Never in her whole life had she felt so small and worthless and insignificant.
Three months later she’d found out he was seeing a girl whose father owned half of Shropshire. Right there and then she’d realised she’d been fooling herself all along. She sighed. ‘Maybe if the perfect guy fell out of the sky tomorrow, I’d make time for romance, but it’s not a bad idea to concentrate on the business for the moment.’
Peggy just snorted. ‘It’s not a bad idea to be wrapped around a hot guy once in a while, either!’ She shook her head. ‘Your love life has been in drought since we started planning to open Hopes & Dreams, and the one time you did get close, you chickened out. I never understood why you didn’t call that total cutie of a cowboy you pinned down under the mistletoe on New Year’s Eve.’
Once again Peggy was playing fast and loose with the facts. ‘There was no mistletoe, and he was the back end of a pantomime horse, not a cowboy.’
Nicole went quiet then, assailed by a rather vivid flashback of that kiss—his arms pulling her close, the scent of his aftershave as she’d let her head fall back and he’d pressed his lips to that quivery little spot just under her ear.
She shuddered, then shook herself. Damn. She hadn’t had one of those for months.
‘That doesn’t count,’ she told Peggy. ‘I told you I lost his number. It was hardly surprising, seeing that under your influence, I got very…well…under the influence.’
Peggy shook her head. ‘Squiffy or no, it was very careless of you. That was one dreamy cowboy…’
Nicole sipped her drink, worried that she might incriminate herself if she said any more.
Peggy wasn’t the only one playing a little fast and loose with the facts this evening. Because Nicole knew exactly where that little scrap of paper he’d written his phone number on was. She’d known it all year.
She didn’t know why she’d lied when Peggy had asked about it the following day; she just had. She’d had too much of a hangover to have the energy to resist her flatmate’s insistence to call him and arrange a date. This year was very important. She couldn’t afford to lose focus. Besides, she didn’t do that kind of thing, not since Jasper. These days she played it cool and let the guy do all the running.
Okay, she didn’t usually go around kissing random strangers, either, but maybe one out-of-character action each year was allowed. One per year was certainly enough. She’d spent a long time grooming herself into the woman she was now. She wasn’t about to let go of all that because of one drunken kiss.
Even if it had been one seriously hot drunken kiss…
Another flashback hit. Instead of being a muted aftershock, it was double the intensity. Nicole’s ears grew warm and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She rubbed her hand over the spot to shoo the feeling away.
On a purely physical level the fizz of awareness was pleasant, but she didn’t welcome it. This was how Jasper had made her feel, as if she were one buzzing, whirling mass of sensation, churning her up so she couldn’t think straight, so she couldn’t see the truth or even remember who she was. She definitely didn’t need a man like that in her life.
So she hadn’t called the cowboy. She’d tucked the scribbled number into a little pocket inside her purse and had tried to forget about it. She probably should throw it away. In fact, she would. As soon as she got home that evening. When Peg wasn’t looking.
What she needed right now was a distraction, something to veer the subject away from her love life—or lack of it. She flashed her friends and business partners a smile, straightened her skirt and stood up tall.
‘Come on, ladies. I spy Jayce Ryder’s right-hand woman over there—and smart girls like us know that the real connection to make is the power behind the throne. Let’s go and wow her socks off before Celeste and Minty get to her.’
The Hopes & Dreams office was east of Clerkenwell, a stone’s throw from the Golden Lane housing estate. While many of the old buildings of the area had been demolished during the Blitz, there were still little pockets of Victorian and Edwardian architecture. Tucked away from the main roads was a half-forgotten little courtyard that had once been home to tradesmen’s shops, like cobblers and ironmongers.
Nicole’s dad had come across the premises while repairing a leaky roof on a nearby shop. He had wandered down an alleyway in search of a decent cuppa and found a small, organic cafe in what had once been a hardware shop. There he’d spotted an old tailor’s and haberdasher’s shop, which he’d thought would be perfect.
Nicole hadn’t been quite so sure of the location when he’d shown it to her earlier that year, but she’d realised that while she could do a lot of the proposal organising at home, constantly having meetings in coffee shops wasn’t ideal. She’d really needed a base where she could meet clients discreetly and give the sense of an up-and-coming business, not a one-man-band affair.
Then her dad had taken her down the road to Clerkenwell and shown her how its regeneration meant that young and trendy businesses were flocking to the area: art galleries and bistros and independent bookshops. It would only be a matter of time before the effect rippled outwards. She should sign the lease while the rent was still within her reach.
Mr Chapman, the softly spoken, white-haired tailor who owned the shop, hadn’t used the upstairs of his premises for a while, on account of his arthritis. The haberdasher’s, which his wife had run and had occupied the ground floor of the premises, had been closed for years, so he’d moved his work downstairs and had put the upstairs space out for rent. Seeing as the late Mrs Chapman hadn’t wanted dirty great men who needed their suits altered tramping through her shop on a regular basis, they’d chosen a place with a separate entrance to the first-floor studio.
The rent had still been a stretch, especially as the whole place would need refitting to be the kind of office Nicole had envisioned, but when she’d brought Peggy back with her for a second opinion, Peggy had come up with a solution. She was a freelance graphic designer and shared office space with three other designers, all of whom were men. She’d said she’d just about had enough of the slightly smelly testosterone-filled air and the takeaway cartons that no one seemed to clear up after an all-nighter doing a rush job for a client, so she’d suggested she and Nicole share the studio above the shop. She could do her design work without having to breathe through her mouth half the day or listen to endless discussions about ‘World of Warcraft’, but since her job meant work often ebbed and flowed, she could also help Nicole with Hopes & Dreams during the downtimes.
Nicole’s dad had been an absolute star, doing any building work at cost, and Peggy and Nicole had got their hands dirty too, wielding paintbrushes and electric drills and sanding the original floorboards. They’d scoured salvage yards and boot fairs for pieces of furniture that went with the quirky vintage vibe of the shop and had managed to find two large desks in dark wood that had been sanded and re-stained. Nicole’s remained neat and tidy, with a few pencil pots and notepads, while Peggy’s was an explosion of photo frames and polka-dotted accessories.
One of the walls was filled with dark wooden shelves, probably home to thread and ribbons and buttons once upon a time, but now it housed photos of happy couples she’d helped on their way to matrimony, miniature wedding cakes, bouquets of silk flowers and just about anything heart-shaped Peggy could lay her hands on. Near the other window was a small purple velvet sofa with silver scatter cushions.
The crowning glory of their junk-shop treasures was