Alex Hines - Chance

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Fancy another escapist read?

Chapter One – It Started With a Kiss by Miranda Dickinson

Acknowledgements

Copyright

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For Louis, with whom I

can barely wait to dance.

Chapter One

Monday, 22 August

As she opened the door Ava could see the floor was covered in flowers: unopened peonies in tight pink balls, crisp white lilies, their stamens bristling with pollen and a bank of roses, almost mocking in their velvety glamour. Taking a deep breath to enjoy the aromatic mixture their scents made, she stepped over buckets of daisies to reach her desk. She hung up her coat, flicked the kettle on and flipped open her laptop. While the kettle boiled, she flicked through her post – the usual selection of bills and junk mail, along with a flyer for new classes at the Arts Centre. There wasn’t really anything worth opening or reading properly before she had a cup of tea on the go, so she stared absentmindedly at the flowers as the comforting sound of the kettle grew louder and louder. They were lined up according to type and colour, creating an extravagant floral carpet. Ava knew it would take her another few minutes to start to feel fully awake and was glad of some time alone with the shop.

She swirled a teabag around in the water, wondering if Rob was up yet. He had taken to staying at her house more and more lately, although whether his motivation was the prospect of cosy evenings together or being closer to his office was unclear. Either way, he had been dead to the world when she left the house – completely still and snoring lightly, despite the clatter of her Monday morning routine. Ava wondered if he was even awake yet, if he had discovered the cup of tea she left by his bedside, or if he was still curled up in her bed, leaving his imprint on her pillow.

‘Morning, Boss!’ Matt had arrived and was standing in the doorway, a bucket of flowers already under each arm. ‘Had a good weekend?’

‘Yes thanks, Matt, nothing special,’ she replied. She repeated those last two words to herself: nothing special. ‘You?’

‘Oh yeah, it was wicked!’ Matt was grinning at the memory and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Was he immune to Monday mornings? If he wasn’t a little sluggish at this point in the week, when was he? ‘We went down to the coast for a bit of surfing, had a barbecue – good times, amazing waves.’

Well over 10 years younger than her, Matt seemed to have boundless energy and an insatiable appetite for fun. Even a spare half hour would be filled with some kind of sporting activity, an impromptu burst of socialising or a quick trip somewhere. He was no sofa surfer; indeed TV seemed to hold no allure for him at all. Just hearing about his hectic social life made Ava feel slightly dizzy, but he was so good-natured it was hard to begrudge him a moment of it. Truly, he was a gift. She smiled to herself as he put the first two buckets of flowers up onto the highest bracket of the shelving unit, whistling, then immediately turned round to reach for the rest.

‘Look at these!’ he said as he picked up the roses, holding them admiringly with outstretched arms as if they were Liz Taylor herself, ready to dance. ‘They’re gorgeous today – I wonder where they’ll be ending up …’ He winked at Ava and she rolled her eyes. Relatively new to the job, he was still enthused by almost every part of his work at Dunne’s. ‘Although, you’ve got to wonder – what’s a man doing buying red roses on a Monday if he’s not a little bit guilty about something?’

‘Oh come on, so young and already such a cynic! Maybe some men are just impulsive or romantic. I wouldn’t keep ordering them for a Monday if they didn’t sell.’ She gave him a playful cuff over the head and he ducked, giggling.

‘They sell alright,’ replied Matt with a wink, ‘but to romantic men … or those in the doghouse?’

‘Stop it – that’s too depressing!’

‘Only kidding,’ he said, as he finally hung up his jacket. But Ava suspected he wasn’t. She shook herself, trying to get rid of the leaden Monday morning blues she still felt.

‘Right, you – a cup of tea?’

‘Go on, then. I reckon it’s going to be busy for a Monday.’

For the next few minutes they worked alongside each other in companionable silence. Matt knew where the usual spots for all of the flowers were and neatly moved bunches from the plastic buckets in which they had been left to the smarter tin pails they were displayed in. More delicate blooms were stacked on wooden shelves across the main sidewall of the shop and he took the smaller, almost wine-bucket size pails outside onto the street. Daffodils, sunflowers and sturdy tulips were all arranged on the pavement beneath the shop window, with Matt whistling along to the radio as he worked. Ava made his milky tea and handed it to him before checking off deliveries against the invoice left three hours earlier.

‘Something’s missing,’ said Matt, as he nodded to thank Ava for the mug she had just passed him.

‘The sweet peas are late.’

Unlike the more exotic flowers that Dunne’s stocked, the sweet peas were not imported from abroad, but delivered sporadically by a local farm. They tended to swing by and drop off a supply whenever they felt the shop needed them, paying little heed to such trivialities as whether or not Ava actually needed them, or had indeed ordered them. But Ava couldn’t bring herself to start ordering them from elsewhere. She loved the area, having grown up just outside of Salisbury, and stocking local flowers was important to her. It made no sense to have spent her childhood playing in the fields of the West Country and then to import absolutely everything from elsewhere once she had her own business in the area.

When she left college and headed off to London with dreams of a career arranging cutting-edge displays for celebrity events and society weddings, she had wanted little to do with the gentler countryside flowers such as blowsy roses, peonies and sweet peas. After over a decade of providing breath-taking arrangements for corporate receptions only to watch city brokers and their nonchalant PAs walk past completely oblivious to their beauty, she began to tire of wasting her best work on an audience who cared so little. The breaking point had been the week when she worked her fingers raw on a series of jaw-dropping displays for the awards ceremony of a glossy magazine. Held in an echoing warehouse somewhere near the Docklands, she had led a team spending 18-hour days to transform the imposing concrete structure into a venue where pop princesses, rock icons and supermodels alike would be happy to pose and party against a backdrop befitting them. Exhausted, but aglow with the satisfaction of a job well done, Ava had left the building only to wake to a series of charmless tabloid photographs of a well-oiled soap starlet flicking her cigarette into one of her red ginger and anthurium arrangements before collapsing into another – apparently fuelled by a lethal combination of four-inch fluoro heels and limitless free fizz.