‘Are you having some kind of a laugh?’ he snapped. ‘When you said you needed a fake break-up I wasn’t expecting it to involve my public humiliation. You were going to lob that drink over me, for heaven’s sake, and now you think I’ll just agree to a rerun?’
She opened her mouth to respond and he cut her off.
‘There are people I know in here,’ he said in a furious stage whisper, nodding around them at the crowd. ‘What kind of impression do you think that would have given them?’
‘I didn’t expect things to get so out of hand,’ she said. ‘I just thought we’d have a quick mock row in front of my parents and that would be it.’
‘You didn’t even warn me!’
‘I didn’t want to lose the element of surprise. I wanted to make it look, you know, authentic.’
He stared at her in disbelief.
There was the squeal of whiny microphone feedback and Adam appeared on the landing above the gallery. Emma looked up towards her brother, picked out in a pool of light in front of a billboard with his own name on it in six-foot-tall violet letters. She felt overshadowed, as always, by his brilliance. Just as she had done at school. But now it was on a much more glamorous level. No wonder her legal career seemed drab in comparison. No wonder her parents were expecting her to give it all up at any moment to get married and give them grandchildren. Adam was far too good for such normal, boring life plans.
His voice began to boom over the audio system, thanking everyone for coming and crediting a list of people she’d never heard of with his success.
‘I can’t believe you’d make a scene like that without considering what effect it might have on me,’ Dan said, anger still lacing his voice.
The blonde champagne waitress chose that moment to walk past them. Emma watched as Dan’s gaze flickered away from her to follow the woman’s progress and the grovelling apology she’d been about to give screeched to a halt on the tip of her tongue. Just who the hell did he think he was, moaning about being dumped, when his relationship principles were pretty much in the gutter? OK, so they might not have actually been a couple, but she’d seen the trail of broken hearts he left in his wake. He had no relationship scruples whatsoever. One girl followed another. And as soon as he’d got what he wanted he lost interest and dumped them. As far as she knew he’d never suffered a moment’s comeback as a result.
Maybe this new improved Emma, with her stupid unrequited girlie crush on Dan well and truly in the past, had a duty to press that point on behalf of womankind.
‘Oh, get over yourself,’ she said, before she could change her mind. ‘I’d say a public dumping was probably long overdue. It’s just that none of your conquests have had the nous or the self-respect to do it before. There’s probably a harem of curvy blonde waitresses and models who’ve thought about lobbing a drink over you when you’ve chucked them just because you’re bored. And I didn’t actually spill a drop on you, so let’s just move on, shall we?’
Adam smiled and laughed his way back through the crowd towards them, and she seized the opportunity as he neared her proudly beaming parents.
‘Same plan as before, minus the champagne. I’ll start picking on you and...’
The words trailed away in her mouth as Adam clamped one arm around Dan’s shoulders and one around her own.
‘Got some news for you all—gather round, gather round,’ he said.
As her parents moved in closer, questioning expressions on their faces, he raised both hands in a gesture of triumph above his head.
‘Be happy for me, people!’
He performed a jokey pirouette and finished with a manic grin and jazz hands.
‘Ernie and I are getting married!’
Beaming at them, he slid his velvet-sleeved arm around his boyfriend and pulled him into a hot kiss.
Her mother’s gasp of shock was audible above the cheers. And any plans Emma might have had of staging a limelight-stealing break-up went straight back to the drawing board.
* * *
Emma watched the buzzing crowd of people now surrounding Adam and Ernie, showering them with congratulations, vaguely relieved that she hadn’t managed to dispense with Dan after all. From the tense look on her parents’ faces, as they stood well away from the throng, dealing with the fallout from Adam’s announcement wasn’t going to be easy. And despite the fact that it was a setback in her plans to introduce Alistair, there was no doubt that her mother was much easier to handle when she had Dan in her corner.
Dealing with her parents without him was something she hadn’t had to do in so long that she hadn’t realised how she’d come to rely on his calming presence. They might have only been helping each other out, but Dan had had her back where her family were concerned. And he’d never been remotely fazed by her overbearing mother and downtrodden father.
She wondered for the first time with a spike of doubt whether Alistair would be as supportive as that. Or would he let her family cloud his judgement of her? What was that saying? Look at the mother if you want to see your future wife. If that theory held up she might as well join a nunnery. Alistair would be out of her life before she could blink.
She couldn’t let herself think like that.
Calling a halt with Dan was clearly the right thing to do if she was so ridiculously dependent on him that she could no longer handle her family on her own. But she couldn’t ruin Adam’s excitement. Not tonight. She’d simply have to reschedule things.
And in the meantime at least she wasn’t handling her mother’s shock by herself. She took a new flute of champagne gratefully from Dan and braced herself with a big sip.
‘I’m sure it must just be a publicity stunt,’ her mother was saying.
Denial. Her mother’s stock reaction to news she didn’t want to hear.
‘It’s not a publicity stunt,’ Adam said. ‘We’re getting married.’
He beamed at Ernie, standing beside him in a slim-cut electric blue suit. He certainly looked the perfect match for Adam.
Her mother’s jaw didn’t even really drop. Disbelief was so ingrained in her.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling,’ she said, flicking an invisible speck of dirt from Adam’s lapel. ‘Of course you’re not.’
Adam’s face took on the stoic expression of one who knew he would need to press the point more than once in order to be heard. Possibly a few hundred times.
‘It’s the next logical step,’ he said.
‘In what?’ Her mother flapped a dismissive hand. ‘It’s just a phase. You’ll soon snap out of it once the right girl comes along. Bit like Emma with her vegetarian thing back in the day.’ She nodded at Emma. ‘Soon went back to normal after a couple of weeks when she fancied a bacon sandwich.’
‘Mum,’ Adam said patiently, ‘Emma was thirteen. I’m twenty-nine. Ernie and
