Paige rested her arms on his and lay back against his chest. She murmured in agreement. ‘Tell me more about us,’ she said quietly, as they stared out across the darkening sky.
‘We’re stubborn, strong-willed, and determined,’ he kissed her shoulder. ‘We’re business-minded and creative.’
‘Mmm, don’t forget we enjoy good food and drink,’ she said quietly. ‘What else?’
‘We’ve both been jilted,’ he teased, kissing her when she lifted her head and giggled. ‘So, we both have a lot to be grateful for.’
Paige laughed. ‘We do. Anything else you can think of?’
He sensed she was enjoying lying with him as much as he did. He breathed in the faint smell of her perfume, and slowly the heat of her body warmed him as they lay there. ‘We’re extremely attracted to each other.’
‘True,’ she agreed.
‘And I love you.’
She snuggled back into him. ‘I love you, too,’ she whispered.
Not quite the end…
A Jersey Dreamboat
The Jersey Scene, Book Three
Georgina Troy
Chapter One
‘Sometimes I just want to grab life by the bollocks and kick the hell out of it.’ Izzy Le Lievre slammed down her mug, splashing the bank’s rejection letter for an overdraft with cold coffee.
‘And other times?’ asked her mother, Cherry, not bothering to hide her amusement. She was busily creating another of the huge sculptures which were her source of income.
‘I just grab the nearest Toffee Crisp and eat it.’
‘It’s just money, darling, and there are other banks you can approach.’
Izzy frowned, thinking back to all the paperwork she’d collated for the meeting. ‘I gave them everything they asked for. He laughed at me as if I was some silly woman playing at building up a business.’ She flicked several drops of liquid from the form where they’d left a stain. ‘Why didn’t he take me seriously?’
Cherry shook her head, causing the mop of blonde hair to wobble on the top of her head. ‘Maybe tripping over your own feet as you entered his office wasn’t the sort of entrance he expected from a professional businesswoman.’
‘He’s still a git. And he was a bit pompous, now I come to think of it.’
‘I guess. Make me a tea, darling.’ Cherry indicated her well-used kettle on the recycled melamine work surface.
‘Raspberry leaf?’
‘No, Isabelle. This is me you’re talking to. You know I only have that in the cupboard for the odd occasion. Make me some proper tea.’
Izzy walked over to the small cluttered worktop in her mother’s studio and put the kettle on. Her mother had been on a diet for as long as Izzy could recall, which was probably why she kept various boxes of tea she’d almost certainly never finish.
Izzy made the tea in one of her mother’s pottery mugs and carried it over to her, placing it on a small messy table next to her elbow. Studying the sculpture her mother was working on, Izzy narrowed her eyes. It looked a cross between a man in pain and a yeti, but whatever it was someone must have commissioned it.
‘Can I open the windows a little wider?’ Izzy asked, fanning herself in the July heat and wishing she didn’t have the next ten weekends booked up for weddings and birthday parties. This was the third summer she and her best friend Jessica Moon had been kept busy building up their vintage hire business, Lapins de Lune. She loved her work but it would have been nice just to have one weekend dozing lazily in the sunshine in their back garden instead of creating works of art for the weddings and milestone parties for Jersey locals throughout the summer months.
Her mother nodded. ‘Yes, do.’ She held up a photo, studied it with narrowed eyes, and altered the clay aquiline nose in front of her slightly. ‘Strange-looking man, but rather charismatic in his own way.’
‘Who?’ Izzy asked, shrieking as the studio door was flung open and her business partner and best friend, Jess, burst into the room like a manic fairy. She looked furious. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Sorry to burst in,’ Jess panted, pulling a pained expression in Cherry’s direction by way of an apology. Cherry waved her over for a peck on the cheek. Jess hurried over and leaning forward to ensure her lacy crop top didn’t connect with Cherry’s clay-smeared hands, kissed her. Spotting the letter next to Izzy she raised her eyebrows. ‘Bank?’
Izzy nodded. ‘No go, I’m afraid.’
