Christmas at Tiffany's Read Online Free

woman here who could rival the outsiders for style. She was as much at home in the city as in the country, and as a senior partner at Edinburgh’s leading divorce firm McMaster & Mathieson, she retained a personal shopper at Harvey Nicks who made a point of reserving the key pieces from the designer collections for her.
    Her head was thrown back in laughter at something Kelly had said and they were all smiling, but Cassie was fluent in the group’s microscopic body language and her stomach lurched – Anouk had her eyes fractionally narrowed, Suzy was smiling slightly too brightly, Kelly’s chin was dipped a bit too low. Although the girls had never mentioned it, there was an unspoken tension – jealousy, she supposed – surrounding her friendship with Wiz.
    Cassie knew they all did their best to keep her in the loop. They spoke regularly on the phone and sent emails; they had even persuaded her to leave status updates on Facebook, but after a fortnight’s rotation of Cassie Fraser is . . . drinking a cup of tea / sitting at the computer / bored , they had begged her to stop. The simple fact that she’d never seen sausage pants and thought gladiator sandals were last worn by the Romans highlighted just how far outside their orbit she was circuiting. They might be old friends, but their lives were very different now, and the truth was it was Wiz who now knew her best.
    When Cassie’s beloved father had died four years ago, it had been Wiz who’d booked the tickets for her to go back to Hong Kong for a couple of months to be with her mother. And it worked both ways. When Wiz’s husband, Sholto, had walked out on her when she was five months pregnant with their son Rory, it was Cassie who had attended all the antenatal classes with her, held her hand during the birth and become a besotted godmother.
    For nearly ten years, the two separate strands of friendship had worked in perfect harmony because they had never overlapped. Tonight was a first for all of them.
    Making a vague excuse about circulating, she tried to make her way over to the girls, but the demands of courtesy in response to the attention engendered by her dazzling dress meant it was like wading through mud. By the time she grabbed Suzy’s arm, Wiz had gone.
    ‘Where is she?’ she asked, disappointed. She desperately wanted her opinion on the dress. Gil was still cloistered in a group out of eyeshot somewhere.
    ‘She had to take a phone call. Someone called Martha?’
    Cassie nodded. ‘That’s her nanny.’
    ‘Right. Well, she’s in the study.’
    ‘Thanks. I’ll come straight back,’ she said, smoothing her palms anxiously on her thighs.
    She wound her way through the crowd, trying to keep her eyes down. ‘Sorry, phone call . . . excuse me . . . I’ll be straight back . . .’
    The door to the study was ajar, but she could hear Wiz’s soothing voice as she said goodnight to Rory. ‘I love you, darling,’ she heard. ‘Be good for Martha, okay . . .’
    Cassie smiled and stopped just short of the doorway, not wanting to intrude. Rory was three now and had just started at nursery, but he already had a social diary that outranked Cassie’s, and she had joked on more than one occasion that it would be easier to schedule a meeting with the Pope than a playdate with Rory. If he wasn’t at kindergarten he was at baby-gym, yoga, French classes or toddler football, or otherwise napping. Cassie knew from the newspapers that ‘overscheduling’ was a modern parent’s malaise, but there never seemed to be any mention of the other modern dilemma – the earnest godparent worrying about her place on the sidelines of the child’s life.
    She leant against the door jamb, tracing the navy and bottle-green tartan wallpaper with her fingers.
    ‘And remember to brush your teeth. Martha told me you had ice cream for pudding . . .’
    Cassie looked back towards the hall and watched as the waiters walked around with trays of drinks and the guests took them