Chapter 4
4
“Are you sure you can’t come with me to this wedding, Ollie?” Carole said down the phone, unable to keep the pleading tone out of her voice. “It’ll be a great day! You’ll enjoy a terrific meal and you won’t have to pay for any drinks, I promise!”
“Sorry, Carole,” Ollie replied. “I wish I could say yes, but I’m on shift that day.”
Carole knew Ollie from back when they’d been friends at university. They’d stayed in touch over the years and often met for drinks with others from their graduating class to swap stories and catch up. He lived somewhat locally, near Southampton, which was why he’d made it onto Carole’s call list as a potential candidate for her wedding plus-one.
“Maybe you could switch shifts with someone else?” she asked.
“Sorry, but I can’t do that. Listen, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Carole, but you sound a bit desperate.”
“That’s because I am desperate, Ollie. I really need a plus-one for this wedding.”
“I wish I could help, but I’m managing a big project at work right now and every minute of my shifts are tied up with tasks I need to oversee to make sure things go smoothly. I can’t switch shifts, not unless it’s a huge emergency.”
“This is a huge emergency! My mother’s trying to pair me off with some awful guy who’ll make my brain melt with boredom listening to his self-obsessed drivel if I have to put up with him for an entire wedding.”
Ollie laughed down the line. “I really am sorry, Carole. You’ll find someone who’s willing and able, I’m sure of it. Listen, I need to go, but we’ll catch up soon, okay?”
They said their goodbyes and hung-up. Carole stared at her phone contacts for a long moment, wondering who else she could call up and humiliate herself with. Ollie was the fifth male friend she’d called and the fifth to turn her down. Everyone was too busy to help, with work or family commitments or other weekend plans they couldn’t change at late notice.
So much for this being a straightforward matter of calling up a friend or two and easily finding a date.
She wondered if she ought to start phoning her female friends, too. Restricting her search to the menfolk she knew clearly wasn’t getting her anywhere.
“Surely there must be someone out there who’ll take pity on me?” Carole muttered to herself, still scrolling through her phone.
The sudden appearance of a head above the garden fence gave her a start and she let out a squeak of surprise. When she looked up, she saw her new neighbour, Tom, peering over at her.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Tom said, giving her a sheepish grin.
“It’s fine. I was lost in my thoughts.”
Carole returned his smile and walked over to their shared fence line. Since moving into her new house, she’d met Tom on a few occasions as they’d both been coming and going. A couple of nights ago, he’d knocked on her door to give her a welcome card and a bottle of wine. The thoughtful gesture had touched her. It was nice to know she had friendly neighbours on both sides of her terraced property.
“How’s it going with the unpacking?” Tom asked.
“Nearly there,” Carole replied, and then gestured to her grubby clothing. “Please ignore how I look. I was painting the kitchen.”
Tom grinned. “Just ignore how I look, too,” he said, waving a hand at the shirt she could just about see above the top of the fence. “I was baking and decorating fairy cakes and I think there’s more icing on me than on them.”
Carole now noticed the splodges of icing sugar and dusting of flour across his shirt. “I didn’t know you were a baker, Tom.”
“I’m not. Evie was here.”
“Ah, I thought I heard voices. Not that I was listening through the fence or anything,” she added, hastily. “When I came outside to talk on the phone, I heard laughter and…”
But Tom was already waving away her explanation. “My kitchen door was open and sound travels, especially the shrieks and laughter of a nine-year-old girl.”
Carole still wasn’t sure what relation the little girl she’d seen at the house a couple of times was to Tom. Perhaps a niece? She’d briefly thought the child might be his daughter, considering how well the two of them seemed to get on, but when she’d heard the little girl call him by his first name as she’d waved goodbye a few days ago, she’d ruled that out.
She was about to ask about their relationship, but Tom kept talking.
“Listen, if I tell you what Evie and I were chatting about earlier, then you’ll understand why I couldn’t help listening to what you were saying on the phone just now.”
Heat flushed Carole’s cheeks. “Ah, you heard me begging my friends to be my wedding plus-one?”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard,” Tom said, his expression mercifully kind.
“It’s my cousin’s wedding next weekend, and my mother wants to pair me off with this dreadful man she knows because she doesn’t want me to be on my own. She’s a meddler.”
Tom laughed. “I’m sure she means well.”
“She does. But she’s still a meddler. I just got out of a long relationship before I moved here, you see, and…” Carole caught herself, certain her neighbour didn’t want to hear about any of this ridiculous melodrama. “I won’t bore you with the details.”
“You’re not boring me,” Tom said quickly. “Listen, you might not believe this, but I think I’m in the same situation right now as you are.”
Carole frowned. “What do you mean?”
“My ex, Lucy, is getting married in a few weeks’ time. Evie, that’s Lucy’s daughter, was telling me while we were baking earlier that her mother was sorting out the seating arrangements for the wedding reception and has sat me beside a woman who Lucy knows from work.” Tom grimaced. “Her name is Claire and she’s quite, er, full-on, and I really, really don’t want to end up sitting beside her at the meal.”