‘Bastards.’
Izzy waited for her to tell them the reason for her unexpected visit and when Jess picked up and read the bank’s letter but didn’t elaborate, she couldn’t hold back any longer.
‘Well? Is something the matter?’ she asked trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
‘Apart from this, you mean?’ Jess waved the letter in the air. Her shoulders slumped. ‘Yes, something has happened.’
‘Go on,’ Izzy urged when Jess hesitated.
‘You’ll never guess what that cow Catherine de St Croix has done?’ She pursed her lips and folded her arms in front of her chest.
Izzy could tell by Jess’s nervous foot tapping that she wasn’t going to like what was coming next. ‘What?’ she asked, not sure she really wanted to know.
They had been asked by Catherine, only daughter of the local Seigneur, to hire their entire collection of vintage party décor including linens, bunting, and crockery for her forthcoming wedding to a wealthy London hedge fund manager. The booking had been for three consecutive weeks, including the stay of various houseguests at her father’s manor house for the lead up to the wedding, the celebration weekend, and the following week.
Dread seeped through Izzy. ‘Please don’t tell me she’s changed her mind about getting married.’
‘No,’ Jess snapped, hands now perched on her slim hips.
Izzy sighed. ‘Thank heavens for that.’
‘They’ve only gone and bloody eloped.’
‘Why?’ Cherry asked, stepping away from her masterpiece, intrigued.
‘No idea, romantic though, don’t you think?’
Izzy waved her hands in the air. ‘Er, hello? Never mind her love life, what about our business?’
Jess seemed to deflate in front of her. ‘We’re screwed.’
‘Snot-nosed little madam, I never liked her.’ Cherry pulled off the pink and green silk scarf she tied around her hair when she was sculpting and threw it on the floor. All three watched it glide down slowly, not giving Cherry the dramatic effect Izzy suspected her mother had been after. ‘No one treats my daughter like that and gets away with it!’
Izzy bent down and grabbed the scarf, motioning for her mum to sit down on a nearby clay-splashed stool.
‘Mum, calm down.’ Izzy didn’t like Catherine’s fiancé very much, but suspected he wasn’t going to have an easy life being married to someone as demanding as she could be. ‘It’s our own fault for only having one booking for the three busiest weeks in the year – we should have settled on a few smaller ones.’
Jess sniffed. ‘I blame myself.’
‘Don’t,’ Izzy said, stroking her friend’s arm. ‘These things happen.’
As devastated as Izzy was at this news, she didn’t like the thought of Jess feeling so guilty. They’d argued about this booking for days before accepting it.
‘But I insisted it would be a brilliant opportunity,’ Jess said, her eyes looking rather watery. ‘I thought it would help us,’ she made quote signs with her fingers, ‘“cultivate a professional relationship with the attendees who would be staying at the manor house”.’
Izzy shook her head. The last thing she was going to do now was be negative and make her friend feel any worse than she already did. ‘Your intentions were good.’
‘How much money have you lost?’ Cherry put down her knife and photo and crossed the stained floor to give Jess a big hug. ‘There must be a cancellation clause in your terms and conditions?’
Jess began to cry. ‘She didn’t sign the contract.’
<
br /> ‘What?’ Izzy stared at her in disbelief, all thoughts of remaining positive vanishing at this revelation.
Cherry’s arms dropped to her sides. ‘Jessica, please tell me this isn’t as bad as I presume.’
Izzy glared at her mum and hurried over to Jess. She tried to push away the memory of when she had relented about the job and made Jess promise to ensure Catherine would sign their contract.
‘She never signed it?’ she whispered, just in case she’d misheard.
Jess shook her head.
‘But all our clients are supposed to sign the contract before we agree to take them on and mark their date, or in this case dates, into our diary system.’
Jess nodded her head rapidly. ‘Yes, I know. And ordinarily we’d be covered so that in the event of a last-minute cancellation her father would still have to pay us a cancellation fee.’
