The Little Lady Agency and the Prince - Hardcover

Browne, Hester

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416539069 ISBN 13: 9781416539063

Publisher: Pocket, 2008

Synopsis

Entreated by her grandmother to help reform playboy Prince Nicolas, girlfriend-for-hire Melissa is supported in her endeavor by her fiancé, but finds the task more daunting than anticipated when her client changes her romantic perspectives in unexpected ways. By the author of The Little Lady Agency. 75,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Hester Browne is the New York Times bestselling author of The Little Lady Agency; Little Lady, Big Apple; and The Little Lady Agency and the Prince. Born in England, she read English at Trinity College, Cambridge. A devotee of Scottish reeling, vintage-clothes hunting, and cryptic crosswords, she lives in London and Herefordshire with her Basset hound Violet. Visit her at www.simonandschuster.com/hesterbrowne.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

one

My name is Melissa Romney-Jones, but pretty soon, you'll be able to call me Melissa Romney-Jones-Riley! My fiancé, Jonathan, thinks it has quite a ring to it, although we've had one or two discussions about whether it should be Riley-Romney-Jones or Romney-Jones-Riley. Whichever, it certainly isn't any more ridiculous than my professional name, Honey Blennerhesket, which...

Actually, let's start at the beginning.

As Melissa, I am many things to many people: long-suffering daughter of notorious Member of Parliament Martin Romney-Jones; undereducated but perfectly mannered Old Girl of several fine boarding schools; and the delighted fiancée of the debonair, successful, and charming Jonathan Riley, a paragon who gives estate agents and American men a good name. I'm what parents like to call a "nice girl," i.e., cheerful, practical, sturdy in the leg and ample of bosom, and entirely without embarrassing tattoos. Not what you'd call a sex kitten, in other words.

But then there's my other life. Add a satin corset, and some serious red lipstick, and I'm Honey Blennerhesket, bootylicious troubleshooter for London's hapless bachelors and chaps generally in need of a woman's multitasking mind. As far as they're concerned, there's no domestic problem Honey can't sort out, no etiquette dilemma she can't advise on, and no sticky social situation she can't winkle them out of faster than you can say "Gina Lollobrigida." It's weird, but I can't be bossy when I'm everyday Melissa, yet somehow when I'm walking in Honey's stilettos I turn into a whirlwind of retro-glamour and female dynamism. A supernanny for grown men, if you like.

I've tried to keep my two identities apart, but my two lives have a habit of running into each other. Even the name of the business -- The Little Lady Agency -- comes from the annoying manner in which my father, an unreconstructed male chauvinist pig, would refer to my mother, and indeed any woman, as The Little Lady. If men want to engage this little lady to run their lives the way my mother runs my father's, they pay very handsome hourly rates. But in return, I sort out their problems, advise them gently on the real reasons they're going wrong socially, and ideally, leave them not only spruced up but also in a better state to tackle things themselves.

I really do love my job. As my flatmate, Nelson, says, it's a form of social work. And he should know, being the third most well-meaning person in Britain, after Bono and Jamie Oliver.

In fact, it was by shamelessly playing on Nelson's mile-wide humanitarian streak that I'd managed to enlist his reluctant help in The Little Lady Agency's first job of the day.

"You understand that I'm doing this on the sole condition that I don't tell a single lie?" he stressed for the ninth time, as he flipped through the stack of glossy mags on my office coffee table.

Nelson was my oldest friend. He looked how you'd imagine an English cricket hero should -- tall and strapping with a shock of blond hair. At thirty-three, he was a couple of years older than me, but really he should have been born around 1815, when he could have spent his time striding across some vast estate, tending kindly to his peasants, railing at the iniquities of the slave trade, and eating enormous gourmet meals.

Instead, he worked in fund-raising and administration for a charity and spent a lot of time sailing with his school friend Roger Trumpet, who, coincidentally, had the personal hygiene habits of a nineteenth-century serf.

"Absolutely," I reassured him. "I'll be doing all the talking. You just have to look patient. You're good at that."

"But what I don't understand is why Jethro Lorton-Hunter needs you in the first place," he said, furrowing his brow like a baffled Labrador. "If his girlfriend's so flaky that she can't bear to see him talking to another woman, why doesn't he just tell her to pack it in? Before he packs her in?"

For all his eligibility -- and despite having lived with me for years -- Nelson understood women about as well as I understood computer programming.

"Because it's not as simple as that."

"It never is," he sighed. "Explain."

Jethro Lorton-Hunter brought his own personal cloud of gloom into my office three days ago when he arrived for his consultation. Like most of my clients, he'd been sent on a friend's recommendation; apparently I'd "done wonders" for his mate George's party chitchat technique, to the point where George now had three girlfriends. Jethro's problem was his girlfriend, Daisy, who was an absolute sweetheart, apart from one thing: she went bug-eyed if she saw him talking to another woman.

