by Fiona Harper
He laughed. ‘No, nothing so exotic as a faun,’ he said. ‘I’m the back end of a pantomime horse.’
She smiled a serene little smile, as if that made perfect sense. ‘Peggy said there’d be a horse…but I can’t really remember how the horse was going to get here or why.’ She screwed up her face, as if she was thinking hard. ‘Where’s your head?’
He nodded in the direction of the bar. ‘Trying to chat up one of your friends,’ he replied.
Lara was still scowling. It looked as if Tom had struck out for once, but he probably wouldn’t mind too much. His motto in everything—especially when it came to women—was ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’.
The brunette looked over her shoulder, then turned to look him in the eye and thought hard for a moment. ‘I think I need to kiss you again. Three times is supposed to be lucky, isn’t it?’
He nodded, equally serious. It certainly was. And he hoped these cheap hired horse hindquarters were fire retardant, because the kiss that followed topped the previous two on the scorch-o-meter. That was the best kiss he’d had all year. And not just the one that had started. He’d included the one before that too.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked again.
She laughed loudly, indicated her black dress and string of pearls with a hand. ‘Don’t you know?’
He shook his head, smiling. A few wisps of hair had escaped from her neat bun thing and she looked totally adorable.
‘But I’m from Breakfast at Tiffany’s! Everybody’s seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s!’
He shrugged. ‘Not me.’
Her mouth dropped open. ‘Really! Never?’
Alex shook his head. Breakfast…Now, there was an appealing idea. ‘Let me guess…Are you Tiffany?’
She went from shocked to amused in a heartbeat, hitting him gently on the chest. ‘No, silly!’
He caught her hand and kept it trapped under his.
‘I’m Holly!’ she said with a weary sigh, as if even his two-year-old niece would know that. But then again, she probably did. Women seemed to know everything about every chick flick ever made from the moment of their births.
‘Well, Holly…Can I have your number? I’d like to call you.’
She closed her eyes and rested against him, mumbled sleepily, ‘Sure.’
He waited for a moment. ‘Care to enlighten me?’
One eyelid lifted. ‘Huh?’
‘Your number?’
The eyelid slid closed again. ‘It’s oh-nine-three…no, seven…no, three…’ She lifted her head and peered at him from under half-mast false lashes. ‘I can’t seem to remember.’
‘How about I give you mine?’
She nodded. He tore a corner off a flyer on a nearby table and scribbled his number down for her. When he handed it to her she blinked twice, very deliberately, then tucked it down in the front of her dress. All the saliva evaporated from his mouth.
He caught a flash of baby-pink moving towards him and realised her friends had come to rescue her.
She smiled dreamily at him. ‘Thank you…for my midnight kiss. It was very nice.’
His smile grew wider. ‘Yes, it was.’
Over her shoulder he saw Tom heading back in his direction, down but not out, according to the rueful smile on his face. His mystery woman’s friends weren’t far behind. They pushed their way through the dance floor, stopped a short distance away and beckoned for their friend.
The one in the pink gave him a saucy wink, while the Lara Croft lookalike kept an eye on Tom, making sure he was heading away from her.
‘Call me,’ he said, as they led her away.
Pinky looked back at him over her shoulder as they headed for the door. ‘If she doesn’t,’ she said with a little smirk, ‘I will.’
Tom sighed as he leaned back against the wall beside him. ‘Damn. Knew I should have gone for Doris instead.’ He took a swig of beer and smiled at the polka-dotted hips wiggling their way out of the door. ‘The good girls are always so much fun when they’re persuaded to be just a little bit bad.’
CHAPTER TWO
Ten months later
Nicole stood on top of an office building in Lambeth, arms wrapped around her for warmth. The sun had set half an hour ago, leaving just a smudge of peach peeping out between the glass towers and church spires that crowded the London horizon.
She risked a glance over the edge and instantly regretted it. Twenty storeys below, the November wind tugged papery leaves from trees then threw them carelessly in the path of the rush-hour traffic.