‘Yes, with the amount increasing on a sliding scale as each day passed closer to the wedding.’ She took a deep breath, desperate not to give into the panic rising in her chest. ‘Jess, I thought you said it was all in hand.’
Jess sniffed, and pulling a tissue out of her denim shorts pocket, gave her nose a good blow. ‘It was, sort of,’ she explained. ‘I’d been phoning her every day and Catherine kept promising to get the contract back to me. This morning, knowing it was getting really close and that you’d have a fit if you knew she still hadn’t signed it, I drove to the manor to find her.’ She groaned covering her face with her hands.
‘Go on,’ Cherry urged, going back to sit at her stool.
‘That’s when they told me she’d bloody eloped.’
‘Oh.’ Izzy blinked away tears. ‘We did take a deposit though, didn’t we?’
Jess nodded between gulping sobs. ‘When I confirmed the initial booking.’
Light-headed with relief that all their hard work hadn’t been for nothing, Izzy grinned. ‘Thank heavens for that.’ She gave her mother a reassuring smile.
Cherry’s expression remained stern. ‘How much?’
Jess winced. ‘Ten per cent of the total estimate.’
‘Is that all?’
Izzy understood her mother’s shock. She was pretty shocked herself and couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Only ten per cent?
She didn’t ask in front of her mother why Jess had lowered the deposit from their usual twenty-five per cent and was unable to understand why her friend had done such a thing. It wouldn’t make up for having no bookings at the busiest time of the year. Hadn’t Cherry nagged them time and again about needing to toughen up if they wanted Lapins de Lune to survive?
‘She ground me down,’ Jess said eventually, not looking either of them in the eyes.
Izzy spotted her mother’s tight-lipped irritation and not being in the mood for one of her tirades, decided to back Jess up. ‘We were hoping to make contacts from Catherine’s wealthy family and friends for more weddings and parties, so only asked for a smaller percentage.’ Izzy explained. ‘It was stupid.’
‘It was extremely stupid.’ Cherry snapped, shaking her head, causing her blonde curls to bounce wildly around her head. ‘Honestly, girls, you’re supposed to be professional event planners, when will you learn?’
Izzy couldn’t help feeling indignant at her mum’s words. ‘We did learn, Mum,’ she argued. ‘Don’t forget we’d initially intended hiring out our crockery and linen as our business, now that’s just our side-line. We soon learnt we needed to offer more if we wanted Lapins de Lune to work.’
‘That’s true,’ Cherry’s voice softened slightly. ‘But you can’t afford to keep making mistakes and expect to survive financially.’
‘This is the first big mistake we’ve made.’ It was. Up until now their business had gone really well. They both loved collecting the vintage décor and when Jess’s granny had died several years before and left her cottage to Jess, they’d both been stunned to discover that she’d left her linens and crockery sets equally between Jess and Izzy.
‘She hated that you didn’t have a gran of your own to leave you special mementos,’ Jess recalled Izzy telling her when the will had been read. ‘She always said we should relish the past when we plan for our future. Although I didn’t understand what she was going on about at the time.’
Izzy had been deeply touched that Jess’s gran had thought of her. Apart from Cherry and Jess, of course, the old lady had been there to offer her much support after her boyfriend David’s unexpected death four years before. She still felt the excitement when they’d discovered the abundance of linens stashed in two cedarwood chests, each separated with a layer of tissue paper. The linens had been the inspiration for them to start the business they’d always talked about.
‘Yes, but this mistake could be the one that ruins you.’ Cherry said in her typical matter-of-fact way before turning her attention back to her work. She studied the picture once again. ‘What will you do now? You could advertise for other bookings, I suppose.’ She dampened her index finger and thumb in a small bowl of water and made a miniscule adjustment to the bust’s square chin. ‘I doubt anyone who’s anyone would leave their planning until this late in the summer though.’
She was right, Izzy thought miserably. What where they supposed to do now? She watched her mother, willing her to come up with an ingenious plan.
