A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas!. Trisha Ashley

       Chapter 1: Bottled

      ‘You mean you’ve known for ages that your boss at Champers&Chocs was passing off bottles of cheap fizz as vintage champagne, and you haven’t done a single thing about it?’ Kate exclaimed incredulously, her pale blue eyes wide and a cup of herbal tea the exact colour of cat pee suspended halfway to her rose-tinted lips.

      Kate was my opposite in looks, being small, fair and cute, though she wasn’t as cute as she thought she was, unless you were really fond of rabbits. And speaking of rabbits, she should long since have put her penchant for pale pink fluffy jumpers behind her, even if the angora had been ethically sourced, which I doubted.

      I sighed and stirred my Americano, starting to wish I hadn’t said anything about it because, after all, she and her husband were Jeremy’s old friends, not mine, and she’d been less than welcoming when we’d first got engaged. But sometimes Kate and I would meet up for coffee and, that day being one of those occasions, my worries had spilled out of me the moment we’d sat down.

      It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been able to tell my best friend, Emma, but since she’d remarried she’d increasingly been having problems of her own with her husband, Desmond, so I hadn’t wanted to burden her with mine.

      Still, at least she wouldn’t have gazed at me in the sad, accusing way Kate was, when I looked up.

      ‘The idea that anything fraudulent was going on never crossed my mind until I found out by accident,’ I explained. ‘I mean, I don’t think I’d even seen a real bottle of champagne, other than on the TV, until I got engaged to Jeremy.’

      ‘No, I don’t suppose there are champagne bars on every corner of council estates,’ she said snidely. ‘Just cheap booze shops.’

      For the last years of her life, Mum and I had shared a specially adapted council bungalow on a very nice estate, but Kate always talked as if I was dragged up in a slum and had made some giant social leap by getting engaged to a member of the teaching profession.

      ‘Oh, forget it,’ I snapped.

      ‘No, you can’t just leave it there without telling me how you found out and why you didn’t report it to the police,’ she insisted.

      ‘Because I thought it had stopped. It was before last Christmas, when I was packing special orders one evening and my boss and I were the only people there. There was a phone call and I walked