My Perfect Stranger: A hilarious love story by the bestselling author of One Day in December

‘No I fucking cannot. What sort of grown woman can’t cook bacon? Sort your own mess out.’ He curled his lip and slammed his door.

Honey reeled. Her life was full of people who, on the whole, were decent human beings. To come up against someone so outright obnoxious came as a shock.

‘Fine!’ she shouted. ‘Fine. I’ll do it myself.’ She made a half-hearted attempt at jumping to smack the alarm box. Futile. At five foot five and not very athletic, it had always been a long shot.

Plan B was required. Honey took her slipper off and hurled it upwards, but still she missed the alarm by a good foot. Then she spotted her tall, red polka dot umbrella propped in the corner of the hallway. Bingo! Could she reach the reset button with the metal end spike? She tried, but the damn thing wobbled too much for accuracy and the close proximity to the noise threatened to burst her eardrums.

Gah. The next time she wanted bacon she’d go to the café on the corner.

Honey sighed and opted for the only source of action left. She swung the umbrella above her head and whacked the alarm clean off the wall. It bounced hard against her new neighbour’s door, then landed with a squawk, before dying. She closed her eyes in relief.

Johnny Depp wrenched his door open again.

‘What?’ he growled.

‘What what?’

‘You knocked my door.’

‘Oh.’ Honey bent to pick up the mangled alarm. He recoiled as she straightened, as if her nearness offended him.

‘I didn’t knock. The alarm hit your door on the way down.’

‘You smashed it.’

No shit, Sherlock.

‘I suggest you don’t attempt to cook again. You might burn the fucking house down.’

The stony look on his face told her that he wasn’t amused. As did the door slammed in her face. Again.

Prick.

‘I can cook perfectly well, thank you,’ she yelled, annoyed by his assumption. This was her home. He was on her turf. If he thought he could roll up and chuck his weight around, he could think again.

In a valiant last stand the alarm case pinged open, and the battery plopped out pathetically onto Honey’s foot. A bubble of laughter filtered up. She’d murdered it.

She threw a glance at the door opposite.

Hello new neighbour. It’s good to meet you too.

One thing was for sure. This guy was no Simon. There wasn’t a meek or mild bone in his body. Tash would love him – as long as he was loaded. Their wine-fuelled conversation from last night floated back. Her specific. She knocked on his door.

‘Umm, you don’t happen to play the piano, do you?’ she shouted, knowing how funny Nell and Tash would find it when she told them.

He didn’t need to open his door for her to hear him howl fuck off.

On the other side of the door, Hal inched along the hallway. Ten paces to the kitchen work surface, where he’d left the half-empty whisky bottle last night. The cool glass against his sweaty palms soothed his rattled nerves. The wail of that alarm had kicked him straight into DEFCON 1 mode.

Stupid airhead woman. ‘Could you possibly reach it?’ Her question still taunted him. He tipped the bottle to his lips, and the harsh burn of the whisky took the raw edge off his anger.

She’d smelled of strawberry shampoo and bacon smoke when she’d stepped close, and the ever-present laughter behind her voice had told him she didn’t take life seriously.

Well, she should.

He fumbled his way to the bedroom and walked until his shins hit the edge of the mattress. The unmade sheets scratched his skin when he sprawled out, whisky in one hand, the other balled into a tight fist of frustration. He hated this house, and now he hated Strawberry Girl too.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_33659b5b-cfdd-5f3d-83a7-7195cfc69371)

Honey emptied out the latest bin liners on Monday morning and picked through the worn polyester blouses and elasticated skirts without enthusiasm. When she’d first started work at the charity shop, this had been one of her favourite bits of the day – tipping out the innocuous black bags in the hope of unearthing vintage treasure, or that some It-girl might have cleared out her summer wardrobe of all last season’s Prada to make room for her winter collection.

It hadn’t taken long for the shine to wear off. Honey had soon come to realise that the average age of people who gave to charity was around eighty. Either that or it was families clearing the decks of a deceased relative’s possessions. Cheap chain store separates. Moth-eaten dresses or suits that had been held on to for sentimental reasons that had died with their owners. Thrift shop jewellery with broken catches. Chipped teacups long since separated from their saucers. Stiff leatherette handbags with brass clasps and screwed-up bingo tickets in the bottom, or a yellowed letter that relatives hadn’t cared enough to hold on to. Honey could never bring herself to throw treasured mementoes away, so she slipped them into a drawer in the old bureau that doubled up as her desk in the small back room of the shop.

