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  ‘Scusi?’ The woman looked appropriately startled as I threw myself in between her and Nick, elbowing him backwards to make room. ‘Nick, this is your friend?’

  ‘No,’ I answered for him. ‘I’m not his bloody friend.’

  ‘She’s not,’ he confirmed. ‘Definitely not. Tess, what are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I could hear myself slurring and couldn’t quite work out why. Everything sounded fine in my head. ‘But I know what I’m not doing. I’m not sitting over there while you stand here, being all Mr Charming Arse and flirting with this woman!’

  I patted her on the shoulder and smiled as apologetically as I could.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This is a whole big thing. It’s not your fault you’re the sea witch.’

  ‘The sea witch?’ She was confused. It was sad.

  ‘Yeah, it’s this whole Disney thing,’ I explained, waving my arms around in the air. Was it me or had my hair got bigger? ‘Amy will explain it to you.’

  ‘Amy?’

  ‘Really, this doesn’t concern you,’ I said, turning my attention to Nick. ‘It concerns you. And your “I’m not interested but I am interested but I’m not interested” bollocks.’

  ‘Are we really going to do this now?’ Nick asked through gritted teeth. ‘Because I’d really rather not.’

  ‘I don’t give two shits about what you’d rather do,’ I wailed. ‘I waited for someone to make his mind up for ten years, Nick. Ten years. And now I’m supposed to sit there like some twat and wait for you to decide what you want? No way. Forget that.’

  Somewhere in the bar, I heard Amy cheering.

  ‘You told me how you felt and I listened and I’ve gone along with your hot-and-cold headfuck of an attitude until now but enough is enough!’ I stamped my bare foot on the bar floor to prove my point. ‘I like you. I more than like you. Actually, I think I probably might that other word you, but I can’t say it here and I’m not going to say it because you’re awful and you can’t make your mind up and you’re just messing with me and my foot hurts.’

  I looked down at the floor, trying to pick up my foot and bend down to check it out, all at the same time. First mistake. The second was grabbing hold of the front of Sophia Loren’s dress to stop myself from falling when I inevitably went over.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I yelped as we both toppled to the floor, me with a handful of frock, her with both boobs popping out as we went.

  ‘I think that’s our cue to leave.’

  On my hands and knees, surrounded by too much tulle, my own blood and an empty bottle of limoncello I faintly recognized, I felt at least one pair of tiny fists beating me around the head while two bigger hands grabbed me around my waist and yanked me upwards.

  ‘Sorry,’ I shouted as I was hoisted onto someone’s shoulder and carried towards the door. ‘Mi scusi. Ciao Ciao!’

  The cold night air was a shock. It had been so hot in the bar, and from my unconventional upside-down view, I could see it had rained while we had been inside. No wonder it was so lovely and fresh. With blood rushing to my ears, it was hard to follow the exact conversation but there were definitely two male voices involved and whatever they were discussing, we were not standing still to do it.

  ‘Could you please put me down, please?’ I asked, the contents of my stomach, almost entirely liquid, beginning to churn.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I might do a sick.’

  Without another word, I was immediately turned the right way round.

  ‘I need Amy to hold my hair,’ I said, brushing my hair out of my face and laughing as it sprang right back. ‘She holds my hair best.’

  ‘Amy is still in the bar, retrieving your shoes and Kekipi’s phone,’ Nick said, turning a corner and finally setting me down on the damp ground. ‘What the fuck just happened in there?’

  I pouted and shrugged.

  ‘I got the shoes!’ I heard Amy and looked over to see her holding my heels over her head triumphantly. Altogether less triumphant was the huge red stain in the middle of her chest. Kekipi’s jaw dropped as we all stared at her. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t been shot – that chick threw a glass of red wine at me. Probably fair.’

  ‘The dress!’ Kekipi reached out to lean one hand against the wall. ‘I think I’m going to faint.’

  ‘I’m definitely going to be sick,’ I said, kneeling down and gathering my hair behind my head.

