THE CINDERELLA VALENTINE

POLLY had allowed herself plenty of time. She was leaving nothing to chance. She’d even used two alarm clocks, set at five minute intervals, both of which had performed on cue. Emma Valentine had come through for her with a life and sanity saving job at Bella Lucia, her famous family’s chic, elegant, A-list group of restaurants. Hard work, but big tips. This was not the day to turn over and go back sleep.

The bus – incredibly -- arrived on time and dropped her a mere two minutes walk from the classic, ornate Georgian building in the heart of Chelsea, where the first of the fabulous Bella Lucia restaurants had been opened fifty year earlier.

For once in her life, she hadn’t messed up.

Even the sun was shining.

‘Excuse me?’ Polly turned to see a harassed mother encumbered by a three-year-old, a baby and a buggy struggling to get off the bus. ‘Would you mind...?’

In an all’s-right-with-my-world glow, she took the buggy and did what she’d done a hundred times when babysitting her nieces and nephews, flicked it open.

The buggy didn’t flick. It sprang like a hungry tiger, taking a chunk out of her tights. As she bent to check the damage, the three-year-old generously thrust the rusk he’d been chewing at her. A thick beige smear appeared on the front of her waistcoat. Already off balance, a speeding motorbike, skimming the kerb to dodge the traffic, finished the job and dumped her in the road.

It could have been worse.

They were at a bus stop. She could have fallen under a bus.

All was not lost, she told herself, as she picked herself up. She was early. With luck she’d be able to slip into the staff washroom and clean up, change into the spare pair of tights that she’d fortuitously slipped into her bag, before Mr Valentine saw her. She scooped up a strand of hair that had sprung loose, tucked it behind her ear, rang the bell on the wrought iron gate that guarded the rear entrance and was buzzed through.

It was only then that she discovered what she should have known the minute the buggy attacked her: that she’d carelessly left her luck, like an umbrella, on the bus. Unmissed until the heavens opened and she actually needed it.

Right now the sun was shining, but even so, as the man blocking her dash to the staff washroom slowly turned, she could have sworn she heard a clap of thunder.

Maybe that was because he bore more than a passing resemblance to the devil himself.

Read on...