The Work Husband

Chapter 1

ONE

‘Of course,’ I said as brightly as I could, forcing myself to smile.

Even though I was on a voice call and not a video one, I couldn’t shake the fear that any doubt on my part would be immediately clear unless I was grinning so widely you’d be able to see if there was spinach in my teeth.

‘No worries, Cormac. Leave it with me. I’ll get back to you as soon as they’ve confirmed. Bye now.’

Replacing the handset in its cradle – gently, not slamming it as I longed to, in case Cormac hadn’t yet ended the call on his side – I finally rearranged my face and did the eye-roll I’d been suppressing. It was so exaggerated I practically caught sight of my own brain stem.

‘What does the nation’s number one crush want now?’ Across from me, Jamie looked curiously up from his computer screen. ‘Flock of flamingos delivered to his swimming pool? Madonna jumping out of the cake at his mum’s sixtieth birthday party? Flight to New York on Concorde?’

‘I wish.’ Gloomily, I picked up my mobile, flicking through my contacts even though I knew the answer to my problems wasn’t going to leap from the screen going, Ta-dah! ‘A flight on Concorde would be a walk in the park compared to what he wants this time.’

Jamie raised an eyebrow. He’d had them threaded recently, I noticed – probably at the same time he’d had his dark beard trimmed and his hair cut into an even sharper than usual low fade. ‘Concorde hasn’t flown for more than twenty years.’

‘I know. But getting it off the ground would still be easier than getting Cormac Kennedy a table for six tonight at Ash and Brine.’

‘Seriously?’ It was my colleague’s turn to roll his eyes. ‘Is he for real?’

‘Apparently so.’

On my computer screen, the photo of Cormac that had flashed up on the system when it identified his number stared broodingly back at me.

His hair was chestnut brown and artfully tousled, his eyes an improbably brilliant shade of forest green, his pouting lips full.

He’d hit the big time a few months back, starring in a Netflix adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray that had surprised everyone by becoming a viral hit.

Not long after, Cormac had joined the clientele of Devereaux Partners, the high-end concierge service firm where I’d worked for the past three years, and – in a classic case of being careful what you wish for – been assigned to me.

At first, I’d been giddy with excitement at the prospect, resisting the urge to break the firm’s confidentiality rules and tell absolutely everyone, and instead restricting myself to a breathless text message to my boyfriend, Sam.

Cormac who? he’d replied.

But the shine had worn off almost instantly.

Even though dealing with difficult clients was literally my job and smoothing ruffled egos was a skill I’d had years to perfect, Cormac had turned out to be next-level demanding.

He thought nothing of ringing me at one in the morning, expecting me to magic VIP nightclub access out of thin air.

I’d spent a Friday night making endless cups of coffee for a Savile Row tailor while he cursed and sweated over a bespoke suit that Cormac had decided with less than twenty-four hours’ notice he simply had to wear to a friend’s wedding.

He was the only person I’d ever met who asked the question, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ without a hint of irony.

And now he wanted a table at London’s hottest new restaurant, where online reservations were booked up within seconds of them opening. Worse still, Ash and Brine’s policy was that paying customers were paying customers, with no list of VIPs for whom tables would always be found.

‘What the hell am I going to do?’ I groaned. ‘I can’t tell him no.’

‘I mean, you could.’ Jamie grinned. ‘It would do him good. Like a life lesson.’

‘Trouble is, he’s spent years and years having people tell him no, and now they’ve suddenly stopped, he’s forgotten what it’s like.

Or maybe he actually remembers really clearly, and he’s not going back there without a fight.

I’ve got to make it happen. Depriving Cormac Kennedy of his oak-smoked oysters and aged dairy beef is not an option. ’

So much not an option that I could almost imagine offering to cook them for him myself – an offer which would be bound to end in disaster given my ability to set off smoke alarms every time I made a piece of toast.

Banishing Cormac’s face from my screen, I clicked over to the Ash and Brine website. I had it on a permanently open browser window, which I refreshed several times a day, just in case. But I hadn’t got lucky yet, and, surprise surprise, I didn’t get lucky now.

‘Nothing?’ Jamie asked.

‘Nothing,’ I confirmed. ‘I offered him one of the tables we booked on spec, but they’re no good. It’s got to be eight o’clock tonight, six people.’

‘Wanker.’ Jamie pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘I’m heading out for a vape. Coming?’

‘I’m good, thanks.’ Normally, although I didn’t indulge myself, I’d have gone outside with him to enjoy a bit of sunshine.