‘Are you ready, Warren?’ she asked, only just managing to stop her teeth chattering. She forced her cheeks into the soothing, yet professional smile she always used on her clients at this part of the proposal process.
Warren, a baby-faced, slightly balding forty-something, was fastening an abseiling harness over the top of his dinner suit. He looked up and nodded, nervous but determined.
Nicole caught the eye of Kirk, the ex-army guy she’d used a few times for similar stunts. He was one of those wordless, beefy types, who Nicole had been worried would intimidate men preparing to be the most vulnerable they’d ever been in their life, but somehow he inspired laddish camaraderie, and even the most timid of clients seemed more ready to do something high-risk and daring under his guidance. He finished testing Warren’s harness then stepped back and nodded at Nicole.
Warren’s face paled.
Nicole stepped forward and handed him an earpiece, similar to the one she was wearing. She looked him in the eyes. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ she told him. ‘A minute from now you’re going to be face to face with the woman you love, and she’s worth all of this, isn’t she?’
He nodded and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
Nicole stepped back as Warren jammed the earpiece into place. ‘Now you’ve got your very own piece of high-tech gadgetry—just like James Bond,’ she added, warming the ever-present smile up a notch.
Warren fidgeted with his harness a little. She guessed it was probably pinching in places she didn’t want to know about. ‘That’s the idea,’ he said. ‘Cheryl’s always had a bit of a thing for 007. I’m not under any grand illusions, but I thought if I could show her I could be the tiniest bit like him, it might improve the chance of her saying yes.’
Nicole looked across at his smooth receding forehead, his slightly chubby cheeks, the torso that suggested he’d spent more time at the kebab shop than at the gym. She wished she really could tell him he was the spitting image of Pierce or Roger or Sean. ‘You look extremely dashing,’ she said. ‘You’re going to blow Cheryl away.’
Warren smiled softly. ‘Like a real Bond film…Something always gets blown away—or up—in a Bond film.’
The thought of an explosion of any kind featuring in the proposal she spent the last month meticulously planning sent a shiver of fear down Nicole’s spine. However, she glued the smile in place and projected it back at Warren with even greater force. ‘As long as it’s an explosion of love, and love alone, everyone will be happy.’
Especially her.
She checked her watch. ‘Do you remember what to do?’
Warren went back to looking very serious. He nodded. ‘Abseil down slowly two floors, then wait for your signal before doing the last bit.’
‘You can do it,’ she said, handing him the sign he was going to clip to his harness and a single red rose. ‘Just remember…Kirk is here at the top if you need help and I’ll be waiting for you on the seventeenth floor.’
Warren nodded weakly and backed towards the edge. With Kirk’s help he started to lower himself down. Nicole stood, calm and serene, smiling as he went. Just before he vanished she did a little thumbs-up gesture, but as soon as his eyes disappeared below the parapet, and only the thinning fluff on the top of his head was left in view, she set off running like a greyhound towards the door that led to the fire escape.
Her heels clattered on the stairs as she raced down two flights. They weren’t really
practical for this kind of thing, she knew, but she had a professional image to maintain.
She paused briefly outside the room where the action was due to take place and sucked in as much oxygen as she could. Five seconds was all she had, so five seconds would have to do. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as she waited for her pulse to stop stampeding, then slipped gracefully through the fire-exit door and into the open-plan office. No one would ever have known she’d been a heaving mess only seconds earlier.
Cheryl, Warren’s fiancée-to-be, was tapping away on her keyboard right next to the floor-to-ceiling windows. Every now and then she glanced up at the large clock on the far wall and sighed. The rest of the office carried on with their business, as if it were the end of a normal Friday afternoon.
Nicole made eye contact with Felicity, Cheryl’s best friend, who’d been only too happy to be the office ‘mole’ for this part of the operation. Then she checked her watch. ‘Where are you, Warren?’ she mumbled into her Bluetooth earpiece.
She could hear panting and the wind whistling. ‘Just about there,’ he said in a high-pitched voice. ‘Passing the eighteenth floor now.’
