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But he wasn’t going to spoil his sister’s wedding by picking a fight with her best friend. At least, not in front of Ashleigh. He fully intended to discuss the matter with Claire herself—sooner, rather than later. ‘OK. Is there anything else you need?’
‘No, it’s fine.’
But his little sister didn’t sound fine. She sounded shaky. ‘Is Luke there with you?’ he asked.
‘Yes. He said the dress didn’t matter and he’d marry me if I was wearing a hessian sack. He says it’s our marriage that matters, not the trappings.’
Sean mentally high-fived his brother-in-law-to-be. And thank God Luke was so sensible and reliable. Ashleigh’s last boyfriend had been selfish, thoughtless and flaky—and he’d just so happened to be the best friend of Claire’s boyfriend at the time. Which figured. Claire always seemed to leave chaos in her wake.
‘I could’ve told you that, sweetheart. Luke’s a good bloke and he loves you to bits. Look, I’ll be there later tonight, OK? If there’s anything you need, anything at all, just call me. And I’m with Luke. Even if you’re wearing a hessian sack, you’re going to be the most beautiful bride ever.’ The bride his father should’ve been giving away. His throat tightened. If only. But the crash had happened and they’d had to make the best of it ever since. And Sean was determined that his little sister was going to have the wedding she really wanted. He’d make it happen.
‘Thanks, Sean.’ She blew out a breath. ‘I’m fine. Really. This is just a little hiccup and Claire’s fixing it.’
Yes, Sean thought grimly, because he’d make quite sure that Claire did exactly that.
‘See you tonight,’ she said.
‘See you tonight.’
Sean checked his diary when he’d put down the phone. All his meetings that afternoon could be moved. Anything else, he could deal with in Capri. A quick word with his PA meant that everything would be sorted. And then he called Claire.
Her phone went straight through to voicemail.
So that meant either she was on the phone already, her phone was switched off completely, or she’d seen his name on the screen and wasn’t answering because she was trying to avoid him. OK, then; he’d wait for her at the shop. And he’d make absolutely sure that Ashleigh’s dress didn’t get lost, this time round.
It didn’t take Sean long to get to the terraced house in Camden which held Dream of a Dress on the ground floor and Claire’s flat on the top storey. Although the sign on the door said ‘closed’, he could see light inside—meaning that Claire was there, or whoever she’d employed to man the shop in her absence. Either would do.
He rang the doorbell.
No reply.
OK. Play dirty it was, then. This time, he leaned on the doorbell until a figure hurried through to the door.
A figure wearing a wedding dress.
Claire narrowed her eyes at him when she opened the door. Though he noticed that she didn’t ask him why he was here. Clearly she had a pretty good idea that he already knew she’d lost his sister’s wedding dress and he wasn’t happy about the situation.
‘I’m Skypeing Ash right now,’ she said quietly. ‘And I don’t want her upset any more today, so can we leave the fight until she’s chosen another dress and I’ve said goodbye to her?’
Claire clearly realised that they were about to have a fight. A huge one. But Sean agreed with her about not rowing in front of his sister. Right now, Ashleigh’s feelings had to come first. ‘OK.’
‘Good. Come in. If you want a drink, feel free to make yourself something. There’s tea, coffee and mugs in the cupboard above the kettle, though I’m afraid there’s only long-life milk.’ She gestured to a doorway which obviously led to the business’s kitchen.
‘Thank you,’ he said. Though he wasn’t about to accept any hospitality from Claire Stewart, even if it was do-it-yourself hospitality.
‘If you’ll excuse me, I have a wedding dress to sort out.’ She gave him a level look. ‘And I’m modelling the dresses for Ash, which means I’ll need to change several times—so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t come through to the back until I’m done.’
‘Noted,’ he said.
She locked the shop door again, still keeping the ‘closed’ sign in place, and vanished into the back room. Feeling a bit like a spare part—but wanting to know just how Claire had managed to lose a wedding dress—Sean waited in the main area of the shop until she walked back out, this time dressed in faded jeans and a strappy top rather than a wedding dress.
‘No coffee?’ she asked.
‘No.’
She folded her arms. ‘OK. Spit it out.’
‘Firstly, does Ashleigh actually have a dress?’ he asked.
