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Honestly, coming all the way down here in the hopes of seeing a woman she’d met once for thirty seconds and who had turned her down.

What an idiot.

She gestured to the bartender for another drink.

Chapter Eight

Constable purred and rolled over, wanting his tummy tickled. Ellie obliged as she looked over the list on her laptop. It was good, but not perfect, and she needed perfect. With a sigh, she picked up her phone and called Mo.

Who didn’t answer.

She growled and tried Carys. No answer there either.

Her laptop flickered up a message that her battery was low. Why was tonight the night when things decided to go wrong? She found the power lead, plugged it in and went into the kitchen to make tea.

Comfortably settled with a cup of tea and her laptop in her lap again, she went back to work. Color swatches were added to table decorating ideas, yet more menu options. She needed some kind of idea of what the location was going to be, but so far, Alistair Darlington had been close-mouthed on the situation.

A nice hotel would be her first choice. Something central. She googled and added a few ideas to the list.

And then her laptop flashed up another power warning. Muttering under her breath, she wiggled the cable and went back to work.

The kind of hotel that Alistair Darlington would like and the kind of hotel that Ellie Baker was familiar with were two very different monsters. Actually, now that she thought of it, she’d only ever stayed in a hotel once, on a school trip to StratfordUpon Avon. Or had that been a hostel? Probably a hostel now she came to think of it.

Still, anything was better than the tiny broom cupboard of a bedroom that she’d shared with her sisters.

She didn’t allow herself to think of her family often, so she blurred out her sisters’ faces from her memory, like on Court TV. She could clearly see the bedroom though, the bunkbeds and the single bed crammed together into a sort of mattress fort, half obscuring the only window. The posters that she’d ripped out of magazines at the library to decorate the wall.

The entire flat hadn’t been much bigger than the one she was in now, and there’d been four, sometimes five of them, depending on who her mother was taking up with at the time.

One of the things she treasured most about her life now was the quiet, the silence when she walked in the door.

Constable meowed for attention as though to remind her that she wasn’t completely alone, not that she minded being alone. And then the computer flashed up a very serious sounding power warning.

“For God’s sake,” she muttered to herself, plugging and unplugging the power cable, jiggling it around in the slot, and finally moving it to a different socket.

Her laptop started to make a death-rattle, a slowing sound that she knew meant it was about to shut down. And the power cable was doing precisely nothing.

She reached out to hit the save icon but was a fraction of a millisecond too late. She wailed in frustration as her laptop screen faded into blackness.

“God damn it!”

She took deep breaths, in and out, focusing on the feeling of oxygen flowing through her. Trying and failing to calm herself down. What if this was a sign? A jinx? What if the whole stupid party was going to be like this? Doomed from the very beginning?

And then she’d be a laughing stock. Her name would still be known, but it would be known as someone to avoid, herbusiness would collapse, she’d have to fire Mo, she’d have to let the flat go. The sound of breath rushing into her lungs grew louder and faster.

Someone knocked at the door. But Ellie was too busy trying to catch her breath to answer it. They knocked again and Ellie’s vision started to fade like her computer screen, started to close in at the edges.

“El! Ellie! Breathe!”

Which was ridiculous advice because breathing was exactly what had gotten her into this situation in the first place.

“Count with me,” Paul said, his worried face pale. “We’re going in for four, hold for five, out for six. Come on, love, you’ve got this. In, two, three four. Hold, two, three, four, five. Out, two, three, four, five, six.”

She did as she was told because she had nothing else to do and if she was going to die of a heart attack right here on her own sofa then she supposed there were worse places to go. Paul was holding her hands, counting patiently, and she just kept doing what he told her to.

Until slowly, her vision came back, the darkness receded, her breathing slowed, and she was able to mumble that she needed water.

“Here,” said Paul, handing her a glass carefully then sitting on the couch beside her.