She gave Felicity a nod, and Felicity turned and gave a signal to a large man sitting at a desk in the centre of the room. His name was Morris, and he had the most soulful voice Nicole had ever heard. He stood up, cleared his throat and started singing the opening bars to ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’.
A few of the other workers looked up, but most kept on about their work. One by one they joined in the song until the whole seventeenth floor was singing its heart out. Nicole grinned. Those endless choir practices at Hurstdean Academy had come in useful after all.
Warren might not be James Bond, but Nicole dearly hoped that Cheryl was going to say yes. Not only was he a really nice guy, but it said a lot about him that their workmates had spent hours perfecting the song in secret over the last fortnight.
Nicole crept a little further into the office so she could see Cheryl more clearly round the edge of a row of cubicles. She’d stopped typing now and was staring open-mouthed at her colleagues, who sang and smiled as they gathered round her. And, just as Morris took the song to its lungbursting climax, Warren lurched into view outside Cheryl’s window, fumbling to pull the red rose out of his lapel and holding it towards her.
For a moment Cheryl didn’t see him, but that sixth sense that comes when someone is looking over one’s shoulder must have kicked in, because she twisted round and screamed at the same time. She would have fled halfway across the office if Felicity hadn’t caught her and steered her back.
‘Warren!’ Cheryl shrieked, both hands pressed against her sternum, one on top of the other. ‘What the heck are you doing out there?’
Warren, bless his little cotton socks, managed to stop looking quite so nervous. He flashed her a truly 007-worthy smile, then swung the sign dangling from a short rope attached to his harness up into his hands with one swift move.
On it were written four words: Will you marry me?
He’d wanted to go with something Bond-themed, but Nicole had convinced him to keep it simple. When it came to this part of the proposal, no fuss, no frills were needed. That was all a woman needed to hear.
The hairs on the back of her neck lifted as a hush fell on the whole office. Cheryl covered her mouth with her hands then nodded slowly. Once. Twice. Then a flurry of bobbing as she pressed her hands against the glass and started crying.
Nicole smiled as she whispered into her headset, ‘We are go!’
Right on cue, fireworks erupted from the park opposite and Warren and Cheryl’s colleagues cheered and rushed to the windows to watch. Nicole waved at Warren to catch his attention and pointed downwards with an exaggerated action. He was just hanging there, a stupid grin plastered all over his chubby face. He’d completely forgotten the next part of the plan was to get him down and on this side of the glass ASAP.
She sighed and looked around at the mayhem. It was lovely. It really was. And romantic. But…
She shook her head and plucked her earpiece out of her ear. Maybe she was getting a little jaded. In the ten and a half months since she’d started Hopes & Dreams she’d helped numerous men pop the question, but maybe the daily diet of OTT was starting to wear on her.
It was lovely to see all these couples happily planning their futures, but it only seemed to emphasise that once they’d taken each other by the hand and waltzed off into the sunset, she was left standing there alone.
She’d come close—once—to being proposed to. Or so she’d thought. She shook her head to dislodge the memory of that night. She didn’t need to go back there. Life was all about moving forward, about making the future count, not about moping over things that should have been but weren’t.
Warren, who’d finally made it down to the balcony two floors below and unharnessed himself with Kirk’s help, appeared in the doorway to an almighty cheer from his colleagues. He marched over to Cheryl looking ten feet tall, a bit of a Bond swagger in his usual lolloping gait. His fiancée watched him approach, her eyes wide and moist, and Nicole couldn’t help but shake off the mood that had been troubling her a few moments earlier.
She caught Warren’s eye across the top of the crowd and he winked at her as he drew Cheryl into his arms then dipped her for a kiss. Nicole smiled back and tucked her earpiece in her pocket.
Her job was done here. Everything had gone according to her meticulous plan—as everything in her life always did. And she didn’t know why she was getting all maudlin about the lack of proposals in her own life. It was a moot point. She wasn’t even seeing anyone at the moment. There’d been no one since…
She mentally swatted that thought.
