CHAPTER ONE
THE HONEYMOON SUITEat the legendary Stanmore Hotel in London’s Mayfair was quite possibly the most beautiful room Effie Price had ever seen. It was certainly one of the most expensive, although not as expensive as the Royal Suite upstairs, where one night alone would cost more than half her annual salary.
As a maid.
She glanced down at her neat black uniform dress and white apron. And right now, she was being paid to clean the room, not gawp at it.
But it was hard not to just stand and admire the cream-coloured living room. It was big enough to land a small plane in, and as well as the glittering chandeliers and bespoke handcrafted furniture the suite was a technophile’s dream, with remote-controlled everything.
Was it worth it?
Running her hand across the marble swags on the feature fireplace, she sighed. It was a rhetorical question. Aside from not having the money, she was twenty-two years old and had never had a boyfriend. This might be the closest she was ever going to get to a honeymoon suite.
‘There you are. I’ve been looking for you—’
Picking up a pile of used towels, Effie glanced over her shoulder as Janine and Emily, her friends and fellow chambermaids, put their heads round the door. Actually, according to her job description, they were ‘accommodation assistants’, but nobody except management ever referred to any of them as anything but maids.
Reaching out, Janine grabbed the pile of towels and dumped them firmly in the laundry basket. ‘Shoo!’ She pointed at the door. ‘We can finish up.’
Effie shook her head. ‘It’s okay. I’m nearly done.’
Mentally she ticked off her to-do list.
In the bedroom, the Icelandic down duvet sat plumply on the Christian Liaigre four-poster bed, with the pillowcase folds facing away from the door so the guests didn’t see them when they walked in. All the woodwork was buffed, the mini bar and desk were both restocked, the bath and sink had been cleaned, toiletries replenished, towels and robes replaced, mirrors polished—
‘I just need to vacuum.’
‘I can do that.’ Eyes narrowing, Emily jerked the handle of the vacuum out of reach. ‘Come on, Effie. We’ve got this. You have somewhere to be, remember? This is the big day.’
Effie felt her stomach flip over. The big day.
It sounded like one of those essay-writing prompts you got at school. She breathed out unsteadily. She had loved making up stories in her head, but her dyslexia had made writing them down so hard. Often, she’d chosen to use words she could spell rather than embarrass herself.
Only this big day was not in her head. It was happening in just over an hour.
A wave of part panic, part excitement crested inside her. Ever since she was a little girl, she had dreamed about owning her own perfumery business. Her mother, Sam, had worked from home as a beautician, and every day women would arrive to have a facial or their make-up done. To Effie, watching the lines around their eyes soften, it had seemed to her almost as if her mother was weaving a spell.
And, for her, making perfume had that same transformative magic. Not just the process of turning the raw ingredients into a unique scent, but the alchemy that scent performed on the person wearing it. The people smelling it. Perfume could change your mood...make you feel happy or sexy or strong.
But she didn’t just want to change the lives of strangers. She wanted to get her mother out of a situation where she had to constantly worry about money.
Today, finally, she would be able to make that happen.
She felt her skin prickle with nerves and excitement. She still couldn’t quite believe it, but if this meeting went well, and the bank agreed to the loan, the money would be in her account in forty-eight hours. And then her life would change too. Finally, she would stop living in a minor key.
That was her dream—her promise to herself.
And if she kept that promise then all of this—emptying bins, picking up other people’s dirty laundry—would be over. She looked over at her friends, her throat tightening. There were some plus points to her job, though.
Two minutes later she was making her way along the corridor.
Her glasses were hurting a little, and she had just slipped them off and was rubbing the place on her face where they had made a small indentation when a man stepped out of the lift, a woman tottering beside him, clutching his arm as if it were a lifebelt. Her footsteps faltered. The guests in this part of the hotel were either wealthy, famous, or wealthy and famous, but either way eye contact and conversation were discouraged and, lowering her gaze, she edged closer to the wall as she walked.
‘This doesn’t look right.’
The man’s voice made her head jerk up. More than that: it made goosebumps break out on her arms.
She didn’t usually notice voices, mainly because she experienced the world through other senses—how things smelled and tasted. But this man’s voice was impossible to ignore. It was rich and deep, with a teasing, shifting accent.