Lucie’s Vintage Cupcake Company

‘Lucie, I’m… erm… well, I’m flattered…’ He glanced nervously over his shoulder to where Greg had tucked his arm around Yolande’s waist and guided her to a cabinet of jewel-encrusted carriage clocks, mumbling exclamations of interest, clearly embarrassed.

‘Flattered? You’re flattered?’

Her voice came out an octave higher than she’d expected and she could feel her cheeks glowing with the fiery heat of mortification.

The sales assistant peeled away from Brett Coulson and went to assist Greg and Yolande, nervously recounting the features of the pieces they were browsing. Brett caught her eye and stepped forward, smooth and unruffled, as though this sort of thing happened at Tiffany’s every day.

‘Miss Bradshaw, Mr Morgan, perhaps you would like to avail yourselves of one of our private consultation rooms. If you’ll just follow…’

‘No! Thank you.’ Lucie gulped back the pressing tsunami of tears. She turned to Alex. ‘You don’t want to marry me, do you?’

‘Look, Luce, I think we need to talk about such a serious commitment before we make any promises, you know… It’s a bit sudden, that’s all.’ Then, to her amazement, he lowered his voice and leant towards her, gesturing over his shoulder. ‘Why on earth did you have to invite them?’

‘Is that all you can say? Your girlfriend has just arranged for Tiffany’s to stay open late so she could propose to you on the precise spot she met you and all you can think of to say is that you wish I hadn’t invited Greg and Yolande?’

Tears gathered along her lower lashes as the truth became crystal-clear and a metal vice began to crush the air from her lungs. Her peripheral vision seemed to recede and then rush back at her and she reached out to grasp the display counter to steady herself. She hadn’t realised she’d been holding her breath and the lack of oxygen had caused her head to feel fuzzy. As the tears trickled down her cheeks, she surveyed the man she loved with every cell of her body – in a matter of seconds he had morphed into a total stranger.

‘So your answer is no, then?’

‘I didn’t say that, Lucie,’ Alex said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

‘But you didn’t say yes.’

And in his silence her whole world crumbled. Seeing the embarrassment on Alex’s face was almost more than she could bear. An involuntary sob escaped from her throat. She clutched her stomach with her arm and doubled over as a slash of pain hit her squarely in the solar plexus.

‘Lucie, I’m sorry. If I’d known you were planning… well, all this…’ He swung his palm around her personal idea of retail paradise, still unable to meet her eyes.

‘Go away. Just leave me alone,’ she spluttered more harshly than she’d intended, her eyes narrowed and her teeth clenched.

Alex stepped away from her as though he’d been slapped and Lucie felt even worse. She saw the discomfort written boldly on his handsome features. He was terrified she was about to cause a scene in front of his boss. That was something Alex abhorred – women who showed their emotions in public were to be pitied. She saw him flash a hand gesture to Yolande and after that her senses became muddled. She felt Yolande link arms with her, mutter an incomprehensible but soothing stream of random words into her ear and watched as Alex disappeared from her life without a backward glance. She vaguely heard Yolande politely thank Brett for his assistance before steering her into the darkness of the street outside to allow the manager to lock the door behind them.

The fresh air hit her brain but her body still endured a cauldron of emotions – mortification and embarrassment at her public rejection, shock and confusion at Alex’s reaction, and pain, a sharp raw pain coursing through her veins, sparkling out to her fingertips before jettisoning back up to her chest where it gathered in a heavy armour of lead weight.

She was grateful for Yolande’s support, physical and emotional, as they waited at the kerb for a taxi. Her mind was so crowded with unanswered questions she was unable to formulate speech, either to ask for her opinion on what had just transpired or to thank her for her kindness. She was vaguely aware of being bundled into the back of a cab, but not before she noticed, incongruously, that it had stopped raining and the sky had taken on a smooth, infinite mantle of black silk which pressed down onto her shoulders and wrapped its fabric around her body, inducing a feeling of claustrophobic panic.

‘Here.’ Yolande handed her a packet of fragrant tissues and enveloped her hands with her own. ‘I’m so sorry, Lucie. So, so sorry that happened to you. I don’t know what Alex was thinking. Perhaps it was the surprise; perhaps when he’s had chance to think things through...’

Lucie stared at Yolande, at her carefully made-up face creased in genuine concern, and found her voice at last. ‘He doesn’t love me. If he did, he would have said yes straightaway, wouldn’t he?’

Sadness now took the place of shame and descended like a tepid shower. Yolande didn’t reply and they sat in silence until the taxi drew up in front of the building that housed the apartment she shared with Alex. The windows on the third floor were in darkness – just like her world. She glanced at her watch and was astonished to see that less than an hour had passed since she’d left the restaurant, her life on an upward spiral, consumed with happiness and excitement for her future. How was she going to explain what had happened to Gino, Antonio and Sofia? She knew Francesca wouldn’t care as long as it didn’t affect her ability to create culinary artistry.

Why did life have to toss such random grenades into the path of the unsuspecting? What was she going to do? She couldn’t continue to live with Alex after what had happened. But she knew there would be a sofa for her at Steph and Hollie’s flat in Wimbledon. And there was always Jess in Richmond if she could endure the commute and being mauled on a daily basis by her two young nephews. She’d better start packing.

‘Want me to come up with you?’

Lucie liked Yolande, but even in her pain-infused state she caught the tremor of dread in the woman’s voice. ‘No, but thanks for… well, for bringing me home.’

‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?’

