Playing for Keeps: A fun, flirty romantic comedy perfect for summer reading. Rosa Temple

you’re Anya Stankovic. I’ve been following your career since you were the face for L’Oréal in 2010. I was fifteen years old and you turned my life around. I was sorry about those semi-nudes that found their way into that French magazine, whatever it was called. I choose to forget because they didn’t get your lighting right anyway.’

      ‘I told them the exact same thing,’ Anya enthused. At that stage she’d got up to shake his hand.

      ‘Zac Choudhary,’ he’d beamed, standing and bowing. ‘It’s an honour to meet you.’ It was a curtsey more than a bow he gave but he had Anya wrapped around his little finger. I did, however, manage to extract from him what experience he’d had in sales and it was vast. He was working for a luxury men’s footwear concession in Selfridges but insisted that Shearman Bright bags, especially the women’s handbags, spoke to him and he could sell them in his sleep.

      ‘Trust me, I know leather and I know how to match a person to a bag.’

      ‘I’m convinced you can,’ Anya had said, turning to me with a ‘my work here is done’ expression on her face. She picked up Zac’s application form and drew a big star on it. She slapped it down on the desk in front of me while staring at Zac’s pink ankle socks. ‘I love a man who can carry off pink.’ She was falling in love with this flamboyant man by the second.

      ‘Thank you for coming in, Zac,’ I said, getting to my feet and offering him my hand. ‘We’ll let you know.’

      ‘Ahh,’ he gasped looking closely at my fingers. ‘Did you get this manicure at Peter Jones?’

      I looked over my shoulder at Anya, who had a raised eyebrow, then back at Zac.

      ‘As a matter of fact, yes I did.’

      ‘They do a to-die-for French polish. Have you tried it?’

      ‘I… er…’

      ‘Then do,’ he went on. ‘But make sure you ask for Candace. Love that girl. Great at waxing too.’

      He left then, swishing his way through the door and turning back to wave his fingers at Anya. She did the same.

      Once all the interviews were done, Anya left me and Riley to clear up the shop-floor-cum-waiting-room and interview-room-cum-!

      office. Riley took charge of the application forms and we planned to contact everyone the next morning.

      I thanked Riley for all her help and watched her leave with the box file of forms to drop off at the office, and went to get my handbag and keys to lock up. I spotted another screwed-up application on the floor under the desk. It belonged to the girl who’d dared to come before Anya carrying a mock-leather handbag.

      ‘Could it really have hurt her to spend a few pounds more to impress the owner of a leather handbag shop?’ she’d ranted.

      As I went to unravel the piece of paper so we could contact her in the morning with a ‘thank you but no thank you’ letter there was a timid knock on the door. I was pretty sure we’d interviewed everyone we had to. I went to the door. My mouth dropped open when I saw who was standing behind it.

Chapter 7

      I didn’t know if I should panic at this point. I was looking into the eyes of the woman I’d suspected of trying to curse me or my shop because she was a witch or, failing that, an inexperienced stalker.

      ‘If you came for the interviews, I’m afraid you’re a little late,’ I said, knowing full well she wasn’t at the back of my new shop for that reason.

      She stepped a little closer as if she was expecting to be asked into the office. Her skin was clear and smooth but not as tan as when I’d first seen her walk past the shop. She was in white again. She wore a wide-skirted summer dress, a man’s navy sweater over the top. I wondered where she could have come from. It seemed strange that her clothes were out of season, almost as if she’d turned up in London in the summer and stayed longer than she’d intended, only having packed for a summer vacation.

      As we stood there, just staring at each other, her mobile phone began to ring from the straw shoulder bag she was carrying.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘No one ever calls.’

      She was British from what I could make of her accent, maybe from the south west despite the obvious foreign look to her clothes and accessories, which were more exotic. More hippy chic than anything else. I watched her long hair fall across her face as she plunged into her bag to turn off the phone. She seemed agitated.

      ‘There,’ she said before looking up at me red-faced. ‘I… I hope you don’t mind the intrusion but I was passing by… yet again… and when I saw you wave off that girl with the red hair and go back in I decided to take the plunge.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, taking a step back and folding my arms. ‘But have we met?’

      ‘No. Never. B… but I know who you are. Magenta, right? Magenta Bright?’ She put out a small hand for me to shake. I took her hand, which was limp in mine, and which she withdrew fairly rapidly. ‘Stella. Stella Knowles. You’re going to think this a little odd but we have a mutual friend.’

      ‘Do you want to come in and take a seat.’

      She exhaled, in relief it would seem. Had she expected me to boot her out right there and then? Not when she mentioned the mutual friend. I was intrigued. As she took a seat in the interview chair and crossed her legs, which were still pretty suntanned compared to her face, I contemplated staying by the door… you never knew. Instead I took a seat in my interviewer’s chair, leaned my arms across the table and smiled at Stella, who seemed too embarrassed to look up at me.

      ‘So, who is this mystery mutual friend? Do they owe us money? Do we like them?’

      She finally raised her eyes and smiled. ‘We loved them. Well, I still do and you did… once.’

      I sat back in dread. This was the girlfriend of one of my exes. Was she coming here for notes? Had he dumped her and she wanted to see if I knew how to win him back?

      ‘Well…’ I gave a nervous snort of a laugh. ‘I haven’t been in love that many times.’ I was racking my brain but I had a feeling I knew who she was going to dredge up.

      Here was a girl who had come from abroad, tanned skin and summer clothes. A dead giveaway now that I thought about it. I held my breath.

      ‘Hugo,’ she said just before I said the name for her. ‘He’s a great friend of mine. He doesn’t know I’m here.’

      ‘What? In the country?’

      ‘He knows I’m over from Brazil but he has no idea I tracked you down.’

      ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but why on earth have you tracked me down? Hugo and I are old news. Our relationship ended a long time ago. In fact you could call it the relationship that never really was. I met him as a teenager.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘Then you know it lasted all of a week and then he got on a plane and left my life for good. Well, for ten years anyway, and then came back again for a short fling. A very, very short fling.’

      ‘Magenta, it was more than a fling. He told me all about it. How he tried to make it up to you, wanted you so desperately he gave up practically everything he owned in Brazil to be with you.’

      ‘He said that?’

      She nodded and looked down at her fidgeting hands. ‘He also told me that when he thought you were back in love with him and that everything was going to be okay, you bailed.’

      ‘He used those words? I bailed?’

      ‘N… no. Hugo didn’t say bailed. Look, I’m kind of nervous. I don’t know how to say this and I don’t know, now, why I came when…’

      I