Mistletoe and the Lost Stiletto. Liz Fielding

had followed her every move.

      Everything she’d done, everywhere she’d been was a story and, as she tried to ease through the crowd, eyes down, she knew she was being stared at.

      Then, from somewhere at the bottom of her bag, her phone began to belt out her I’m In Love With a Wonderful Guy ringtone.

      Could anything be any less appropriate?

      Or loud.

      She might as well put a great big sign over her head, lit up and flashing ‘Dumb blonde here!’

      Hampered by the file, she hunted for the wretched thing but, by the time she’d dug it out of the bottom of the bag, it had gone to voicemail. Not for the first time.

      There had been half a dozen missed calls while she’d been making her escape and, as she looked at it, it beeped at her, warning that she now had a text, adding to her sense of being hunted.

      She had to get off the ground floor and out of sight—now—and, giving up on the attempt to look casual, she kicked off her remaining shoe—after all, if she was four inches shorter she’d be less noticeable—and stuffed it, along with the file, in her bag.

      As far as she could recall, the nearest powder room was on the third floor. If she made that without being discovered, she could hole up there for a while, lock herself in a cubicle and think. Something she should have done before barging into that press conference.

      Avoiding the glass lifts and escalators—her red coat was too bright, too noticeable and the people following her had been close enough, smart enough to have figured out where she’d gone to earth—she hurried towards the stairs.

      It was a good plan. The only problem with it was that by the time she’d reached the first floor she had a stitch in her side, her legs felt like jelly and her head was swimming from the crack on the temple.

      For a moment she bent double as she tried to ease the pain.

      ‘Are you all right?’ A sweet lady was looking at her with concern.

      ‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Just a stitch.’ But the minute the woman was out of sight she slithered behind a floor-to-ceiling arrangement of silver and white snowflakes that had been constructed in the corner where the stairs turned. Safely out of sight, she sank down onto the floor and used her free hand to massage her ankles, which were aching from the strain. She pulled a face as she saw the state of her foot. Her shredded tights. But there was nothing she could do about that now.

      Instead, she leaned back against the wall to catch her breath, regarding the state-of-the-art all-singing, alldancing phone that had so quickly become a part of her new life with uncertainty.

      It held all her contacts, appointments. She dictated her thoughts into it. Her private diary. The elation, the disbelief, the occasional doubt. And it was her connection to a world that seemed endlessly fascinated by her.

      Her Facebook page, the YouTube videos, her Twitter account.

      Rupert’s PR people hadn’t been happy when they’d discovered that she’d signed up to Twitter all by herself. Actually, it had been her hairdresser who’d told her that she was being tweeted about and showed her how to set up her own account while waiting for her highlights to take.

      That had been the first warning that she wasn’t supposed to have a mind of her own, but keep to the script.

      Once they’d realised how well it was working, though, they’d encouraged her to tweet her every thought, every action, using the Cinderella hashtag, to her hundreds of thousands of followers. Keep them up to date with her transformation from Cinderella into Rupert’s fairy tale princess.

      Innocently selling the illusion. Doing their dirty work for them.

      But it was a two-way thing.

      Right now her in-box was filling up with messages from followers who had watched the web feed, seen the ruckus and, despite everything, she smiled as she read them.

       @LucyB Nice bag work, Cinders! What’s occurring?

       #Cinderella

       WelshWitch, [+] Wed 1 Dec 16:08

       @LucyB What’s the b*****d done, sweetie?

       #Cinderella

       jenpb, [+] Wed 1 Dec 16:09

       @LucyB DM me a contact number. You’re going to

       need help. #Cinderella

       prguru, [+] Wed 1 Dec 16:12

      Too true, she thought, the smile fading. But not from ‘prguru’, aka Mr Public Relations, the man famous for selling grubby secrets to grubby newspapers and gossip mags. It didn’t matter to him if you were a model in rehab, a politician having an affair with his PA or the victim of some terrible tragedy. He’d sell your story for hard cash and turn you into a celebrity overnight.

      Nor any of the other public relations types lining up to jump in and feed off her story. As if she’d trust anyone in the PR business ever again.

      She wasn’t sure how long the phone would function—Rupert would surely pull the plug the minute he thought of it—so she quickly thumbed in a message to her followers while she had the chance.

      And maybe she should update her diary, too. Just in case anything happened to her. Something else her hairdresser had clued her up on. That she could set up a private web document, record her thoughts on her phone and then send it to be stored on her own private Internet space.

      ‘Think of it as your pension, princess,’ he’d said.

      She’d thought him cynical, but she had started keeping a diary, mostly because there were some things she hadn’t been able to confide to anyone else.

      Diary update: Day hit the skids after the photoshoot when I realised I’d forgotten the wedding file and went to the office to borrow R’s copy. His dragon of a personal assistant had gone with him to the Lucy B press launch and her assistant is on holiday so there was a temp holding the fort or I would never have been handed the key to his private filing cabinet.

       I had my hand on the wedding file when I spotted the one next to it. The one labelled ‘The Cinderella Project’.

       Well, of course I opened it. Wouldn’t you?

       Now meeting with wedding planner off. Celebration off. Dinner at Ritz most definitely off. As for wedding…Off, off, off.

       Time to Tweet the good news.

      Thanks for concern, tweeps. Fairy tale fractured—kissed prince, got frog. HEA cancelled. End of story.

       #Cinderella

       LucyB, [+] Wed 1 Dec 16:41

      The phone belted out the ghastly ringtone again just as she clicked ‘send’ and made her jump nearly out of her skin. It was a sharp reminder of the need to keep her head down and she switched it to silent, unable to cut herself off entirely.

      There had to be someone she could ring. Someone she could trust. But not from here.

      This was no haven.

      She had to move before someone spotted her, but first she had to do something to change her appearance.

      She’d felt so utterly Christmassy when she’d set off in her bright red coat that morning. Utterly full of the joys of a season that had never before felt so exciting, so full of promise.

      Now she felt as conspicuous as Santa in a snowdrift.

      She would have liked to abandon it. Abandon everything. Strip off, change back into who she was. Her real self, not this manufactured ‘princess’.

      Easier