‘I took over my mum’s business when she retired, and made a few changes, including the name and the van.’
‘I see you’re still wearing dungarees.’ He smiled and looked around again. ‘So this is your doing. It’s great.’
She couldn’t help the glow of pleasure and pride inside her. ‘Thanks but I can’t take all the credit. A friend helped me. I wouldn’t have been able to finish on time if it hadn’t been for him.’
‘I’m sorry I dragged you all the way here for nothing, old chap, when you still have to drive to the holiday let, unpack your stuff and get ready for the stag do,’ Alastair told Nathan. ‘I should have trusted Cassie to do a great job and have everything under control.’
Nathan shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it… Actually, I could murder a pint. Who is up for a drink at the pub?’
Kerry and Alastair replied that they were meeting the vicar for a last minute talk about the ceremony.
‘What about you?’ Nathan asked Cassie.
A drink with Nathan… Two years before she would have swooned at the idea. All she could think of now was that this was her chance to ask him about Hotel Maritel. ‘I have a couple of things to sort out here, but why not?’
‘Great. I’ll meet you at the Eagle and Child.’
Once alone, Cassie forced herself to focus on putting the finishing touches to the décor and making sure everything was in order for the reception the following day, but she was shaking with nerves. She hated confrontations, especially after the ugly scene with Piers earlier on, and had no idea how to broach the subject of her hotel designs with Nathan.
Her fingers froze as she realised she was folding the petals of the same paper flower over and over again. She put the flower down. She was only wasting time… She should be brave and drive to the pub right now to ask Nathan for an explanation. As the horrid altercation with Piers had shown her that lunchtime, procrastinating only led to trouble.
Nathan was sipping a beer and chatting to Sadie at the bar when she walked in. She ordered an orange juice, and they took their drinks to a table near the fireplace.
Nathan glanced up at the paper snowflakes dangling from the ceiling, the lights flickering along the counter and the fireplace, and the tinsel draped around the Christmas tree, and pulled a face. ‘In all the years I worked in Ambleside I’ve never been here at Christmas. The decorations are a bit over the top, aren’t they?’
‘Big Jim and his wife Ruby make everything themselves.’
‘And doesn’t it show?’ he muttered before turning to look at her. ‘I never thought I would ever bump into you again. I have known Alastair since school, but I had no idea his fiancée was related to you.’
‘She is, in a roundabout way.’ Now he was looking at her, his dark brown eyes soft as velvet, she could hardly speak. At least if she kept her sentences short there was less risk of stammering, or saying anything stupid. Her old feelings of inadequacy were springing back to the surface. It was as if she was the clueless young cleaner, and he the posh, handsome and talented designer all over again.
‘I hope you weren’t offended that Alastair called me to help with the clubhouse,’ Nathan said. ‘He was worried you couldn’t pull it off, but you did a really good job, considering it was all very last minute.’
‘Thank you.’ She drank a sip of orange juice and wished she was less tongue-tied. Perhaps she should have asked Sadie to pour a slug of vodka or gin in her glass.
Nathan was smiling, but his fingers tapped against his pint glass, and he kept coughing to clear his throat. ‘Is your cleaning business doing well?’
‘I manage.’ Or she did, before the fiasco with Piers. She would have to work really hard to get new clients if – when – Piers terminated her contract.
‘Good. Good. Have you… ahem… thought any more about working in interior design?’
She nodded. ‘Every single day.’ Now would be the time to mention that she read the professional press, and had seen the article in Great Designs about Maritel.
‘Ah…’ He drank a sip of beer. ‘Have you worked on any design project since I moved to London?’
‘A few.’ This wasn’t strictly a lie. Mason’s house, Salomé’s living room and Cecilia’s shop refurbishment counted as proper interior design projects after all, albeit on a small scale. She couldn’t however mention her sketches for Belthorn or the holiday cottages since she had no intention of ever submitting them.
He fiddled with his beer mat and appeared engrossed in reading the slogan printed at the front. ‘Good… Actually it’s lucky I bumped into you because I have something rather interesting to tell you.’
He cleared his throat again. ‘It’s about the hotel refurbishment competition I worked on two years ago. Do you remember?’
‘Of course.’ Did he expect her to have forgotten that he had branded her sketches as amateurish, and broken her heart in the process?
‘Well, the thing is I found your portfolio when I unpacked my stuff in my London studio and realised that some of your ideas were actually quite good – for an amateur, that is.’ He looked at her and smiled, probably expecting her to jump up with joy.
When she didn’t say anything, he carried on. ‘Of course, your sketches needed a lot of redrafting but they provided me with an initial idea. I reworked some of them and submitted them to Maritel. And guess what?’
‘You won the competition, and now you have the contract to refurbish their whole chain,’ she answered.
He glared at her. ‘You know?’
‘I saw the article and the photos in Great Designs magazine.’
‘Ah. Yes.’ He gave her a tight smile. ‘I should have told you, shouldn’t I, that I was using some of your ideas, but I… I didn’t know how to get in touch.’
This was the biggest, most ridiculous lie she’d ever heard, and all of a sudden her shyness and confusion fell away. ‘I’ve had the same phone number for years – the same you texted me on every week to arrange my cleaning days. And even if you’d lost it, you could have checked the internet, or asked any of your friends or former business contacts who lived locally.’
He looked down, and sighed. It was so strange, sitting opposite this man she had once had a massive crush on – a man she always believed was completely out of her league, being more intelligent, more talented, and altogether more worthy than her – and feel nothing but contempt.
‘Why didn’t you tell Maritel your designs were my ideas?’
He drained what was left of his beer and gave her a quizzical look before putting his glass down. ‘Do you really not understand?’ He sounded haughty and patronising now. ‘They wanted a designer with a good track record and wouldn’t have taken the proposal seriously if I had told them it came from a cleaning lady who only had one A-Level and a distance-learning diploma.’
She shook her head. ‘What mattered was the work, not my CV, and at the end of the day, you used my ideas.’
‘Believe me, there’s a lot of snobbism in the field of interior design, and Maritel would have scrunched the papers into a ball and thrown them in the bin without even glancing at them if they’d had your name on them. Anyway, like I said, I did have to rework and refine the whole concept and sell it to them.’