Out of the Blue Read online

  _________

  NINA HARRINGTON

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter One

  Friday

  Things to do today:

  *Deliver all of the weekend orders before six.

  *Try to stop panicking about turning thirty. Yeah. Sob.

  *Convince Alex that I really do NOT want a boy stripper turning up at my birthday party this year. Seriously. No strippers, blind dates, or any other kind of dates.

  “Hi, Erin. Isn’t he the dreamiest?”

  Erin Doyle whirled around on the narrow London footpath and grinned at her old school friend Pippa, who was sneaking a quick cigarette in the covered doorway of the bookshop where she worked. Pippa was rocking a 1940s style tweed skirt suit, bright magenta pink tights and black patent loafers, so this was one of her less adventurous days.

  “I thought you’d stopped smoking, Pip.” Erin tutted with a smile.

  “Hey. Lent is still a few months away and I need something to give up and it is not going to be my latest man crush, that’s for sure.”

  Erin snorted through her nose and dodged between the jostling crowds of pedestrians to step closer.

  “Who is tickling your fancy this time? The sales rep who slips you free books, or another hottie from those erotica novels you keep stashed under the counter?”

  Pippa sniffed once dismissively and looked longingly at the window display before replying with a slow sigh of frustrated lust. “They are nothing to me compared to my Luca.”

  Erin followed her gaze and in an instant, her shoulders slumped towards the pavement.

  “Oh, mozzarella balls!” She exhaled in a long slow groan.

  Erin couldn’t help it. The words came tumbling out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  The downside of ghostwriting your cousin’s cookery books was that sometimes you had to see a collection of your precious recipes, the modern Italian dishes you had slaved late into the night to perfect, with Luca Caruso’s face plastered all over the cover.

  But there he was. Luca Caruso. Her least favourite Italian cousin.

  Today Luca was leering at her from behind the hardback copies of what the huge placard declared to be the eagerly awaited cookbook from Italy’s hottest new celebrity chef.

  Italy’s hottest chef? Fake, fake, and more fake with extra fake on the side.

  Her so-called family might own one of Italy’s largest food companies, but their precious son and heir could not boil water without burning it.

  Which was so ridiculous it was not even vaguely funny.

  Oh, he acted the part, she gave him that. Luca’s entourage of slick image consultants made sure he stayed totally on message, no matter what TV chat show or magazine interview he gave. The speech was always the same. Luca the great was not only a talented chef, but also a brilliant businessman who had personally saved the Caruso food company with his passion for wonderful home-cooked food.

  Of course, Luca made sure that he was never expected to personally cook anything on live TV, apart from maybe tossing a salad one of the team had made. But what made her really grind her teeth was that not only was Luca useless in a kitchen, but she was the one who came up with all of those recipes!

  The stress headache that had been bothering Erin all day started to throb just behind her eyes. Why did Luca have to turn up today of all days?

  Her thirtieth birthday was supposed to be something to celebrate! But the more she looked at the window display the more depressed she became.

  Look at him! She was precisely one month older than Luca and their lives could not be more different.

  What did she have to show for all her years of hard work? Aching feet and a collection of plain, easy-to-wash work clothes.

  He looked fresh and enthusiastic while she was exhausted from running ragged just keeping Doyle’s deli afloat.

  “He really is to die for,” Pippa drooled, gazing up at the life-size colour poster of Luca that dominated the bookshop window. “If only we had hot Italians like that around here every day.”

  Erin stared up at the poster and hot was not the first word that came to mind at that moment.

  The stylist had gone overboard this time and the Luca who smirked back at her was just too perfect, too smooth and way too arrogant and oily to be digestible.

  Real chefs did not have manicures and dental veneers, and that self-satisfied pout made her want to grab the placard and tear it to shreds.

  Pippa would probably be stunned by the fact that she was even vaguely related to this cardboard cut-out. But on second thoughts it was probably best not to talk about the Carusos. She already had enough on her plate without adding to her headache.

  “Did you see Luca on Chefs Italia last week? Talk about a judge with the most. Girls in the audience were drooling!” Pippa tilted her head to one side, slid her Harry Potter black-rimmed spectacles down from the top of her head onto her nose and peered closer to the glass. “Yup. Luca Caruso is now, officially, on my hunkalicious hotties list.”

  “Sorry. I missed that episode,” Erin whispered and pressed her lips tight together. She would rather run down the high street wearing nothing but strategically placed sheets of pasta than waste her time watching her cousin Luca Caruso pretend to know the first thing about cooking.

  If the bookshops only knew the truth about who was actually writing those recipes, they would run Luca out of town!

  Shame that she had signed a rock-solid contract swearing her to secrecy.

  “Are you here for the book signing tonight?” Pippa whispered. “Luca will be here in person. Oh, I can hardly wait.” She jiggled around on the spot for a few seconds in excitement then looked up and asked. “Do you think he would notice me if I swooned?”

