She looked at him for a long, long time. And then she nodded. ‘Truce. I can do that. Then thank you—it would save me a bit of time if you could find me a flight. I don’t care which London airport it’s from or how much it costs—just let me know as soon as they need paying and I’ll come to the phone and give them my credit card details. But please put whichever airline in the picture about what happened to the dress this morning, and I want cast-iron guarantees that these dresses are going to make it out to Italy with me. Otherwise I’ll be carving their entire check-in staff into little pieces with a rusty spoon.’
He couldn’t help smiling. ‘Spoons are blunt.’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is entirely the point. Ditto the rusty.’
‘You really care about Ashleigh, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Sean, how can you not already know that?’ Claire frowned. ‘She’s been my best friend for more than half my lifetime, since I moved to the same school as her when I was thirteen. I think of Ash practically as my sister.’
Which would technically make her his sister, too. Except Sean didn’t have any sibling-like feelings towards Claire. What he felt for Claire was...
Well, it was a lot easier to think of it as dislike. When they weren’t being scrupulously polite to each other, they clashed. They had totally opposite world views. They were totally incompatible. He wasn’t going to let himself think about the fact that her hair was the colour of a cornfield bathed in sunshine, and her eyes were the deep blue of a late summer evening. And he certainly wasn’t going to let himself think about the last time he’d kissed her.
‘Of course. I’ll get you a flight sorted.’
Though he noticed her movements while he was on the phone. Deft and very sure as she packed each dress in tissue paper to avoid creases, put it inside a plastic cover to protect it from any damage and then in a box. As if she’d done this many times before. Which, he realised, she probably had.
He’d never seen Claire at work before. Apart from when she’d measured the three men in the wedding party for their waistcoats, and that had been at Ashleigh and Luke’s house. He’d been too busy concentrating on being polite and anodyne to her for his sister’s sake to take much notice of what she was actually doing.
And, OK, it was easy to think of dress designers as a bit kooky and not living in the same world as the rest of the population. The outlandish outfits on the catwalks in Milan and the big fashion shows left him cold and wondering what on earth was going on in the heads of the designers—real people just didn’t wear stuff like that. But the woman in front of him seemed businesslike. Organised. Efficient.
Like someone who belonged in his world.
He shook himself. That was just an illusion. Temporary. Claire didn’t belong in his world and he didn’t belong in hers. They’d be civil to each other over the next few days, purely for Ashleigh’s sake, and then they’d go back to avoiding each other.
Safely.
AS CLAIRE WORKED on packing up the dresses, she found herself growing more and more aware of Sean. He looked every inch the meticulous businessman in a made-to-measure suit, handmade shirt, and perfectly polished shoes; as part of her job, Claire noticed details like that. Sean wouldn’t have looked out of place on a catwalk or in a glossy magazine ad.
And he was actually helping her—working with her as a team. Which was rarer than a blue moon. They didn’t get on.
Apart from a few occasions, and some of those were memories that still had the ability to make Claire squirm. Such as Ashleigh’s eighteenth birthday party. Claire’s life had imploded only a couple of weeks before and, although she’d tried so hard to smile and be happy for her best friend’s sake, she’d ended up helping herself to too much champagne that evening to blot out the misery that had threatened to overwhelm her.
Sean had come to her rescue—and Claire had been young enough and drunk enough to throw herself at him. Sean had been a perfect gentleman and turned her down, and her adult self was glad that he’d been so decent, but as a teenager she’d been hideously embarrassed by the whole episode and she’d avoided him like the plague for months and months afterwards.
Then there was his parents’ funeral, three years later. Claire had been there to support Ashleigh—just as Ashleigh had supported Claire at her own mother’s funeral—and she’d glanced across at Sean at a moment when he’d looked utterly lost. Wanting to help, Claire had pushed past the old embarrassment and gone to offer him her condolences. Sean hadn’t been quite approachable enough for her to give him a hug, so she’d simply squeezed his hand and said she was sorry for his loss. At the time, her skin had tingled at the contact with his—but the timing was so inappropriate that she hadn’t acted on it.
They’d fought again when Ashleigh had decided not to join the family business. Sean had blamed Claire for talking Ashleigh out of what he clearly saw as her duty. OK, so Claire had been a sounding board and helped Ashleigh work out what she really wanted to do, encouraging her to follow her dreams; but surely Sean had wanted his sister to be happy instead of feeling trapped and miserable in a job she really didn’t want to do? And surely, given that his parents had died so young, he understood how short life was and how you needed to make the most of every moment? It wasn’t as if being a maths teacher was some insecure, fly-by-night job. And Ash was a really gifted teacher. She loved what she did and her pupils adored her. It had been the right decision.
The problem was, Sean had always been so overprotective. Claire could understand why; he was Ashleigh’s elder brother and had been the head of the family since he was twenty-four. But at the same time he really needed to understand that his sister was perfectly capable of standing on her own two feet and making her own way in the world.
She forced herself to concentrate on packing the dresses properly, but she couldn’t help noticing the deep tone of Sean’s voice, his confidence and sureness as he talked to the airline.
Most of the time Claire didn’t admit it, even to herself, but she’d had a secret crush on Sean when she’d been fourteen. Which was half the reason why she’d thrown herself at him at Ashleigh’s birthday party, three years later.
Another memory seeped back in. Ashleigh’s engagement party to Luke. Sean had asked her to dance; Claire had been well aware that he was only being polite for his sister’s sake. Which was the same reason why she’d agreed to dance with him. Though, somewhere between the start and the middle of the song, something had changed. Claire couldn’t even blame it on the champagne, because she hadn’t been drinking. But something had made her pull back slightly and look up at Sean. Something had made her lips part slightly. And then he’d dipped his head and kissed her.
The kiss had shaken her right to the core. Nobody had ever made her feel like that with a single kiss—as if her knees had turned to mush and she needed to cling to him to keep herself upright. It had panicked her into backing away and cracking some inane joke, and the moment was lost.
Since then, she’d been scrupulously polite and distant with Sean. But in unguarded moments she wondered. Had he felt that same pull of attraction? And what if...?
She shook herself. Of course not. Apart from the fact that her judgement when it came to men was totally rubbish, she knew that Sean just saw her as his baby sister’s super-annoying best friend, the woman he ended up bickering with every time they spoke to each other for more than five minutes. It rankled slightly that he still didn’t take her seriously—surely the fact that she’d had her own business for the last three years and kept it going through the recession counted for something?
Then again, she didn’t need to prove anything to him. She was perfectly comfortable with who she was and what she’d achieved.
She finished packing the last