by Rachel Dove
RACHEL DOVE is a wife and mother of two boys, living in Yorkshire. She is the proud winner of the 2015 Flirty Fiction Competition with Prima Magazine and Mills & Boon, with her entry, The Chic Boutique on Baker Street. When she is not writing, she can be found raising her boys or curled up under a blanket with a book.
Emily Bronte, the author of my favourite book, once wrote:
‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’
I married my soulmate, and my best friend.
Love you Peter.
To my boys, Jayden and Nathan – the two masterpieces of my life. Mummy loves you, now go tidy your room.
Acknowledgements
This book is a magical dream come true for me, and it wouldn’t have happened without help. First of all, can I thank the amazing judges and staff involved with Prima Magazine and the Flirty Fiction competition. I enjoyed every minute, so thank you. Also, huge thanks to Anna Baggaley, my lovely editor who has been with me for every word, turning the jumble in my head to a book I am proud of, and the lovely people at Mills & Boon for being fabulous in general.
The writing and book blogging community on Facebook and Twitter have been amazing too, and without their support, encouragement and general nuttiness, I would be in a corner somewhere dribbling, so thank you all.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Endpages
Copyright
One
Amanda stared up at the dark wood beam, pondering whether a strip of pale yellow taffeta ribbon would be robust enough as a makeshift noose.
She shook her head, banishing the futile thoughts, and started to clear off the workspace of her new venture when she heard the shutter from next door’s shop go up. The metallic clang reminded her that next door had left their advertising board out the night before. She picked it up on her way to the shop front. New Lease of Life had only been open for a week or so, and her next-door neighbour, ‘Shampooched’, had not been the ideal business colleague. The twenty-something pink-haired rock enthusiast who worked there was not the friendliest person Amanda had ever encountered, but Amanda didn’t want to make waves, being new to town and living above the shop and all. She took a deep breath and walked backwards into the shop, clasping the heavy A-board, a blackboard detailing their opening times.
‘Hey, Tracy, you seem to have left this out … er again … so …’
Amanda was blocked from walking any further by a wall. Squeaking in surprise, she promptly dropped the A-board onto her own feet, this morning clad in soft green ballet pumps, of all things.
‘Owww, son of a b—’
She was tumbling towards the concrete tiled floor, and a bruised bum to boot, when the wall moved and caught her in its grasp. Her words caught in her throat as she gazed up into a pair of steely grey eyes. She found herself smiling despite her embarrassment.
‘I am so sorry, are you OK?’
The man was staring at her with a mixture of concern and amusement. Amanda’s eyes flitted from his chiselled jaw to his full bow lips, and travelled down to his tanned, muscular neck, and his chest, which was encased in a simple black T-shirt. She loved watching the lips move. The movements stopped and Amanda frowned, disappointed. It was then she realised that the lips were attached to an actual person, a person who was waiting for an answer to whatever question these lips had formed.
What is wrong with you?
A voice, soft and cracking with what Amanda thought might be suppressed laughter, broke through the awkward silence.
‘I said, did you hit your head?’ he asked.
Amanda shook her head. ‘Er … no, no, just banged it a little. Sorry!’
Looking down at her right shoe, she saw crimson staining the mint green canvas of her pump. He followed her gaze, frowning.
‘I’m Ben. Just stay sat there a sec, I’ll get a chair and the first aid kit.’
Amanda nodded mutely, feeling a little cheated that the moment had passed, and more than a little embarrassed of her own behaviour. Seriously, woman, you used to command the attention of courtrooms, a bloke in a shop trips you up, and you lose it!
Ben returned, bringing with him a black fold-up chair and large green first aid kit. Amanda kept her eyes on the floor, but could just make out his long lithe legs in his smart black jeans and brown Docker boots. He settled her onto the chair, offering himself as a prop to support her as she got up off the floor. Her cheeks flushed as she felt his arm muscles flex under his T-shirt, and her nostrils twitched with the scent of his heavenly cologne. She literally had to stop herself from burying her head into his neck there and then.
‘So,’ Ben started, as he kneeled before her, opening his kit. ‘You just opened next door, right?’
Amanda nodded, grateful for the small talk.
‘Er yes, that’s right, Amanda Perry. Do you work with Tracy?’
The mention of Tracy reminded Amanda that the goth girl was nowhere to be seen, and Amanda was acutely grateful for her absence. She figured this man couldn’t be a customer, as he had no dog in tow, and he seemed to know his way around.
Please don’t be her boyfriend, she thought to herself. Wait, what? You don’t care anyway, Amanda, new life, remember? Celibate new life. Men are out of bounds.
Ben was concentrating intently on Amanda’s injury, seemingly unaware of her question. Yep, definitely her boyfriend then. Before she knew it, the wound had been cleaned and bandaged up. Amanda was suddenly glad her last pedicure had not been too long ago, and thanked her lucky stars that she had bothered to shave her legs last night. Had this occurred a day earlier, Ben would have been patching up a limb resembling that of a Himalayan yeti.
