Page 5 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop (Vintage Dress Shop Romance #3)

At least Anita and Bea were not loved up, though they never had any shortage of admirers either on the apps or in actual real life. They were already planning their manoeuvres for the rest of the evening: a bar in Dalston, then a party after that.

Phoebe made a mental note to make sure that they weren’t hungover tomorrow. She couldn’t have them breathing stale alcohol fumes on the customers or the dresses.

Freddy caught her eye and winked again as Phoebe drained the last of her drink, then stood up. She never stayed long. Just the one drink.

There was a fine line between being manageress and being a mate. Phoebe never wanted to step over it. So, when no one wanted to talk about vintage fashion anymore and half of their party were making noises about heading off to the pool table, it was time for Phoebe to leave.

She gathered up a grumbling Coco Chanel, tucking her under one arm like a clutch bag, and said her goodbyes. ‘I’ll see you all tomorrow, bright-eyed and absolutely not hungover. Right?’

Phoebe stood her ground until Anita and Bea agreed that they wouldn’t be hungover, then wended her way through the crowded pub.

Outside, it was now dark enough and late enough that the streets were quiet. She took Coco’s lead and they began to walk the route that they both knew so well.

Behind them came the sound of footsteps. With her heart racing, Phoebe turned the corner but the footsteps were still coming closer and closer.

Then there was a hand on her arm, so Phoebe and Coco had to stop. She turned round, her heart still going like the clappers, and couldn’t even make a sound of protest as the hand slipped to her waist to pull her closer.

‘I’ve been wanting to kiss you for hours,’ Freddy said, because she might not need a man but it was quite . . . nice to have a man, Freddy, in her life.

‘Not hours,’ Phoebe protested. ‘You came to the shop just after six and it’s not even eight.’

‘I don’t have to be in your presence to want to kiss you,’ Freddy said, his voice dipping low in a way that always caused Phoebe’s knees to tremble.

‘I hope your clients don’t realise that you’re wasting their billable hours thinking about . . .’

‘Less arguing, more kissing,’ Freddy said and then he was kissing her and Phoebe hadn’t really wanted to argue with Freddy anyway.

She’d much rather be kissing him too. The hand that wasn’t clutching Coco’s lead now grabbed Freddy’s shoulder as his mouth moved on hers, his hands cradling her face as if she was something precious.

They kissed until Coco Chanel came between them. Quite literally. Wriggling her body between their legs and jumping up so that her front paws were pressed against Phoebe’s thighs.

‘You’re such a buzzkill, Coco,’ Freddy said fondly. He scooped Coco up and, after checking to make sure that there was no one around, Phoebe tucked her arm into Freddy’s and they walked home.

Not to the houseboat but to Freddy’s flat a couple of streets away.

He wasn’t just a solicitor by trade and a Mr Fixit for Johnno and the dress shop, he also handled the business affairs of several well-known indie bands, a big live music and arts venue in Chalk Farm and who knew what else.

Freddy’s clever hands were knuckle-deep in several pies.

His office was on the second floor of a pretty stucco-fronted building just off Regent’s Park Road and Freddy lived above that on the top floor.

It had been a long day but Phoebe wasn’t out of breath as she climbed up the many flights of stairs, the stairwell getting narrower and narrower, in her heels.

She’d been here many times. When she reached Freddy’s front door, she did what she always did and slipped off her heels with a grateful sigh before Freddy had even got his keys out.

Phoebe took off her coat and hung it one of the hooks by the door.

Freddy already had Coco’s jacket and lead off and was heading for his little galley kitchen, Coco leading the way.

As Phoebe stretched tiredly, she could hear the fridge door opening then the trickle of water as he filled Coco’s bowl from the filter jug.

Not the tap. She’d had to tell Freddy a hundred times before he finally got the message.

‘Does madam want salmon or chicken tonight?’ Freddy was asking Coco Chanel by the time Phoebe followed them into the kitchen.

The whole flat was tucked under the eaves.

The sloping edges of each room weren’t designed for giants.

It was just as well that Freddy wasn’t that tall.

Only a couple of inches taller than Phoebe when she was in her heels.

Which was just how Phoebe liked it. She knew that a lot of women seemed to think that only men over six feet were acceptable, as if height was an actual character trait like being generous or kind to animals, but she didn’t feel comfortable having someone loom over her.