  Well, this was getting even better! Apparently, Luca Caruso was in London for a book signing and the family had not even bothered to let her know or offer to meet up. Nice!

  Of course, she had been here before, but it still hurt.

  Her poor mother had spent the last years of her life waiting in vain for the phone call from her brother Paolo, pleading with her to go back to Milan to take her place in the family business. Surely her own family would not cut her off, just because she married a handsome Irish grocer and moved to London.

  Erin took a deep calming breath of diesel fumes from the passing London buses, motorcycles and taxis and coughed on the fug.

  She was still waiting for that call on the day that she died.

  The corner of Erin’s left eye started to burn with unshed tears, but she instantly blinked them away and lifted her chin to take one last look at the poster.

  A hint of a smile creased Erin’s mouth.

  “Three days, Luca,” Erin whispered to herself. “That contract runs out in three days and then you are all on your own. Good luck to you and all who sail in you. You’re going to need it.”

&nbsp
; As far as she was concerned Luca and the whole tribe could stay where they belonged. Back in Italy. She didn’t need them, and she certainly didn’t want to see them. She would find the money on her own, no matter what it took, rather than taking handouts from the Carusos.

  “I can save you a ticket if you like, but there is bound to be a long queue.”

  Erin exhaled slowly before replying to Pippa in a sweet voice. “Sorry. Too busy at the moment. Lots to do before the birthday party tonight.”

  “Oh, what a shame. He could have given you a few tips. You are the Italian food expert around here. Well, don’t wear yourself out. The birthday girl has to be ready to have some fun on a Friday night.”

  Luckily, Erin did not have to reply because a customer pushed open the stained-glass door to the bookshop and the doorbell called Pippa back to work. She gave Erin a quick finger wave. “I’ll try and get over once Luca has finished signing all our stock. See you later!”

  Give me a few tips?

  Erin suddenly felt like laughing out loud. This really was the icing on the crazy kind of birthday cake. If this was what being thirty felt like, they could take it back with bells on.

  First, there was the letter from the local authority telling her that the new business rates on the deli were increasing from extortionate to legal robbery. As if a one-woman food business could instantly magic up that kind of money. She had expected a price hike, but the amount they wanted made her brain spin.

  And then there was the small matter that the second she had pressed the snooze button on her alarm clock that morning, it had struck her like a heavy weight that she was thirty years old.

  Thirty! How could that be possible?

  With one tick of the clock, she had officially stopped being an up-and-coming chef in her twenties and was plunged into the hard reality that she was a thirty-year-old single woman who was still living above the family deli and, from the state of her bank balance, likely to stay there for a long time to come.

  What had happened to the girl with the big dreams who had been so confident that she would be running a chain of Doyle’s delicatessens specialising in luxury Italian ready meals by the time she was thirty?

  A cluster of elegantly dressed twenty-something girls with long glossy hair shuffled up next to Erin and started giggling at the poster boy. Their expensive perfume drifted in her direction, just as the girl closest to Erin stepped back a little and waved a hand in front of her as though wafting away a smell.

  Erin lifted her chin and sniffed.

  Hum. That was a mistake.

  She hadn’t even had time to change out of the kitchen-smelly work clothes she had been wearing for the past twelve hours.

  “Okay, yes, I have been chopping garlic most of the day.” Erin smiled across at her. “It’s not contagious.”

  The girl smirked and pointed downwards towards Erin’s ratty old black trainers, forcing their owner to glance down to what lay below her grease-stained, creased kitchen trousers. The fact that they were only inches away from a pair of silky black stockings and high heels only made her clothing look more decrepit than normal.

  But then she spotted what was on the sole of her shoe.

  Marvellous. She hated city dogs. And she hated their careless owners even more.

  Hoisting her bags higher, Erin could only shuffle off, red-faced, trying not to make it too obvious that she was wiping one trainer on the side of the kerbstone as she went.

  She’d bet that never happened to the immaculate Luca!

  And then she made the mistake of glancing at her wristwatch.

  Brilliant. Now Luca had made her late too.

  Although he was not totally responsible.

  It had felt as though every regular customer who walked into the deli that afternoon had some urgent and important question about the provenance of the salami they were buying, or the secret ingredients that made her patisserie and ready meals so special. Especially the cannoli. They all loved her cannoli.

  It was such a thrill to join in the busy chatter of the customers who gathered to taste and talk in appreciation of her food and she wouldn’t want it any other way. Busy, busy, busy.

  She’d allowed just enough time to catch the bus before the six o’clock deadline. Okay, yes, it was rather unusual for a chef to deliver catering-sized packs of gnocchi and fresh wild mushroom sauce by public transport, but this was London on a cold wet January evening. She could either walk it or catch the bus. Taxis were a luxury she could ill afford, and with this rush-hour traffic?

  She had missed her bus. And was now officially and undeniably late for her delivery to Patrick at the Dog and Duck.

