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First there was the letter from the local authority telling her that the new business rates on the deli were increasing from extortionate to legal robbery. Nice.
As if a one-woman food business could instantly magic up that kind of money. She had expected a price hike, but the amount they wanted made her brain spin.
And then there was the small matter that the second she had pressed the snooze button on her alarm clock that morning, it had struck her like a heavy weight that she was thirty years old.
Thirty! How could that be possible?
With one tick of the clock she had officially stopped being an up-and-coming chef in her twenties and was plunged into the hard reality that she was a thirty-year-old single woman who was still living above the family deli and, from the state of her bank balance, likely to stay there for a long time to come.
What had happened to the girl with the big dreams who had been so confident that she would have her own chain of Brannigans delicatessens specialising in luxury Italian ready meals by the time she was thirty?
The last thing she needed was a reminder the size of a window display that she was being held to ransom by her cousin Luca and her so-called family, who owned one of Italy’s largest food companies. Who apparently were in London for a book signing and had not even bothered to let her know. Typical.
Well, as far as she was concerned Luca and the whole tribe could stay where they belonged. Back in Italy. She didn’t need them and she certainly didn’t want to see them.
A cluster of elegantly dressed twenty-something girls with long glossy hair shuffled up next to Bunty and started giggling at the poster boy. Their expensive perfume drifted in her direction, just as the girl closest to Bunty stepped back a little and waved a hand in front of her as though wafting away a smell.
Bunty lifted her chin and sniffed. Hum. That was a mistake. She hadn’t even had time to change out of the kitchen-smelly work clothes she had been wearing for the past twelve hours.
‘Okay, yes, I have been chopping garlic most of the day.’ Bunty smiled across at her. ‘It’s not contagious.’
The girl smirked and pointed downwards towards Bunty’s ratty old black trainers, forcing their owner to glance down to what lay below her grease-stained, creased kitchen trousers. The fact that they were only inches away from a pair of silky black stockings and high heels only made her clothing look more decrepit than normal.
But then she spotted what was on the sole of her shoe.
Marvellous. She hated city dogs. And she hated their careless owners even more.
Hoisting her bags higher, Bunty could only shuffle off, red-faced, trying not to make it too obvious that she was wiping one trainer on the side of the kerb stone as she went.
She’d bet that never happened to the immaculate Luca!
And then she made the mistake of glancing at her wristwatch.
Brilliant. Now Luca had made her late too.
Although he was not totally responsible.
It had felt as though every customer who walked into the deli that afternoon had some urgent and important question about the provenance of the salami they were buying, or the secret ingredients that made her patisserie and ready meals so special.
She loved every one of the regulars who had been coming to Brannigans week in, week out, for weeks, months or years.
It was such a thrill to join in the busy chatter of the customers who gathered to taste and talk in appreciation of her food and she wouldn’t want it any other way. Busy, busy, busy.
But on the not so plus side, she was working every hour of the day to make the deli a success and it was well after five before she had escaped with her precious cargo.
She’d allowed just enough time to catch the bus before the six o’clock deadline. Okay, yes, it was rather unusual for a chef to deliver catering-sized packs of gnocchi and fresh wild mushroom sauce by public transport, but this was London on a cold wet January evening. She could either walk it, or catch the bus. Taxis were a luxury she could ill afford, and with this rush-hour traffic?
She had missed her bus. And was now officially and undeniably late for her delivery to Patrick at the Dog and Duck.
Patrick served a lot of food between six and seven in the evening and she could still make it before he sent out a search party. It wasn’t her fault that the customers at the hippest gastro pub in town adored her food. Or what they believed was Patrick’s food. He had tripled his order, and she needed that business. Especially now.
Dragging her gaze away from the bookshop window, Bunty dodged and dived along the busy pavements, trying to make up for lost time. The grey January drizzle had turned into sleet and beneath her padded jacket her T-shirt had begun to stick to her skin. She tried not to think about what was happening to her hair.
Had she ever looked like those glossy girls? And where had the last ten years gone?
Apart from the years spent at catering school, training as a restaurant chef, and then looking after her sick mother while running a deli, of course.
Apart from that.
She was still trying to come up with some explanation for her current state of grunginess when a cab cut her off as she tried to cross the street. Both of her hands were occupied with food containers, and the sauce almost ended up on the road as she swerved to avoid splattering the contents.
Luckily for her, Patrick was standing at the door chalking up the menu on a blackboard, and ran forward to take the bags from her. Homemade gnocchi was the first item on the board.
‘You’re cutting it a bit fine, sweetheart. Ten minutes later, and my little Italian treat would have been off the menu.’
