The Little Shop of Hopes and Dreams. Fiona Harper

Dream part-time, and I really don’t want to do that.’

      She couldn’t bear the thought of having to take a backwards step.

      ‘And then there’s the money both you and Mia have put in…’

      ‘No pressure, then,’ Peggy said.

      Nicole shrugged. It was what it was. ‘All it boils down to is that we need a “yes”. I can’t let anything interfere with that.’

      Peggy nodded sadly. ‘Fate is cruel,’ she said melodramatically, and Nicole couldn’t help but burst out laughing.

      ‘What?’ Peggy asked, wrinkling her nose and looking a little offended.

      ‘No, you’re right. Fate is cruel. But you’ve gotta laugh or you’ll cry, right? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…’

      Peggy nodded, instantly joining in the game they liked to play when either of them was down—coming up with inane-sounding platitudes in the hope one of them would make sense. ‘You forgot “There are plenty more fish in the sea.”‘

      ‘So I did.’ Nicole toasted the screen with her glass and snuggled down into the sofa cushions. ‘Now, shut up and let’s watch this movie.’

      Peggy slurped her Chardonnay. ‘I mean…thank goodness it’s her asking him and not the other way round. At least you won’t have to spend much time with him. Just see him on the night, that’s all. And we can make it so you direct things from afar, if you like, and I can do the hands-on stuff…’ She trailed off as she saw the look on Nicole’s face. ‘Oh, no. What have you done?’

      Nicole jabbed the pause button and scowled. Then she explained about the fake magazine article, about Alex’s offer. When she’d finished Peggy stared at her. ‘Holy crap on a cracker,’ she said. ‘You can’t go through with it!’

      ‘I have to,’ Nicole said glumly. ‘I didn’t get any info from Alex this evening—I was too shocked. I know I did the questionnaire with Saffron, but she’s got one of those butterfly minds that leaps all over the place. I hardly got anything useful, partly because I don’t think she knows what she wants. That means I have to see him again or we can’t possibly tailor her proposal to him properly. I need to find out what he thinks about love and marriage and romance…’ She gave Peggy a morbid little smile while her insides churned. Maybe ice cream and wine hadn’t been the best way to go. ‘And what better place to do that than at a wedding?’

      Peggy stared at her. ‘You’re insane. And that’s a lot, coming from me.’

      Nicole turned away and let the movie off pause. They were just about to get to the bit when Duckie slides into the record store and sings ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ and she needed a bit of cheering up.

      ‘I’m only going to do the one week,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘and then I’ll find a reason to pull out—I’ll tell him my editor doesn’t like the angle or something, or that she wants it quicker and I need to investigate the other jobs instead. What else can I do?’

      Peggy laid her head back on the sofa cushions and looked at the ceiling. ‘Nothing. You’re just going to have to go along to some horribly romantic winter wedding, spend all day up-close-and-personal with Mr Sex-on-a-Stick. What could possibly go wrong?’

      Nicole jabbed her in the ribs, making her jump and slosh her wine on her favourite velvet cushion in a particularly violent shade of lime. ‘Hey!’ When she’d brushed the worst of it off, she looked Nicole in the eye. ‘Can you really do this? Can you resist temptation and control yourself?’

      Nicole laughed softly. ‘Of course I can…I’m not you, Peg.’

      Peggy knew her own weaknesses too well and just rolled her eyes instead of getting upset. Besides, if there was one thing Nicole excelled at, it was keeping in control.

CHAPTER NINE

      When Nicole turned up at the chic little oyster bar tucked away behind the theatres of the West End to meet Saffron, she made sure she looked flawless. There was no way she was going to come off as second best in the fashion department, even if she was a loser in every other arena comparisons were made. Especially in the romance department.

      She’d dressed carefully that morning, choosing to echo Saffron’s high-end boho chic rather than her usual sophisticated office wear. She tried adding a chunky woollen scarf, carelessly wrapped around her neck, but instead of looking artsy and casual it just made her look as if she were a farmer about to go milking. Why could she never get this ultra-casual designer look right? It was driving her crazy.

      When she reached the restaurant, she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and pushed open the dark wood door and entered the cluttered space. There was a large horseshoeshaped bar topped with smooth grey marble in the centre of the room. A brass rail ran around the edge and deep leather-covered stools were tucked underneath. The waiter showed her to a little table beyond the bar.

      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