Husband Material (London Calling #2)(53)

Pushing open the door, we stepped into that churchy hush that all jewellers seemed to cultivate, as if they were trying to instil a sense of inadequacy that could be dispelled only by spending more than you could afford.

I was instilled with a sense of inadequacy.

And my credit was nowhere near good enough to dispel it.

To quell my rising panic, I peered into one of the counters, as if I knew what the fuck I was doing. Except I didn’t. I wasn’t even looking at rings.

“Can I help you, sir?”

I looked up to see a slender, ashen-faced man in a three-piece suit who somehow looked like he had a pencil moustache, while also being completely clean-shaven. “Um,” I said. “Um.”

The unaccountably intimidating shop assistant folded his hands behind his back. “And what might sir be looking for?”

Somehow, he made sir sound like an insult.

“I guess,” I tried. “Um. A ring?”

“Estate? Eternity? Wedding? Puzzle? Promise? Semi-mount?

Signet? Cocktail? Cluster? Claddagh?”

Oh my God, I’d walked into the lair of the riddling jeweller. Any second now he was going to say, My first is in diamond, but isn’t in heart. “Engagement,” I squeaked.

“Ah.” In one syllable, he managed to express more disappointment than any of my schoolteachers or university lecturers had ever managed.

I visibly cringed. “Is that okay?”

Without another word, he bent at the waist and drew forth a velvet tray that he laid in front of me very much with the air of someone casting pearls before swine.

Which, as it turned out, he definitely was. Because, looking at the price tags, I couldn’t afford anything.

“Do you,” I asked, with a disproportionate amount of shame for someone who, at the end of the day, was still about to shell out about five hundred quid in his guy’s shop, “by any chance have anything…cheaper?”

The man cleared his throat and took way too long replacing the tray of shit I couldn’t afford with a tray of twenty-five-pound cubic-zirconia tat.

“Oh, come on.” I made a gestural Oh, come on to underscore my verbal Oh, come on in the hopes of articulating quite how much of an Oh, come on situation this was. “Something in the middle.”

“The first tray was in the middle, sir.”

I tried to remember that working in customer service was unrewarding and people had to take their entertainment where they could. “Okay, something just under the middle, then. Something below average. Because I am a below-average person, as you have so clearly implied.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” said the gaslighting fuck on the other side of the counter.

James Royce-Royce stepped forward. “We want to see a selection of men’s engagement rings in the five-to-eight-hundred-pound range.”

I don’t know how James Royce-Royce, despite having a still faintly Muppet-esque baby strapped to his chest, managed to have more gravitas than me, but he did. And approximately forty seconds later, we were poring over a tray of exactly the type of rings I’d been looking for in exactly the range of prices I’d been expecting to pay for them. They were, in a lot of ways, quite similar. Because this was one of those areas where men’s fashions followed some pretty strict rules, though fortunately those rules more or less matched what I knew of Oliver’s taste. Which was to say classic, masculine, and non-ostentatious.

I turned to James Royce-Royce. “How did you…”—I gave a nonspecific hand wave—“for James?”

He shrugged. “It was easy. Got the biggest, shiniest thing I could. Had it custom made.”

“Oh, right. Because you’re incredibly rich.”

He shrugged again. “Not my fault you didn’t do a maths degree, Luc.”

Welp, he had me there. Once again, I leaned over to inspect the rings in front of me. Between my budget and Oliver’s aesthetic, I was able to narrow it down quickly to a gold band, a brushed-gold band, a white-gold band, a subtly different white-gold band, and a white-gold band with a thin strip of rose gold running round the middle.

There’d also been one with a diamond set in it, one with three diamonds set in it, and one with a faux Celtic motif, but I’d discounted those immediately on the grounds that Oliver would have fucking hated them. After a moment of thought, I also discounted the plain and the brushed gold because they’d looked too weddingy and Oliver was kind of traditional in some regards, so I wasn’t sure he’d like a gold engagement ring.

“Okay.” I turned to James Royce-Royce. “Which of these identical rings is least crap?”

“Excuse me, sir,” protested the unaccountably intimidating shop assistant. “I can assure you our goods are all of the highest quality.”

I glowered at him. “Leave it out, this isn’t Tiffany’s. You’ve made it very clear that I’m a middle-of-the road guy, but let’s be honest: this is a middle-of-the-road shop.”

“Sir appears to have taken offence at my manner,” the assistant sneered. “I beg sir’s forgiveness.”

Obviously he was banking on sir being too lazy to walk eight minutes down the road to a shop where sir might be treated less rudely. And he had sir bang to rights. Sir would take a lot more abuse than this if it meant dodging a short walk or a long queue.