You Can't Hurry Love

Chapter Thirty-Nine

DECEMBER 19th

'He did WHAT?'

'I know! I'm just as surprised about it as you are.'

'But . . . but . . . how?'

Lizzie sounds astonished and I catch myself shrugging dazedly to her words, until I remember I was sitting alone in a pub a few doors down from home and I didn't want to look foolish.

I sit up, taking a sip from my orange juice before continuing.

'I don't know,' I say down the phone. 'One minute we were screaming at each other in his office and the next thing I knew, he'd chased me down the street, pinned me up against the wall and then we were just . . .'

'Snogging each other's faces off?' Lizzie inputs slyly, finishing my sentence for me and my heart skips a beat as she repeats my words back to me.

It still wasn't sinking in. Even after an entire day of obsessing about it (and I mean obsessing), I still couldn't believe it had happened. Lincoln . . . his hands . . . his lips, on mine. The whole thing was absurd.

'Well, yeah. Pretty much.'

'And you didn't think to tell me any of this when you were in the office this morning?' Lizzies asks accusingly.

'I was going to,' I urge. 'But I couldn't get near to you. I sat waiting for half an hour in reception but I'd had to give up in the end, I was starving. And to be honest, you looked a bit tense anyway so I didn't want to bother you. Was everything okay earlier?'

'Oh, don't get me started on this morning,' Lizzie growls down the phone as I peer at my watch.

Only another ten minutes or so until he gets here. I wonder what his excuse was going to be.

'You know Lauren has basically got me phoning all of her contacts for this Christmas party, right? She's been telling anyone who even looks in her direction how she's so rushed off her feet having to sort everything out, but it's been me who's spent the entire week back and forth on the phone to the venue and the caterers and the technicians . . .'

'Are you for real? Why is she making you do it?'

'Apparently she's far too busy to have to deal with the logistics side of it all and to quote her words on Monday, "Seeing as you're paid to sit on the phones all day, it really shouldn't be any bother for you to pick up some of the slack. You are attending the party after all".' Lizzie huffs tempestuously. 'That's what she said to me. And when I told her I had enough to do without having to mollycoddle her as well, she called my manager and told her I was being difficult!'

'Shut up!' I gasp. 'That girl is a flaming liability.'

'I know! But don't you worry. I got my own back.'

'Oh, God. What've you done?'

'Let's just say Lauren was awfully intrigued about who you might be bringing to the Christmas party next week. She was acting all cool and unbothered, but she was doing her best to wrangle it out of me. I think she thought if she pretended to be pally with me I'd tell her you were actually lying about having a plus one after all and that you were secretly miserable and alone and trying desperately to find any old sod to go with you.' She makes a noise of contempt. 'But I set her straight.'

I wince painfully. Partly because of how pathetic her words made me sound. (I was miserable and alone and desperate for a date to take to this flaming party.) And partly because I knew Lizzie had a tendency to go to the extreme and I was dreading hearing the next words that left her mouth.