Swept Off Her Stilettos

Adam looked stunned. I suppose it wasn’t that surprising. We didn’t ever really talk about the fact that he was a boy and I was a girl. I knew he’d rather veer away from this topic of conversation, but I batted my lashes and gave him a look that said Please.

He chewed the inside of his mouth for a few moments. ‘I’ve never said I don’t find you attractive, Coreen. A guy would have to be unconscious not to find you attractive.’

Well, now it was my turn to be stunned.

Adam gave a one-shouldered shrug. His lazy demeanour had returned and he didn’t look at all bothered by what he’d just said.

‘Then why haven’t you …? Why have we never …?’

‘Hooked up?’ he suggested.

I pulled a face. That sounded kind of tacky. Adam wasn’t the sort of guy you ‘hooked up’ with. He was keeper material. And I didn’t like the thought of anyone treating him in such a … disposable manner.

‘See? That face you just made is one of many reasons why.’

I shook my head. He was taking it all the wrong way. The face I’d pulled didn’t mean—

‘And I’ve seen the way you treat men, remember? I’ve never jumped through hoops for you and I never will.’

I gasped. There had never been any hoops! Well … not for Adam.

He read my mind and fixed me with a knowing stare. ‘How did it go? Oh, yes. I remember …’ He did a rather good impression of my eyelash sweep and added an earthy, softer tone to his voice. If I hadn’t been so horrified I might have admitted it sounded quite a lot like me. “Adam, sweetie, would you mind coming along with me to a party this evening? I know it’s short notice, but I could really do with some moral support.”’

And then he flicked some pretend hair away from his shoulder, and I forgot to be horrified and descended into giggles. Adam, strangely enough, wasn’t laughing so hard.

‘When we got to said party I realised my role was more stooge than moral support.’

I stopped laughing. ‘That’s not true!’

He raised his eyebrows at me.

I opened my mouth to protest, but thought better of it. I’d buried that memory—along with a whole host of others from those days—quite effectively until that moment. It all came back to me with searing clarity: Adam’s face, his jaw set. The way he’d stormed from the party. They weren’t moments in my life I wanted to be reminded of.

I bit my lip. Something I hoped would show my contrition. Although—and I honestly did out of sheer habit this time—I knew it made me look very appealing too.

‘That was a long time ago. Back when we were teenagers. Teenagers do lots of stupid things.’

‘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.