Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop

He led Nina further down the hall to a door, which he unlocked so Nina could sneak out the back while Steven was still waiting to order her very large vodka and tonic.

‘You’re a real gent, Chris,’ she said gratefully, because this wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, that Chris had come to her rescue. ‘I owe you one.’

‘You owe me more than one,’ Chris said with a grin. ‘Time you settled down with a nice bloke.’

Nina pulled a face. ‘I don’t want to settle down with a nice bloke. I want nothing less than mad, passionate love with a man who’d give me the moon and stars if I asked for them.’

‘Good luck with that, sweetheart.’ Chris shook his head then pulled the door shut behind her.

Nina took her phone out of her coat pocket so she could block Steven. She was still logged into HookUpp, the app pinging to let her know there were matches close by, and for a moment, Nina was tempted. The night was still young, after all, and it wasn’t as if she was getting any younger. Or she could go back to the tapas bar and maybe have another crack at Javier. Perhaps she’d written him off too quickly.

Or she could just go home. She was only around the corner from Happy Ever After and, as if they had a mind of their own, her feet were swinging left and down Rochester Street then into Rochester Mews. Nina sighed as she tapped the security code into the panel of the electric gate that prevented undesirables from gaining access to the mews after hours.

Then it was an unsteady, vertiginous wobble across the cobblestones towards Happy Ever After. The shop was in darkness and Nina didn’t bother to turn on the lights as she locked the door behind her then gratefully eased off her shoes.

She padded across the main room, past the shop counter to the door that led to the stairs. There were no lights on upstairs but that didn’t necessarily mean that Verity was staying over at Johnny’s again. She could be home and doing yoga, which she preferred to do by candlelight. Or she could be reading, which was another quiet activity and one she could easily abandon to listen to Nina spin an amusing yarn about her adventures this evening.

‘Very? Are you in?’ Nina called out as she climbed the stairs. ‘Had a lucky escape from a total loser tonight. He had the worst hair plugs of anyone I’ve ever seen.’

‘Roooowwwwwrrrrrrrr!’ came the plaintive reply, not from Verity, but Strumpet, Verity’s obese, needy cat who waited for Nina to get to the top of the stairs then hurled himself at her shins.

‘Mr Strumpet! Did she leave you home alone?’ Nina hefted Strumpet into her arms, nearly giving herself a hernia in the process, and padded down the hall to the kitchen wearing Strumpet like he was a fur stole.

There was a note pinned to the fridge. ‘Hey Nina, probably going to stay at Johnny’s tonight. Strumpet has already been fed, despite what he might tell you. Be good. See you tomorrow. Very xxx’

It was only a short time ago that Verity and Posy, with a bit of nagging, could be persuaded to go out with Nina. And now it wasn’t even nine o’clock on a Wednesday evening and Posy was snuggled up with her husband, and Verity was sharing sofa space (she really wasn’t the snuggling sort) with her extremely eligible handsome architect boyfriend. And where did that leave Nina?

While she would rather die than become a smug married, it would be wonderful to have someone to come home to. And God, a passion-filled all-nighter with her Heathcliff-alike would absolutely hit the spot right now. Instead, Nina’s companion for the night was a chubby, demanding cat, like she was a spinstery crazy cat lady, with nothing to do but put on her pyjamas, ferret in the fridge for some leftovers and catch up on the latest episode of Tattoo Fixers.

It was less Wuthering Heights and more the absolute pits.

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‘But I begin to fancy you don’t like me.’

Though Nina was very fond of saying ‘I can sleep when I’m dead’ every time any of her friends, especially Verity who was evangelical about eight hours of shut-eye, remonstrated with her about burning the candle at both ends, there was a lot to be said for an early night.

She’d been in bed by an unprecedented half past ten and woke up the next morning before her alarm. It was quite a revelation that getting showered, dressed and made-up could be done in a leisurely fashion, and when Verity finally came home from staying the night at Johnny’s, she did a double-take to see Nina sitting in the kitchen, lingering over toast and jam and her first cup of coffee of the day.

‘Morning, Very!’ Nina picked up the cafetière. ‘Do you want a cup?’

Verity goggled at her. ‘What is going on here?’ she asked in a bewildered fashion. ‘Did you stay out all night?’

‘I beg your pardon!’ Nina gasped, like she was affronted at the notion that the only reason she was up was because she hadn’t gone to bed. ‘The very idea! Not like you, you dirty stop-out!’

It was Verity’s turn to gasp in outrage. ‘I’m not a dirty stop-out. I’m in a loving, committed relationship, thank you very much.’

Half an hour later when Posy arrived for work, Nina took great delight in opening the shop door for her with much ceremony and a chirpy, ‘Posy! You’re five minutes late! No need to worry though, I’ve already signed for a couple of deliveries and done the till float.’

Posy put a hand to her forehead and pretended to swoon. ‘Oh God, I must be hallucinating. Are you really Nina?’

Nina nodded. ‘I’m a new, improved Nina who had an early night.’