‘I’m fine…’

‘I’ll get Greg to talk to Alex… Perhaps if…’

‘No, please don’t do that. Greg is Alex’s boss. It’s better to keep this between the two of us. I don’t want it to affect Alex’s chance at partnership.’

‘Well, if you’re sure…’

‘Bye, Yolande.’

Lucie slammed the door and the cab sped away, its red tail lights shimmering like cat’s eyes growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared round the corner. She had a feeling of absolute certainty that she would never see Yolande, or Greg, again.

Would her premonition extend to Alex, too?

Chapter Three (#ulink_0c22da07-7bc9-508a-853b-c993e0c6736f)

‘Hey, Lucie, are you planning on serving chargrilled torta di ricotta to our customers this evening?’ chuckled Antonio, grabbing a cloth to remove her ricotta pie from the oven and setting it down to smoulder on a wire rack.

Because it was Friday, the busiest night of the week, Lucie, like Gino and Antonio, had arrived at the restaurant early to prepare her ingredients and bake her most popular desserts for the evening’s service. The torte she’d spent the last hour creating had the additional aura of silver smoke and an intense aroma of burnt caramel.

‘Oh, God! Sorry, sorry!’

Gino paused in his task of separating zucchini flowers from their stems and swept his palm over his dark hair as he turned to look at Lucie, his face wreathed in anxiety. ‘You okay, Lucie?’

Gino and Antonio were treating her like a delicate piece of Venetian glass to be bundled up in cotton wool, dipped in love and affection and dispatched home. While it was a welcome relief to know she was loved, and surrounded by such genuine concern for her well-being, all she really wanted to do was bury herself in a busy shift – the busier, the better – so that her brain had something else to focus on other than the painful memory of her rejection and broken heart.

Once they’d settled into the familiar routine of the daily preparations, Gino strode over to Lucie and enveloped her in an Aramis-infused bear hug. ‘Alex is an imbecille. You want that me and Antonio take our meat cleavers over to Pimlico and surprise the hell out of him on his commute to work?’

Tempting though it might have been to authorise such a foray, she knew it wouldn’t solve anything. And, more worryingly, she knew both Gino and Antonio had large extended families in Italy with accompanying whispers of connections to the Mafia. She was sure it was a wind-up by Antonio, but who knew?

She scrutinised the handsome head chef’s features. Anyone meeting him for the first time couldn’t fail to guess at his Italian ancestry – his Mediterranean-hued complexion, those dark curled lashes. He could be described by some as stocky but there wasn’t a spare inch on him, and when he cooked he exuded such a force of energy he made the onlooker exhausted just from watching him.

However, Gino’s most endearing trait was his infinite capacity to make everyone feel special. He possessed the enviable ability to recall the names of their regular diners like an ageless elephant. He had grown up above his parents’ restaurant on the outskirts of Milan, helping out with the service from the time he could toddle around the tables with the bread basket. Lucie loved him – all the staff at Francesca’s did – and he was the reason she had forced herself to slap on a mask of make-up and return to work. Friday nights were always manic, but the kitchen staff worked in formation like a professionally choreographed ballet troupe. Well, under usual circumstances they did – that day she had been cast in the role of the clumsy, flat-footed clown.

Next it was Antonio’s turn to grab her shoulders and deposit a noisy kiss on each cheek before declaring she was too good for the tight-arsed, stuck-up lawyer and should stick to dating red-blooded, passionate Italian sous chefs instead of dallying with wet, cowardly corporate suits. Lucie smiled her gratitude at the Italian Adonis who had girls reserving the same table every Saturday night to ogle the fruits of his obsession with the gym. Sicily’s loss had been their gain throughout the winter season, but the women would be sobbing into their Prosecco rosé when he returned to Palermo in July to help his uncle out at his pizzeria for the summer.

Yet, as Lucie chopped, sliced and grated the stack of ingredients she would be using in her desserts that evening, she had to admit Gino and Antonio did have a point. Alex still hadn’t returned any of her calls. Even her friend Steph had tried to corner him one morning at the County Court but he’d scuttled away with his client into a conference room. Steph had declared herself disgusted at his spineless attitude.

‘Damn!’

Lucie took a sharp step backwards as an almost empty bottle of extra virgin olive oil, which Francesca’s brother had sent over from his hill farm in Tuscany, slithered from her fingertips. Then she was forced to watch in horror as Francesca herself appeared in the kitchen doorway and bent down to retrieve a piece of the broken glass, her sharp hazel eyes narrowed and her brow creased into parallel lines of concern.

‘I should deduct this breakage from your salary, but I’m prepared to make an exception on this occasion.’ Francesca leaned in a little closer to scrutinise Lucie, running her eyes from her tangle of bird’s-nest-inspired hair to the scuffed toes of her ankle boots. A blast of her heavy perfume lingered in the air between them. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Lucie, you look like you’ve been flattened by a runaway steamroller and waited while it reversed to make sure the job was done properly.

‘Of course, I understand that you’ve just endured the most tremendous shock but you must resist bringing your personal difficulties into the kitchen. If you are unable to do so, you should take the rest of the day and this evening off when you’ve completed your desserts. However, I should remind you that indulgence in your relationship problems will most certainly have to be accounted for. I don’t want you to make a habit of it. And if Antonio’s tip-off is correct, and we are to be visited by the celebrity blogger from Anon. Appetit, then tonight of all nights I will need my staff to be at the top of their game.’

‘Really, Fran, I’m fine. I’m sorry, I know how important tonight is and…’

‘Well, if you insist on staying, I want the same attention to detail I demand from all my staff every night of the week no matter what personal triumph or disaster has befallen them that day.’