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 have her own chain of Brannigans delicatessens specialising in luxury Italian ready meals by the time she was thirty?
The last thing she needed was a reminder the size of a window display that she was being held to ransom by her cousin Luca and her so-called family, who owned one of Italy’s largest food companies. Who apparently were in London for a book signing and had not even bothered to let her know. Typical.
Well, 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.
A cluster of elegantly dressed twenty-something girls with long glossy hair shuffled up next to Bunty and started giggling at the poster boy. Their expensive perfume drifted in her direction, just as the girl closest to Bunty stepped back a little and waved a hand in front of her as though wafting away a smell.
Bunty 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.’ Bunty smiled across at her. ‘It’s not contagious.’
The girl smirked and pointed downwards towards Bunty’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, Bunty could only shuffle off, red-faced, trying not to make it too obvious that she was wiping one trainer on the side of the kerb stone 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 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.
She loved every one of the regulars who had been coming to Brannigans week in, week out, for weeks, months or years.
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.
But on the not so plus side, she was working every hour of the day to make the deli a success and it was well after five before she had escaped with her precious cargo.
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 gastro pub 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, Bunty 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, 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 yards later, 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 lightly on the cheek and smiled. ‘You know you love me.’
The tall, handsome, stubbly Irishman nodded a couple of times. ‘True, but I’d love you more if you came back 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 love me, you get first look at some new meals I’ve been working on.’
Her mobile phone rang and cut short her stab at optimism. Bunty flipped open the cover. ‘Pronto?’
‘It’s me,’ Alex said. ‘We have a problem.’
‘Really,’ Bunty said, pulling a printed menu from her pocket, telephone lodged between her neck and shoulder. ‘Surely not. I thought you’d be out partying by now. Let me guess, you picked up a hunky date at the airport and have decided to bail on me?’
‘You should be back by now. At this rate you are going to be late for your own birthday party,’ Alex said with a high-pitched laugh and Bunty 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.
Bunty 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.
‘Not a bit,’ Bunty said to him. ‘Alex is worried that I won’t have time for a serious makeover before my birthday party.’
‘Makeover?