‘Tea.’ Lucille popped out of the kitchenette, a vision in tan support tights and an egg yolk-yellow sundress cinched in at the waist by a rhinestone belt. Lucille and her sister Mimi were the lifeblood of the charity shop, full-time volunteers who asked for nothing in return for their services apart from company and the occasional bright string of beads. They were magpies for colour and sparkle; or rather a pair of colourful canaries, singing wartime hits as they fluttered from customer to customer and batted their eyelashes against their heavily rouged cheeks to encourage a sale. Honey adored them both; fabulous aunts she’d chosen rather than had foisted upon her by the inconvenience of bloodline.

‘Thanks, Lucille.’ Honey took the dainty teacup and saucer. ‘No Mimi yet this morning?’

Lucille bent to pull a sequinned dress from the pile at Honey’s feet and shook it out at arm’s length in front of her. ‘She was entertaining last night.’ Her perfectly lipsticked mouth puckered into a tight, sour little raspberry as she turned the dress inside out to squint at the label.

‘Was she really?’ Honey whistled. ‘Not with Billy Bobbysocks again?’

Lucille sniffed. Her sister was far too smitten with Billy for her liking. Exactly what Mimi saw in him, with his ridiculous quiff and purple drainpipe trousers that were indecently tight for a man well into his eighties, was anyone’s guess.

Honey glanced down to hide her smile. Both Lucille and Mimi lived in fear of the other leaving, when history really ought to have taught them better. Men had come and gone in each of their lives, but their sibling bond had remained undiminished by romantic entanglements. It was a bond Honey well understood, having spent her formative years in the comfortable sweet spot between her elder sister Bluebell and their equally fantastically named youngest sister, Tigerlily. Their mother Jane, a failed actress forever saddled with the moniker ‘Plain Jane Jones’, had made certain that her daughters would never suffer the same indignity of anonymity.

Honey sorted the last of the clothes into washing and ironing piles and moved on to unpick the sticky tape from around a dog-eared cardboard box. The musty smell of long-discarded possessions assailed her nostrils as she peeled back the lid, and just as she was about to reach inside to remove the top layer of yellowed newsprint the telephone trilled in the office.

‘It’s probably Mimi ringing to say that she’s still indisposed,’ Lucille said with a scandalised arch of her eyebrows.

Honey grinned at the idea of being too swept away by the tides of passion to go into work at the ripe old age of eighty-three. ‘I sincerely hope so.’

But when she picked up the receiver, she found herself doubly disappointed. One, it wasn’t a love-swept Mimi and secondly, it was Christopher, the manager of the shop and the attached old people’s residential home. A man of much influence and no charisma, which he masked with borderline rude officiousness.

‘Staff meeting. Seventeen hundred hours. Don’t be late or I’ll start without you.’

‘But we don’t close until five p.m.’

‘So close early. You’re not exactly Tesco’s, are you? And don’t bring those old women, either. Paid staff only. Got that?’

‘Loud and clear, Christopher. Loud and clear.’

Honey sighed as the dial tone clicked in her ear. ‘Yeah. Goodbye to you too,’ she muttered into the empty ether. Would it kill the man to feign politeness? Lord knows how he got people to entrust their frail relatives into his care; Honey wouldn’t trust him with so much as a hamster. It was a great shame, then, that her financial security rested in his sweaty little hands.

Several long and eventful hours later, Honey dropped her plastic shopping carriers down on her front step and groaned with relief as she flexed her bag-sore fingers. Baked beans and tinned tomatoes were heavy but essential items on the non-cooking cook’s shopping list.

Her heart lurched at the crunch of broken glass as she shouldered the door open. Shit. Had she been broken into? Honey flicked her eyes over the undamaged panes in the stained glass door, confused, until she noticed the pink tulips strewn across the parquet hallway floor. The very same pink tulips she’d placed in her favourite glass jug in the hallway a couple of days ago to welcome herself home. Or at least it had been her favourite, until now. There was no mending it – whoever had broken it had made a very thorough job.

By the looks of the still dewy flowers and the huge wet patch on the floor, whatever had happened had happened fairly recently, and as everything else in the shared hallway looked ship-shape, that left only one possible culprit. Only one person who would come through here and smash her jug without bothering to clear up the mess or leave an apology note.