Free The Secret of Happy Ever After by Lucy Dillon Page B

– there was something on every table that whispered, ‘Buy me’.
    She picked up the glass ball, imagining a cluster of them in Becca’s room, hanging on gold ribbons around her window maybe, then put it down. They were on one income now, and the girls would be shopping it up in New York. But at half price they were such a bargain, and she’d seen Becca admiring them.
    ‘Oh, aren’t they gorgeous?’ said a breathy voice. ‘But, um, wouldn’t you be worried about Pongo eating one? Not being funny, but they do look like tomatoes. I couldn’t work out what was Christmassy about tomatoes till Michelle told me they were for the tree.’
    Anna looked up to see Michelle’s junior assistant, Kelsey, hovering by the table, and put the bauble down. Kelsey was lovely, like everything else in the shop, but about as useful as the glass baubles when it came to actual selling. She was mostly confined to dealing with internet orders, since she’d never managed to make the till work on her own, and had kindly talked Anna out of a couple of rash purchases – not, thankfully, while Michelle was around. Kelsey was like a golden-eyebrowed supermodel, or an angel whose wings had fallen off, and she drove Michelle insane with her unfortunate habit of missing shoplifters because she was unpicking her complicated love life on the phone to her friends.
    If Gillian, queen of the window display, hadn’t been so efficient, Kelsey would have been ruthlessly excised from Michelle’s empire long ago, but like the green fig candles burning in high alcoves, and the Ella Fitzgerald soundtrack, she added a certain aspirational ambience to the place.
    ‘Hi, Kelsey, is Michelle around?’ Anna asked. ‘She said she’d meet me here, at quarter to?’
    ‘She’s upstairs.’ Kelsey dropped her voice conspiratorially. ‘With a guy!’
    ‘A guy ?’ Anna hadn’t meant it to sound so loud, but the way Kelsey was winking at her made it hard not to.
    ‘Yeah. A really good-looking guy. Bit young for her, if you ask me, but if you’ve got it, right?’ She stopped winking and pulled a face to indicate that she felt Michelle did still have it.
    ‘Are you sure he’s not a rep?’ asked Anna.
    Kelsey snorted. ‘Not unless he’s selling sexy hair.’
    ‘Michelle’s upstairs sorting out the website,’ called a voice from the room behind the main shop floor; a competent, older voice. ‘It’s gone down again, don’t ask me how or why. And she’s with her brother . She won’t be a moment.’
    ‘Her brother?’ mouthed Kelsey, shocked.
    ‘She’s got three brothers,’ said Anna, as Gillian appeared in her Christmas sale outfit: a red cardigan over her usual black shift dress, and an extra-rigid girdle flattening her Christmas excesses. There were no seasonal reindeer horns in here. ‘Which one is it?’
    ‘The hot one,’ said Gillian. ‘Pardon my French.’
    Anna heard two sets of footsteps clattering down the stairs that led up to the flat, and before Kelsey had time to do more than fluff up her hair, Michelle and Owen were standing in front of a three-woman welcome committee.
    ‘What?’ said Michelle, seeing the blatant curiosity on their faces. ‘Oh, I get it. Owen, let me introduce you properly. This is Gillian, who runs the shop. This is Kelsey, who posts out the website orders, and this is Anna, who stops me from going mad. Ladies, this is my little brother, Owen. He’s our new website geek.’
    ‘I prefer IT consultant,’ said Owen, with a smile that reached his brown eyes, making them crinkle attractively.
    Anna could see the family resemblance. Owen had the same dark chestnut hair as Michelle and the same sharp chin, but whereas her hair was cut into a geometric bob, his curled round his ears and over his collar. And his brown eyes flashed – she started to correct the Mills and Boon-ish word, then had to admit that actually, in this instance, it was fair enough – whereas Michelle’s eyes were more guarded, noticing