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He cleared his throat, looked down intently at her. ‘I know this is a bit back to front, that we’ve just had what could be considered dessert …’
She licked her lips again. More out of nervousness than because of stray caramel.
‘But why don’t we round it all up by having a starter and a main course somewhere else?’ He smiled again, and Chloe discovered the caramel had travelled to her knees.
Oh, it was so tempting …
This was what she’d fantasised about, aged nineteen, on many a night in her student digs—Daniel Bradford, looking at her this way, asking her in that deep, earthy voice of his if they could go somewhere alone together.
She shook her head, and just that motion helped the next words out. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea … We’re colleagues. People will talk … and I want to get on at Kew because of what I can do,’ she said quietly, ‘not because people think I’m sleeping with the boss.’
His lips curved into the sexiest of smiles, telling her that he had an answer for that one. ‘There’s no rule against it,’ he said. ‘And we don’t have to broadcast it. It’ll be our secret.’
She shook her head. ‘With the attention you’re generating right now that’s nigh on impossible.’
She was a genius for coming up with that one! It was perfect.
He nodded, pressed his lips together in grim acceptance. ‘I can understand that. My life is a bit of a circus at present. But maybe later, when all the fuss has died down?’
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.
No, she thought. That sad, geeky girl is dead. Something far better has risen from her ashes. She clamped down hard on the ghostly presence. That was all it was. A memory. An echo.
‘Don’t suppose you have another ice cream on you?’ she asked, closing her eyes again briefly. ‘It’s more the weather for it today.’
He shook his head and silently pulled a smartphone with a large screen from his pocket. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he handed it to her. ‘This isn’t anywhere near as nice as ice cream.’
Chloe scrolled through the whole blog entry carefully, reading every word. It was the picture that did the most damage, though. In the grainy photograph she was looking up at Daniel as he leant towards her, her eyes wide, her lips … waiting.
She handed the phone back to him without saying anything, not wanting to see it any more. She must have made a face, because he shook his head and then said, ‘You’ve every right to be upset.’
It wasn’t that. She wasn’t upset that people thought she was romantically involved with Daniel Bradford. It might make her life at Kew a little more complicated, sure, but it was hardly anything to get her knickers in a twist about. No, what she was really worried about was that photograph.
‘How many people have seen this?’ she asked, looking straight ahead, eyes fixed on the Georgian orangery that now served as the gardens’ main restaurant.
She heard the fragments of pine cones and twigs beneath his feet crunch as he shifted his weight. ‘There’s no way of knowing, but I think we have to assume everyone.’
Chloe nodded. Okay. She could cope with this. People might see the picture, but they wouldn’t recognise it, wouldn’t know what it meant.
She turned her head to look at him, made her cheek muscles tighten to pull the corners of her lips upwards. Then she shifted along the bench and made room for him. He blinked, confusion etched into his features, and sat down.
He was probably expecting a scene. Lots of women did scenes. Luckily for him, New Chloe had banished them from her life. She only did confident and breezy and unfazed.
‘So … what do we do now?’ she asked, leaning back and feigning a relaxed posture.
He stared intently at her for a moment. ‘That’s up to you,’ he said. ‘I could contact the blog, make a statement …’
Chloe thought for a moment. ‘No … I don’t think it’s worth it.’
Unfortunately, the old adage was true: pictures did speak louder than words, and that one of her and Daniel was gabbling uncontrollably, contradicting any carefully worded denial they could come up with. There was no point.
‘Are you sure?’ The closed, slightly guarded look he’d been giving her softened. Chloe nodded brightly. She didn’t want his concern, didn’t want to see any more flashes of that warm, more caring side she’d just glimpsed of Daniel Bradford. Things were hard enough as it was.
She stood up and walked a little bit before turning back to face him. ‘It’d be like shouting into the wind. People will think what they want to think, no matter what we say.’
Daniel scowled. ‘We can’t just sit back and do nothing.’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t say we should do nothing. I just said we shouldn’t bother contacting the press to deny it. We don’t have to go on the offensive to beat this thing.’
He looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. To Daniel Bradford, she probably was. She smiled. Properly this time.
She walked over to him, slid the phone from his hand without touching his fingers and showed him the picture. ‘It’s not as if we’re in a full lip-lock,’ she said, ignoring the shiver that ran up her spine at the thought. ‘It’s innocent enough. I think we should just ignore it, go on as normal. People will soon realise there’s nothing in it.’
Daniel took the phone back from her, and this time their fingers did touch. And the way his eyes lit up, she guessed it wasn’t entirely an accident. She pulled her hand away and stuffed it in her coat pocket, where it continued to tingle.
‘No comment?’
‘No comment,’ she agreed. ‘Perfect. That’s exactly what people say in circumstances like this.’
Daniel stood up. ‘You’re saying you just want to ride whatever comes, ignore it?’
She nodded again. She was good at ignoring things.
Daniel shook his head as he put the phone back in his pocket.
‘You haven’t given an interview since Valentine’s Day, have you?’ she asked.
‘No …’ He looked away and then back at her. He was still frowning, but now she could tell he was turning her idea over instead of just resisting it. ‘I suppose you’re right. Starting a dialogue may just increase the frenzy.’
Chloe walked forward, sat down on the bench and picked up her salad box again. ‘Great. All sorted,’ she said, unclipping the lid.
Daniel stared at her, brow still furrowed. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but he finally said, ‘I’d better go and give Alan back his phone.’
She smiled back and waved her fork slightly before popping a cherry tomato in her mouth and swallowing it almost whole. ‘Well, if Alan is as addicted to his smartphone as I am to mine, you’d better hurry. He may already be having withdrawal symptoms.’
Daniel gave a wry smile and stared at the phone, as if he couldn’t quite believe in the seductive pull in that little bit of technology. ‘I appreciate you being understanding about this,’ he said as he put it back in his pocket.
‘No problem,’ she said, managing to sound fairly normal, although she was fairly sure that tomato had lodged itself somewhere in her throat. ‘And if Alan is shaking and sweating when you get back to him, I recommend an early lunch break. Half an hour of Vengeful Ducks should get him back on track.’
‘Let me thank you somehow,’ Daniel said, lowering his voice, and an irresistible little glimmer of naughtiness twitched his mouth into an off-centre smile. ‘How about dinner?’
Chloe blinked slowly and licked her lips. ‘I thought we talked about this last night,’ she said, looking at her salad and using her fork to tease a bit of carrot.
When she looked back up at Daniel he was still smiling at her. It took all she had not to fling her salad to one side and have him for lunch instead.
‘Can’t blame a guy for trying,’ he said, then nodded and headed back towards the nurseries.
When he was out of earshot Chloe let go of her intercostal muscles and allowed the coughing fit she’d been holding back to take over. Eventually, the tomato made its way down the right hole.
She put her salad box down on the bench beside her, put her elbows on her knees and rested her face in her hands. She really didn’t want to go back to who she’d been when she’d first met Daniel. That Chloe had been a nice enough girl, the class swot, always excelling at everything. She hadn’t cared that she hadn’t followed the latest fashion trends or had only a passing acquaintance with the opposite sex. Because that Chloe had known that everything came easy to her, that she’d hardly ever had to try to be good at anything.
And then Daniel Bradford had walked into her life and had shown her exactly where she’d been lacking.
She hadn’t realised she wasn’t any good at being a girl until he’d come along. And that was a pretty important thing when you were one.
For a girl who’d never failed at anything, crashing and burning so spectacularly in the male-female stakes had come not just as a shock, but a reality slap. That was what the grown-up world was all about. And nice-but-geeky Chloe just hadn’t been cutting it.