‘There are three she likes,’ Claire said. ‘I’m taking them all over to Capri as soon as I can get a flight. Then she can try them on, and I’ll make any necessary alterations in time for the wedding.’
‘What I don’t understand is how you managed to lose her dress in the first place.’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘Why wasn’t it with you in the plane?’
‘Believe it or not,’ she said dryly, ‘that was my original plan. I cleared it with the airline that I could put the boxes with her dress and mine in the overhead storage compartments, and if there was room they’d hang Ash’s dress on a rail in the stewardesses’ cabin. I packed both the dresses in boxes that specifically met the airline’s size guidelines. Your waistcoat and cravat, plus Luke’s and Tom’s, are packed in with my dress.’
So far, so sensible. But this was Claire—the woman who was chaos in high heels with a snippy attitude. ‘But?’
‘It turned out there were three other brides on the flight. One of whom was a total Bridezilla and demanded that her dress should be the one in with the stewardesses. There was a massive row. In the end, the captain intervened and ordered that all the bridal dresses should go in the hold with the rest of the luggage—even those belonging to people who weren’t involved in the argument with Bridezilla. He wouldn’t even let us put the dresses in the overhead lockers. The atmosphere on the plane was pretty bad.’ She shrugged. ‘The airline staff have looked in London and in Naples, and there’s no sign of the box with Ash’s dress. They’re still checking. It might turn up in time. But it probably won’t, so these dresses are my contingency plan—because I don’t intend to let Ash down. Ever.’
It hadn’t been entirely Claire’s fault, Sean acknowledged. But, at the same time, she had been the one responsible for the dress, and right now the dress was missing. ‘Why didn’t you buy a seat for the dress?’
‘They said I couldn’t—that if I wanted the dress to come with me, it would have to be treated as additional cabin luggage. Which,’ she pointed out, ‘is what I organised and what I paid for.’ Her blue eyes were icy as she added, ‘And, just in case you think I’m perfectly OK about the situation, understand that I’ve spent weeks working on that dress and I’m gutted that my best friend doesn’t get to wear the dress of her dreams—the dress I designed especially for her. But moaning on about the situation isn’t going to get the dress back. I’d rather do something practical to make sure Ash’s wedding goes as smoothly as possible. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have three wedding dresses to pack and a flight to book.’ She shrugged again. ‘But, if it makes you feel better, do feel free to storm and shout at me.’
Funny how she was the one in the wrong, but she’d managed to make him feel as if he were the one in the wrong, Sean thought.
Though she had a point. Complaining about the situation or losing his temper with her wouldn’t make the dress magically reappear. And Claire had spent most of today travelling—two and a half hours each way on a plane, plus an hour each way on a train and waiting round in between. Now she was just about to fly back to Italy: yet more travelling. All for his sister’s sake.
Claire Stewart was trying—in both senses of the phrase. But maybe he needed to try a bit harder, too.
‘Do you want me to find you a flight while you pack the dresses?’ he asked.
She looked at him as if he’d just grown two heads.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Are you actually being helpful?’ she asked. ‘To me?’
He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Don’t make it sound as if I’m always the one in the wrong.’
‘No. That would be me,’ she said. ‘In your regimented world view.’
‘I’m not regimented,’ he said, stung. ‘I’m organised and efficient. There’s a difference.’
Her expression suggested otherwise.
‘I was,’ he pointed out, ‘trying to call a truce and work with you. For Ashleigh’s sake.’
She looked at him for a long, long time. And then she nodded. ‘Truce. I can do that. Then thank you—it would save me a bit of time if you could find me a flight. I don’t care which London airport it’s from or how much it costs—just let me know as soon as they need paying and I’ll come to the phone and give them my credit card details. But please put whichever airline in the picture about what happened to the dress this morning, and I want cast-iron guarantees that these dresses are going to make it out to Italy with me. Otherwise I’ll be carving their entire check-in staff into little pieces with a rusty spoon.’
He couldn’t help smiling. ‘Spoons are blunt.’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is entirely the point. Ditto the rusty.’
‘You really care about Ashleigh, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Sean, how can you not already know that?’ Claire frowned. ‘She’s been my best friend for more than half my lifetime, since I moved to the same school as her when I was thirteen. I think of Ash practically as my sister.’