‘Ten yards later, and you would have been scraping your treats and me off the front of that taxi.’ She leant forward, stood on tiptoe and kissed her old boyfriend lightly on the cheek and smiled. ‘You know you love me.’
The tall, handsome, stubbly Irishman nodded a couple of times. ‘True, but I’d love you more if you came back to work for me. A couple of nights a week? One night? I need you, babe. And you must have missed me!’ His eyebrows lifted a couple of times above the smile.
‘Tempting. But I think you only want me for my food.’
He swiped his hand across his thigh. ‘Drat. You saw through my evil plan. In that case I need to double up the ravioli and all the antipasti for the lunch crew. I’ll send one of the lads around tomorrow and pick it up.’
‘No problem. And since you love me, you get first look at some new meals I’ve been working on.’
Her mobile phone rang and cut short her stab at optimism. Bunty flipped open the cover. ‘Pronto?’
‘It’s me,’ Alex said. ‘We have a problem.’
‘Really,’ Bunty said, pulling a printed menu from her pocket, telephone lodged between her neck and shoulder. ‘Surely not. I thought you’d be out partying by now. Let me guess, you picked up a hunky date at the airport and have decided to bail on me?’
‘You should be back by now. At this rate you are going to be late for your own birthday party,’ Alex said with a high-pitched laugh and Bunty stopped, taken aback by the tone in her best friend’s voice. Alex McGee was an industrial chemist who travelled the world auditing production plants. She did stress for a living.
Bunty could hear the urgency in her friend’s voice as she turned to pass the menu across to Patrick.
‘I am on my way right now,’ she said into the phone.
‘Something wrong?’ Patrick asked, sounding concerned, from behind her.
‘Not a bit,’ Bunty said to him. ‘Alex is worried that I won’t have time for a serious makeover before my birthday party.’
‘Makeover? Not from what I can see.’ Patrick grinned, looking into her face. ‘Sorry I can’t be there. Mad busy. But I’ll be raising a glass later in your direction.’
‘Thanks, sweetie, but it is going to take more than Alex’s make-up bag to change my life,’ Bunty whispered to herself, ‘but it’s worth a try’ before smiling back at Patrick to reassure him.
Ten minutes later, sweaty and slightly out of breath, she was weaving her way along the busy pavements, filled with young people heading out after work to the collection of wine bars, cafés and bistros that had opened along the narrow pedestrian-only area of the London suburb. Her short cut took her past the new office blocks and apartments where there used to be small shops and businesses just like hers. They were good customers, but she still missed the old community that used to be here.
Head back, shoulders down, she strode out in her black trainers, dodging the cycles and scooters, switching from lane to lane down the backstreets, before turning the corner onto the main parade, with its collection of two-storey stone and brick buildings, where she could see Alex standing under the striped navy-blue and white awning of Brannigans.
Her parents’ deli.
Her deli now.
The thought caught in her throat, and Bunty exhaled slowly as Alex waved back and stepped out to greet her.
Her best friend from convent school was wearing the trouser suit Bunty had helped her choose the previous September. It was summer-weight dark navy worsted, faint pink fine stripes, with a cleverly constructed narrow lapel and trouser cuffs – but fitted in at the waist so that there was no mistake that this lady had curves to be proud of..
With that suit Alex had won the promotion she had been begging for, the two-seater sports car parked outside the shop, and six weeks’ paid holiday a year.
The coral silk shirt was an inspiration for a girl who paid a fortune for caramel highlights in her brown hair, and Alex looked great, even under fluorescent streetlight on a grey January evening.
‘Hey, look at you.’ Bunty grinned and gave her a one-armed hug.
‘More to the point, look at you.’ Alex tutted and stepped back to hold Bunty at arm’s length. ‘Is this the new fashion in kitchen grunge couture that I have been hearing about? Because I have to tell you, it is not working for me.’
Then she gave an over-the-top shudder. ‘Sorry, my girl. It’s time for an intervention. You pop inside and sort through your birthday cards with Fran. I need to skip up the street and ask the two hunks who run the gym if they can run door security for us. Because you are going to look so hot tonight I’ll be beating the boys back with a stick.’
Bunty snorted a reply. ‘Security for whom? I know you, Alexandra Caitlin McGee. Those poor boys wouldn’t stand a chance. I knew that it was a mistake leaving you and Fran to organise my birthday party.’
Bunty pushed the door wide open, reached inside and switched on the main lights so that she could see across the main shop floor, and through into the long refrigerated display area, and marble counter.
‘Spoilsport,’ Alex replied through pursed lips as she followed Bunty into the deli. ‘Bernadette Caruso Brannigan! Best decision you ever made. It’s going to be great. And no, I didn’t invite all of the people I wanted because you said that you wanted it low-key.’