  ‘They wouldn’t give me your phone,’ Amy told Kekipi, rummaging in her own tiny evening bag. ‘And I think I’ve forgotten mine.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered to Nick as he took hold of my handheld ponytail as I leaned over and threw up delicately in the gutter. Wiping my mouth on the sleeve of my dress I smiled at him. ‘I love you.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Nick crouched in front of me, his hands still holding my hair, not quite beaming back. ‘Have you got your phone to call the car?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I muttered, sitting up straight and pawing through my purse. ‘Here.’

  Nick passed my phone to Kekipi and sighed.

  ‘What am I going to do with you?’ he asked. ‘What was that?’

  ‘You’re supposed to say “I love you” back,’ I pointed out, trying not to throw up again. My body did not care for lemon-flavoured liqueurs. ‘Or at least give me a thumbs up.’

  ‘No, you’re not supposed to give someone a thumbs up when they tell you they love you,’ Nick replied. ‘Not ever.’

  ‘Now you tell me,’ I said, taking my phone back and holding it in my hand. Squeezing the hard, sharp brick helped me focus. ‘Can we go home?’

  ‘The car will be here in two minutes,’ Kekipi said, bending down to rest his hand against my forehead. ‘We’ll be home in fifteen, sweetcheeks. I really do have to stop getting you drunk, don’t I?’

  ‘No,’ I said with much seriousness. ‘I think my tolerance is improving.’

  ‘You really are my hero,’ he smiled back at me. ‘Come on, let’s get you to your feet.’

  It felt like we waited forever for the car to arrive but I put that down to the fact that everyone else seemed very concerned that the people from the bar were going to hunt us down and kill us. Once we were safely inside and motoring through he streets of Milan, I pulled out my phone, remembering the weird emoji-filled text from Charlie.

  Not for the first time, my phone did not want to play fair. It took forever to open up the conversation and even longer before it allowed me to scan up to my last sent message. ‘Oh, fuck off,’ I muttered, pulling my hair into my face so I couldn’t see my phone. It was the perfect plan.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Nick asked, stroking my hair away from my head. ‘Are you going to be sick again? Do we need to stop?’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I promised, lying through my back teeth. ‘It’s nothing.’

  Impressively, I had lied twice in that short sentence. I was absolutely going to be sick again and it really wasn’t fine. Lying on the backseat of the car, resting my head in Nick’s lap, I flashed back to the night before, back to my secret garden. The reason Charlie had sent me a text message full of smiley-faced emojis was because he was happy. And the reason he was happy was because I had sent him a text message of my own.

  A text message that said “I love you too” and there was not a single thumbs up emoji to be seen.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘I can’t believe you made me walk this morning.’ Amy reached up and grabbed the sunglasses from my face, slapping them over her own eyes. ‘I think I’m dying. I didn’t think limoncello was that strong.’

  ‘If we’d got in the car, I would have thrown up,’ I said, squinting down the street and checking numbers on the buildings. ‘And I don’t think limoncello is any stronger than anything else but it probably doesn’t go that well with whisky and champagne.’

  ‘This bag is heavy – being an assistant is rubbish,’ she moaned. ‘I’m leaning towards the agency, right now. Could I be your secretary? I could answer the phones and f
etch sandwiches and find a husband.’

  Sixty-seven, sixty-nine, seventy-one.

  ‘Not sure the agency is going to be an option,’ I said, shifting my genuinely heavy backpack and stopping to check the directions on my phone. ‘I have to talk to Charlie about last night.’

  ‘You’re going to tell him you threw up in a gutter?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what I’m going to tell him but I do have to talk to him. And Nick.’

  ‘Yeah, what’s that all about?’ she asked, pushing her sunglasses back up her shiny nose. ‘He was practically pleasant last night. Is he ill? Does he have some sort of syndrome?’

  ‘That’s offensive to people who have some sort of syndrome,’ I said. ‘Any sort of syndrome. Nick isn’t mentally ill; he’s just a knob. But then, so am I, so there we go.’

  I was relatively hazy on what had happened after we got home. I remembered Nick helping me up to my room and getting me out of my dress but since I woke up in an empty bed with my knickers on, I was fairly certain he had done the gentlemanly thing and vacated the room as soon as I was under the covers. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  ‘I can’t decide if this is a better situation or a worse one,’ Amy replied, switching her backpack to the other shoulder. ‘Now you’ve got both of them trying it on? Maybe you should send them on a quest or something. Make them prove their love. First one to come back with the Heart of the Ocean is the winner.’

