by Jill Mansell
He inclined his head. ‘I noticed.’
Nadia peered at the empty road behind him. ‘Did you crash too?’
‘No, I did the sensible thing.’ He looked amused. ‘Abandoned the car before that happened. It’s at the bottom of the last hill.’
‘Rolo?’ She offered him one through the open window. Not her last Rolo, obviously.
‘No thanks. Look, there’s a village half a mile ahead. Do you want to walk with me?’
‘You live around here?’ Nadia brightened, then hesitated. Hang on, a complete stranger offering her shelter in the middle of nowhere, seemingly perfectly normal and friendly right up until the moment he reappeared from the woodshed with madness in his eyes and a sharp axe?
How many times had she seen that film?
He shook his head, scattering snowflakes. ‘No, I live in Oxford.’
‘So how do you know there’s a village?’ She didn’t want to struggle through the blizzard on a whim.
The mad axe-murderer seemed entertained by the wary look in her eyes.
‘I’m very psychic.’
Oh God, he really was a nutter.
‘That’s great.’ Nadia took a deep breath. ‘Look, have you ever been to this part of Gloucestershire before?’
‘No.’ Smiling, he patted the pocket of his waxed Barbour. ‘But, unlike you, I do have a map.’
***
‘I feel like a refugee,’ Nadia muttered as they trudged along the narrow lane, the snow squeaking underfoot. Since hopping along like a ten-year-old in a sack race wasn’t practical, she was carrying her rolled-up sleeping bag under one arm and her overnight case in the other.
‘You look like a refugee.’ Glancing across at her, he broke into a grin and held out an arm. ‘Here, let me carry those.’
She knew his name now. Jay Tiernan. He’d introduced himself while she’d been struggling to extricate herself from the sleeping bag. In return she’d asked, ‘What does J stand for?’
‘Nothing. It’s just Jay.’
Hmm, a likely story. It was probably short for something embarrassing like Jethro or Jasper. Or Josephine.
Then again, Nadia could sympathise. School sports days had always been a mortifying experience, with dozens of sniggering boys lined up roaring, ‘Go, Nad… GONAD… GO, GO, GO!’
But Jay Tiernan didn’t need to know that. Thankfully, Nadia handed him her overnight bag. Her nose was a fetching shade of pink, her eyes were watering and her toes numb. Ranulph Fiennes needn’t worry about competition—she’d be hopeless at trekking across the Antarctic.
‘You lied,’ Nadia panted forty minutes later. ‘That wasn’t half a mile.’
‘Never mind, we’re here now.’
‘And this isn’t a village.’
‘It is,’ said Jay. ‘It’s just… small.’
Nadia peered through the tumbling snowflakes at the deserted single street. There were no lights on in any of the cottages. Nor were there any shops. Just a postbox, a bus shelter and a phone box.
And a pub.
‘The Willow Inn,’ Jay announced, squinting at the dilapidated sign. ‘We’ll try there.’
The front door was locked. After several minutes of hammering on the wood, they heard the sound of keys rattling and bolts being drawn back.
‘Blimey,’ slurred the landlord, enveloping them in a cloud of whisky breath. ‘Mary and Joseph and the little baby Jesus. Fancy bumping into you in a place like this.’
Nadia, clutching her rolled-up sleeping bag in her arms, realised he thought she had a baby in there. Then again, he was so drunk she could probably get away with it.
‘Hi,’ Jay began. ‘We wondered if––’
‘Shut, mate. Closed. Six o’clock we open.’ The middle-aged man jabbed vaguely at his watch. ‘You could try coming back then. No kids mind, this isn’t a family pub. Kids? Can’t stand ’em.’
‘Look, the roads are blocked, we’ve had to abandon our cars, we’ve been walking for hours,’ Nadia blurted out, ‘and we need somewhere to stay.’ Hastily she unravelled the sleeping bag to show him how empty it was. ‘And we definitely don’t have a baby.’
As a rule, batting her eyelashes and widening her big brown eyes had the desired effect, but the landlord of the Willow Inn was clearly too far gone for that.
‘Don’t do board and lodging neither.’ Wheezing with laughter he flapped his arm and said, ‘There’s a stable down the road, you could try there.’
Nadia briefly wondered if bursting into tears would help. Failing that, hitting the landlord over the head before tying him up and locking him in his own cellar.
Jay, his method thankfully more law-abiding, said, ‘We need somewhere to stay and something to eat. We’d pay you, of course.’
The landlord’s bloodshot eyes promptly lit up. ‘Hundred quid.’
‘Fine.’
‘Cash, mind. Up front.’
Solemnly, Jay nodded. ‘It’s a deal.’
The power cut that had left every house in the street in darkness was still going strong at nine o’clock that evening. The pub, illuminated with flickering candles, had gradually filled up with locals driven out of their homes by the lack of TV, as well as half a dozen other stranded drivers in need of a roof over their heads.
By some miracle the landlord, Pete, was still drinking and still conscious. Well, just about. Cindy, the barmaid, confided to Nadia that Pete’s latest girlfriend had walked out on him three weeks ago, precipitating this mammoth binge. Now, evidently cheered by the amount of money he was extorting from stranded travellers, he was wavering precariously on a bar stool, leaving Cindy to do all the work.
Dinner, also thanks to the power cut, was thick chunks of bread toasted over an open fire, tinned ravioli, doorsteps of cheese, pickled onions the size of satsumas and stale digestive biscuits.
Nadia, who had given the onions a miss, said, ‘Yum.’
‘A candlelit meal, what could be more romantic?’ Jay indicated their rickety wooden table. ‘Never let it be said I don’t know how to give a woman a good time. Pickled egg?’
Nadia smiled; he had a nice voice. She’d always been a sucker for a nice voice.
‘No thanks. We need to sort the room thing out. You can’t sleep down here.’
Pete’s insistence on cash in advance for the only spare bedroom had left Nadia with a dilemma. With only fifteen pounds in her purse, it had been left to Jay to come up with the rest of the money. When Pete had shown them the chilly room, cluttered with junk and taken up almost entirely by a lumpy, unmade double bed (A hundred pounds? Bargain!), Jay had murmured, ‘It’s OK, I’ll sleep downstairs.’
But that had been before the others had arrived, turning the small bar into a makeshift refugee camp. Two of them had nasty hacking coughs. It wasn’t fair to take the room Jay had largely paid for.
‘You should have the bed,’ Nadia told him. ‘Honestly, I’ll be fine down here.’
‘You might be fine, but you won’t get any sleep.’
‘I’d feel guilty otherwise.’ She watched him refill their glasses with red wine.
‘We could both sleep in the bed,’ said Jay.
Nadia hesitated. It was the most practical solution, of course. It was just a shame he couldn’t have been nice-but-comfortingly-ugly, rather than nice-and-definitely-attractive.
Dangerously attractive, in fact.
Not that she’d be tempted to do anything naughty, but she didn’t want Jay thinking she might be tempted. In her experience, attractive men seemed to take this for granted.
‘Just sleep.’ Nadia met his gaze. ‘No funny business. We’d have all our clothes on. And I’d be in my sleeping bag,’ she added for good measure.
‘Absolutely.’ Jay’s mouth had begun to twitch. Oh Lord, did he still think she fancied him?
‘I have a boyfriend,’ Nadia explained firmly, ‘and we really love each other.’
Jay nodded, to show he understood. ‘Me too.’
Jill Mansell, To the Moon and Back
