by Fiona Harper
He grunted his acknowledgement, and then he looked up at her. ‘Why are you here, Nicole?’
Nicole. Not ‘Nic’ any more.
She gulped in some air. ‘Because I like you too, Alex. More than I should have done. More than I wanted to. But I do.’
He scuffed the concrete floor with the toe of his boot. ‘And you want me to say that now it’s all over and I’m free of crazy old Saffron we can just walk off into our happy-ever-after? It doesn’t work like that.’
‘I know.’ Her throat felt very tight. She paused for a moment. ‘But we have something, don’t we? Something that’s worth not letting it slip away a second time.’
Alex just stared back at her, jaw clenched.
‘So there it is,’ she said, clasping her hands in front of her, mainly to stop her fidgeting with the buttons on her coat. ‘I’m sorry I lied to you, and I’m sorry I hurt you. I don’t exactly know what I could have done differently, but I know I messed up. I’m not perfect.’ She looked hopefully at him. ‘You seemed to think that wasn’t such a bad thing once upon a time, that maybe even something wonderful could come from mistakes…’
He shook his head and pushed himself away from the wall, walked around the empty space. ‘I don’t care about you being perfect,’ he said slowly as he paced. ‘I care about you being real. And there lies the problem—I have no idea who you are. Are you the smart, slick woman standing before me?’
She looked herself up and down. Okay, she hadn’t quite been able to bear coming to see him in her tatty tracksuit bottoms with all her mascara smudged down her cheeks, but she hadn’t especially dressed up. It was just that most of her wardrobe looked a certain way.
‘Or are you the girl who drops memory cards in champagne glasses? Who goes gooey at other people’s weddings? Or were you just being who you needed to be to keep that all-important confidentiality going?’
‘You want the truth?’
He nodded. Instead of looking just plain angry now, there was sadness in his expression.
She wanted to tell him that she was the latter, the girl he liked, the girl who knew how to be a little bit impulsive, to go with the flow like he did, but she wasn’t sure if that was really her or if he just rubbed off on her when she was with him. She sighed and then gave him his answer. ‘The truth is that I don’t really know, either.’
He pressed his lips together, looking resigned. She knew he was going to pull the plug. She saw it in his eyes before the words even formed in his brain.
‘All I know is that I’m being real now,’ she said quickly. ‘There’s no job to lie for, no reason to pretend to be anything that I’m not.’
He nodded, walked closer. Far too close for her sense of composure not to flitter up to the ceiling like the dust he’d disturbed with his striding. ‘The problem is that you talk a good talk…But if you don’t know who you are from one moment to the next, how am I supposed to?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said again. She seemed to be saying that a lot tonight.
He shook his head. ‘It’s no basis for a relationship.’
She nodded. She knew that much.
He finally touched her, lifted his hand to stroke her hair as he looked into her eyes. ‘Maybe it was only ever supposed to be what happened on New Year’s Eve, that one perfect moment. I don’t think you’re ready for it to be anything more, Nicole.’
She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him he was wrong, that she wanted everything from him. But she couldn’t. Because he was right. The girl she’d turned herself into didn’t know how to be real, and maybe she never would.
She had one last thing to tell him before she left, though.
‘If it had been my proposal,’ she began, ‘I would have done it differently.’
He stepped back, stared back at her, unblinking.
She took a steadying breath. ‘I would have taken you hiking, along the shores of a remote loch in Western Scotland, a place where the water is as clear as glass, even in the weak winter sun. I’d have told you we were staying at a youth hostel, but as the sun set I would have led you to a little castle perched on an outcrop that looked over the loch. The air would have smelled of heather and the clouds would have huddled round a large and pale full moon, so clear you could have photographed the individual craters if you’d wanted to.’
She paused for a moment, swallowed to moisten her dry throat. ‘Inside there would have been no one, but we’d have walked in to find a roaring fire and a picnic in a large wicker hamper. There, on a small table beside a small and cosy leather sofa built for two, would have been a bottle of exceptional single malt and two glasses.
