The Little Shop of Hopes and Dreams

Nicole saluted her with her empty glass. Too right. She’d worked really hard to become the woman she was today, the kind of woman who could bring the Jaspers of this world to their knees, reflected in her choice of costume this evening. Who embodied effortless elegance more than Audrey Hepburn in her Breakfast at Tiffany’s little black dress?

Okay, maybe Holly Golightly herself hadn’t always been cool, calm and dignified, but it was the overall image that counted. It was iconic.

‘Stuff Jasper! May he marry the cow and have a brood full of boys as shallow and stuck-up as he is!’ she said, trying to slide onto the stool next to Peggy’s and missing.

‘Exactly,’ Peggy said and ordered another round of cosmos.

Lara…or Mia…tapped Peggy on the arm. She nodded at Nicole. ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.’

Peggy turned and studied her friend, pursing her lips. ‘Well, we’ve got to do something to cheer her up. My gran used to say the way you start a new year is the way you’ll end it, and I don’t want her moping around our brand-new office for the next twelve months.’

Mia sipped beer out of the bottle. ‘You’re all heart,’ she said, giving her a very Lara look.

‘Of course, I want Nicole to be happy too,’ Peggy added, pouting a little.

Nicole listened to her friends debate the merit of a fourth—or was it fifth?—cocktail. She hadn’t kept count. Probably because she really hadn’t planned to drink much this evening.

She felt oddly detached, as if the room was swimming in and out of focus, sounds waning and then becoming magnified. She tried to fix her gaze on Peggy, but the spots on her dress were now involved in the complicated choreography of a Busby Berkeley number, complete with split-second timing and terrifying symmetry. Nicole could have sworn, as she tried to tear her eyes away from the swimming mass of white-on-pink polka dots, that one of them actually winked at her.

‘It’s just because it’s been a while since you’ve had a man in your life,’ Peggy explained, ‘and that can always make you susceptible to the “if only”s.’

Mia snorted. ‘So that’s your excuse for not having more than a half-hour break between relationships, is it?’

Peggy glared at Mia. ‘We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about Nicole. It’s been two months since she waved bye-bye to the last boyfriend, and it’s about time she got back on the horse.’

Horse? Nicole didn’t think there’d been a horse that evening, but she’d drifted off for a moment there. Maybe there had been. She was starting to realise that whole swathes of New Year’s Eve were a complete blank. Probably because Mia was right—she didn’t usually drink much, if at all. She didn’t usually like the way alcohol fuzzied up her edges, made her lose control. She ended up doing things that really weren’t like her at all.

‘Having a conveyor belt of men in your life isn’t the answer to everything,’ Mia replied. ‘Sometimes a girl needs a bit of breathing space.’

Peggy waved a hand. ‘Breathing space, schmeathing space. There’s only one way to deal with a situation like this—she needs to find a cute guy to smooch at midnight and start the year in the way she means to go on.’

‘No,’ Nicole said, suppressing a hiccup. ‘I don’t do things like that.’

‘Then it’s about time you started,’ Peggy said, grinning at her, then scanning the room for a likely candidate.

Thankfully, Mia rescued her. ‘Who needs to pin our happiness on men, anyway? I say we refill our glasses…’ she nodded at Nicole ‘…orange juice for you, my love, and toast ourselves and Nicole’s new business venture. This time next year she’ll own the first proposal-planning agency in London and we’ll be rich because we had the good sense to invest in it!’

‘Now, that I can drink to,’ Nicole said, thumping the bar. ‘A pint of water, if you will, bartender!’

‘Classy,’ Peggy said, shaking her head.

‘Sensible,’ Mia countered, swinging her long plait behind her head.

The bartender sloshed a glass of water in front of Nicole and she scooped it up, not even caring it was dripping on her dress. ‘To Nicole!’ she said. ‘And her little shop of Hopes & Dreams!’

Peggy and Mia joined her, clinking their respective cocktail glass and beer bottle with her pint glass. ‘To us!’ they chorused.

