Sweep Me Off My Feet: Swept Off Her Stilettos / Housekeeper's Happy-Ever-After

‘Like kissing their best friend in front of the whole room when the current Romeo is being a slightly harder nut to crack?’

Oh, hell. I’d actually done that too, hadn’t I? Not that I’d planned it, though. I’d just got carried away in the heat of the moment.

Adam hadn’t spoken to me for a month after Sharon’s party, even though I’d wheedled and whined and pulled every trick in the book to get him to forgive me. In the end I’d just turned up on his doorstep one day—no tricks up my sleeve, not even any make-up on—and begged him to give me another chance, to say we could be friends again. There’d been a huge Adam-shaped hole in my life. One I hadn’t cared for very much. One I hadn’t thought I could go on living with. Its presence had nibbled away at my very soul.

Adam had forgiven me. Eventually. But since then we’d both tacitly agreed to ignore the boy-girl element to our relationship, and I must have done a pretty good job of it if I’d managed to forget how atrociously I’d behaved.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m such a horrible person. No wonder Nicholas Chatterton-Jones wants nothing to do with me.’ And this time I wasn’t even angling for a compliment. I really meant it.

Adam pulled me close again and let out a long breath. ‘Don’t be silly. You’re fabulous. You know you are. It’s just that I realised that you won’t let the men in your life be anything but “puppies”, and I’m the sort that refuses to wear a collar and lead for anyone—not even you. So for that reason, and probably a few more, I decided we work better as friends.’ And then he kissed the top of my head.

One corner of my mouth tried to smile.

Adam carried on talking, and I could feel his warm breath in my hair. ‘I have to warn you…well…I’m sorry to say I don’t think you stand a chance with this one. You’d better find yourself a different puppy to train.’

Sorry? He didn’t sound sorry in the slightest.

I sat up and looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

He hesitated, and I half hoped he would drop it. Adam and I didn’t have conversations like this. But then, instead of looking down at his battered old trainers, he looked me straight in the eye. I held my breath. Just a little.

‘Guys like Chatterton-Whatsit… Well, sometime less is more. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘You think I’m too…?’ I trailed off, not quite sure how to label myself.

‘Maybe.’

I frowned. ‘But that’s who I am! Nicholas Chatterton-Jones might be a god, but I’m not changing myself for anybody.’

Adam looked rather weary. He shook his head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just that there’s a girl underneath all of—’ he waved his hand to encompass the hairspray, the lipstick, the polka dots ‘—this. Just don’t forget that.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course I brushed the hairspray out and took the lipstick off at night. I knew what I looked like without all of it. It was just that all of this, as Adam had so articulately put it, was how I felt on the inside. I only dressed the outside up to match.

I scowled at him. It felt as if he was criticising me, and I didn’t care for it much.

‘What makes you such an expert at relationships?’ I said sulkily, folding my arms and shifting back to rest against the opposite end of the sofa. ‘You haven’t had a serious girlfriend since Hannah, and that was a good couple of years ago.’

Adam matched my position, folding his arms across his shirt. ‘I’ve been working hard on building the business up. I haven’t had time for relationships. Unlike some people I know, I don’t think it’s fair to toy with people and then drop them when it suits me.’

See? This was why we should have never veered into to this territory. It was all getting horribly messy, and the lovely, smiling, joking Adam I knew had totally disappeared. I suspected that I too was being less than my normal charming self, but I wasn’t about to back down, and I wasn’t about to let my Best Bud analyse me further.

‘You never did tell me why it all fizzled out with Hannah. Did she get fed up with you spending all your time mucking about in garden sheds?’

That was below the belt, I knew. But Adam’s role was to make me feel better, not kick me when I was down, so he’d kind of brought it on himself.

He looked away. ‘My heart just wasn’t in it. I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. And it wasn’t fair to Hannah to keep pretending.’

Blast, Adam! Just when I was all revved up for a cat fight, he had to go and get all honest on me and deflate my nice little bubble of adrenaline.

He looked back at me, an expression in his eyes I hadn’t seen many times before. ‘I hate it when you get like this about my job. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and I’ve been nothing but supportive of you.’