‘All done,’ he said cheerily, flashing a smile up at her. He stood and, grasping her hands, pulled her to her feet. The sudden movement startled her and she swayed slightly. He tightened his grip, steadying her.
‘Whoa! Are you sure you’re OK?’ he asked, concern clouding his features.
Amanda stiffened in his grasp and extricated herself from him as gracefully as she could.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Thanks for doing that. I just wanted to bring your board back. I … er … had better get back next door, I left it unlocked and we open soon.’
Ben smiled, and Amanda was once again drawn to his full lips. She mentally gave herself a telling-off, and pursed her lips in a businesslike fashion.
‘Well, nice to meet you, Amanda, and if you need anything else, we are just next door.’
Amanda noticed the ‘we’ in the sentence, and winced.
‘Yes, thanks,’ she muttered.
‘What is it you are doing next door, anyway? Antiques and such? Be nice to have one again, good for the tourists. Since Old Bill died, we have been sadly lacking for the antique market in Westfield.’
‘No, nothing like that. Actually it’s a boutique. We sell handmade crafts, doorstoppers, shabby chic decorations, upcycled furniture, craft kits, tea cosies, fairy doors. I make a lot of the items myself and run the upcycling
service and I am planning to stock some kitchen table businesses’ designs too, once my website is up and running. Plus, in the front, I have plans for a small coffee area, so people can shop and get a nice coffee, swap ideas. I am going to expand and sell items online too—handmade goods produced in Westfield. My research showed that people love Yorkshire crafts.’
When she paused to draw breath, exerted from talking excitedly about her new venture, she noticed that Ben was now scowling, and looking quite put out. ‘Really? And the town council agreed to all this, did they? Tell them all this, did you?’
Amanda bristled at his abrupt line of questioning. Folding her arms, she suddenly missed her city heels. She drew herself up to her full height, which in flats still meant that she was looking at the bottom of his now upturned and set jaw.
‘Yes, I did tell them, and it was approved. Of course, why I need a town council’s permission to set up a shop that I own myself is a little strange, but—’
Ben huffed. ‘Strange!’ he practically shouted. ‘I don’t think you quite understand, Amanda. Westfield is a historical Yorkshire village, we have a way of life here, I know you mean well but I just can’t see any good coming from any of this.’
Amanda was absolutely dumbstruck. She was about to start apologising and explaining herself when she realised that this was exactly the reason she had left London in the first place.
‘Well,’ she retorted, poking Ben in his chest with an index finger. Well, not his chest, more like his stomach, from her angle. ‘The day I take orders from another man is the day I pack up and quit life, so why don’t you just do me a favour, Ben—stay out of my business and keep your bloody board out of my way!’ With that, she spun on her heel, not easy in flats, and flounced out of the shop, making sure to bang the door on the way out. As she was busy storming out, she heard him mutter, ‘Bloody Londoners.’
She resisted the urge to go back and slap him, and instead spent the next half-hour pummelling stuffing into her new cushion range, imagining she was inserting things into her stuck-up country boy neighbour.
Next door, Ben was doing much the same, only he took out his frustrations on an unamused Border collie, who was shampooed and brushed vigorously to within an inch of its doggy life.
Two
Amanda dragged the silver metal shutter down with tired shoulders. The metal clanged into place, and she cursed as she dropped the key twice in her attempts to lock the deadbolts. Sighing, she secured the last bolt and straightened up. She winced as her back popped and clicked back into place. She had always thought that being sat ramrod-straight in court all day, followed by long nights hunched over her desk, would have been detrimental to her health, but after a long day in her shop, she now realised that the city girl in her had actually had it pretty easy compared to her new country bumpkin self.
The one thing she didn’t miss was the long commute home. She shuddered as she thought of all those early mornings and late nights crammed on the Tube with sweaty, cranky people and drunks, all trying to get somewhere, anywhere else but the tin can they were entombed in most probably. She remembered the stench, the awkward face thrust into an armpit journeys, the glazed eyes all framed within the condensation of the windows of the trains. To say Amanda had a new-found respect for sardines after all those years would be an understatement. Those fish were the Thors of the oceans, albeit that their journeys were done in the afterlife, but still, kudos.
All Amanda had to do now was pirouette on one foot from the shopfront to her own front door, the flat being directly above her livelihood. The living quarters had been one of the main draws for Amanda, one of the catalysts that had enabled her to even visualise embarking into a new life, far away from her old one.
She had kept the property listing bookmarked for weeks, occasionally taking time to moon over it in between sending work emails and IMs to Marcus. It was like her porn, property websites and Pinterest. They made her happy, and growing up in the dysfunctional family she had, Amanda had soon realised that happiness had to be grasped where it could.
