Call Me Cupid: The Guy to Be Seen With / The First Crush Is the Deepest / Too Close for Comfort

‘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.

She couldn’t have that.

Right from an early age her parents had pushed their rather precocious only child to excel, to be the best at everything she did. So how had she failed at something so basic, something that was supposed to come naturally?

She drew in a breath and sat up. It didn’t matter any more. She’d fixed it. Now being not just a girl, but a woman, was something Chloe Michaels got top marks in, so she really shouldn’t worry.

A wisp of breeze curled itself around her, lifted a strand of hair and pushed it across her face. She brushed it aside. There was no point in dwelling on the past—she had a problem in the present that needed fixing.

Unfortunately, the root was the same: Daniel.

What was she going to do about him, about this stupid article?

Ignore it, she told herself firmly. That’s what you’ve got to do. Ignore the stupid blog. Ignore the way Indiana there makes your skin tighten and your pulse zing. Most of all, ignore that horrible photograph.

A cold feeling spiked through Chloe and she masked it by sitting up and spearing another vegetable, chewing it quickly then swallowing it fast.

Yes, ignore the fact that, despite the trademark blonde curls and the red lips, she hadn’t recognised herself in that photo. Not the version of herself she was today, anyway.

Because, in the grainy greyness of that mobile phone picture, it hadn’t been ‘new and improved’ Chloe staring up at Daniel all wide-eyed and breathy; it had been the Mouse.

FOUR

Daniel caught a flash of colour out of the corner of his eye as he flicked a paintbrush full of pollen over a plant he was trying to propagate. Instinctively, he swung round to find it again.

Just a brightly coloured plastic bag one of the staff had walked past the door of his nursery with. Not a pink shoe, or an emerald blouse or even a pair of smiling ruby lips.

He stood up and scrubbed a hand over his face.

He was losing it, wasn’t he?

Just a hint of colour, which he now seemed to associate with Chloe, because everyone else here wore variations of brown and green and navy blue, or a scent like her perfume—an easy mistake to make in a greenhouse full of flowers—and he’d react. He’d seek first and think later, making him just like the insects who were lured by the smell and hue of the plant he was tending. They couldn’t help it.

He couldn’t help it.

Another dash of soft pink at the edge of his peripheral vision. He turned immediately, then swore.

This time it was Chloe, popping her head in the door of one of the other rooms and asking one of the horticultural students something. She was wearing a top that clung in all the right places. She smiled at the two young men, was charming and poised. Just as she was with him. No difference.

No difference at all.

It was driving him mad.

He’d tried everything, every trick up his sleeve—every look, every line—and she was still completely unaffected.

He bowed his head and turned his attention back to the bulbous Nepenthes hamata he was working on. Most people thought of plants as pretty things, but this specimen was dark and fierce-looking. He thought it was beautiful, but with vicious-looking black teeth round the opening of the pitcher it resembled something out of a science-fiction movie more than a bloom fit for a bridal bouquet.

He was trying to cross it with another species that was a deep purply-black. If he succeeded, he’d have a plant that would give even Sigourney Weaver nightmares.

He glanced up again, but realised he was subconsciously searching for soft pink, and made himself focus on the plant instead.

Not her. This plant wouldn’t scare her. In fact, nothing seemed to rattle her, and he both admired and resented that ability. Chloe Michaels was like her own unique subspecies of womankind. Bred to resist him.

And, with all the lurid rumours flying round about them, her apathy just rubbed salt into the wound. Maybe it was just stubbornness on his part, an unwillingness to admit defeat?

A fly buzzed round the Nepenthes, alighting on the slippery edge of the plant’s mouth and climbing inside. Daniel knew that was the last he’d see of it. The waxy interior would prevent any escape.

He studied the plant once again. So beautiful, but so deadly, luring most unwitting insects in with the promise of sweetness but the reality of slow drowning and digestion.

He heard heels on the concrete floor, sensed a patch of pink walk past his nursery door, but, despite the urge to turn, he kept his eyes trained on the shiny black teeth at the gaping mouth of the pitcher.

Maybe he would do well to learn a lesson from that fly.

* * *

Emma slid into the empty chair next to Chloe in the

Orangery restaurant. It was a bright May afternoon, temperatures approaching those of high summer.

‘So...’ Emma said, leaning in close and lowering her voice. ‘How are things going between you and the gorgeous Daniel?’

Chloe stopped chewing. If she had to say the equivalent of no comment just one more time she thought she’d scream. Even if it had been her clever idea.

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ she said, after swallowing her mouthful.

Emma just grinned at her. When the rumours about her and Daniel had first surfaced Emma had given her a wide berth, but now she’d decided to buddy up with Chloe and live vicariously through her colleague’s fictitious love life.

‘I know that’s the official line,’ Emma said, her eyes gleaming over the top of her soup bowl, ‘but everybody knows there’s more to it than that. Come on...just one juicy detail...please?’