Bunty nodded and dumped her bag on the counter. ‘Only my idea of low-key and your low-key might not be the same thing. Please tell me that Fran was joking about hiring a male stripper. I’m not sure that Elena has a licence for performance art.’
‘What? And spoil the surprise? My lips are sealed.’
‘Hah!’ Bunty tutted out loud, automatically picked up two packs of organic fusilli, and turned back towards the display shelving and their ‘New Arrivals’ section.
At the very same second that Fran leapt out at her from inside the store room waving a flag and screaming, ‘Surprise Party! Surprise! Happy Birthday!’
Bunty screamed out loud, her arms went flailing and the fusilli exploded out of their packets like yellow worms and cascaded like a fountain over the floor.
Happy Birthday. Right.
Fabio Rossi twirled the ice cubes in his crystal tumbler before taking a long slow drink of sparkling tonic water.
He leant one elbow on the brass rail in the cocktail bar of one of the most stylish boutique hotels in London and casually glanced towards the marble and wood-panel hallway as Paolo Caruso strolled past.
From the bar, Fabio could hear Paolo pontificating loudly in very good English with two stylish ladies in smart black business suits as they made their way out to a no doubt luxurious dinner with Paolo and his son Luca.
Pale, overweight, prematurely balding, and so smug in his superiority as head of the Caruso food company, Paolo seemed to have no problem at all pimping his only son and heir to the publishers and literary agents who all wanted a piece of the action that was the latest hot Italian chef—Luca Caruso.
Professional etiquette demanded that Fabio should keep his opinion of Paolo to himself, of course, considering that the Caruso food company was his father’s biggest client.
Rossi and Rossi had taken care of the Caruso family’s legal work for over fifty years and had built a major law firm out of the connections and income that came with it.
Shame that the Caruso family did not deem the youngest of the Rossi lawyers to be worthy of their business, no matter how many times his father and brother had tried to include Fabio in company meetings over the past two years.
Fabio lowered his tumbler onto the leather coaster on the bar and ran his finger around the rim while he took a steadying breath.
He’d thought he had left his past mistakes behind him in California.
Wrong.
Apparently respectable corporations did not want their reputation tainted by association with his kind of contract lawyer.
Oh, no. All Paolo Caruso saw was the lawyer’s son who had been dumped by his sweet, wealthy wife when his poker habit had got out of hand. A rogue. A misfit. A lawyer who could not control his obsession for the thrill of the chase.
Why did they need him? His father knew the Caruso family business inside out. Rossi and Rossi. Father and eldest son. They didn’t want a liability like Fabio Rossi working on their business accounts.
Of course, there was something that Paolo didn’t know…yet.
It was true that Fabio was in London meeting up with a few prospective clients for his new law firm. But that wasn’t the only reason he had packed his bags and driven from Milan with his friend and business partner, Jerry Frobisher, yesterday morning.
His father had given him one last assignment for Rossi and Rossi before he officially left the family business and started out on his own.
A one-off situation, which was going to need his complete attention and dedication until the client’s instructions had been carried out.
He needed to stay engaged and focused and frosty.
Precisely the skills that he had tuned so meticulously in casinos around the world.
And that was exactly what he was going to deliver.
All of the hard work Fabio had done to rebuild some kind of reputation by swallowing his pride and going back to his father’s law firm had come down to this.
His chance to show that his family could depend on him to get the job done.
A chance to demonstrate what he could achieve and put the past behind him once and for all.
Like it or not, his start-up law firm needed the seal of approval that adding major clients like Caruso Foods could bring. This job might open doors that still stayed firmly closed to an ex-gambler with a reputation for being a hothead.
Fabio’s fingers tightened so firmly around the tumbler that for a second he thought the crystal would shatter from the pressure.
His past mistakes had brought him here. There was nothing he could do to change history but he had to look forward. His hard work was going to have to pull his brand-new company back from the edge and give it the professional kudos and future it needed.
The voices from the reception area faded away.
This was it. Rossi and Frobisher were on the case and the sooner he finished this last job for his dad, the sooner he could start work on his own business.
Time to rock and roll.
Fabio finished his drink, slid his designer jeans off the bar stool with a nod to the barman and minutes later strolled down the luxurious carpet outside the second-floor guest bedrooms.
A handsome, slim, fair-haired young man with a dark natural tan was deep in conversation with one of the very pretty uniformed chambermaids, his arm winding its way around her waist as she giggled in reply to a question.
Fabio coughed politely as he came up to the door and signalled to Jerry over the shoulder of the now preoccupied and still-giggling maid.
