely touching.
The little bubble of magic I’d created inside my head popped as Robert ushered a shabbily dressed man into the room. It was apparent after a few moments that he was another of the murder-mystery team, playing the role of a slightly clueless detective sergeant. I accepted Robert’s offer of a glass of port while the man summed up the case so far and offered a few suggestions about possible motives. We were then left to chat amongst ourselves, supposedly to wheedle more clues out of our fellow suspects, while he investigated the scene of the murder. When he returned he brought with him the murder weapon—an ornate gold letter-opener, which was quickly identified by Lady Southerby as being from her husband’s study.
Unlike a proper investigation, in which suspects would be interviewed privately, Detective Sergeant Moffat questioned us in front of the group, and soon a picture of the late Lord Southerby began to emerge.
He’d been a strict parent, fickle with his attention, favouring his elder son Rupert over Giles, the younger brother. He’d also been an inveterate womaniser and there were hints of dodgy financial dealings in the past. The detective made a one-sided phone call to an imaginary family lawyer and then revealed that Lord Southerby had visited the lawyer only a fortnight earlier to discuss changing his will.
We did a good job of keeping in character for a while, but once the sergeant had left and we were allowed to question each other the masks slipped and we started chatting informally, dropping our aliases and talking about last week’s football results, next season’s fashion and generally getting to know each other. All except Izzi, who remained stiff-backed and fierce-looking in her winged armchair, and refused to answer to anything but ‘Lady Southerby’ or ‘Evangeline’.
I slid my horrendous glasses off and hid them behind a photograph of Nicholas as a serious-looking toddler on the mantelpiece. Then I subtly worked my way around the room, asking carefully worded questions of the different ‘suspects’ until I was close to the group in the bay window and waited for a gap in the conversation.
Remembering what Adam had said about less is more, I did a rather demure version of my eyelash sweep and tilted my head fetchingly to one side. Much less obvious, I thought.
‘Cousin Rupert, let me offer my condolences on your loss.’
I placed my fingers lightly on his arm and left them there.
Nicholas turned and looked at me. I hoped he was just very good at acting, because his eyes were alarmingly blank. ‘Thank you.’
I inhaled gently. Gently, because I was trying to make sure the top button on my jacket, which rested right at the fullest part of my bust, didn’t pop off and give me a black eye.
‘But I’m curious about something. Lord Southerby—I mean, Uncle Edward—always had a soft spot for me. You wouldn’t happen to know why that was?’
Marcus let out a huge guffaw. ‘It’s obvious that the old rogue was a complete scoundrel with the ladies…’ He looked me up and down, and suddenly my tweed suit felt as transparent as muslin. ‘I can think of a couple of good reasons why,’ he added, fixing his gaze on my straining button.
Nicholas, however, didn’t even try to stare at my chest. ‘I believe my father had some other reason for favouring you,’ he said cryptically, ‘but beyond that I’m not prepared to say.’
Adam looked at Nicholas, then across to me and back again. ‘I don’t suppose it had anything to do with the meeting your father had with his solicitor, did it? I don’t like anyone suggesting my…sister…would do anything improper.’
Nicholas blinked slowly, and smiled a little, but it wasn’t the kind of smile where the corners of the mouth turned up. His lips merely stretched wider and flattened. ‘Possibly…’ He looked down at me—at least it felt that way. I seemed a lot shorter to myself without my heels. At last I could see something other than complete uninterest in Nicholas’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry if I said anything untoward, cousin. I didn’t mean to imply you were that kind of girl.’
I sucked a breath in through my nostrils and held it, only letting it out again as a wide smile blossomed on my face. I totally forget to do my normal Marlilyn-esque, parted lips thing, and just gave him the biggest, cheesiest grin in my repertoire. It’s not often that people assume I’m not That Kind Of Girl, and I liked the idea that Nicholas was being careful of my honour.
He seemed taken aback by my wide-toothed display of gratitude for a second, but then he smiled back at me—properly smiled—and I saw a glimmer of something banish the greyness from his gaze.
‘Bah. I’ve had enough of this foraging for clues nonsense,’ Marcus bellowed suddenly. ‘I think it’s high time we all went off duty!’
