Chapter 3: Dinner plans with someone New

Whoever invented the word 'hangover' had it spot on. Hangover was exactly right. I didn't want to stand, I wanted to hang over something. Scrub that. I wanted to lie down, sprawl across the sales counter and press my aching forehead against its cool Formica surface. How could I be such a lightweight? I'd only had three quarters of a bottle of Chardonnay.

"Sam."

I attempted to blot out the sound of my name. The last thing I wanted was to engage in conversation. Come to think of it, I'd been attempting to blot out most things from the moment I'd woken up, having discovered my head hurt a lot less if I didn't allow myself to remember anything from the evening before.

"Sam."

Alice wasn't going to give up.

"What?" I mumbled irritably, forcing myself to straighten up and turn around before wincing with guilty gratitude at the sight of the mug of tea in her outstretched hand. "Thanks."

She set it down on the counter then reached for my hand. "Here," she said grimly, uncurling my fingers and dropping two blue and white capsules into my palm. "Either take these or go home."

"Oh." I gazed at the painkillers, my throat already constricting at the sight. "Alice, you know I don't—"

She gave a loud snort before I could finish my customary spiel about not liking to interfere with my body's natural restorative mechanisms. But of course, she knew the excuse was a crock of shit and that actually, I had an almost pathological fear of taking medicines. "Fine," she said, even more brusquely than before. "In that case, you'd better take yourself back home again, hadn't you?"

Sometimes, I had to remind myself who employed who. Exactly who was the boss and who had the right to call the shots. But the fact remained that even though Alice was my senior by more than thirty years, I was her employer. The shop was mine—and had been for nigh on three years. "I'll be fine," I said with practised stoicism. "Just need a few glasses of water to get myself rehydrated."

Alice sighed. "There's no helping some people," she grumbled, plucking the capsules back out of my hand and dropping them into a side pocket of her voluminous black handbag. "At least drink the tea."

That I could do. Grimacing at her, I took a sip, then grimaced even harder as I realised she'd sweetened it with so much sugar, I could probably have stood up a spoon in the resulting gloop. "I look that bad?" I asked resignedly.

She nodded before strolling to the rail of clothing in front of me and straightening dresses on their hangers. "Good job we're not busy this morning. You'd frighten the customers away."

"Gee, thanks."

"Don't mention it. I thought you said you were staying in last night?"

"I did stay in." Wrapping my fingers around the earthenware mug, I blew over the top of the steaming liquid. "Not my fault your nephew came round." I thought I'd said the last partsotto voce, but when Alice turned to give me another searching look, I realised I hadn't said it quietly enough.

"Andrew?" Her expression had brightened. "Oh, that was nice of him. You know that he and Kayleigh have...?"

Averting my gaze, I nodded into her deliberate pause. "So he said."

"Such a shame," Alice rattled on, her light tone belying her words. "I only met her the once, of course, but she seemed such a lovely girl. Sometimes I wonder if that boy'll ever settle down. I told him the other day when he told me, he can't go on playing the field all his life. Still—" She sniffed, turning back to the rail of dresses. "You young folks. I keep forgetting things aren't like they used to be. You think nothing of waiting until you're in your thirties before getting married and having babies in your forties. It's a different world."

As if to prove her point, the tiny bell over the shop door tinkled as it swung inwards, a blast of wintry air heralding the arrival of a heavily pregnant woman we both knew to be forty-two years old, thanks to Alice's insatiable nosiness. I'd long since given up trying to persuade her that it was neither politically correct nor tactful to enquire as to our clients' ages. "Anne-Marie!" she exclaimed now with a broad smile of welcome. "Goodness me, look at you! How wonderful to see you again!"

And this was why. As Anne-Marie beamed back at her, I marvelled anew at Alice's ability to remember the name of every customer. "Hi," she said shyly, looking a little pink. "Back again."

"We're delighted you are." From any other person's lips, that might have sounded patronising, but Alice always managed to say such things so warmly, it would have been impossible to doubt her sincerity. "How many weeks now? Thirty-four? Thirty-five?"

"Thirty-five," Anne-Marie agreed, still smiling. "Not long now."

"No, indeed! So, dear... Are you just here for a browse or is there something in particular you were looking for?"