Which would technically make her his sister, too. Except Sean didn’t have any sibling-like feelings towards Claire. What he felt for Claire was...
Well, it was a lot easier to think of it as dislike. When they weren’t being scrupulously polite to each other, they clashed. They had totally opposite world views. They were totally incompatible. He wasn’t going to let himself think about the fact that her hair was the colour of a cornfield bathed in sunshine, and her eyes were the deep blue of a late summer evening. And he certainly wasn’t going to let himself think about the last time he’d kissed her.
‘Of course. I’ll get you a flight sorted.’
Though he noticed her movements while he was on the phone. Deft and very sure as she packed each dress in tissue paper to avoid creases, put it inside a plastic cover to protect it from any damage and then in a box. As if she’d done this many times before. Which, he realised, she probably had.
He’d never seen Claire at work before. Apart from when she’d measured the three men in the wedding party for their waistcoats, and that had been at Ashleigh and Luke’s house. He’d been too busy concentrating on being polite and anodyne to her for his sister’s sake to take much notice of what she was actually doing.
And, OK, it was easy to think of dress designers as a bit kooky and not living in the same world as the rest of the population. The outlandish outfits on the catwalks in Milan and the big fashion shows left him cold and wondering what on earth was going on in the heads of the designers—real people just didn’t wear stuff like that. But the woman in front of him seemed businesslike. Organised. Efficient.
Like someone who belonged in his world.
He shook himself. That was just an illusion. Temporary. Claire didn’t belong in his world and he didn’t belong in hers. They’d be civil to each other over the next few days, purely for Ashleigh’s sake, and then they’d go back to avoiding each other.
Safely.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_4b4393ba-9ce3-559f-803b-23549325172c)
AS CLAIRE WORKED on packing up the dresses, she found herself growing more and more aware of Sean. He looked every inch the meticulous businessman in a made-to-measure suit, handmade shirt, and perfectly polished shoes; as part of her job, Claire noticed details like that. Sean wouldn’t have looked out of place on a catwalk or in a glossy magazine ad.
And he was actually helping her—working with her as a team. Which was rarer than a blue moon. They didn’t get on.
Apart from a few occasions, and some of those were memories that still had the ability to make Claire squirm. Such as Ashleigh’s eighteenth birthday party. Claire’s life had imploded only a couple of weeks before and, although she’d tried so hard to smile and be happy for her best friend’s sake, she’d ended up helping herself to too much champagne that evening to blot out the misery that had threatened to overwhelm her.
Sean had come to her rescue—and Claire had been young enough and drunk enough to throw herself at him. Sean had been a perfect gentleman and turned her down, and her adult self was glad that he’d been so decent, but as a teenager she’d been hideously embarrassed by the whole episode and she’d avoided him like the plague for months and months afterwards.
Then there was his parents’ funeral, three years later. Claire had been there to support Ashleigh—just as Ashleigh had supported Claire at her own mother’s funeral—and she’d glanced across at Sean at a moment when he’d looked utterly lost. Wanting to help, Claire had pushed past the old embarrassment and gone to offer him her condolences. Sean hadn’t been quite approachable enough for her to give him a hug, so she’d simply squeezed his hand and said she was sorry for his loss. At the time, her skin had tingled at the contact with his—but the timing was so inappropriate that she hadn’t acted on it.
They’d fought again when Ashleigh had decided not to join the family business. Sean had blamed Claire for talking Ashleigh out of what he clearly saw as her duty. OK, so Claire had been a sounding board and helped Ashleigh work out what she really wanted to do, encouraging her to follow her dreams; but surely Sean had wanted his sister to be happy instead of feeling trapped and miserable in a job she really didn’t want to do? And surely, given that his parents had died so young, he understood how short life was and how you needed to make the most of every moment? It wasn’t as if being a maths teacher was some insecure, fly-by-night job. And Ash was a really gifted teacher. She loved what she did and her pupils adored her. It had been the right decision.
The problem was, Sean had always been so overprotective. Claire could understand why; he was Ashleigh’s elder brother and had been the head of the family since he was twenty-four. But at the same time he really needed to understand that his sister was perfectly capable of standing on her own two feet and making her own way in the world.