The long hours I’d been spending at my desk recently had left me feeling like one of those freakish, translucent blind creatures you sometimes read about biologists discovering in caves.

But right now, I didn’t fancy it – I felt like if I was away from my computer for five minutes, Cormac would call again, or a table would magically appear on Ash and Brine’s online booking system and be snapped up from under me.

I watched as Jamie strolled across the office, his vape and phone in his hands, his shoulders lean and straight beneath his waistcoat. Not for the first time, I felt a rush of gratitude that, whatever else might be wrong with my job – and there were many things – I had Jamie.

From the day I’d started at Devereaux Partners and learned that I’d be sitting next to Jamie, who himself had been in post for just a week, we’d got on.

We’d… vibed. We’d discovered that we shared a love of Pret smoked salmon sandwiches and Married at First Sight Australia.

We’d exchanged grimaces when a client came up with particularly absurd requests and, later, developed a whole secret language so we could slag them off behind our boss Jasper’s back.

Best of all, we didn’t fancy each other one bit.

At first, I’d worried that was a clear and present danger – even though I loved Sam and was one hundred per cent committed to our relationship, Jamie was the sort of man I’d have fancied if I was single.

I mean, anyone would. With his megawatt smile and his long legs and his sharp suits, he was straight out of ‘office crush’ central casting.

I’d even hoped that he might be gay, thus placing the two of us firmly in the friend zone by default, but that had turned out not to be the case.

But after a few weeks, with an almost slack feeling of relief, I’d realised it wasn’t going to happen.

I didn’t fancy Jamie! I wasn’t going to have to guard against inappropriate emotions or feelings.

And best of all, not having an office crush meant I wasn’t going to have to continually sneak off to reapply make-up at work, panic that I had a ladder in my tights or worry that a rogue eyebrow hair had suddenly sprouted between meetings.

And Jamie didn’t fancy me either. There was no flirtatiousness to our office banter, no hint that anything inappropriate might happen, even when we’d drunkenly shared Ubers home after nights out. We were colleagues and friends, and that was as far as it would ever go – and I was delighted.

Because Sam was perfect. Not in the glossy, groomed way Jamie was, but in his own imperfect way.

While Jamie never had a hair out of place, Sam’s mid-brown curls were often dishevelled and overdue a cut.

In contrast to Jamie’s immaculate office attire, Sam headed off to work in battered, faded jeans held up above his (frankly irresistible) bum by a vintage leather belt.

While Jamie was always surrounded by the fragrance of Parma violet aftershave, Sam would usually emerge from the shower smelling only of soap, having not bothered to shave at all.

Normally, imagining Sam in that state would have me feeling all the feels, but now not even that image could take my mind off my current predicament.

With a gusty sigh, I turned back to my computer and refreshed the Ash and Brine reservations site.

Nothing, obviously. I was going to have to ring Cormac and explain that, in spite of the Devereaux Partners slogan (‘Everything is Possible’), this, in fact, was not.

I was going to have to let down a client and endure the ensuing tantrum.

I’d be on the receiving end of one of Jasper’s famously sarcastic bollockings.

When I met Sam in the pub after work, I’d probably cry on his shoulder.

There was no point breaking the bad news just yet, though.

Nothing was going to change in the next half hour, but if I told Cormac too quickly that I’d failed to deliver what he wanted, he’d think I hadn’t tried.

I was going to have wait, the anticipation of my client’s reaction even worse than the actual reaction was likely to be.

Then I heard Jamie’s footsteps behind me. He hitched his hip on the corner of my desk and said, ‘So a horse walks into a bar…’

‘And the barman says, “Why the long face?”’ I finished for him, giving my second eye-roll of the afternoon. ‘Your face would be long too if you were about to have to ring Cormac Kennedy and tell him his dinner plans are a non-starter.’

‘Except they’re not.’ Jamie grinned. ‘I fixed it for you. Table for six at eight p.m. for Mr. C. Kennedy.’

‘What?’ I spun my chair round to face him so quickly I overshot and completed a full 360 before coming to rest. ‘You never.’

‘I did.’ Smugly, he adjusted a cufflink. ‘You know what they say around here?’

‘“Everything is possible”,’ I quoted, amazed. I was aware my jaw was hanging open like a goldfish mid-bubble, but I couldn’t seem to close it. I shook myself. ‘But it literally wasn’t.’

‘It literally was,’ he said. ‘You can thank me later.’