"It's because of some stupid mix-up at a party," Jethro sighed, nervously shredding a tissue into flakes. "We were playing that game with the orange, you know, where you pass it along with your chin, and, well, you know how things roll down Tilly Chadwick's...chest...and then Daisy walked in -- it was totally innocent, but you know how some people jump to conclusions and no matter what you say you can't convince them otherwise. Daisy's been like the secret police ever since. Convinced I'm eyeing up women every time we go out." He stuck his hands in his thick black hair. "She even accused me of flirting with a traffic warden this weekend! I mean, Daisy means the world to me, but nothing I say makes the slightest difference, and it's driving me nuts." He raised his big eyes to me. "What can I do?"

I heard that phrase at least four times a day. "Don't worry," I said, patting his knee. "There's a very quick way to fix this."

"...so," I said to Nelson, "we're going to go have lunch with Jethro and Daisy, who thinks I'm -- or rather Honey is -- an old schoolmate of Jethro's. I'm going to give him the full Honey Blennerhesket charm offensive, and Jethro's going to make a big show of being utterly uninterested in me." I smiled encouragingly. "All you have to do is sit there and give her the impression that you're my boyfriend."

"But I'm not," Nelson pointed out. "If I was being your boyfriend I'd need to get my teeth fixed, a much more expensive suit, and a faint air of superiority."

Nelson wasn't all that keen on Jonathan. I put it down to jealousy, plain and simple, combined with the fact that they were, in many ways, quite similar. Their manic attention to detail, for one thing.

"You don't have to lie," I said, ignoring the dig. "Just...play along. Listen, I need to get changed, so could you put the coffee machine on? I could do with a quick cup before we leave."

"Fine," said Nelson. "I'll pretend you use my razor to shave your legs. Oh, hang on -- you do."

I gave him a reproachful look, then slipped into the spare room, removed Melissa's comfy wide trousers, and began decanting myself into Honey's stockings. My office had once been a little one-bedroom flat, and in the old bedroom I kept my foxy Little Lady wardrobe of pencil skirts, neat tweed suits, and deep V-neck cardies. I had the sort of unmanageable figure that made high street shopping pure misery, even with my bestfriend, Gabi's, encouragement, but somehow, my ample bosom and even more ample hips filled Honey's fitted outfits like cream in an éclair, as if things constantly threatened to burst free, but in a good way.

I wriggled into a tight black pencil skirt. In the beginning, when I'd tried to keep my agency a secret, the clothes had been more of a disguise than anything else, but since the bombshell uniform had seemed to focus both the client's mind and mine on the job at hand, I'd continued to use it. There was no way our little plan for this afternoon would work, for instance, if I was just plain old Melissa. Believe me, I was perfectly resistible as Melissa.

"So what are you going to do to the poor man?" yelled Nelson.

"Oh, you know, the usual Honey stuff." To be honest, I never really planned anything as Honey: it just seemed to come out of its own accord. I buckled a waspie belt round my waist. At least having hips like a Russian doll meant your waist looked smaller by comparison. "I've told Jethro that he has to ignore me, whatever I do, go on about how happy he is with Daisy, and if necessary, ask me to stop flirting because he's simply not interested. Just don't let her slap me."

"Don't worry, I'm the office first aider," said Nelson. He did a gratifying double take as I sashayed into the main office and slid my feet into a pair of patent leather peep-toe sandals. "Good Lord. How does anyone get any work done with you dressed like that? How do you walk downstairs? How do you breathe?"

"I'm a woman of many talents." I winked, then paused as I caught a glimpse of my curvaceous reflection in the mirror. Something was missing. I was still too...Melissa.

"Do you think I should...?" I made a halo motion around my head.

"Should what?" he said sternly, as if he didn't already know what I was talking about.

"Should I...put it on?"

We held each other's gaze.

He knew I was talking about The Wig.

I used to offer a rather ingenious service whereby I'd pretend to be a client's girlfriend -- just to tide them over a tricky social hump, you understand. Weddings, meetings with nosy mothers, that sort of thing. To stop other people from recognizing me -- I know an embarrassing number of people -- I'd bought a blond wig because I hadn't wanted my freelance girlfriend work getting back to my family. But the weird thing was, tossing my fabulous blond mane around gave me an amazing thrill. I wasn't frumpy, reliable Mel anymore, I was a fearless, quick-thinking blond goddess.

It was how I'd met Jonathan, actually. He'd moved here from New York after a horrendous divorce, and he'd needed a smoke screen to keep himself from being matchmade to death by all the hostesses desperate for gorgeous thirty-something bachelors. So when he and I had gotten together for real, Jonathan had decided for obvious reasons that he hadn't wanted me wearing the wig for work anymore. I could see his point. I was never quite sure what would happen myself when I put the wig on. So I'd promised him it would stay in the box.

And it had, more or less...

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416539069
• ISBN 13: 9781416539063
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400