‘We’d have shrugged off our coats and warmed ourselves on the outside with the fire and the inside with a dash of what was in the bottle. I’d have kissed you slowly, softly, the taste of whisky on my tongue, a promise in my touch, and then I would have whispered in your ear. No fuss, no rigmarole. No fireworks, no choirs. Just simple words. Just the truth.’ She inhaled, aware the burning in her nose would soon make any further speech impossible. ‘That is how I would have asked you to marry me.’
Alex stood there like a statue. He looked as if he’d just been slapped. Nicole waited for him to come out of his trance, but he didn’t move, didn’t speak. Eventually, she just dropped her head, turned and walked out the door.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Peggy and Nicole’s doorbell went at 8 a.m. Peggy was still in her fluffy pink dressing gown, so she shooed Nicole, who was mostly dressed, down the stairs to open the door. She found Mia standing there, a cardboard tray containing three takeaway coffee cups in her hand.
‘Hello,’ Nicole said, rubbing the corner of one eye with her index finger. ‘What are you doing here?’
Mia often looked a bit serious, Nicole thought, and she did so this morning. ‘I brought cappuccinos,’ she replied, giving nothing away. Nicole let her inside and followed her back upstairs to the flat.
Mia put the coffees on the kitchen table and yelled for Peggy to join them. Peggy appeared with only one false eyelash attached, but Mia refused to let her go and sort the other one out. ‘We need to have an emergency meeting,’ she explained.
Peggy yawned and slid into one of the mismatched wooden chairs that surrounded her vintage Formica table, which she’d rescued from an old cafe that had gone out of business. ‘I wouldn’t exactly call cappuccinos and pastries an emergency, but I’m prepared to go with the flow…’ She eyed the paper bag that Mia had placed on the table beside the coffees. ‘Got an almond croissant in there?’
‘Of course,’ Mia said and nudged the bag in her direction. Once Peggy had snaffled her pastry, she handed the bag to Nicole.
‘I thought you might need fortification when you saw this…’ Mia slapped a tabloid newspaper down on the table. It took a couple of seconds for Nicole to compute there were faces she recognised on there, and that Saffron’s almost filled the front cover. She snatched it up and stared at it, mouth open.
‘How…? What…? How…?’
Peggy leaned in over her shoulder and read the headline beside the picture of Saffron. ‘“Proposal Planner Stole My Fiancé”. Hey, that’s you, Nicole!’
Nicole’s gaze drifted to the two smaller pictures flanking the one of a forlorn-looking Saffron. One was of Alex and Saffron together, smiling at each other. The grainy texture suggested it was a personal photo, probably taken on someone’s mobile phone. And the other was a fuzzy one of Nicole, looking tense and, well…the only word Nicole could think of to describe the look on her face was ‘bitchy’.
Peggy swore. ‘They must have taken that sometime since Saturday!’ she added, tapping a hot-pink fingernail against Nicole’s unflattering image.
Nicole couldn’t do anything but stare. Peggy was right. There was a certain puffiness around her eyes that had marked it out as a recent photo, a certain deadness in her expression.
She shook her head slowly. ‘Someone has been following me? Taking my picture without my know
ledge?’
Peggy shrugged. ‘Look on the bright side! You did say you wanted Hopes & Dreams to be a little more high profile…’ She looked at the headline again. ‘This certainly accomplishes that.’
Nicole turned to look at her. ‘Are you insane? I said we needed more high-profile clients! Not to become notorious…infamous…’ She closed her eyes to block out the words and images swimming in front of them. ‘This is not what I meant and you know it!’
‘I was just trying to find the silver lining,’ Peggy mumbled, sounding a little hurt.
Nicole opened her eyes and pulled Peggy into a loose hug. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have shouted at you…It’s just. It’s just…’ Her eyes were drawn to the picture of her again. She was turning into the bitch the photo suggested she was, obviously.
