One Hundred Proposals. Holly Martin

something missing.’

      Was there really such a thing as a perfect proposal? Three months ago, just before Valentine’s Day, Harry had made it his mission to provide me with one. But deep down I knew what I wanted and I doubted Harry would be able to deliver it. I should have told him that when he first started this wild goose chase. It would have saved me a lot of heartache.

       Chapter One

      Three Months Before

      I put the phone down on another excited client and sighed. It was February 11^th and we’d had a surge of customers all desperately wanting to propose on top of the Eiffel Tower on Valentine’s Day. I felt like screaming. It was only by careful planning that I’d arranged that my customers weren’t going to be there at the same time. That’s just what a girl wants to feel special, to see other girls being proposed to at the same place and time that she was. Was there no originality anymore? Harry was brilliant at coming up with unique proposals, but no matter how many times I had tried to sell Harry’s ideas to them, they wanted the traditional and that was that.

      ‘Another Eiffel Tower?’ asked Harry as he absentmindedly uploaded photos to our rolling gallery.

      ‘He wants a dozen red roses delivered to the observation deck at eight.’ I rubbed my head in defeat. ‘What about something different, going to the ballet or proposing over a bag of chips at the end of Brighton Pier?’

      He swivelled in his chair. ‘What would be your perfect proposal?’

      I looked at him and had a sudden flash of him holding me in his arms and asking me to marry him.

      ‘I don’t know, the perfect guy would definitely be a bonus.’

      ‘Ok so you have your perfect guy and it’s not greasy kebab boy –’

      ‘Let’s be clear, it was the kebab that was greasy not the man.’

      He waved away the details. ‘So Orlando Bloom or some other non-greasy hunk is asking you to marry him, how would he do it?’

      I took a sip of tea whilst I pondered this. If one of my customers phoned up at a loss for inspiration I had a hundred ideas. But for me, my mind was blank.

      ‘I have an idea.’ Harry’s eyes were suddenly bright with excitement. He whirled round on his chair and started tapping away furiously on his computer. I peered over his shoulder at our website.

       Proposer’s Blog

       How Do You Propose to a Proposer?

      Over the next hundred days I intend to find out. I will find one hundred ways to propose to our Chief Proposer Suzie McKenzie, and post the results here for your enjoyment. One thing’s for sure, not one of my proposals will be on top of the Eiffel Tower with a dozen red roses.

      ‘You can’t put that, we’ve had fifteen customers who want to propose like that over the last week,’ I said, ignoring the sudden thundering of my heart that Harry was going to propose to me.

      ‘Then maybe they’ll have a rethink.’ Harry was already uploading a picture of a diamond ring onto the blog.

      ‘Or ask for their money back.’

      But Harry was still writing.

      Day 1: The Traditional Proposal. Location: Our office.

      He stood up and got down on one knee – yanking the snake ring off his thumb, he held it aloft to my shocked face.

      ‘Suzie McKenzie, you are my best friend and I cannot imagine finding anyone I would rather spend the rest of my life with. Marry me.’

      The world stopped. My mouth was dry. How unfair was it that the one thing I wanted most in the world was happening right in front of me and it was as real as a pair of breasts on Sunset Boulevard.

      I wanted to snatch the ring off him, stuff it on my finger and march him down to the nearest registry office. But I didn’t.

      I cleared my throat of the huge lump. ‘Too clichéd, wrong location, wrong ring.’

      He grinned as he appraised his ring and stood up, clearly not fussed by this rejection. He started typing.

      Crashed and Burned. Apparently a snake ring with evil red eyes and the beige walls of our cramped office isn’t good enough for her. I’ll try again tomorrow.

      Surely not. A hundred days of this torment? I didn’t think I could bear it.

      He looked at his watch. ‘Oh, I’ve got to go, hot date with Sexy Samantha again tonight.’

      Samantha was his first girlfriend in nearly a year. When I first met him he seemed to go through a different girl each week, so I wasn’t sure why he’d gone through the sudden dry patch. But Samantha was definitely the type to tempt him out of it.

      I’d had the pleasure of meeting Sexy Samantha the night before. Suspicious of Harry’s relationship with his best friend, she’d barrelled into my home and demanded that Harry introduce me. I came downstairs in leggings and an oversized black hoodie – I knew I was hardly dressed to impress. And impress her I didn’t. The look of relief when Samantha saw me was palpable. She, on the other hand, was a vision of heavenly loveliness. She was almost as tall as Harry, with long blonde hair and curves everywhere. My eyes were immediately drawn to a big pair of breasts, squeezed between an overly tight top. Harry was definitely a breast man. All of his girlfriends were very well-endowed in the breast department. Some of the breasts, I suspected, weren’t even real – though Harry didn’t seem to mind. I was more in the straight up, straight down department, definitely no curves and not really any breasts to speak of.

      I watched Harry log off his computer with haste and obvious excitement about what Sexy Samantha had in store for him that night.

      ‘I have a hot date too,’ I blurted out, watching for any flicker of jealousy. Of course there was none.

      ‘That’s great Suze.’ He looked genuinely pleased. ‘You haven’t seen anyone since Jack…’ He trailed off. My life was defined into two segments. Before Jack and After Jack. I wondered if Jules felt the same. He grabbed his jacket, averting his eyes from me, perhaps knowing that he had said something he shouldn’t. ‘It’s about time you got back on the horse again. We can swap notes tomorrow.’

      ‘Or not.’ I couldn’t bear thinking about that conversation. The literal ins and outs of Harry’s date would be something I really didn’t want to hear. I’d changed the subject twice that morning already when he started giving me explicit details that would be right at home on the pages of an erotic fiction novel. Sexy Samantha was far kinkier than those baby blue eyes might suggest. Besides, what did I have to contribute to that conversation? My hot date consisted of a tub of Ben and Jerry’s and a night in with the beautiful Brad Pitt. I logged off my own computer, keen to show him I also had something exciting to run off to.

      ‘Where did you meet him?’

      I racked my brain as I fluffed out my hair in the reflection of a photo showing me and Harry covered in snow and grinning ear to ear after sledging at the indoor Snow Zone. Before Jack.

      ‘Skiing,’ I said, then wished I hadn’t.

      He stopped in his hasty exit. ‘Skiing? When have you been skiing?’

      ‘I go every Sunday, skiing lessons, he’s my ski instructor.’ I was making it worse.

      ‘You hate skiing.’

      I had said that hadn’t I. Because this photo was taken when we had our first and last skiing lesson a year before. I had spent forty minutes falling on my bum – as kids as young as five glided effortlessly past me – and the last twenty minutes of the lesson, after Harry had been upgraded to the adult slopes, trying to get up and rolling