Urgh. I felt like an utter heel. He was right. I was taking cheap shots at my best friend just because some guy had had the nerve not to fall instantly at my feet. I was behaving despicably.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I would have gone on, but there was a lump as big as one of my paste brooches in my throat.

Adam put his hand on top of mine and squeezed. ‘Apology accepted. You’ve really got it bad for this Nicholas guy, haven’t you?’

He looked slightly pained, as if he was sharing my misery. I nodded, and my whole insides started to ache. I don’t normally do the crying thing. Who has the time when liquid liner and three coats of mascara are involved? But I’d got this stinging sensation right up at the top of my nose and I knew I was perilously close.

I didn’t know why I liked Nicholas so much. Apart from the obvious looks-like-a-Greek-god, has-piles-of-cash thing. It was more than that. I never usually let guys get to me this way. Adam was right. Normally I was the one pulling all the strings. But there was something about Nicholas that had called out to me right from the start. I had a feeling he might be the elusive cupcake that would assuage my nagging hunger and satisfy all my sweet-toothed desires.

The stinging got worse. I looked at my shoes. Beautiful red peep-toe creations. But even they made me sad, and I didn’t even really know why.

Maybe Nan was right. Maybe something was ticking inside me. I was almost thirty, after all. But, seeing as I was…well, me, I was obviously going for the full-fledged meltdown rather than the polite tick-tock in the background of my life. Nan always says I can’t do anything unless I make a production out of it.

Adam shuffled closer on the sofa, so his arm was touching mine. He leaned down to try and see into my eyes, and nudged me. ‘Coreen…?’

My bottom lip slid forward. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am too much for Nicholas Chatterton-Jones.’ I shrugged and tipped my head slightly to look at him. ‘It’s a moot point now, anyway. I found out a couple of days ago that Nicholas might be off the market soon. There are rumours about a possible new girlfriend.’

Adam gave me a lopsided smile. ‘That’s never stopped you before.’

I punched him on the arm. ‘That makes me sound awful! I’ve never actually stolen a man away from anyone. I can’t help it if they take one look at me and realise I’m the one they can’t live without.’

Adam pressed his lips together and nodded sagely. ‘That’s what I love about you—your matchless modesty.’

I punched him again. And then I smiled. How did he do that?

He put up his fists and nudged me on the shoulder with one of them. ‘So? Who’s this girlfriend? Do you think you can take her?’

I swatted his hand away, but he kept jabbing me gently on the upper arm, the way boxers did when they warmed up with one of those swinging punch bags.

‘I’m going to take you down in a minute, if you don’t cut that out!’ I said, laughing.

The devilish twinkle was back. ‘Promises, promises,’ he said.

‘It’s that awful Louisa Fanshawe,’ I said, not rising to the bait. And if we were talking fisticuffs, I probably could take her. She was another one of those willowy sorts who’d blow away in a stiff breeze. I wouldn’t risk breaking a nail on her, though, so she was safe on that count.

‘Oh, yes. I’ve heard how awful she is,’ Adam replied. ‘All that charity work…visiting sick children in hospital and campaigning for the homeless. It’s positively disgusting.’

I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. He was supposed to be on my side, so why was he practically bouncing up and down? What had he to be so happy about? I decided to direct my ire at the absent Louisa.

‘When she’s not swanning up and down a catwalk for some pretentious designer,’ I pointed out.

I thought about Louisa Fanshawe and her stick-like limbs and big doleful eyes. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but I’d allow for the fact she was striking—in that understated, slightly duck-faced way some high fashion models were. The women on Nicholas’s arm always looked frighteningly similar. Duck-faced and stick-thin was obviously his type.

I sighed again. Louisa was the less Adam had been talking about. I looked down at my chest. Less wasn’t something I had a lot of. I was doomed.

I was about to point this out to Adam, but when I looked up at him he was paying an inordinate amount of attention to the last of the prawn toasts. I think he felt me looking at him, because he offered me the foil tray. I shook my head. ‘You have it.’