They were all just drinking deep when Peggy nudged Nicole in the ribs. ‘Ooh, don’t look now, but…two o’clock…’

Already? Had she missed midnight? Those cocktails must be more lethal than she’d thought!

‘You’re hopeless,’ Peggy said, physically moving Nicole’s head so she dragged her gaze from the clock behind the bar and across the seething mass of partygoers. ‘I mean two o’clock. The guy with the black T-shirt standing over there. He’s a dish. I think you should claim him for that midnight kiss.’

A dish? Peggy was really getting into character, wasn’t she?

Nicole shook her head. ‘I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’ Peggy said, nudging her off her stool and in the right direction. ‘There’s no force field stopping you, is there?’

Nicole shook her head. But there probably should be. His black T-shirt clung lovingly to his broad chest and his hair was just messy enough to be sexy but just short enough to stop him looking foppish. It was as if the air pulsed around him, the molecules excited by his presence. Or maybe that was the fifth cosmo messing with gravity…Whatever it was, there was a definite whiff of danger in the air, and if there was one thing Nicole knew, bad boys like him didn’t go for good girls like her.

‘Interesting choice of trousers,’ Mia said, looking him up and down, ‘but I suppose you can’t have everything.’

And while Nicole tried to work out what Mia meant, and if the soft fuzz of his jeans was something more than the delicious blurring effect of vodka and cranberry juice, Peggy leaned in and whispered in her ear.

‘Go on, Nicole. It’s almost midnight…I dare you.’

He watched the brunette over by the bar snap to attention and stare directly at him. He toasted her with his bottle of beer and smiled. Well, he hadn’t seen that coming. He’d been half-watching her all night and he’d thought he’d had her pegged.

He didn’t know why she’d caught his eye. She wasn’t his usual type—extroverted and free-spirited—but there was something about her calmness and poise in a room full of chaos that had drawn his gaze.

But he still hadn’t been able to help looking over now and then, and the more he’d looked, the more he’d noticed the good bone structure, the fine features that weren’t arranged to make her conventionally pretty, but interesting.

He liked interesting.

She got up from her bar stool, straightened her black dress, adjusted the rope of large pearls circling her neck, then wobbled her way towards him.

He would have said she was heading straight for him, but halfway across the room she got distracted and veered off course until the blonde in the pink dress by the bar yelled something at her and she shook herself and started pushing her way through the heaving dance floor to where he was leaning against the wall.

He couldn’t help smiling to himself. He was glad it was the Audrey Hepburn girl, not Doris or Lara, who was teetering her way towards him. He put his beer bottle down on a nearby ledge and pushed himself away from the wall.

If he’d said women hadn’t approached him in bars before he’d be lying. So badly his pants would probably burst into flames. But there was something different about this girl. Instead of that hungry, almost predatory, look he’d come to expect, she was wide-eyed and uncertain. For some reason that made her approach all the more tantalising.

‘Incoming,’ his buddy Tom, and partner in crime, whispered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Which means I’m going to make myself scarce. In fact, now that the group at the bar is depleted a little, I might just see if Lara Croft would like to get into some one-to-one combat with me.’ And with a flash of a wicked smile he set off.

‘Good luck!’

Tom was going to need it. Lara had spotted him coming her way and was glaring at him, but that probably wasn’t going to stop him. Tom liked a challenge, and you didn’t get to be a hot up-and-coming record producer without being able to handle a few prickly customers.

He watched his friend’s progress for a few seconds then turned his attention back to the brunette. She was only a few steps away now, blocked by the people on the fringes of the dance floor, but then a groping pair stumbled off to one side and suddenly she was right in front of him.

‘Hi,’ he said, his smile growing wider.

‘Hi,’ she replied, and one ankle buckled a little beneath her before she found her footing again. And then she just stared at him, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with him. He found he liked that too. There was a hum of anticipation that was missing from a more direct approach.

He saw her ribcage rise as she hauled in some air and then she stepped forward and placed her hands on his chest. Her long-boned fingers were pale and delicate, but they packed quite a punch. A jolt shot through him, as if he’d been on a hospital trolley and someone had zapped him with a defibrillator.

Suddenly, things got very, very interesting.