Call Me Cupid: The Guy to Be Seen With / The First Crush Is the Deepest / Too Close for Comfort

Chloe knew she must be earning brownie points with someone somewhere, because she found the strength to shake her head again, her curls gently moving side to side.

‘Sorry, Indiana. Thank you, though... It was very sweet of you to ask.’

And then she turned and walked away, leaving him staring after her.

It should have felt like a victory.

* * *

Daniel marched the half mile from the Princess of Wales conservatory to the tropical nurseries in record time the following morning. He wasn’t in a good mood.

He passed The Orangery restaurant and headed up the main path towards the kids’ play area, then slipped through an iron gate next to the café and left the public area of the gardens behind in favour of the relative sanctuary of the propagation and research greenhouses.

A soursop tree was due to arrive this morning, part of a trade with the botanical gardens in St Lucia, and Daniel wanted to see the specimen for himself. Alan was standing back and supervising while a couple of horticultural students moved the waxy-leafed tree with its spiky fruit from a trolley onto the floor. He turned round when he heard Daniel approaching.

‘You okay?’ he said.

Daniel gave him a weary, having-one-heck-of-a-day nod. ‘Yup.’

A couple of people had asked him exactly the same thing this morning. Why did they keep doing that? It was most strange.

Alan issued a couple of final instructions to the students before shooing them away. When the two lads were gone and the sliding door of the nursery was closed, he turned to look at his boss.

‘There’s something you need to see.’ He gave Daniel a hooded look and pulled his smartphone from his back pocket. ‘I thought you needed to know before it goes viral.’

He punched a couple of buttons then twisted the phone round to show Daniel the screen. Daniel swore loudly and fluently, then snatched the phone from

Alan’s hand. Unfortunately, seeing it up close and staring hard at it didn’t make the Internet news headline go away.

Valentine’s man finally trapped? it screamed, and underneath it was a picture of him and Chloe, obviously taken the night before, although he’d had no idea anyone had been walking past with a mobile phone to capture the moment. It must have been when he’d been wiping the wine off Chloe’s jacket, a very innocent pastime, he’d have thought, but this photo showed him holding her wrist and they were staring at each other, lost to everyone else. Chloe’s lips were parted and he was leaning in slightly, making it look as if he were about to kiss her.

Daniel closed his eyes and handed the phone back to his friend before opening them again.

‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ he said.

Alan just shrugged. ‘I knew the minute she walked in the door that you were toast. Can’t blame a guy for trying, though.’

Well, at least Alan was being philosophical about it. ‘Who’s seen this?’

Alan pressed his lips together and shook his head. ‘Not sure. The girls in the café had been cooing over it for half an hour when I stumbled upon them.’

Just when he thought his crazy life was getting back to normal.

‘So...what’s the story with Miss Fancy Knickers?’ Alan said, smiling a little.

Daniel forgot to look cross. ‘Who?’ he asked, genuinely confused.

‘That’s the nickname some of the students coined for Miss Orchid House.’ He held up his hands. ‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the view, but those shoes and skirts she wears some days are hardly practical wear for a job like ours, even if she is just messing around with flowers instead of digging beds.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘So...are they?’

Daniel’s voice was low and warning. ‘Are they what?’

Alan’s smile upgraded itself into a lascivious grin. ‘Fancy.’

‘Not you too!’ Daniel turned and pulled the sliding door open. ‘I believe the official phrase is: No comment,’ he said just before he slammed it closed again.

He strode away. A couple of the nursery team ducked for cover. Just as well, really. They’d obviously worked out that he was liable to assign the grottiest jobs to anyone who got in his way when he was feeling like this. And, with having to watch Kelly struggling through her chemo for months on end, there had been plenty of days when he’d been in a mood like this.

Fancy knickers. Humph.

No chance of him finding that out at present. He’d barely touched her, let alone got on first name terms with her underwear. And just thinking about said underwear was making it very difficult to calm down.

And it would have to be ‘no comment’ if anyone else asked him about Chloe, because he wasn’t about to tell anyone he’d asked her out and she’d turned him down. That would be too humiliating.

Like what you did to Georgia.

No. That wasn’t the same. Georgia had gone live on air and made the choice to publicise her ill-advised proposal. That hadn’t been his fault at all. He’d asked Chloe out in private, just the two of them. Or so he’d thought.

Still, if he was feeling a fraction of the mortification Georgia had felt on Valentine’s Day, it was no wonder it had taken her a month before she’d been able to face him in person. That must have been the pits.

Oh, heck.

Georgia.

He had a pretty good idea she hadn’t seen this yet, and when she did she was going to kill him. He’d been able to tell from her expression yesterday that she was still feeling raw, even if she agreed that ending it had been the best thing for both of them.

To Georgia it would look as if he’d taken her visit yesterday to go out and bed the nearest available hottie. It didn’t help to know he’d been on that train of thought himself last night, hardly stopping to think how it might look to anyone else. And Georgia had always had a bit of a thing about women like Chloe...

Oh, bloody hell. Chloe.

When Georgia was finished with him, Chloe would bring him back to life and make him suffer a second time. What a mess.

He yanked the greenhouse door open and strode out into the fresh air. There was only one thing to do: he had to talk to both of them before they found out about it from anyone else.

* * *

The morning had been a hectic one and Chloe decided to go and sit on a bench to eat her lunch. While it was cold enough to still need her coat, it was the best kind of day March could deliver, and she was determined to mop up as much sun as she could.

She’d always wanted to work at Kew, ever since she’d trained here. It was the most amazing place in the world as far as she was concerned. And who wanted to hide away in an office or a staff tearoom when there were acres of beautiful gardens on their doorstep?

An empty bench was waiting for her just away from one of the main paths. She made her way to it and sat down, trying to let the tranquillity seep into her, but she hardly took in the carpet of lilac-blue crocuses or the swathes of daffodils covering some of the sloping banks, because her mind was too busy living the events of the night before.

Half of her was screaming at the other half for having walked away from Daniel, and the other half congratulated itself on being safe and sensible. While the two continued to have a tug of war inside her skull, she closed her eyes and let her head slip back, enjoying the sun on her face.

She wasn’t sure how long she stayed like that, but the snap of a twig nearby disturbed her. She sat up quickly and opened her eyes. Her heart had started to pump a little faster when she’d heard that noise and now she knew why. Indiana Jones, minus his secateurs, had come to pay her a visit.

She snapped the lid back on her salad and looked him evenly in the eye. That was the sort of thing New Chloe did. That girl wasn’t scared of anything.

However, for the first time in years she was aware of another presence at the fringes of her consciousness. Deep down inside, another Chloe—the naive frizzy mouse—was huddled in a corner, twitching.