The Complete #LoveLondon Collection. Nikki Moore

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СКАЧАТЬ Millie giggled at her expression. ‘I think I probably wore the same expression the first time I saw it. Difference is, you get to wear it. You are so lucky.’ A tannoy announcement sounded above their head. ‘Quick,’ Millie urged, ‘the store closes in ten minutes.’

      ‘Oh, I’ll be quick!’ Frankie whipped her jumper over her head, stopping when she realised the kind of bra she had on wouldn’t do.

      ‘Sorry, I forgot.’ Millie rushed back out and returned to fling a strapless bra and invisible underwear at Frankie. ‘Hurry! Call me when you need zipping up, I’ll be out there tidying,’ she gestured to the reception area.

      ‘Thank you.’

      Five minutes later Frankie gazed at the mirror in awe, her expression twinned with Millie’s, who’d come in to secure the zip, hooks and eyes running up the back of the dress.

      'He got the fit exactly right.’ The personal shopper said. ‘He must know you really well.’

      ‘Hmm,’ Frankie made an indistinct sound. It was the most beautiful dress she’d ever seen and she felt like a princess, but the accurate sizing was more puzzling than ever. She’d lost a lot of weight since the break-up. Between the hospital stay, when she’d barely eaten through grieving for her mum and pain had driven away the need for food, and the change in lifestyle of having to budget constantly to afford to eat, she’d dropped at least two dress sizes. So how would Christian know what would fit her now?

      Zack was the most likely candidate; they’d been messing around with a tape measure in one of the stock cupboards only the week before. But how on earth could he afford something like this, on his wages as a Merchandiser? And how would she feel if it was him, when they were only friends?

      ***

      ‘Hey, weird girl!’ Zack appeared next to Frankie in the open door. ‘What’s up?

      ‘Shit!’ She dropped the box she was holding with a clatter and the hangers spilled out onto the floor. ‘Zack, you scared me.’ Crouching down, she started picking them up, shoving them away.

      ‘Sorry, I thought you heard me coming.’ Stooping next to her, he took the hangers back out of the box and lined them up neatly before putting them back in. ‘I was whistling.’ He added, eyes twinkling.

      She stood up and went over to one of the cupboards to find some skew tags, seeing as he had the hanger situation under control. ‘Sorry,’ she replied in a mock sniffy tone, ‘I was too busy humming to hear you whistling.’

      ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Lady Frankie, is humming now a superior art form to whistling? Who do we send the memo to?’ he teased.

      ‘Human Resources, who else? Maybe it qualifies as part of a staff well-being initiative.’

      ‘Well-being? Ha, ha. Where do you work?’ Zack straightened, inserting the box back into its space on the shelf. ‘Because it’s definitely not here! Isn’t it odd,’ he mused, ‘how pristine the shop floor is, how polished and neat the shopping areas, and then how tatty the back of house areas are? If only the customers got the behind the scenes experience.’

      Frankie stopped in her tracks, having had the same thought a hundred times before, every time she’d stepped off the shop floor and into the staff room or one of the store cupboards. ‘Yes,’ she said softly, ‘it is odd.’ She smiled, ’Imagine if one day we didn’t close a door properly and a customer saw the fourth floor corridor with all the mannequins and boxes of crap along it; a complete fire hazard. There’d be mayhem!’ she joked.

      He laughed, ‘You are strange, weird girl.’

      ‘Stop calling me that,’ she exclaimed, setting the skew tags aside, and bending over to root through one of the cupboards. The flexible measuring tape in Womenswear was forever going missing and the sales manager had asked Frankie to search some spares out.

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Argh. What a mess!’ Her hands tangled in the assortment of stuff shoved in the box by colleagues, measuring tapes and thick white parcel string and paperclips and tags. ‘Because I’m not weird.’ She spun around, hands extended to him. She pulled a pitiful face, ‘Help me, please.’

      ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Zack came over to her and started unpicking string from around her thumb and forefinger. ‘I mean, who else could imprison their hands just by going through a box?’

      She stuck her tongue out at him in answer.

      ‘And who else has got freaky alien eyes?’ he quipped, grinning to take the sting out of any insult.

      ‘Oi! What do you mean alien eyes?’ she growled, pretending to glower at him.

      ‘They’re a really unusual colour,’ he said, head bent over her hands as he tried to unwrap the requested measuring tape from around her wrist, and separate it from the string.

      Frankie didn’t answer, distracted by the space between his hair and collar, noticing a row of freckles along the back of his neck. It was hardly surprising how fair he was, but it was funny the things you saw when you stopped to look at people. She wondered if he had freckles in other places too. The thought shocked her into talking. ‘They’re a kind of deep violet,’ she agreed. ‘It is quite rare. Comes from my Mum’s side of the family.’ She stiffened.

      ‘Yeah,’ he lifted his head to gaze up at her, but didn’t give any indication he’d picked up on her tension, ‘for weeks after I started I thought you were wearing some of those fake party contact lenses you get. I even asked George,’ one of their colleagues from Menswear, ‘and he laughed at me. But the shape of your eyes is sort of different too, sort of cat-like.’

      ‘You’ve been spending far too much time thinking about this,’ she sniggered, pulling her hands away as he unravelled the last of the mess. ‘Cheers.’ She took a measuring tape off him and started wrapping it up and he took the other. ‘Next you’ll be telling me you’ve been trying to calculate my dress size too.’

      ‘Which is?’ he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, holding the tape out to her and trying to wrap it around her waist.

      'Get lost!’ she squirmed away. ‘A lady never shares that information.’

      ‘Fair enough,’ he smiled, ‘not that it really matters.’

      'God, you’re not going to go all Bridget Jones on me, are you?'

      'What, and tell you that I like you,’ he batted his eyelashes and she realised just how long they were, ‘just as you are? Nah, I'm hardly Colin Firth.'

      She smirked, ‘But you do watch rom coms.’

      He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Occasionally, but I’m man enough to take it. But we’re just friends right?’ he waited for her to nod, and dropped the rolled up measuring tape in her palm. ‘And besides, I'm not really into any of that soppy stuff. I’d rather just tell a girl I like her and ask her out.’

      ‘Okay. You don’t have to act like I’ve accused you of being a mass murderer.’

      He swiped a pair of scissors off the side, a fake manic gleam in his eyes as he advanced towards her. 'How do you know I’m not?’

      ‘Eek! СКАЧАТЬ