  ‘The problem is, Nick didn’t exactly throw himself at my feet, did he?’ I said, shepherding her to the pedestrian crossing and trying not to trip over someone’s sausage dog. Milan was full of sausage dogs. ‘And – I can’t quite believe I’m saying this – but even if Charlie went to the bottom of the ocean and found the necklace, I don’t know what I would do with it.’

  ‘Woah,’ Amy breathed. ‘You’re serious. You would never take Titanic in vain.’

  ‘I know.’ I turned down the alleyway that I hoped would bring us out at Edward Warren’s studio. It didn’t. ‘It feels weird. I’ve had this crush for so long and I don’t know how to explain it, but something has shifted. Can you be in love with two people at once?’

  ‘Asked every shitty romcom ever,’ Amy said. ‘Unfortunately for you, yes, I think you can but I don’t think it can be the same kind of love. And just so you know, a crush isn’t the same as being in love.’

  I rolled my shoulder and it stung like a bitch. I might have slept on it funny. Or I might have fallen down and grabbed someone’s boobs to hold me up. One or the other.

  ‘I do have feelings for both of them,’ I said, pressing the aching muscles in my neck. ‘But it’s different.’

  Amy skipped in front of me, clutching her hands to her chest. ‘Charlie is the moon and Nick is the sun? Charlie is a daisy and Nick is a luscious red rose? Charlie is Liam Hemsworth and Nick is Chris Hemsworth?’

  ‘Is Chris hotter than Liam?’ I asked.

  ‘Eh.’ She waved her hand from side to side. ‘It’s pretty fifty-fifty looks-wise but Liam loses points for the Miley Cyrus engagement thing.’

  ‘I do worry about you,’ I said, still struggling to choose a favourite Hemsworth.

  ‘I only wish I’d known it was going to be this easy for you to get over him,’ she said, following me back out of the alley without a peep of complaint. ‘I could have found some random hot fuck-knuckle to bang some sense into you ten years ago.’

  ‘I can’t believe I told Nick I loved him,’ I said, checking the map one more time. ‘I can’t believe I pulled that woman’s dress down.’

  ‘The dress part I can believe,’ she went on, trotting along behind me. ‘I should have cut you off after the champagne but yeah, I think the “I love you” part was a shock to everyone. Even if it is completely obvious.’

  ‘It’s so not obvious,’ I said, quite aware that it was.

  ‘Yeah, it is.’ Amy pulled her polka-dot shorts down to cover her knickers as we arrived outside the studio. ‘This is wild. I thought you just wanted to shag the arse off him but you properly love him.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I was as noncommittal as possible. ‘I think this is it.’

  I still wasn’t completely ready to talk about it. If only I could have had my life-hanging epiphany when I wasn’t completely tanked, I might feel better. Telling someone you loved them and then throwing up on their shoes was not the beginning of a love story to echo through the ages.

  I pressed the doorbell then pinched my cheeks to bring a colour to my face other than green. ‘We can talk about this later. Actually, no, we can’t.’

  ‘I just want to get this done as quickly as possible,’ she muttered, rubbing her temples. ‘I need a Berocca mixed with Red Bull and half a packet of Nurofen Plus. What’s the Italian equivalent of Nurofen Plus?’

  I turned to give her a look but there really was no point. We were both so hung over that anything other than express verbal communication was a waste of time.

  ‘It shouldn’t take long.’ I took a step back to stare up at the unassuming façade of Warren’s building, waiting to be buzzed in. ‘We’re just here to get a few shots of whatever Edward has done so far.’

  ‘Thank God we’re in Italy though,’ Amy said as the door opened and a different slender secretary indifferently ushered us inside. ‘I need to eat all the carbs.’

  ‘All of them,’ I agreed, thinking of the amazing spread on the breakfast table that neither of us had been able to touch. ‘It’ll be fine; he can’t have done that much, can he? We were only here on Monday. We’ll get in, take a few shots and be out in no time, I promise.’

  ‘As you can see, I have been quite busy.’