Chloe’s eyebrows raised. ‘Everybody? Still?’

‘Pretty much,’ Emma said as she slurped butternut squash soup off her spoon.

Chloe stared at her sandwich in dismay. She’d hardly seen Daniel in the last few weeks, let alone spoken to him. This ‘deny everything’ tactic had given her the perfect excuse to keep her distance.

‘I don’t know how you’re managing to be so discreet,’ Emma added between mouthfuls, so enthusiastic she dribbled a big glob of orange soup down her front. ‘If I owned a man like that, I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off him—at home or at work.’

Chloe closed her eyes. It didn’t matter what they did, did it? They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. Keeping their distance, only nodding at each other in hallways when they passed, was just as much a confirmation of a steamy relationship as if they’d stripped naked and done it in the middle of the Palm House.

But it had worked. Media attention on Daniel and his ex had lulled. Thanks to that blog article, Daniel wasn’t The One Who Got Away any more; he was The One Who’d Been Snared. Nowhere near as appealing. The women of London were moving on to pastures new.

‘How’s the pole dancing going?’ she asked Emma, and thankfully her friend took the bait.

‘The course finished and I’ve switched to belly dancing. You should try it!’

And as Emma gushed on about her new hobby an idea solidified in Chloe’s head.

She would go and talk to Daniel, suggest they end this no comment nonsense. She felt as if invisible ropes, projected by other people’s minds, were tying the pair of them together, each day becoming tighter and tighter, and it was making her itchy. It was time to break free.

And, thankfully, since Alan had also mentioned that the carnivorous plant display in the Princess of Wales Conservatory was being updated today, she knew just where to find him.

* * *

When Chloe entered the Wet Tropics zone of the Princess of Wales Conservatory she almost bumped into a woman in a raincoat standing at the slope that led down to the lily-pad pool.

‘Sorry,’ she said, but the woman didn’t hear her. She was too busy staring at something on the other side of the pond. Chloe followed her gaze and quickly worked out why. Not bothering to wait for a ladder or any other suitable piece of equipment, Daniel had climbed outside the railing of the stepped walkway that led from the pond’s edge over the water to the upper level. His attempts to hook a recently planted basket of trailing pitchers from a chain suspended from the ceiling were drawing quite a crowd.

Chloe folded her arms and enjoyed the view. She knew he relished finding plants in inaccessible places, particularly mountainsides, and he seemed totally at home hanging off the walkway, his feet pressing down onto the edge of the concrete path and the taut muscles of his outstretched left arm gripping onto the railing. His T-shirt stretched tight across his back and when he leaned a little bit further, exposing a band of tanned skin between hem and belt, there was a collective female sigh from the crowd of onlookers.

Chloe almost joined in herself. This was what had attracted her to him in the first place as an impressionable young student. Not just the good looks, but his passion for his area of study, the way he flung himself wholeheartedly into everything.

She frowned. While present-day Daniel obviously still liked a physical challenge, if she compared him to the Daniel she’d crushed over in her student days she realised there were subtle differences too. A decade ago he’d smiled more, laughed more. Present-day Daniel seemed more tense, more self-contained. Less...happy.

The woman next to her made a funny noise. Chloe turned to look at her. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Oh, yes,’ the woman replied emphatically, her eyes still fixed on Daniel. ‘Just getting up my nerve.’

Chloe stared at her for a second and began to walk quickly towards the crowd by the pool. A strange tickling under her skin told her she needed to get to him, and she needed to get to him fast. As she neared the pool he disappointed the sighing onlookers by finishing his task and hopping back over the railing to stand on the walkway. The round of applause he received took him completely by surprise.

She was just trying to fight the tide of the dispersing crowd when the woman she’d bumped into earlier dashed past her and ran up the ramp towards Daniel. He was facing the other direction but he must have heard her approach, because when she was within a few feet of him he turned round.

The woman skidded to a halt, fiddled with the buttons of her raincoat, then ripped the flaps open.

Chloe pushed her way through the onlookers and ran up the ramp behind her. Even from that vantage point she could see there was way too much bare skin under that coat. Daniel just stared at the woman, eyes on stalks. And not in a good way.

Everything stopped. The only thing moving was Chloe and the only noise was the overhead misters, hissing their displeasure. Exactly why she was racing to Daniel’s side she wasn’t sure; she just knew she had to do something.

When she reached the woman, she noted—thank goodness—that it wasn’t as bad as she’d first feared. At least she was wearing a set of sexy black lingerie...and a message, written on what looked like permanent marker on her torso.

I do, Daniel, it read. Do you?

He just stared at the writing, a look of frozen horror on his face.

Chloe stared too, unable to work out just what kind of desperation drove a woman to do something like that, but then her gaze drifted from midriff to face. What she saw there was possibly even more shocking.