She wasn’t seeing anyone, and that was fine, because she was too busy getting a fledgling business off the ground in tough economic times. So right now she was perfectly content organising everyone else’s happy-ever-afters. As long as everything kept going to plan, hers would get here eventually.
CHAPTER THREE
Feeling a little windswept and definitely a lot tired, Nicole walked into the foyer of the Hamilton Grand Hotel and quickly disposed of her coat and bag in the cloakroom. She checked her watch. She was late. Just a little. But it didn’t sit well with her. She didn’t do late. Or unprofessional. Or disorganised.
Her outfit wasn’t perfect, either. But that was what happened when you had to go from the top of an office block to a party in one evening. She usually preferred a cocktail dress, but her pencil skirt and classic chiffon blouse would just have to do.
Since both Peggy and Mia had both invested money in Hopes & Dreams and were hoping to join Nicole in the business full-time when things took off, Nicole had invited both her friends to come along with her. She found them in the Terrace Bar with a view over the Thames, along with a hundred or so event planners, hoteliers and media bods. The Hamilton had recently undergone an extensive refurbishment and this was their ‘we’re back!’ party, designed to wow former clients who’d been less than impressed with gradually dilapidating facilities.
Nicole had to admit, they’d done a marvellous job. It was now chic and modern. Flat matt walls in both neutral and bold colours, textured fabrics, funky light fittings. No hint of the dated plasterwork, thank goodness. Nicole shuddered at the memory. She’d always had a hatred for that fussy eighties faux-Victorian look, ever since one of her posh boarding-school friends had come to stay, taken one look at Nicole’s mother’s stripy wallpaper under the glued-on dado rail and had wrinkled her nose a little.
None of the other girls at Hurstdean had homes like that. They’d had antiques instead of orange pine that had darkened to an almost radioactive tone, real oil paintings instead of Monet prints from IKEA. But that was what came from being the scholarship kid, she supposed.
But after that incident Nicole had decided it was better to go without if you couldn’t have the real thing, and she’d started building her furnishings, her wardrobe—and he
r life—according to that code. ‘Dress for the job you want…’ someone had once said. Well, Nicole dressed for the life she wanted, a fabulous one.
‘So, did Cheryl say yes to tubby old Warren?’ Peggy asked as Nicole approached.
Nicole nodded and the other two girls breathed out a sigh of relief. While a negative to a proposal really came down to the relationship in question, too many refusals could make the Hopes & Dreams look bad. So far, though, Nicole had a really good success rate. Only one ‘no’, and that had been right back at the beginning, a big-headed plonker whose ill-fated proposal idea had only convinced his girlfriend that he loved himself more than he did her.
That one blot on her otherwise perfect record still smarted. Still, she’d been on a huge learning curve since then and had come up with protective measures to stop herself falling into that kind of situation ever again.
Thankfully, her proposer tonight had been nothing like Mr Arrogant.
‘He got right into the part too,’ Nicole said. ‘Not sure what Cheryl’s going to do with him now he’s discovered his inner Bond.’
Peggy’s red lips stretched slowly into a smile. ‘I know what I’d do with a man who’d discovered his inner Bond…’
‘Oh, there you are, darlings! Doesn’t the Hamilton look super? I’m sure Minty and I are going to use it for one of our next parties.’
Nicole’s stomach sank, but she turned round, smiling—if not genuinely—widely. ‘Celeste…Araminta…How are you?’
The two women were both tall and had cascading, thick honey-coloured waves. They looked as if they’d blown in off the King’s Road after an afternoon’s shopping. The dresses were bang on trend, the make-up artfully suggesting a healthy glow, and the legs went on for centuries.
However, despite her irritation at their presence, Nicole couldn’t help taking a mental note of how their outfits were put together, noting details like designers, fabrics, cut…As much as she didn’t like them, Celeste and Minty always looked fabulous, and it was never good to be outshone by the competition.