‘I always knew this day would come,’ Posy said with a grin, nudging Nina. ‘If you continue to be new and improved, I might have to promote you to deputy manager, then you could open the shop every day and I could have a bit of a lie-in.’

‘I’m pretty sure that come tomorrow, I’ll revert back to Nina version one,’ Nina decided and then Posy pretended to cry and it set a jokey mood for the morning, which was just as well, because the day was grey and drizzly, yet again, and the shop was very quiet. Nina hoped that it was just because of the weather and not because they’d run out of customers. Verity still seemed to have a lot of orders coming in through the website and Posy insisted that it was just a lull and ‘things will pick up nearer to Valentine’s Day.’

But Valentine’s Day was only a week away and Nina couldn’t see that people would want to buy more romantic fiction if they had the real thing. And if they were single, why buy a romantic novel as a special Valentine’s Day treat, when it would only remind you of the fact that no one loved you?

Anyway, Valentine’s Day or not, the shop had become awfully quiet now that Christmas was long gone.

When they’d reopened as Happy Ever After last summer, they’d planned all sorts of exciting things. Author events, blogger evenings, a book-of-the-month club, but as yet none of these exciting things had happened.

No one even bothered to update the shop’s Twitter or Instagram feeds any more. Sam, Posy’s sixteen-year-old brother, and Little Sophie, their Saturday girl, had promised to take responsibility for them, but their good intentions had lasted a maximum of two weeks. Nina wouldn’t have minded taking them over, or the Instagram at least, so she could take pictures of the new releases, but no one seemed to know the login details for each account. When Nina had asked Sam, he’d gone full teenage strop on her, so she suspected that he couldn’t actually remember what the passwords were.

Still, there was something to be said for a slow morning. Nina painted her nails then read a very sexy workplace romance called Billionaire In The Boardroom, Gigolo In The Bedroom in between texting back and forth with her friend Marianne about her new-found resolve to stop taking a chance on losers and really focus on finding her own true love, so despite the lack of customers, the morning sped by.

As the shop was quiet and she had actually started work early that morning, Nina reasoned that no one would mind if she was a little late back from lunch. She had planned to grab a quick bite with lovely Annika, girlfriend of lovely Stefan who ran the Swedish deli on Rochester Street, but Annika and Stefan had had a massive argument, which sounded far from lovely, so Nina had to listen to an entire repeat of said massive argument and then offer advice.

Usually when her women friends were fighting with their significant others, Nina would argue that passion made a relationship stronger as long as the reason for the fight didn’t involve cheating or skidmarks, but Annika wasn’t convinced.

‘He cares more about his smokehouse than he cares about me,’ she said sadly of the little wooden shed in the backyard of the deli where Stefan cured his own salmon.

So, Nina was late back from lunch. Only by fifteen minutes, which was nothing. She’d been back from lunch much later than that before. Much, much later.

Unfortunately the sun had come out since Nina had left the shop and when she returned, Happy Ever After was full of customers, as if the romance novel-reading public only ventured outside for blue skies.

‘Sorry!’ Nina said in a jaunty voice as she approached the counter where Posy was manning the till and a very reluctant Verity had been press-ganged into helping. ‘I got held up.’

‘There’s a reason why it’s called a lunch hour,’ Posy snapped in a very un-Posy-like manner. ‘That’s because it’s only meant to last sixty minutes.’

‘I said I was sorry. Keep your hair on,’ Nina said, nudging Posy out of the way with her hip, so she could serve the next customer. ‘Hello! Shall I take those from you?’

‘I’m going back to the office now,’ Verity announced in martyred tones, because she hated interacting with the general public in any way, shape or form. She’d only answer the phone under extreme duress, whereas Nina was happy to answer the phone every time it rang and chat to every customer, which even Posy got a bit bored with, so Verity and Posy could just get over themselves.

Her timekeeping might be a little free-form but Nina was excellent at customer service. She said as much to Posy, who was now taking the books that Nina rang up, and bagging them along with a complimentary Happy Ever After bookmark, but Posy just muttered darkly that she already missed the new and improved Nina.

The queue seemed never ending but it did end eventually, and Nina could take off her coat, stash her bag under the counter and come face to face with …

‘Not you again! How long have you been standing there?’ Nina demanded of Noah, who was indeed standing at the other end of the counter in his stupid suit with his stupid handheld device. No doubt he’d been writing copious notes about the amount of backchat Nina gave to Posy and was recommending that she be fired immediately.

‘Quite a while actually,’ Noah replied mildly. ‘You see, I wasn’t back late from lunch.’

Nina gave him a hard stare – she didn’t appreciate his sarcasm. Not one little bit. He had a clever, kind-looking face but when he smiled blandly at Nina, as he was doing now, it just stoked the flames of her dislike.

‘Noah’s here for the afternoon,’ Posy said. ‘Which you’d have known if you’d got back from lunch in time.’

‘God, Posy, will you let it go?’ Nina groaned and Noah made another mark on his iPad, which Nina was going to spill a hot drink on first chance she got, and Posy sniffed and said that she had work to do and that she wasn’t to be disturbed, and disappeared into the back office.