Daniel closed his eyes and handed the phone back to his friend before opening them again.
‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ he said.
Alan just shrugged. ‘I knew the minute she walked in the door that you were toast. Can’t blame a guy for trying, though.’
Well, at least Alan was being philosophical about it. ‘Who’s seen this?’
Alan pressed his lips together and shook his head. ‘Not sure. The girls in the café had been cooing over it for half an hour when I stumbled upon them.’
Just when he thought his crazy life was getting back to normal.
‘So … what’s the story with Miss Fancy Knickers?’ Alan said, smiling a little.
Daniel forgot to look cross. ‘Who?’ he asked, genuinely confused.
‘That’s the nickname some of the students coined for Miss Orchid House.’ He held up his hands. ‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the view, but those shoes and skirts she wears some days are hardly practical wear for a job like ours, even if she is just messing around with flowers instead of digging beds.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘So … are they?’
Daniel’s voice was low and warning. ‘Are they what?’
Alan’s smile upgraded itself into a lascivious grin. ‘Fancy.’
‘Not you too!’ Daniel turned and pulled the sliding door open. ‘I believe the official phrase is: No comment,’ he said just before he slammed it closed again.
He strode away. A couple of the nursery team ducked for cover. Just as well, really. They’d obviously worked out that he was liable to assign the grottiest jobs to anyone who got in his way when he was feeling like this. And, with having to watch Kelly struggling through her chemo for months on end, there had been plenty of days when he’d been in a mood like this.
Fancy knickers. Humph.
No chance of him finding that out at present. He’d barely touched her, let alone got on first name terms with her underwear. And just thinking about said underwear was making it very difficult to calm down.
And it would have to be ‘no comment’ if anyone else asked him about Chloe, because he wasn’t about to tell anyone he’d asked her out and she’d turned him down. That would be too humiliating.
Like what you did to Georgia.
No. That wasn’t the same. Georgia had gone live on air and made the choice to publicise her ill-advised proposal. That hadn’t been his fault at all. He’d asked Chloe out in private, just the two of them. Or so he’d thought.
Still, if he was feeling a fraction of the mortification Georgia had felt on Valentine’s Day, it was no wonder it had taken her a month before she’d been able to face him in person. That must have been the pits.
Oh, heck.
Georgia.
He had a pretty good idea she hadn’t seen this yet, and when she did she was going to kill him. He’d been able to tell from her expression yesterday that she was still feeling raw, even if she agreed that ending it had been the best thing for both of them.
To Georgia it would look as if he’d taken her visit yesterday to go out and bed the nearest available hottie. It didn’t help to know he’d been on that train of thought himself last night, hardly stopping to think how it might look to anyone else. And Georgia had always had a bit of a thing about women like Chloe …
Oh, bloody hell. Chloe.
When Georgia was finished with him, Chloe would bring him back to life and make him suffer a second time. What a mess.
He yanked the greenhouse door open and strode out into the fresh air. There was only one thing to do: he had to talk to both of them before they found out about it from anyone else.
The morning had been a hectic one and Chloe decided to go and sit on a bench to eat her lunch. While it was cold enough to still need her coat, it was the best kind of day March could deliver, and she was determined to mop up as much sun as she could.
She’d always wanted to work at Kew, ever since she’d trained here. It was the most amazing place in the world as far as she was concerned. And who wanted to hide away in an office or a staff tearoom when there were acres of beautiful gardens on their doorstep?
An empty bench was waiting for her just away from one of the main paths. She made her way to it and sat down, trying to let the tranquillity seep into her, but she hardly took in the carpet of lilac-blue crocuses or the swathes of daffodils covering some of the sloping banks, because her mind was too busy living the events of the night before.
Half of her was screaming at the other half for having walked away from Daniel, and the other half congratulated itself on being safe and sensible. While the two continued to have a tug of war inside her skull, she closed her eyes and let her head slip back, enjoying the sun on her face.
She wasn’t sure how long she stayed like that, but the snap of a twig nearby disturbed her. She sat up quickly and opened her eyes. Her heart had started to pump a little faster when she’d heard that noise and now she knew why. Indiana Jones, minus his secateurs, had come to pay her a visit.
She snapped the lid back on her salad and looked him evenly in the eye. That was the sort of thing New Chloe did. That girl wasn’t scared of anything.
However, for the first time in years she was aware of another presence at the fringes of her consciousness. Deep down inside, another Chloe—the naive frizzy mouse—was huddled in a corner, twitching.
No, she thought. That sad, geeky girl is dead. Something far better has risen from her ashes. She clamped down hard on the ghostly presence. That was all it was. A memory. An echo.
‘Don’t suppose you have another ice cream on you?’ she asked, closing her eyes again briefly. ‘It’s more the weather for it today.’
He shook his head and silently pulled a smartphone with a large screen from his pocket. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he handed it to her. ‘This isn’t anywhere near as nice as ice cream.’
Chloe scrolled through the whole blog entry carefully, reading every word. It was the picture that did the most damage, though. In the grainy photograph she was looking up at Daniel as he leant towards her, her eyes wide, her lips … waiting.
She handed the phone back to him without saying anything, not wanting to see it any more. She must have made a face, because he shook his head and then said, ‘You’ve every right to be upset.’
It wasn’t that. She wasn’t upset that people thought she was romantically involved with Daniel Bradford. It might make her life at Kew a little more complicated, sure, but it was hardly anything to get her knickers in a twist about. No, what she was really worried about was that photograph.
‘How many people have seen this?’ she asked, looking straight ahead, eyes fixed on the Georgian orangery that now served as the gardens’ main restaurant.
She heard the fragments of pine cones and twigs beneath his feet crunch as he shifted his weight. ‘There’s no way of knowing, but I think we have to assume everyone.’
Chloe nodded. Okay. She could cope with this. People might see the picture, but they wouldn’t recognise it, wouldn’t know what it meant.
She turned her head to look at him, made her cheek muscles tighten to pull the corners of her lips upwards. Then she shifted along the bench and made room for him. He blinked, confusion etched into his features, and sat down.