Anything but Vanilla(29)
Sorrel wasn’t the only one to immediately think the worst.
Her words had been distorted, broken, but the urgency of her plea for him to ‘come now’, the certainty that she’d been crying had been enough for him to abandon his search and fly home.
Finding the insolvency notice, tossed on the hall table amongst a muddle of bills, had been something of a relief. Financial problems he could deal with, but now it seemed that his ‘Glad you’re not here?’ postcard, sent when he’d briefly touched civilisation a few weeks back, had triggered the downward spiral.
He felt for her, would clear up the mess, but he couldn’t allow her to carry on like this. It wasn’t fair on the people who relied on her. People like Sorrel Amery.
Unfortunately, in her case it was not just a simple matter of settling accounts and then shutting up shop. Despite her outrageously skimpy clothes, she appeared to have convinced sane men to hire her company. Sane men that he knew.
That took more than a short skirt and a ‘do me’ smile and in a burst of irritation he Googled Scoop!
There was more, he discovered. A lot more.
Scoop!’s website was uncluttered, elegant and professional. There were photographs of attractive girls and good-looking young men carrying trays that were a sleek update on the kind used by cinema usherettes and designed to carry a couple of dozen mini ice-cream cones or little glasses containing a mouthful of classic ice-cream desserts.
He clicked on one of the links—an ice-cream cone, what else?—and discovered Sorrel wearing a glamorous calf-length black lace cocktail dress with a neckline that displayed her figure to perfection. He’d seen something very similar in a photograph of his great-grandmother when she was a young woman.
Sorrel, unlike Great-grandma, was wearing the stop-me-and-buy-one smile that would have had him buying whatever she was selling.
Except that the smile wasn’t for him. What she was selling was her business and that was all she’d been thinking about today. While he’d been momentarily blown away by it, falling into the waiting kiss and sufficiently distracted by it to let her walk all over him, she hadn’t wavered in her focus for a moment. She’d only ever had one thing on her mind—ice cream.
Which was the good news.
He told himself that the bad news was that he was stuck with her. Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that. On the contrary, being stuck with her felt like a very good place to be.
He’d definitely been out of circulation for too long, he decided. What he needed...
He forgot what he needed as he clicked through the links to check out recent events and found himself looking at a photograph of a laughing bride about to take a mouthful of an ice that exactly matched the heavily embroidered bodice of her gown. He stared at it for a moment, a back-to-earth reality check, before he clicked through the rest of the photographs.
A school football team celebrating a cup win, their traditional ice-cream cones containing black-and-white striped ices to match their strip.
A company reception, the ices in the colours of the company logo.
He found the ice-cream van, too. Rosie, like the dress that Sorrel was wearing, was a lovingly restored vintage and had made appearances at any kind of event he could think of from hen parties, birthday parties, weddings, even a funeral in the last few months and she—someone—blogged about her very busy life, including appearances in a television drama series that was filmed locally.
He scrolled down until he found what he hadn’t known he was looking for. Sorrel Amery dressed as the Christmas ice-cream fairy. The smile was, it seemed, not reserved for gullible men. She had her arms around a small, desperately sick child, giving her a hug, making her laugh. And this time it brought a lump to his throat.
There was, apparently, a whole lot more to Sorrel Amery than long legs and lashes that fringed eyes the green and gold haze of a hazel hedge on an early spring morning.
But he’d already worked that out. She’d been concerned about her ice cream, her ‘event’ but, despite being badly let down, she’d shown concern for Ria, too. That displayed a depth of character that didn’t quite match the skirt, the shoes or a kiss for a man she’d only set eyes on a minute before. A kiss that had left him breathless.
Apparently he was the one who was shallow here, leaping to conclusions, judging on appearances.
Sorrel hadn’t fallen apart when her day had hit the skids. After a shaky start, she’d buckled down, dealt with the problems as they had been hurled at her and, in the process, convinced him to do something that went against every instinct.