  Patrick served a lot of food between six and seven in the evening and she could still make it before he sent out a search party. It wasn’t her fault that the customers at the hippest gastropub in town adored her food. Or what they believed was Patrick’s food. He had tripled his order, and she needed that business. Especially now.

  Dragging her gaze away from the bookshop window, Erin dodged and dived along the busy pavements, trying to make up for lost time. The grey January drizzle had turned into sleet and beneath her padded jacket, her T-shirt had begun to stick to her skin. She tried not to think about what was happening to her hair.

  Had she ever looked like those glossy girls? And where had the last ten years gone?

  Apart from the years spent at catering school, training as a restaurant chef, and then looking after her sick mother while running a deli, of course.

  Apart from that.

  She was still trying to come up with some explanation for her current state of grunginess when a cab cut her off as she tried to cross the street. Both of her hands were occupied with food containers that spun out on each side of her like wings and the sauce almost ended up on the road as she swerved to avoid splattering the contents.

  Luckily for her, Patrick was standing at the door chalking up the menu on a blackboard and ran forward to take the bags from her. Homemade gnocchi was the first item on the board.

  “You’re cutting it a bit fine, sweetheart. Ten minutes later, and my little Italian treat would have been off the menu.”

  “Ten feet closer and you would have been scraping your treats and me off the front of that taxi.” She leant forward, stood on tiptoe and kissed her old boyfriend from catering college lightly on the cheek and smiled. “You know you love me.”

  The tall, handsome, stubbly Australian nodded a couple of times. “True, but I’d love you more if you came to work for me. A couple of nights a week? One night? I need you, babe. And you must have missed me!” His eyebrows lifted a couple of times above the smile.

  “Tempting. But I think you only want me for my food.”

  He swiped his hand across his thigh. “Drat. You saw through my evil plan. In that case, I need to double up the ravioli and all the antipasti for the lunch crew. I’ll send one of the lads around tomorrow and pick it up.”

  “No problem. And since you are one of my favourite customers, you get first look at some new meals I’ve been working on.”

  Her mobile phone rang and cut short her stab at optimism.

  “It’s me,” Alex said. “We have a problem.”

  “Surely not,” Erin said, pulling a printed menu from her pocket, with her phone lodged between her neck and shoulder. “Let me guess, you picked up a hunky date at the airport and have decided to bail on me?”

  “You should be back at the deli by now. At this rate you are going to be late for your surprise birthday party,” Alex said with a high-pitched laugh and Erin stopped, taken aback by the tone in her best friend’s voice. Alex McGee was an industrial chemist who travelled the world auditing production plants. She did stress for a living.

  Erin could hear the urgency in her friend’s voice as she turned to pass the menu across to Patrick.

  “I am on my way right now,” she said into the phone.

  “Something wrong?” Patrick asked, sounding concerned, from behind her.
br />   “Not a bit,” Erin smiled. “Alex is worried that I won’t have time for a serious makeover before my birthday party.”

  “Makeover? Not from what I can see.” Patrick winked. “Sorry I can’t be there. Mad busy. But I’ll be raising a glass later in your direction.”

  “Thanks, sweetie, but it is going to take more than Alex’s make-up bag to change my life,” Erin whispered to herself, “but it’s worth a try,” before waving back at Patrick to reassure him.

  Ten minutes later, sweaty, and slightly out of breath, she was weaving her way along the busy pavements, filled with young people heading out after work to the collection of wine bars, cafés and bistros that had opened along the narrow pedestrian-only area of the London suburb. Her short cut took her past the new office blocks and apartments where there used to be small shops and businesses just like hers. They were good customers, but she still missed the old community that used to be here.

  Head back, shoulders down, she strode out in her black trainers, dodging the cycles and scooters, switching from lane to lane down the backstreets, before turning the corner onto the main parade, with its collection of two-storey stone and brick buildings, where she could see Alex standing under the striped navy-blue and white awning of ‘Doyle’s Deli’.

  Her parents’ deli. Her deli now.

  The thought caught in her throat, and Erin exhaled slowly as Alex waved back and stepped out to greet her.

  Her best friend from convent school was wearing the trouser suit Erin had helped her choose the previous September. It was summer-weight dark navy worsted, faint pink fine stripes, with a cleverly constructed narrow lapel and trouser cuffs, but fitted in at the waist so that there was no mistake that this lady had curves to be proud of.

  With that suit, Alex had won the promotion she had been begging for, the two-seater sports car parked outside the shop, and six weeks’ paid holiday a year.

  The coral silk shirt was an inspiration for a girl who paid a fortune for caramel highlights in her brown hair and Alex looked great, even under the fluorescent streetlight on a grey January evening.

  “Hey, look at you.” Erin grinned and gave her a one-armed hug.

  “More to the point, look at you.” Alex tutted and stepped back to hold Erin at arm’s length. “Is this the new fashion in kitchen grunge couture that I have been hearing about? Because I have to tell you girl, it is not working for me.”