  Edward Warren, resplendent in head-to-toe emerald green, highlighted with a leopard-print tie, threw open the door to his workroom with a flourish.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Amy breathed. ‘Have you got elves working for you?’

  ‘I tend to get a little carried away when I’m invested in a project,’ he said, waving us past an army of tailors’ dummies, some half-dressed, some draped with fabric, others in what seemed to be finished designs. ‘I haven’t really slept since I last saw you. When I was working on my collection, I had all the samples at the factory within a week.’

  ‘This is amazing.’ I set my backpack down on one of the few bare surfaces, and tried to count the dummies but my hangover had them dancing all over the room. There had to be at least a dozen in varying states of undress. ‘Has Al – I mean, Mr Bennett – seen them yet?’

  ‘He’s coming by tomorrow.’ Edward frowned at the closest dummy, removed a pin and replaced it, smiling at an imperceptible difference in the design. ‘He tells me you’re to take photographs of whatever you like, of everything. Do I need to be in them?’

  ‘It would be great to get you in a couple of shots if you don’t mind?’ I said, looking at the room again with my photographer’s head on. ‘Ideally, it’s all supposed to be pretty natural so maybe we could get you to work on one of the dummies while we shoot?’

  ‘I don’t like to work in front of strangers,’ he said stiffly, adjusting his tie. ‘But as this is for Al, I’ll try. Where do you want me?’

  ‘The light is really nice over there.’ I pointed to the huge arched windows in the front of the building and away from the extensive collection of explicit nude photographs on the walls. It was nice to see he was consistent in his decorating. ‘How about that?’

  ‘I love your tie,’ Amy said as she unfolded the reflector from my kit, jumping as it popped into shape. ‘It’s so leopardy.’

  ‘I never really loved leopard print until I moved to Milan,’ Edward explained, flipping the end of his tie happily. ‘But the Italians have a taste for it and I have to say it’s catching.’

  ‘Very D&G,’ Amy replied as though she knew exactly what she was talking about. ‘I like the mafia widow look myself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Edward replied, reviewing her spotted shorts and pink cropped top for evidence. ‘It is a classic.’

&
nbsp; I rubbed my knuckles over my forehead, driving my hangover into the back of my head as I rifled around for my light meter. If there was one thing that Amy was great at, it was making friends. She could make anyone feel comfortable and usually knew his or her darkest secrets inside half an hour. It was a gift I wished I shared; strangers usually made me feel awkward and uncomfortable. That was one of the reasons I’d been so happy in my Charlie bubble for so long: I was rubbish at chatting people up and even worse at being the chattee. The last time a guy had had a crack at me in a bar, he ended up breaking down in tears and confessing that he was gay. I was quite proud of myself but Amy had been disappointed to say the least, especially when he confessed his feelings for the guy she was talking to. I think everyone went home alone that night.

  ‘You’ve really done all this since Monday?’ I asked Edward as he began to adjust the fabric on a beautiful pale silk shirtdress with a huge, full skirt. At least I found it easier to talk to people when I had a camera in my hands. ‘It’s incredible.’

  ‘Without wanting to sound disparaging, they weren’t complicated designs,’ he said, turning a little towards the light without even being asked. For someone who didn’t like having his photograph taken, he seemed to know exactly what he was doing. ‘They are beautiful and classic and it’s a long time since I worked on anything like this, but they weren’t difficult for me. The beauty of these clothes will be in the detail and the execution. They’re timeless.’

  ‘Amy, can you lift that up a bit?’ I asked. She gave a faint whimper and raised the circular reflector over her head, baring her belly. ‘So, Mr Warren, you’ve known Mr Bennett a long time?’

  ‘Sorry?’ He blinked twice, clearly distracted by Amy’s bare flesh. ‘Oh, it’s Edward, please. And yes, I’ve known him for … goodness, it must be forty years. I was an assistant to a very famous designer in the seventies and we spent a great deal of time with the Bennetts. Jane actually introduced me to my ex-wife. In fact, she introduced me to two of them.’

  ‘I’ve heard so many lovely stories about her,’ I said, crouching down and zooming in. ‘She must have been amazing.’