Carole nodded in understanding. “It sounds like we’re both in the same predicament.”
“Exactly. Which was why I was wondering…”
He trailed off and gave her a nervous look before continuing. “Well, this idea just popped into my head when I heard you talking on the phone, and feel free to tell me it’s a terrible idea if you’re not keen, but… maybe we could be each other’s plus-ones for these weddings?”
Carole took a second to register what he was saying. Her wide-eyed silence prompted him to keep talking, faster this time.
“Look, I know we hardly know each other, and you only just moved into your house, and the last thing you’re probably thinking about is dating your new neighbour, but this definitely wouldn’t be a date, not even remotely close to a date, it’d just be?—”
“—two desperate people helping each other out of dire straits,” Carole finished for him with a smile.
Tom’s bashful expression shifted into one of relief. “Exactly! You don’t want to be paired off with the plus-one your mother is trying to set you up with, and I don’t want to end up stuck with this Claire person slobbering all over me all night. She’s already told Lucy that she’s interested in me, but I’m not remotely interested in her, and she isn’t the sort of woman who’d let that sort of minor detail get in her way. I need a plus-one as a human shield.”
Carole laughed at the mental image he’d conjured and pictured herself at Tom’s side, her presence helping to repel the woman’s unwanted overtures.
And it was true that she, too, needed a plus-one as human shield—to fend off her mother’s matchmaking efforts, yes, but also as a crutch to lean on now that she knew Steven Weaver would be at the wedding.
It occurred to her to mention her old flame to Tom, but if she brought him up it would just make her sound even more pathetic than she already felt. Tom had overheard her begging unsuccessfully on the phone for a wedding date to avoid being paired off by her mother. That was mortifying enough, without adding that the only man who’d ever broken her heart would also be at the wedding, and that she wanted a man on her arm when the time came to face him after all these years.
She decided to debrief Tom on all that stuff later, not while they were chattering over the garden fence. She had to preserve at least some dignity.
What mattered right now was that she had a solution to her awful problem, and she intended to grab it with both hands.
“Okay, Tom, I’ll be your human shield if you’ll be mine,” she told him.
Tom let out a breath of obvious relief. “Brilliant! Thank you. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
“Same here. I’ve got enough going on right now, unpacking and sorting out this place,” Carole said, gesturing to her house, “without having to dig around for someone to take pity on me and agree to come with me to this wedding, which, I’m ashamed to say, I’d completely forgotten all about until about half an hour ago.”
“Right, let’s get our details straight,” Tom said, pulling out his phone. “When and where is your wedding?”
“Next Saturday. The ceremony is at one o’clock at a little church over in Petersfield, that much I do recall, but I can’t remember where the reception is being held. I’ll get back to you with the details.”
Tom tapped on his phone while she spoke. “Okay, that’s in my calendar so my boss at work can’t rope me into any new commitments or work trips.”
Carole realised she had no idea what Tom did for a living. In fact, she knew next to nothing about him at all, and yet here she was, swapping wedding plus-one details with him. It should’ve been odd, but the open warmth in his expression as he shared the date and time of his wedding commitments with her made her feel nothing but comfortable about agreeing to all this.
“So, at least we’ll get all this out the way quite quickly,” Tom said, once they’d swapped wedding details. “Your cousin’s wedding is next weekend, and my ex’s wedding is two weeks after that, and then you’ll be shot of me.”
Carole laughed. “If nothing else, it’ll be a nice chance for us to get to know each other better, now that we’re neighbours.”
“You’re right,” Tom said. “And it’s a huge a relief knowing I’ve got a date for this wedding with absolutely no strings attached.”
“I know exactly what you mean.” Carole smiled and gestured to her paint-splattered clothes. “Listen, now that I’ve averted a wedding date disaster, I should get back to cleaning my paint brushes.”
Tom nodded and stepped back from the fence. “Good luck with the work.”
“See you a week on Saturday.”
“If not before.”
With a wave, Tom disappeared from above the fence line and Carole heard him close the kitchen door as he went inside. She lingered for a moment in the cool evening breeze, relieved that such a brilliantly simple solution to her wedding date predicament had presented itself at precisely the moment she needed it.
The plus-one she’d told her mother about was no longer fictional, which meant if Nina tried to harass her again about pairing up with the gruesome Bradley Godfrey, she could name her neighbour Tom as her date for the day.
But knowing she’d have a man at her side when she inevitably saw Steven Weaver at the wedding was even more of a relief.
It didn’t hurt that Tom was a good-looking man, tall and dark-haired and in great shape. If wanting such a man at her side when she encountered Steven again made her shallow and immature, well, she could make her peace with that.
Carole took a final deep breath of the sweet summer air in her garden before going back inside the house. There were still paintbrushes and rollers to be scrubbed, and boxes to unpack upstairs, before she could reward herself with a long soak in a hot bath to ease her aching arms and shoulders after her redecoration work.
She paused to admire the fresh paint on the kitchen walls, now catching the last of the evening sunshine. Seeing the light and warmth of the space, she knew the effort had been more than worth it.
Her new life on Foxglove Street couldn’t have got off to a better start.