She forced herself to concentrate on packing the dresses properly, but she couldn’t help noticing the deep tone of Sean’s voice, his confidence and sureness as he talked to the airline.
Most of the time Claire didn’t admit it, even to herself, but she’d had a secret crush on Sean when she’d been fourteen. Which was half the reason why she’d thrown herself at him at Ashleigh’s birthday party, three years later.
Another memory seeped back in. Ashleigh’s engagement party to Luke. Sean had asked her to dance; Claire had been well aware that he was only being polite for his sister’s sake. Which was the same reason why she’d agreed to dance with him. Though, somewhere between the start and the middle of the song, something had changed. Claire couldn’t even blame it on the champagne, because she hadn’t been drinking. But something had made her pull back slightly and look up at Sean. Something had made her lips part slightly. And then he’d dipped his head and kissed her.
The kiss had shaken her right to the core. Nobody had ever made her feel like that with a single kiss—as if her knees had turned to mush and she needed to cling to him to keep herself upright. It had panicked her into backing away and cracking some inane joke, and the moment was lost.
Since then, she’d been scrupulously polite and distant with Sean. But in unguarded moments she wondered. Had he felt that same pull of attraction? And what if...?
She shook herself. Of course not. Apart from the fact that her judgement when it came to men was totally rubbish, she knew that Sean just saw her as his baby sister’s super-annoying best friend, the woman he ended up bickering with every time they spoke to each other for more than five minutes. It rankled slightly that he still didn’t take her seriously—surely the fact that she’d had her own business for the last three years and kept it going through the recession counted for something?
Then again, she didn’t need to prove anything to him. She was perfectly comfortable with who she was and what she’d achieved.
She finished packing the last box.
‘Any luck with my flight?’ she asked when Sean ended his call.
‘There’s good news and bad,’ he said.
‘OK. Hit me with the bad first.’
He frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Because then I’ve faced the worst, and there’s still something good to look forward to.’
He looked surprised, as if he’d never thought of it in that way before. ‘OK. The bad news is, I can’t get you a flight where they’ll take the dresses on board.’
The worst-case scenario. Well, she’d just have to deal with it. ‘Then if planes are out, I’ll just have to go by train.’ She thought on her feet. ‘If I get the Eurostar to Paris, there’ll be a connecting train to Milan or Rome, and from there to Naples. Though it means I probably won’t get to Capri until tomorrow, now.’
‘Hold on. I did say there was good news as well,’ he reminded her. ‘We can fly to Naples from London.’
She frowned, not understanding. ‘But you just said you couldn’t get me a seat where they’ll take the dresses.’
‘Not on a commercial flight, no. But I have a friend with a private plane.’
‘You have what?’
‘A friend with a private plane,’ he repeated, ‘who’s willing to take us this afternoon.’
‘Us.’ The word hit her like a sledgehammer and she narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Are you saying that you don’t trust me to take the dresses on my own?’
‘You need to go to Naples. I need to go to Naples. So it makes sense,’ he said, ‘for us to travel together.’
She noticed that he hadn’t answered her question. Clearly he didn’t trust her. To be fair to him, she had already lost his sister’s wedding dress—but it hadn’t been entirely her fault. ‘But don’t you already have a flight booked?’
‘I cancelled it,’ he said. ‘I promised Ashleigh I’d be there tonight or I would’ve offered you my original booking and flown in later. This seemed like the best solution to the problem.’
‘You have a friend with a private plane.’ She still couldn’t get over that one. ‘Sean, normal people don’t have friends with private planes.’
‘You barely accept that I’m human, let alone normal,’ he pointed out.
And they were heading towards yet another fight. She grimaced. ‘Sorry. Let’s just rewind and try this again. Thank you, Sean, for coming to the rescue and calling in whatever favour you had to call in to get me a flight to Naples. Please tell your friend that if he ever needs a wedding dress or a prom dress made, I’ll do it for nothing.’
‘I’ll tell her,’ Sean said dryly.
Her. Girlfriend? Probably not, Claire thought. Ashleigh was always saying that Sean would never settle down and never dated anyone for more than three weeks in a row. So maybe it was someone who’d gone to university with him, or a long-standing business acquaintance. Not that she had any right to ask.
