Page 18 of Never Too Late

Amrita let out a little sigh. “I always liked Finn.”

“Me too.” I cleared my throat against the wistful tone that had slipped out. “I just wasn’t very good at showing it. I’m going to get better.”

“Flowers,” she said, “and chocolates. Go old-fashioned. Don’t take no for an answer. Well, unless it’s sex. Then you should always take no for an answer. You should also take maybe as no, and basically anything that’s not yes as no.”

“Great advice,” I said with an eye-roll.

“What if you’re successful?” she asked. “What then? Are you going to drag him back to London by his hair?”

“I’m not a caveman.” Amrita might have phrased it in her typical call-a-spade-a-spade fashion, but it raised a good point about what would happen if I was successful in winning Finn back when we lived on opposite sides of the English Channel. “I don’t know. I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it. Maybe I’ll sell the agency.”

“No, you won’t.”

“No, I won’t,” I admitted. “Maybe I’ll open a Paris branch and put you in charge of the London branch.”

“What if I want to move to Paris?”

I shook my head at how ornery she was being, even though I knew her well enough to know that I should have expected it. “As always, you’ll do whatever you want and I’ll thank you for it.”

“As you should.” There was amusement in her voice. “It’s like they say, ‘behind every great man is a great woman.’”

“And no one is greater than you.”

“You should save your sweet words for Finn.”

“I should,” I agreed. “I’m going to need them.” I went over to the hotel window to gaze out of it. Given I was in Paris, the view was uninspiring. I craned my neck to see if I could glimpse the Eiffel Tower, but there was none to be had, the hotel room facing the wrong way. “Why didn’t you ever tell me I was fucking up so badly with Finn? You’re never usually shy about sharing your opinions. If I’d known, I might have been able to fix things before he left the country.” The silence told me Amrita was reluctant to answer. “Go on. I can take it.”

She sighed. “Because I thought he was like all the rest.”

“‘All the rest!’ You make me sound like a complete lothario.”

“There have been quite a few over the years.”

“Maybe,” I admitted grudgingly.

“And none of them were ever that serious. So… I assumed Finn was the same. I even thought about warning him off you.”

“You what?” There was no need to fake the outrage in my voice.

“I told you. I liked him.”

“And you didn’t like”—I paused to make mental quotation marks—“all the rest.”

“Not as much as Finn. He’s a sweetie. And completely oblivious to how good looking he is, which is an endearing quality.”

“Maybe I should give him your number.”

“Darling, if there was any part of him, or me for that matter, that was remotely straight, I’d already have given it to him. Although, I invited him out for coffee many times after you giving him a good rogering made him sad.”

“Me, giving him a good rogering did not—” I gripped the phone tighter. “Can we not use the word rogering? We’re adults.”

“One of us is. The other lets their boyfriend move to a different country.”

“You’re fired.”

“Again?”

“I mean it this time.”

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