Cherry kicked a spatula out of her way as she moved around the figure in front of her. Izzy could see she was trying to hide her fury and hoped her mother didn’t take it upon herself to go and have words with the Seigneur about his daughter. Cherry Le Lievre was well known on the island for her no-nonsense attitude to people and this wouldn’t be the first time Izzy experienced her marching off and causing chaos at some function or other.
‘I have no idea what to suggest,’ Cherry said eventually, looking from one to the other of them and shaking her head. ‘It really is too bad of Catherine de St Croix. Just because her father is the Seigneur, doesn’t give her the right to mess about with other people’s lives so thoughtlessly.’ She closed her eyes briefly. ‘Seigneur, what is that anyhow?’
Izzy wasn’t sure. Cherry, who refused to go by her original name of Ingrid, had moved to the island from her native Sweden nearly thirty years before. She’d told Izzy many times how much she’d hated the work as a waitress for one of the local hotels. Despite her own parents being socially important in her home town, she still found the whole idea of anyone thinking they were higher up the social chain than others extremely nauseating. Not that the Seigneur probably saw of himself this way, Izzy thought. Catherine certainly did though. Izzy loved her mother; and since her father had died when she was ten, she was her only parent, but her fierceness when protecting Izzy and her older half-brother, Alex, was legendary.
‘If only she’d given us more notice,’ Jess said, her voice tight. ‘A week doesn’t give us any time to salvage this mess.’
‘I know.’ Izzy agreed, stroking her friend’s back. As bad as she felt right now, she would have hated to be poor Jess. ‘We’ll think of something, don’t worry,’ she soothed.
She heard whistling as someone came down the lavender-lined pathway towards the studio. It stopped as Alex entered the large sunny room and saw her.
‘Hey, munchkin, what are you doing skulking in here with Herself?’
‘Don’t be rude,’ Cherry said, flicking a piece of wet clay at her beloved son. ‘Can’t you see the girls are upset?’
He seemed to notice Jess for the first time. ‘What’s up?’ he asked looking awkward and moving over to the sink on the other side of the studio to them.
Izzy wasn’t ready for a post-mortem about the unexpected cancellation. It was Izzy’s cue to leave. ‘A bit of a business disaster,’ she said, leading Jess towards the door. ‘I’ll leave Mum to explain everything; we need to get on.’
‘But I might be able to help,’ he said, concern on his tanned face.
Jess’s step faltered, and Izzy had to pull her gently along. She was aware of Jess’s attraction
to her brother, but as much as she loved Alex, she wasn’t sure Jess could cope with someone whose life was ruled by the tides, especially a professional surfer who had as much female attention as he did.
‘Thanks, but we’re in a rush,’ she fibbed. ‘Bye, you two,’ she said, giving her mum a quick peck on her mucky cheek and nodding in Alex’s direction. ‘Mum can tell you all about it.’ She propelled Jess outside. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
She could hear Cherry launching into a tirade about the de St Croix and left them to pick over the bones of their disaster.
‘What are we going to do now?’ Jess asked, sniffing miserably as they walked to the back door.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Izzy replied. ‘But I do know we’re not giving up this business without a fight and certainly not because Catherine’s let us down.’
As they walked up the garden path, Alex bellowed for them to stop.
Izzy groaned. She wasn’t in the mood for his usual teasing and motioned for Jess to go back to their place. ‘You make us a couple of drinks, I’ll catch up with you in a sec.’
‘Hey, I was calling you,’ Alex said running up the path towards her, his sun-bleached floppy blond hair falling over one eye.
‘I heard.’
He pushed his hair out of his eye and gave her a hug. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think, Iz.’
She shrugged him off, bending to pick a stem of lavender from her mum’s chaotic garden. ‘I hope not.’
Alex gave her his brightest smile. ‘If you don’t want me to try and help, how about filling some of your time this weekend by helping me celebrate my birthday?’
‘Bugger, I’d forgotten.’
He laughed. ‘That’s fine, little sis,’ he said ruffling her hair and making her scowl at him.
The Jersey Scene series box set Page 65