Peggy squeezed her back. ‘It’s okay. I know this has to be hard for you.’ She pulled away and shrugged. ‘If it was me, I’d probably just laugh it off, but I know this kind of stuff matters to you.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘What people think of you.’
Mia pulled out a chair and sat down. The other two followed. ‘I thought you should see this straight away, before you opened the office,’ she said.
Nicole knew that was true, but her brain had snagged on Peggy’s comment. ‘You think I care too much about what people think about me?’
Peggy and Mia looked at each other, then back at her.
‘A little bit,’ Mia said tactfully.
Nicole shook her head and looked at the picture. How stupid of her. How stupid to care so much about something so artificial. She had a feeling she didn’t even know who she was any more, so how could she get upset if people drew their own conclusions—ones based on her actions, no less. The horrible thing was they might be right.
‘What does it say?’ she asked quietly. ‘Inside?’ There had to be a spread to go along with that headline.
Mia sighed and pulled the paper over to flip it open. Nicole deliberately kept her focus on her cappuccino. She took the lid off and downed a large, scalding mouthful.
‘Pretty much what you’d guess, given the circumstances…’ Mia said as she skim-read the article she’d obviously digested earlier. ‘She hired us…You met with Alex…On the night of the proposal it came to light that you’d been seeing each other behind her back.’
‘But we weren’t!’
Peggy shoved the cinnamon roll in her direction. ‘We know that and you know that, but clearly Saffron doesn’t. I can see how she joined up the dots and got the wrong picture.’
For a moment Nicole couldn’t move, but then she slumped down until her forehead rested on the table. She didn’t even care she could tell the ends of her hair were sticking to one side of her cinnamon roll.
Well, that was it. Even if she hadn’t been tempted to pull the plug on her hopes and dreams, they were blown to smithereens now anyway. It didn’t help that she knew she was the one who’d pressed the detonator. She’d wanted to build a name for herself, a reputation, but it certainly hadn’t been this one. ‘Shoot me now…’ she mumbled with her lips against the table. It was the only humane thing left to do.
She raised her head. ‘I’m so sorry, girls. I really am so sorry.’
Mia reached across and rubbed her arm. Peggy reached across and did the same, but then stole half her pastry too. ‘It’s okay…’
Nicole sat up then stood up. ‘You don’t get it, do you? No, it isn’t!’
Peggy waved at her to sit down again. ‘We’ll weather this storm. It’ll all blow over in a couple of weeks.’
Nicole shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think we will. This business is built on trust.’
‘They trust us to give them a show-stopping proposal and we certainly did that for Saffron,’ Peggy said. ‘It even said so in the article!’
Nicole sighed. ‘But our clients also trust us to keep their secret and not give away what they’re up to, but most importantly, they trust us with their future, their happiness.’ Her voice got quieter. ‘They trust us with their hopes and dreams…Who is going to book us now? Nobody wants to hire a proposal planner more likely to make all their nightmares come true by stealing the groom than give them a happy-ever-after!’
Both Mia and Peggy opened their mouths. Nicole knew they both wanted to say something to contradict her, to cheer her up. She could even see their brains whirring away behind their eyes. There were plenty of platitudes Peggy could have come out with: If at first you don’t succeed… or Live to fight another day…but even she was silent.
Eventually, they all just started drinking their cappuccinos and eating their pastries in silence. Just like that, their emergency meeting felt as if it had turned into a wake.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Alex stood in front of a large display of bouquets in the supermarket and wondered which one Saffron would like best.
See? This was why things had got so screwy. They didn’t even know each other well enough for him to remember her favourite flower. How on earth had she thought they were ready to walk down the aisle together? Especially when he’d broken up with her!
That was why he needed to go and see her. They needed to clear the air so they could both move on. He’d hurt her, by accident of course, but he’d still hurt her, and he didn’t like that. Saffron was a delicate creature, like a butterfly—showy and beautiful, but so, so fragile.
