Liz Fielding - Fairytale Christmas - Mistletoe and the Lost Stiletto / Her Holiday Prince Charming / A Princess by Christmas

‘Thanks.’

Her voice was muffled, thick, and he turned away, picked up a couple of apples and dropped them in the trolley. Giving her a moment. Sparky she might be, but no one could fail to be affected by a bad breakup. Especially one that had been played out in the full gaze of the media. Tears were inevitable.

After a moment she picked up a peach, weighed it in her hand, sniffed it. Replaced it.

‘No good?’ he asked, taking one himself to check it for ripeness.

‘They are a ridiculous price.’

‘I can probably manage if you really want one. I get staff discount.’

That teased a smile out of her, but she shook her head. ‘Peaches are summer fruit. They need to be warm.’

And, just like that, he could see her sitting in the shade of an Italian terrace, grapes ripening overhead, her teeth sinking into the flesh of a perfectly ripe sun-warmed peach straight from the tree. Bare shoulders golden, meltingly relaxed.

Her lips glistening, sweet with the juice…

‘I get why you ran out of the press conference, Lucy,’ he said, crushing the image with cold December reality. ‘But, having dumped the man so publicly, I don’t understand why he’s so desperate to find you.’

She swallowed, managed a careless shrug. ‘I thought you didn’t want to know.’

He didn’t. If he knew, he would be part of it, part of her story. But, conversely, he did, desperately, want her to trust him and the two were intertwined.

‘I have something of his. Something he wants back,’ she admitted.

The file, he thought, remembering the glossy black ring binder she’d been holding up in the news clip. That she’d been carrying in her bag.

It wasn’t there now, he realised.

‘Maybe you should just give it back,’ he suggested. ‘Walk away.’

‘I can’t do that.’

Before he could ask her why, what she’d done with it, she was distracted by the sound of voices coming through the arch that led to the butchery.

‘It’s just one of the cleaning crews,’ he said quickly, seizing her wrist as panic flared in her face and she turned, hunting for the nearest escape route. ‘Good grief, you’re shaking like a leaf. What the hell has he done to you? Do you need the police?’

‘No!’ Her throat moved as she swallowed.

‘Are you sure? What about this?’ he demanded, releasing her wrist, lifting his hand to skim his fingertips lightly over the bruise darkening at her temple.

She stared at him. ‘What? No! A photographer caught me with his camera. It was an accident. Nothing to do with Rupert.’ She looked anxiously towards the archway, the voices were getting nearer. ‘Please…’

‘Okay.’ He wasn’t convinced—he’d heard every variation of the bruise excuse going—but this wasn’t the moment to press it. ‘We’re done here,’ he said, heading for the nearest lift.

‘You can’t take the trolley out of the food hall,’ she protested as the doors opened.

‘You want to stay and pack the groceries into carriers?’ he asked, stopping them from closing with his foot.

A burst of song propelled her into the lift. ‘No, you’re all right.’

‘Doors closing. Going up…’

‘What?’ She turned on him. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Believe me, you’ll be a lot safer on the top floor than the bottom one,’ he said quickly. ‘There’ll be no security staff. No curious cleaners wondering why you look familiar. Where they’ve seen you before.’

She opened her mouth, closed it again, her jaw tightening as she swallowed down whatever she was going to say.

‘You’d never have got away with it, Lucy.’

‘You don’t know that,’ she declared, staring straight ahead. ‘And it would test your security staff. If they found me you’d know they’re as good as you think they are.’

‘Believe me, they are. And you’d spend the night in a police cell.’

‘Oh, but—’

‘They don’t call me when they find intruders, Lucy. They call the local police station and then the game would be up. If you’re so sure that the cleaners would recognise you, I think it’s a fair bet to assume that whoever turned up to arrest you would, too.’

She slumped back against the side of the lift. ‘You’re right, of course. And the elf costume would confirm everything that Rupert was saying about me. That I’m one sandwich short of a picnic.’

‘It wouldn’t look good,’ he agreed. ‘But if you really do have your heart set on spending the night in a tent, I’ll go and fetch one of those pop-up ones. You can set it up on the bedroom floor.’

The lift came to a halt. ‘Tenth floor…Customer services. Accounts. Doors opening…’

‘Bedroom floor?’ She frowned. ‘I thought the bedroom department was on the fifth…’

She stopped, blushing, remembering too late how she knew that.

‘Forget the bedroom department,’ he said, leading the way past the customer services department, down a corridor past empty offices. ‘Have you never heard of living over the shop?’

‘Over the corner shop, maybe,’ she said as he used a swipe card to open a door that led to an internal lobby containing a private lift from the car park and a pair of wide double doors. ‘But not…’

He keyed a number into a security pad, opened the door and, as he stood back to allow her to precede him, her protest died away.

Ahead of her was the most striking room Lucy had ever seen. Acres of limed floor. A pair of huge square black leather sofas. Starkly modern black and steel furniture. Dove-grey walls. No paintings, no colour, not a single thing to distract from the view through the soaring wall of glass in front of her. Constant movement, the ever-changing vibrant colour of the cityscape against the monochrome room.

‘Wow!’ she exclaimed, gazing out over a London lit up and laid out at her feet like fairyland. ‘You actually live here?’ she asked, moving closer.

There were lights everywhere.

Not just the Christmas lights, but every famous landmark floodlit to show it at its best. There was traffic crossing bridges, strings of lights along the Thames. Even the aircraft coming into land, navigation lights winking, added to the drama.

And Christmas trees, everywhere there were Christmas trees.

Big ones in squares, rows of small ones atop buildings, every shape and size in gardens and shining out of windows. The colours reflected in the big soft flakes of snow falling like feathers over the city, settling on parks, covering trees, rooftops. Wiping the world clean.

He hadn’t answered and she turned to him, expecting to see him smiling, amused by her totally uncool reaction.

But his face was expressionless.

‘When I’m in London,’ he said. ‘There are stores all over the country, as well as abroad. I seem to spend a lot of time in hotels.’

‘They don’t all have apartments like this on the top floor?’

‘No. I can say with confidence that this is unique. It was commissioned by my cousin, Christopher Hart, as part of the refurbishment of the Hastings & Hart flagship store.’

‘It’s amazing. I bet you can’t wait to get home.’

‘This isn’t home…’ He bit off the words as if they’d escaped before he could stop them. And when she waited for him to tell her why, ‘It’s a long story.’

‘Is it? Well, here’s the deal. You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.’

‘Long and very boring. Make yourself at…’

‘Home?’ she offered, filling the gap.

He managed a smile. He had an entire repertoire of them, she discovered. Sardonic. Amused. The one that lit up her insides, fizz, whoosh, bang, like a New Year firework display.

And then there was this one. The blank-eyed kind you cranked up when you didn’t want anyone to know how you were really feeling. The shutters had come down so fast she almost heard them clang, excluding her. And now they were down she knew how much she wanted to go back two minutes.