Being the daughter of two law partners, Amanda’s childhood was less My Little Pony and more Mandarin lessons after school and organic vegetables on her dinner plate. Her parents worked hard, played hard and treated their only daughter like a science project, something to be worked on, altered and trotted out to show off at dinner parties. They worked all the time, and Amanda soon found a refuge: Grandma’s house. Dad’s mum lived alone in a neat bungalow on a leafy street in Muswell Hill not far from the impressive and sterile Highbury house she shared with her parental units. Amanda loved staying with her gran, a woman who despaired at her son’s clinical, detached treatment of her only grandchild.
Looking around her new flat, Amanda thought of the happy times she had spent in that house: the smells of cooking, washing on the line, life. That bungalow had more life and joie de vivre within its crooked walls than could be contained, and Amanda learnt everything from her grandmother, Rose. Sewing, cooking, baking: Rose could turn her hand to anything, and showed Amanda another side of life. One where work and money did not rule the world, and where creativity and enjoying life had more value.
She was thirteen when Rose died. She could still remember the bungalow, the smells, the laughter, but now it was tainted, tainted with the memory of her parents picking through Rose’s life, selling and discarding her possessions. She could still picture her mother’s face, full of disgust at the layer of dust on the surfaces, the baskets of wool around the rooms. Grandma Rose’s death affected Amanda deeply, whilst it was barely registered by her own son. After that, Amanda threw herself into schoolwork, working most nights in her room, and when she finished her schooling, she made her escape to university, the promise of a law career already mapped out since her infancy.
She wondered what Grandma Rose would have thought of her actions now; she suspected that she would be watching somewhere, geeing her on. Her parents, however, would not. She shuddered at the thought. Changing her life completely was something they would never understand. She reached out and touched one of the walls of her abode. It was cool to the touch. Perhaps that bookmark was fate, she thought to herself. Maybe it finally brought me home.
The flat was all high ceilings and bumpy plastering, and it looked to Amanda exactly how she was feeling—a bare shell.
She had pored over the pictures on the estate agent’s website all night that night—laptop plonked on the bed, Amanda submerged under the duvet, surrounded by sodden tissues and the contents of her household bills box. She had made herself a little island of desperation, her king-size bed floating along on a sea of desperation, isolation and sheer disbelief. She felt like her world had been spun on its very axis, and she couldn’t help but think of what her parents would say when they discovered the news. That night, Amanda had cried, wailed, and eventually, at 3 a.m., had emailed the estate agent to not only put her London flat on the market, but to also put in an offer on the shop and flat she had been ogling, far away from the hustle and bustle, in a Yorkshire town called Westfield. Only then, once the email had pinged ‘sent’, had the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach eased enough for her to drift off. She dreamed that her little divan island had floated away, and she awoke feeling determined and oddly detached from her previous self.
When she came to, with the light from her bedroom window shining on her laptop screen, she winced, wondering what awaited her now the juggernaut of her plan had started the low rumbling of action. She hadn’t told anyone yet, but the water cooler gossip at work would be in overdrive this morning when she didn’t turn in as normal. What would Marcus tell people? Would he back her up, tell people it was a mistake? Would he even care?
She still had no idea how it had happened herself, so how could she explain it to anyone else?
She remembered how she felt that day, but the reason the contract had gotten so messed up eluded her still. She was always so meticulous. After Marcus’s visit to her office, she had knuckled down,
eager to get the work done and sent off to Marcus, as he had so rudely requested on his way out to an afternoon at the golf course. Time had escaped her once again, and by the time she had finished printing off the paperwork, a quick glance at her workstation clock told her it was well past office hours. After rubbing her stiff neck, she arranged the papers neatly in the case file, threw her coat on, grabbed her bag and headed to Marcus’s office. The office was empty, even the cleaners had gone home. A few side lights lit her path along the sleek corridors. She was just pondering on her pathetic life when she heard a noise coming from Marcus’s office. Looking around her, she became all too aware that she was alone and that no one would actually miss her for a while if she were to go missing. Brandishing the file like a weapon, she froze, listening intently. She heard it again—a low grunt, punctuated by the odd squeal. What the hell was it? Gripping her bag tight to her side with her elbow, she gently pushed open the door to her boyfriend’s office. She jumped as a bang sounded near her, and she realised that she had dropped the file she was holding. The papers exploded from the file, fluttering around her, but she took no notice. What she was looking at was far worse. Marcus was lying across his desk, trousers around his hairy ankles, while a woman was straddled across him, writhing. Both heads snapped towards her at the noise, and they froze. Amanda was trying to form a coherent thought in her head when Marcus jumped up, bouncing the naked woman off him. He jiggled around one-footed on the carpeted floor as he tried to pull his clothing back on. The woman just stared at Amanda, a smug look on her face, and it clicked into place then. Angela, his secretary. The biggest cliché of them all. Shagging her boss in his office after hours.
‘Working late again are we, Miss Perry? We needed that Kamimura file by five,’ she said, all the while pulling her silky panties back up over her stockings and under her short dress. Amanda nodded, looking at Marcus, who was now heading towards her, red-faced and green around the gills.
‘Amanda,’ he said, glaring back at Angela, who shrugged and sat down. ‘This isn’t what you think, I promise.’
