CHAPTER ONE

FOR the first twenty minutes of the phone call Lucy's total contribution consisted of a series of admiring grunts and the occasionally awed 'Really…!'

Her sister Annie was in love, which Lucy knew meant you had to make the sort of allowances you would for anyone suffering from temporary insanity. No problem, Lucy could do that, but there were limits to her endurance and even had she been a card-carrying member of the hopeless-romantic society this conversation might have put her off her lunch.

Lucy Foster wasn't a hopeless romantic, and she had resorted to biting her tongue to stop herself blurting out something caustic that would most likely alienate her big sister forever.

She'd never met Connor Fitzgerald, but she already hated the sound of his name.

Like Annie, Lucy had once imagined there was some special man out there for her, she had even thought that she had found him! A lot more than two years separated the person who was having to bite back cynical retorts from the pathetically trusting creature she had been back then.

Nowadays Lucy worked on the assumption that men were for the most part shallow creatures not to be trusted with a grocery list let alone a girl's heart. This philosophy served her pretty well…two years and no emotional entanglements and all the angst that inevitably accompanied them.

Though it had a lot of bad press, celibacy had a lot to recommend it.

It would clearly have been useless at the moment to attempt to sell this successful formula to her sister; human nature being what it was, some things you just had to learn the hard way, Lucy admitted to herself regretfully. No, she'd just have to be there to pick up the pieces when the man of the moment, this Connor, broke poor Annie's heart. Even if the man sounded like a total pain.

As far as Lucy was concerned it was not so much of a case of if but when.

It wasn't as if she had a closed mind on the subject—she was prepared to concede there might be some rare exceptions to her grocery-list rule—but the chances of Annie striking lucky seemed pretty remote to her.

It was some relief when Annie, having presumably used up her daily quota of clichés, finally stopped waxing lyrical about the length of Connor's eyelashes, his incredible sense of humour and his general all-round superiority to every other man that had ever been born, and got on to the actual reason for her call.

'I just called to say knock them dead, Luce.'

'I'll do my best,' Lucy promised.

'So, are you nervous?'

'I wouldn't say that.' She also wouldn't say she was exactly wildly confident either, in fact there had been several occasions during the past few days when she regretted letting her sister wangle her an interview for a job she was patently unqualified for. 'Well, actually, yes, I think I am slightly nervous…'

Running her tongue across her dry lips, she encountered the unexpected subtle taste of the expensive lipstick that had tinged her lips a fashionable shade of red—or so she'd been told by Marcus.

Lucy, in her total ignorance of this great man's fame, had created a minor furore in the salon frequented by numerous celebrities when she had asked him his surname. Well, his single name might be synonymous with excellence in the world of hairstyling and fashion but Lucy still felt doubtful about accepting style tips from a man the wrong side of forty who wore skin-tight black leather from head to toe!

'Well, adrenaline is good.'

Lucy wondered if she was the only one to find Annie's inexhaustible supply of optimism irritating. 'Even if it reduces me to a gibbering wreck?'

Lucy heard her sister give a sigh of exasperation. 'You remember that positive attitude we discussed?'

'I'm positive…honestly, I'm oozing confidence. I'll dazzle the interview panel with my wit, good looks and the sheer force of my stunning personality…' Which will make them overlook the fact a degree in modern history and working my way around Europe on a shoestring hardly qualifies me for a position as a PA in advertising.

'Now, that is just the sort of remark you want to avoid.'

'I was joking?'

'It's safer to assume that the people interviewing you don't have a sense of humour, dry or otherwise,' her sister advised. 'I'm beginning to think you're not taking this seriously. You do want a proper job?' Annie added, a note of critical doubt entering her voice.

'Proper?' Lucy yelped indignantly. 'What do you think I've been doing up until now?'

'Let me see, where shall I start? How about putting your life on hold for three years to act as an unpaid researcher for your boyfriend who then dumps you and takes the credit for all your work?' Lucy winced. That hadn't been her finest hour but she was older and wiser now.

'Or,' Annie continued warming to her theme, 'do you mean picking grapes in Burgundy? Or maybe looking after rich people's spoilt brats at Lucerne, and then there was the waitressing; now, that was a great career move…'

Lucy pulled a face down the receiver. 'They were lovely kids, and I got to see Europe.'

'I know, you saw the bits the tourists never see; call me superficial, love, but I like my authentic experience to involve authentic five-star hotels. And before you get all sniffy and superior think on…is it so bad of me wanting to see my little sister doing a decent job with some sort of prospects? It's such a waste—you were always the clever one…'

Copyright © 2003 by Kim Lawrence