Much to my displeasure, the rest of the guests seemed to agree, and our small group peeled apart and headed back to the sofas, where Robert was serving brandy. The rest of the group caught up with each other’s news, chatting about friends I’d never heard of and relatives I’d rather not have heard of. After a long while the conversation dried up, and they remembered that Adam and I were sitting in the room and turned their attention to us.
Louisa fixed her gaze on Adam, who was lounging comfortably in the corner of one of the sofas, a goldfish bowl of a brandy glass held loosely in his fingers. ‘What is it you do, Adam? And please don’t tell me you work in an office like the rest of these poor chaps.’
Adam smiled at Louisa and shook his head. ‘It didn’t start out that way, but I’m finding myself office-bound more and more. I own my own company and we build outdoor structures.’
Before he could carry on I piped up on his behalf. I blame it on the fact I’d been left out of the conversation for so long, because the words left my mouth like a jack out of a box. ‘It all started when he was fifteen and built himself a treehouse to hide away from his three sisters in the back garden.’
‘Oh.’ Louisa didn’t seem quite as impressed by the non-office job now. She smiled at Adam, but her eyes were flat and dull. ‘How nice for you…to make a living out of something that used to be a hobby.’
‘If only I could do that,’ moaned Jos, who, despite still being in her maid’s uniform, had flopped down in a comfy armchair and joined the rest of us. ‘I’ve dreamed all my life that someone would pay me to lie in bed until noon and then shop all afternoon!’
I think the topic might have been dropped then if not for Julian. He lifted his gaze off his shoes and asked Adam, quite earnestly, ‘And what kind of outdoor structures do you build now, Adam?’
All of them swivelled their heads to look at him, as if he’d broken some unspoken rule.
Julian flushed, but held his ground. ‘Mother’s been talking about replacing the old summerhouse.’ He took a big swig of his sherry, then cemented his gaze back on his brogues.
Adam, however, wasn’t gazing anywhere but straight back into the eyes of those judging him, not perturbed in the least about the lack of enthusiasm for his chosen profession.
‘Actually,’ he said, shooting a meaningful glance at me, ‘it would be more accurate to say that my company specialises in custom-built wooden structures—lodges, garden buildings. Our most popular range is luxury treehouses.’
‘Treehouses?’ Louisa’s immaculately plucked eyebrows almost disappeared under her hairline. ‘How quaint! For children, I presume…?’
All eyes now turned to Adam.
‘Some,’ he replied, with the trademark twinkle in his eye. ‘But you wouldn’t believe how many grown-ups harbour fantasies about having a treehouse all of their own, somewhere to escape when life gets too hectic.’
There was a general murmur of agreement and nodding of heads.
‘But surely you don’t mean luxury luxury?’ Louisa said.
Honestly, I didn’t know what her problem was. Couldn’t she just let it drop and admit she’d been a wee bit patronising about Adam’s ‘hobby’?
Like you’ve been, a needly little voice in the back of my head whispered. You don’t really take much interest any more, do you? Too full of your own business, your own enterprises.
I silenced the voice with a swig of vintage port.
Adam’s twinkling eyes turned steely. ‘That’s what luxury usually means, doesn’t it?’
Louisa gave a fake little laugh. ‘But a treehouse is always going to be a bit…basic, isn’t it?’
‘Hang on a second…’ Izzi said, forgetting to stay in character for the first time that evening. ‘Do you mean the kind of thing Michael Dove has just had built? There was a feature on his new mansion in one of the Sunday magazines the other week.’
Jos leaned forward. ‘Michael Dove? The rock star?’ she asked in a breathy, hallowed kind of voice.
Adam nodded. ‘That was one of mine. And it was great fun to build—two rooms, complete with bathroom, kitchenette, home cinema system and audio gear that will wake the neighbours three miles away. He said he wanted a guest house with a difference.’
‘Up a tree?’ Louisa said, still not quite getting it.
Adam helped her out. ‘Up several trees, actually. We set it between three large pine trees at the bottom of his lawn.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Marcus rumbled. ‘How much would a pad like that set you back?’
Izzi, with the extensive knowledge gleaned from the magazine article, mentioned a price that rivalled the cost of my one-bedroomed broom cupboard in Lewisham.
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