Fiona Harper - The Little Shop of Hopes and Dreams

It was empty, of course. She ordered a sparkling water and settled down to wait. Unlike Saffron, she didn’t have the luxury of turning up late. If she left a client waiting, even for a few minutes, it wouldn’t look good.

The minutes sloped by. The longer she sat there, the more her mind churned with the thought that had woken her up, making her sit bolt upright, at two-thirty that morning.

She should come clean.

It was a conflict of interest or…something. She should tell Saffron she’d met Alex before, tell her they’d been romantically involved.

Except they hadn’t.

It had only been a kiss, one that had lasted maybe three—possibly five—minutes. A drunken kiss that she really shouldn’t remember in quite such vivid detail. But every time she rehearsed in her head how she was going to broach it with Saffron, the conversation always went badly. It was the fact that the whole thing had been so difficult to categorise that made it harder.

If she could just say, ‘We went out for two months about five years ago, but we parted on good terms and I moved on and I’m madly in love with someone else now,’ then maybe everything would be fine. But she couldn’t say that. Even though what she’d done with Alex was way less intimate, somehow saying, ‘I walked up to him and snogged him senseless earlier this year’ just wasn’t going to put a skittish girlfriend at ease.

And that was where she’d been for almost the last twelve hours. Going backwards and forward between telling and not telling, and she wasn’t getting anywhere. She was always up front with her clients. Always. They trusted her to give an unbiased and sometimes not-easy-to-hear opinion when they needed one.

It was her own stupid fault. She’d known when she’d walked into the arts centre the other evening that she shouldn’t have let herself get sidetracked, but she’d done it anyway. If she’d kept professional, stuck to the plan, it would never have got to the stage where Alex Black was flirting with her and she was starting to like it.

It would never have got to the stage when she’d almost listened to Peggy’s advice about wrapping herself around a hot man, either…

Thank goodness Saffron’s text had arrived when it had. Otherwise she’d have committed professional suicide as well as romantic suicide, and that really would have been too much for one evening.

Saffron appeared half an hour later, with an armful of large, glossy shopping bags with string handles that seemed to contain more air than shopping—the sure sign of some really expensive purchases.

She let the bags drop at her feet with a rustle of tissue paper and greeted Nicole, who had risen and waited patiently while the waiters flapped around their celebrity patron, taking her coat and pulling out her chair so she could sit down.

‘Well,’ she said, leaning forward across the table, her eyes shining. ‘Did you meet him?’

Nicole nodded. ‘I certainly did. That was the plan.’

The only bit of the plan that had gone smoothly, it had to be said.

‘And isn’t he gorgeous? Isn’t he perfect?’

Nicole nodded again, but gently, giving nothing away. ‘He is.’ Not that Saffron would have noticed. She was in full-on gush mode and was only too happy to have someone to sing her fiancé-to-be’s praises to. Which she did, for at least ten minutes. Usually, Nicole enjoyed this bit—seeing that light in a client’s eyes when they talked about the person they wanted to marry—but the longer Saffron talked, the better Alex sounded, and the sicker Nicole felt.

She should tell her. Just spit it out and tell her.

But…

She remembered what Saffron had said about manstealing Minty. And Saffron could be temperamental and rash—she knew that much from the tabloids. And from the fact she wanted to propose to her boyfriend after five months, of course. If she caught Saffron in the wrong mood, she might flush this whole job down the toilet, and Mia and Peggy were depending on her to bring it in. It wasn’t only herself she’d be sabotaging, but her two best friends in the world, and the future of Hopes & Dreams, which she knew she could make a success—she just needed a little more time. And Saffron’s money and profile.

It’s ancient history, she reasoned with herself. Nothing. Less than nothing. And over before Saffron and Alex began. What good would it do to dredge it all up now?

Their drinks and appetisers arrived. Saffron had ordered a seafood platter, which was on a metal plate on a stand, lying on a bed of crushed ice. A large and rather pink prawn was facing in Nicole’s direction and it fixed her with its black, currant-like eyes. I know, it seemed to be saying. I know your secret…

It was at that point that Nicole decided she had to do something to protect her sanity. As much truth as she was able to tell might do it. She took the opportunity while Saffron sipped her wine to butt in. ‘Unfortunately, I didn’t get quite as much information from Alex as I’d like to have done the other evening. I thought I’d better let you know that I may need to meet with him again.’

Saffron threw her head back and tipped an oyster down her throat then shrugged. ‘Fine. Whatever you need to do to get the job done.’

Nicole let out a breath. She’d be honest about the present, even if the past was better left in the past. ‘I’m keeping up my cover story and attending a wedding posing as a journalist next Saturday,’ she told her client. ‘Hopefully, it’ll give me some really good ideas.’

Saffron grinned at her. ‘As long as those ideas are big and colourful and expensive, I’m all in. What have you come up with so far?’

Nicole smiled as she toyed with her dressed crab. At least now she was back in her comfort zone. They spent the rest of the time discussing the merits of different venues and proposal types and ended up with a shortlist of three basic outlines, which Nicole would tailor further to Saffron’s requirements when she had more of an idea of what made the wonderful Alex Black tick.

When they were finished, Saffron thanked her for lunch and swept off to another urgent appointment she was already an hour late for, and Nicole settled the bill.

It had started to rain while they’d been eating. She had a raincoat with her, but it didn’t have a hood, so she had to pull her collar up and jog down the alleyway that ran past a theatre and out onto St Martin’s Lane. She looked sideways as she ran past the row of posters advertising the latest play. The glass was just shiny enough to send back a reflection.

She slowed to a walking pace, still glancing at her image in the dark posters as she passed them. Her eyes were large and she looked younger. She was reminded of the night Jasper hadn’t proposed. She’d run away from the restaurant, down alleys like this, desperate to get to the main road and find a cab.

She’d thought she’d got rid of that woman, that only an echo of her had been left behind. It was a shock to see her staring back at her, the pale face superimposed on those of the actors in the posters.

She couldn’t be that person again. Not now. And definitely not for the next six weeks as they ran up to Christmas and Saffron’s big proposal. The clock couldn’t turn backwards. She wouldn’t let it.

She had this horrible feeling that if she didn’t finish the journey she’d started after Jasper left her, she’d always be stuck in some horrible limbo between being the girl she once was and the woman she wanted to be. And that wouldn’t do. She needed every bit of armour about her now.

Especially if she was going to survive a whole Saturday in the company of Alex Black.