Chapter One

“Dammit” Erin muttered as she stepped onto a drainage grate and her heel went through. She stretched her hand out to lean against a nearby parked car and lifted her foot up to inspect any damage.

She lifted her shoe off and balanced on one leg, loathe to put her stocking clad foot down onto the dirty pavement. She looked at the heel and sighed in relief. It wasn’t broken, just scraped.

She put her shoe back on and, avoiding the grate, stepped out to try and cross Regent Street. The sky was a miserable light grey with just a hint of blue behind it, like a badly designed dress.

Erin’s stomach gave a rumble and she smiled, ruefully, thinking she needed to grab a sandwich and soon. She made her way across Regent Street, only having to run a couple of times to get out of the way of insane Black Cab drivers who seemed hell bent on running down as many pedestrians as they could; like they were keeping a tally or something.

She checked her watch. 1:30pm. My god, no wonder she was hungry, she hadn’t eaten anything since 8am that morning.

She stopped outside of the Virgin Megastore on the corner of Piccadilly and Regent Street to catch her breath. That last cab driver really had been insanely gunning for her.

She smiled at the irony of lighting a cigarette whilst trying to catch your breath and took a long drag, blowing the smoke out with joy.

She had just spent the last two hours doing some excruciating typing and data entry tests for one temp agency and one and a half hours for another one before that. She was currently what the papers liked to call ‘unemployed’ but she liked to think of as ‘totally fucked money wise’. She smiled as she thought of what her best friend had said that morning. Gwen had handed her £10 to pay for her train ticket up to London with the express condition that she get a job or Gwen would sell Erin on Ebay.

Erin was currently staying with Gwen and her husband Jamie as she had nowhere else to stay. She had split up from her ex two days previously and Gwen had taken her in.

Erin stubbed out her cigarette and push her long light brown hair out of her face. She knew she couldn’t afford it but the new Bon Jovi album had just been released and Gwen was eager to hear the new country type sound they’d come up with. Erin had been a bit of a fan back in the early nineties but had lost interest over the years due to moving in with her ex and setting up a home. Gwen was also looking forward to the band coming over on tour for the new album and was determined to drag Erin along. The Lost Highway Tour. Erin had seen posters advertising an imminent tour on the internet but they weren’t due over for at least a year, which gave her enough time to find a job, a place to live and save up some money beforehand.

She entered the large music store and began to browse. As she walked slowly round the rock/pop section she began to feel quite unsteady on her heels.

‘Oh god, if that heel is broken, I’m in the shit’ she thought as she looked down at her one and only pair of Manolo Blahniks. She’d had them for years , having gotten them in a half price sale at Liberty’s and they were her lucky shoes. In fact they were her only pair of heels and the way her money was slowly leaking from her bank account she’d be lucky to be able to afford a pair from Primark. She stood, leaning hard on the heel that felt loose, trying to somehow jam it back into place when she heard an ominous crack and felt herself falling backwards. She staggered on the broken heel and placed her good heel straight down on someone’s foot.

“Fuck!” a male voice muttered behind her.

Erin twisted to see whos foot she’d trodden on when the heel broke off completely tipping her backwards. She stumbled into a hard, firm body but the momentum of her fall caused the both of them to fall backwards.

Erin looked down at the man she’d landed on. ‘Damn, he’s cute’ her libido registered before her brain took back control.

“Oh my god, I’m so, so sorry, my heel broke and I fell.” she said, feeling quite embarrassed as she was lying on a complete stranger, albeit a cute one with the most gorgeous eyes, on the floor in the middle of the Virgin Megastore, surrounded by shoppers, all of whom seemed to have mobile phone camera’s pointed at them.

She looked at his tee shirt and noticed a dark spreading stain, then registered the fact that her hand was wet atop it. She brought her hand up and sniffed at it. It smelt of coffee.

“My coffee. My hot coffee.” he said, staring at the woman who was currently sat on his chest. Her hair had tumbled in a disarray around her face and looked quite sexy. He liked her blue eyes and stared right into them for a few moments before he began to realise they were lying on the floor and people were taking photos of them.

“Erm,” he began, “Could you get off me?” he looked at her with a questioning look on his face; as if her getting up off him was a hard thing for her to comprehend. Maybe she did this sort of thing all day long but he as hell didn’t.

“Oh god yes, sorry, yes,” she replied, scrambling to her feet, trying desperately to pull her skirt back into a presentable position.

She held her hand out to help him up but someone else had already beaten her to it. Brushing himself down, swearing at the coffee stain and muttering about crazy females, he walked off away from her, led by a much bigger man.

Forlornly she looked at her shoe and saw that the heel had broken off completely. She sighed and looking back at the quite gorgeous man she’d literally swept off his feet she watched him walk away.

She put her shoe back on and limped slowly out of the megastore, the album quite forgotten.

It was a very sore footed Erin than walked into her best friends house later on that afternoon