As Anne-Marie explained that she needed something to wear to the Christmas dinner at her husband's golf club, I slipped out to the stock room, more grateful than usual that I could leave the woman in Alice's capable hands. I loved my job—loved my shop—but working with a hangover was proving harder than I'd expected.

Though if I were being honest with myself, it wasn't just the hangover. No matter how hard I tried to shut them out, snippets of the conversation I'd had with Drew the previous evening kept filtering through the haze.

He couldn't have been serious, I decided for what felt like the hundredth time that morning. And he couldn't have believed that I'd been serious either, could he? If I phoned him now and told him it was all a joke, that I'd gone along with the idea to see how long it would be before he cracked, he'd simply laugh and tell me he'd been doing the same. It would be like the time he and my brother had formed that God-awful band when they were seventeen.

Paul, so talented at virtually everything else, couldn't carry a tune in both hands and although Drew's singing wasn't bad, his guitar playing had been dire. Jimi Hendrix he wasn't. But they'd done a gig at a local pub and the next day, I'd phoned Drew up, disguising my voice and pretending to be a talent scout who'd spotted them playing the night before. It had taken him a full three minutes to twig...

I felt myself grinning until the shadows began their inevitable descent over my memories of happier times and with a heavy sigh, I bent down to open the large carton on the floor. Pulling out the polythene-wrapped garments inside, I piled them unceremoniously on to the huge table in the middle of the room.

Okay, sourcing and selling maternity wear might not be everyone's idea of a career in fashion, I had to concede, ducking back into the stock room to answer the telephone. But as a result of my efforts, our clients came from miles around, the customer-base strengthened by the word of mouth testimony of countless grateful mothers-to-be—and more recently, a four page spread In Momma magazine. Business was booming and the word 'expansion' was being muttered in my earshot on a regular basis these days.

"In Full Bloom, Sam speaking."

"Samantha,bella!"

It was as though the person who most often muttered that 'expansion' word had somehow developed the ability to tap into my thoughts. "Marco," I said with a laugh, delighted to hear his deep, melodious Italian accent. "How lovely to hear from you!"

"Believe me, the pleasure is mine." Marco's English was always flawless, far better than my own. "How are you? Business is blooming, I hope?"

I smiled at his customary pun. "Of course," I said briskly, perching on the edge of the table and settling in for a lengthy conversation. With Marco, there was rarely any other kind. "Procreating remains the number one activity in Stow Newton. You know there's not much else to do around here in the evenings."

"Excellent." There was genuine amusement in his tone. "I can count on your continued custom for the foreseeable future then?"

"Oh, I think I'll be able to place a few more smallish orders," I teased, aware he knew full well that his company supplied my shop's biggest and most popular range of maternity wear. "So long as the next shipment's made up of better quality items than the one that arrived today. I've never seen such a load of old tat."

"'Old tat'?" Marco repeated, mock incredulous. "I beg your pardon, Signorina Bloom?"

"So you should," I retorted, tongue firmly in cheek. "Your standards are slipping, Signor Maretti. I may only be able to mark up this stuff by three hundred to four hundred percent. It's just not good enough."

"Ah, Samantha,cara." He gave a low, appreciative chuckle. "Ever the hard task master. Or should that be mistress?"

"You don't know?" I exclaimed, pretending to be shocked but rather spoiling the effect by giggling. "Marco, I'm hurt! How long have we known each other?"

That I'd met Marco Maretti had been more a case of luck than judgement—but a stroke of luck it had certainly turned out to be. At the time, his company was just branching out into the field, its staff of designers small but talented. It had been a gamble to place what seemed to me an enormous order back then—these days in order to satisfy demand I placed orders quadruple the size—but it had paid off.

"Anyway,cara," Marco said several minutes later, "wonderful though it is to spend all this time talking with you about absolutely nothing of consequence, I did in fact have an ulterior motive for making this call."

"You did?" I frowned then winced at the ensuing twinge of pain in my right temple. I'd been enjoying our conversation so much I'd almost forgotten my hangover.

"Uh huh." Once again I could hear the note of laughter in his voice. "You see, I'm going to be in town at the end of the week."

"In Stow Newton?"

He chuckled at my startled tone. "Well, London first. But I was planning on coming up to see you on Friday. I was hoping I might be able to take you out to dinner."