Cinderella's Christmas Secret - Sharon Kendrick Page 0,1

realise that.’

‘So you’ll do it?’

Hollie nodded. It seemed she didn’t have a choice and therefore she would accept the situation gracefully. Wasn’t that one of life’s most important lessons? ‘Yes, Janette, I’ll do it.’

‘Excellent. Run along and get changed. I’ve popped in a pair of my own shoes—I think we’re the same size. You’ll never fit into the other ones. Oh, and wear your hair down for once, will you? I don’t know why you always insist on hiding away your best feature!’

Tucking the outfit under her arm, Hollie slipped from the room, dodging gaudy streamers along the way, trying to concentrate on the evening ahead rather than her boss’s rather overbearing manner. Despite being a whole two months until the holidays, the hotel was decked out with yuletide sparkle, which didn’t quite manage to disguise the ugly fittings which had seen better days. Yet she wasn’t going to complain about the fact that the festival seemed to come earlier every year, because Christmas was a welcome break in the normal routine. A time for candles and carols and twinkling lights. For pine-scented trees and bells and snow. She might not have any family of her own to celebrate with but somehow that didn’t matter. It was a time when strangers talked to one another and it brought with it the indefinable sense of hope that, somehow, things were going to get better—and Hollie loved that feeling.

Fluorescent lights lit the way to a gloomy subterranean cloakroom, which was a bit like descending into hell, but Hollie remained determinedly positive as she shook out the fur-trimmed green dress, the red and white striped tights and Janette’s scarlet stilettos, which were scarily high.

Peeling off her shirt dress, flesh-coloured tights and sensible court shoes, she stood shivering in her underwear as she struggled into her elf costume. But by the time she had managed to zip it up, she realised her reservations had been well founded because the person who stared back at her from the mirror was...

Unrecognisable.

She blinked, finding it hard to reconcile this new image of herself—and not just because she was wearing what amounted to fancy dress. The no-show waitress must have been much shorter, because the hem of fake white fur swung to barely mid-thigh—a super-short length, which was exaggerated by Janette’s skyscraper heels. The other waitress must have been slimmer too, because the green velvet was clinging to every pore of Hollie’s body, like honey on the back of a teaspoon. The rich material moulded itself to her breasts and hugged her waist in a style which was as far from her usual choice of outfit as it was possible to imagine.

She looked...

She cleared her throat, hating the sudden nerves and fear which slammed through her body and made her heart race like a train. She looked like a stranger, that was for sure. The way her mother used to look when she was expecting a visit from her father. As if tight clothes could mask a basic incompatibility—as if adornment were the only thing a woman needed to make a man love her. And it hadn’t worked, had it? She remembered the bitterness which used to distort her mother’s features after she had slammed the door in his wake.

‘You can never make a man love you, Hollie, because men aren’t capable of love!’

It was a lesson she’d never forgotten—her mum had made sure of that—but not one she particularly wanted to remember, especially now. She wished she could strip off these stupid clothes and the too-high heels. Skip the party and go home to her rented cottage. She could study that new cake recipe she was planning to try out on the weekend and dream about the time when she could finally open her own business and be independent at last. One more year of frugality and she should have amassed the funds she needed. Only this time she would be sure to go it alone, in a part of the world which she found manageable. A picturesque little Devon town called Trescombe—not some big, anonymous city like London, where it was all too easy for a person like her to slip off the radar and become invisible.

Was it that erosion of her confidence which had led to her not paying attention to what was going on around her—until one day Hollie had discovered that nearly all the money had gone and her supposedly best friend had ripped her off? It had been a harsh and hurtful