He grabbed a bunch of yellow roses and headed for the tills, hoping she wouldn’t read too much into his gift of appeasement. He stopped before he got to the ‘baskets only’ line, headed back to the floral display and chose something more architectural, all sorts of weird things he couldn’t name mixed with a few he could, including giant blue thistles. Surely she couldn’t read the wrong message into that?
He was waiting in line behind an old lady who couldn’t find her purse at the bottom of her rather roomy handbag, when he glanced around, just for something to do to pass the time until it was his turn. That was when he saw it—the monstrosity in the magazine rack.
He leaped out of the line and grabbed the offending newspaper off the shelf, so hard he ripped a couple of pages as he did so. He knew he probably shouldn’t say the string of words he wanted to say out loud, so he yelled them inside his head, all the while his gaze fixed on the headline in front of him.
‘‘‘Scuse me, dear…’
He turned to find the old lady looking at him.
She nodded at the flowers in his hand. ‘I don’t think your lady friend will appreciate it if you’ve deadheaded them before they’re ready for it.’
He looked down at the bouquet. Somehow, in his dash to the magazine rack, one of the big woody-looking flowers had got a bit crushed and he’d lost the top of a thistle all together. ‘Thanks,’ he mumbled and shoved both flowers and newspaper in the direction of the cashier.
What, oh, what had Saffron done now?
Ten minutes later, he was standing outside her swanky apartment building in Chelsea. Someone on the way out buzzed him in and he took the stairs two at a time until he reached her landing. Then he pounded on her glossy black door.
She opened it a few moments later, barefooted and sleepy, even though it was well after midday. ‘Alex!’
‘Yes, Alex,’ he said, barging past her into the flat. He marched into the living room and then turned and waited for her to catch up to him. When she padded through the door he let out the string of words he’d been trying to hold back. He wasn’t proud he did it, but he’d just reached that pressure-cooker stage when there was nothing else he could do with them.
‘Hello to you too,’ she said drily and then threw herself onto the corner sofa, arms folded, lips pouting.
Alex resisted the urge to throw the bouquet against the windows. Instead he dropped it on the coffee table, where the damp ends began curling the cover of one of her fashion magazines. ‘What did you expect?’ he asked and threw the newspaper so it landed on the sofa cushion next to her. ‘You�
��ve made me look like a philandering jackass!’
Saffron’s eyes grew wide and she covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh!’
Give him strength! ‘Yes, oh.’
She shook her head and stared at the paper. ‘There was a journalist at the party and I was so furious…’ She looked up at him. ‘I just wanted to get back at her. I totally forgot that—’
He turned away and strode to the opposite side of the room, effectively cutting her off. Typical Saffron. She never thought things through, always went on impulse. The reasoning behind the ill-considered proposal suddenly became much clearer. As in, there hadn’t been any.
When he turned back again, Saffron had folded her arms and was looking less penitent. ‘But you did cheat on me…’
He shook his head. ‘You need to get your facts straight before you start spouting off to the press. Yes, there was something going on between me and Nicole—’
‘I knew it!’
‘—but I kissed her. Twice. That was all.’
‘Twice more than you should have done,’ Saffron mumbled.
Alex took a deep breath. He was on the verge of losing it, and he really didn’t want to do that right now. He had a pretty long fuse, but once it was lit…Well, people just needed to get out of the way.
‘I kissed her for the first time on New Year’s Eve last year.’
Saffron’s eyebrows shot up.
‘Yes. That’s right.’ Satisfaction flowed through him, warm and comforting. ‘I met her at a party before I even knew you. And I didn’t see her again until she came to spy on me—at your request.’
‘Oh,’ Saffron said softly. ‘She was that girl.’
Alex frowned. ‘What girl? How did you know about that?’
Saffron did a little shrug. ‘Tom kept teasing you about her when I first met you. I knew at the time she must be my competition if he was still going on about it months after it had happened. But then he stopped mentioning her and I forgot all about it.’
Alex blinked. He didn’t remember that at all. Okay, the ribbing he did remember, but not that Saffron had been witness to any of it.