Freddy wasn’t a loomer, which was one of his many good qualities.

It was funny but Phoebe had never really had a type.

She’d always supposed that if she could tolerate a man, a romantic partner, for any length of time, he’d share a similar aesthetic to Phoebe.

A vintage king. With a nice line in retro suits, his hair quiffed, his shirts and ties always immaculate.

Freddy sat somewhere between Charles and Miles when it came to style.

He liked a suit, but an Italian, slim-cut sixties sort of suit like the dark grey one he was wearing tonight, accessorised with a black Fred Perry with yellow accents and a pair of very retro Adidas shell-toe trainers.

His curly brown hair was always tousled, very much like when Harry Styles had had really good hair.

Also like Harry Styles, Freddy had a friendly ready smile while his blue eyes seemed to come with a twinkle as a permanent feature.

There was more to Freddy than the cheeky-chappy persona that he presented to the world. He was an enigma. That’s what Johnno had called him once. And it was true. Just when Phoebe thought that she had Freddy worked out, he always managed to surprise her.

Just as she’d been surprised at the butterflies that had taken up residence in her stomach when they’d met some eight years earlier.

She’d only recently been made manageress of The Vintage Dress Shop, though she’d worked with Johnno ever since the days of the Holloway junk shop, where she’d quickly moved up through the ranks.

Even though Phoebe had only been interested in their small stock of vintage fashion and would have nothing to do with the other quite unsavoury things they’d also sold.

Johnno had never met a piece of manky taxidermy that he didn’t love.

In her spare time, Phoebe had trawled the charity shops buying up vintage dresses for a song, then selling them on to Johnno for quite the mark-up.

Even now, many years later, Phoebe still felt quite guilty about all those vintage dresses that she’d treated as commodities.

Plus, there’d been one 1950s dress, a ballerina-length black lace ball gown that she wished she’d kept for herself.

She occasionally still dreamed about it.

Eventually the vintage dresses had taken over most of the floorspace of Johnno’s Junk and when Johnno had sold up and moved to the rarified climes of Primrose Hill some ten years earlier, Phoebe had gone with him.

She was twenty-two by then. With three GCSEs and an attitude. That was what she brought to her job.

But Johnno had a kind heart and he was only one of two people in the entire world that Phoebe trusted.

So, despite what everyone else called her unfortunate manner, Johnno gave Phoebe a job in his fancy new shop.

Besides, even then, she still knew more about vintage fashion than the rest of the staff put together.

Including Lucie, the very snooty manageress who had a degree in fine art and a trust fund so she didn’t even need the job.

Phoebe had picked off each subsequent manager. Until finally Johnno had given in and handed over the reins of power. From a girl who came from nothing, absolutely nothing, to being in charge of your own high-end vintage boutique by the time she was twenty-five was quite the leap.

It was around that time that Freddy had come into their lives.

He’d taken over from Johnno’s old solicitor, a starchy man called Mr Bird.

Mr Bird’s remit was to deal with anything particularly troublesome like communicating with the shop’s landlord or the heart-lurching occasion when they’d taken delivery of some costume jewellery, which had turned out to be stolen (this was also before Charles had come into their lives.)

Phoebe hadn’t thought much of it when Johnno had breezed into the shop one morning, left a dog-eared envelope next to the till and then breezed out again.

‘I’ve got to go and see a man about a dog, Pheebs, but my solicitor’s popping in to pick up some papers.

Be a love and make sure he gets them, will you? ’

But the stooped, suited and always harried-looking Mr Bird had never turned up.

She’d put the papers away in the office for safekeeping and when she came back from lunch there was a young man in jeans, a vintage 1960s Gabicci navy knitted shirt with white top-stitching, and Adidas trainers sitting on one of the pink sofas.

Which wasn’t unprecedented. Men did come into The Vintage Dress Shop, mostly to sit on the pink sofas with a long-suffering look as the women they’d come in with shopped, but this man didn’t look long-suffering at all.

His posture was relaxed and his grin was wide as the two girls and the very handsome Hans who worked in the shop back then, fluttered around him like moths to his cheeky-chappy flame.

‘Good to see that you’re all hard at work,’ Phoebe had said to announce her presence, which had gone unnoticed.