Free The Wedding Diary (Choc Lit) by Margaret James

I don’t think he’ll ever sell. It’s all in the diary, if you want to have a look. He won’t be back until tonight.’
    ‘I’ll lock up, don’t worry.’
    ‘I wasn’t worrying, just telling you.’ Tess wound her fake Armani scarf around her neck. ‘But let me give you some advice?’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘They’re all hunters, men. They know by instinct when a woman’s wounded. They know when they’ll be able to make an easy kill. So you watch yourself with Mr Adam Lawley, right?’
    I’m only going to sell him chimneys, Cat thought crossly, as she heard Tess start the flatbed truck belonging to the yard and drive away. I’m not going to offer him my body.
    Now you come to mention it, that might be a plan, observed a little voice inside her head. You’d like to get his shirt off, wouldn’t you?
    Oh, don’t be ridiculous, she muttered to herself.
    She went into the cloakroom and splashed lots of cold water on her face. ‘I am so not interested in Mr Adam Lawley,’ she told her reflection in the glass.
    ‘Ha, we’ll wait and see,’ the glass replied.
    Obviously, Adam had thought while he was shaving earlier that morning, it really didn’t matter if he was attracted to a girl who was engaged to someone else.
    She was out of reach, he told himself and his reflection. So talking to this girl would be like talking to his granny, not that Cat looked anything like his granny, and not that he was actually attracted.
    Or not very seriously attracted, anyway.
    After all, his heart was broken, wasn’t it? So how could he feel anything at all?
    He forced himself to think about the work he had in Middlesex, where he was involved in half a dozen different projects, all in various stages of completion.
    The Elizabethan manor house, whose grounds had all been swallowed up by a small estate of smart new homes, and would be a conference centre soon, didn’t need replacement chimney pots. But the budget would allow for it, and he had seen the very ones in Barry Chapman’s salvage yard.
    When Cat let him into Chapman’s yard at ten past five – the traffic had been terrible, and he’d wondered more than once if she would have locked up and gone home by the time he got to Walthamstow – he saw at once that she was looking good. A little tired, perhaps, a little pale, but she’d probably had a busy day.
    She’d done something different with her hair, had pinned it up with pretty golden combs, and some of it was falling down in graceful, dark blonde curls.
    His fingers itched to loop them up again.
    She wore a pale pink top and smart black trousers which showed off her long legs, and her arms were dusted with light golden down, and around her neck she had a pretty silver chain which looked Victorian or Edwardian perhaps?
    Why was he bothering to notice?
    ‘Mr Lawley?’ Cat was looking at him curiously. ‘I assume you want to see the chimneys?’
    ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said, and told himself to get a grip.
    ‘Okay, let’s go out into the yard.’
    Adam took a good look at the chimneys, satisfied himself that they were genuine sixteenth-century Tudor terracotta, not from B&Q, and told her that he’d take them, if they could agree a price.
    Cat was chewing at her lower lip in a way he’d noticed some girls did when they were worried, anxious, nervous or preoccupied.
    But why would she be anxious?
    Well, they were alone together out here in the yard.
    Perhaps she felt intimidated, even scared of him?
    She didn’t need to be.
    ‘Something wrong, Miss Aston?’ he enquired.
    ‘No, Mr Lawley, nothing’s wrong.’
    She turned to walk back to the office, so he followed, trying all the time to think of something safe to say, something to defuse the tension he was sure he couldn’t have created, but which was getting tighter by the minute.
    The wedding – girls loved talking about weddings and engagements, or in his experience most girls did, even though he’d got it wrong with Maddy.
    Gwennie was