by Emma Jackson
‘I know you’re laughing.’
‘Well, I didn’t mean knock yourself out literally.’ I looked down at him. The fact that he was laughing with me, at himself, and his eyes were so blue against all the white…it just made me want to join him in the snow and make very non-angelic shapes. ‘I bet you never expected the hotel business would be so glamorous.’ I offered him my hand. He grabbed it, springing up a lot more quickly than I was expecting. We were face to face, warm breath mingling, and the humour dropped away slowly as we locked gazes. I couldn’t help but look down at his mouth. I swayed towards him, but he stayed very still.
‘Am I allowed?’
‘Yes.’ The misty cloud of my answer drifted over to him and his mouth met mine.
In just over twelve hours, I’d somehow forgotten how good it was. How good he was at this. Lips brushing and teasing and I was the one licking at his mouth, begging for more. His stubble grazed my cold skin as he changed angle and gave me just enough of what I wanted to make me throb but nowhere near enough to satisfy me. He was tormenting me, and I loved and hated the agony of it. The need drew out further and further until I was desperate, and I bit his bottom lip. He made a surprised, ragged noise in the back of his throat. I smiled; eyes still shut. His next kiss was deeper.
Standing up gave it a whole new squirm-worthy factor because I could appreciate the size of him, six-foot-something of man, and I remembered the shape of him, which was now hidden under those bulky outer layers. Lord, I wanted to unpeel him like a chocolate orange and tap him hard.
When I could feel a moan building up that I wasn’t going to be able to suppress, I forced myself to take a small step back and broke away, gasping: ‘Butcher.’
He blinked and a smile nudged at the corners of his talented lips. ‘Is that a critique of my kissing technique?’
‘No.’ I gave a wobbly laugh. ‘The butcher will be waiting.’
‘Oh yeah, right.’
I unhooked the padlock and pushed the door open with shaky fingers. If it was possible, it was colder inside than outside, which was handy really, as I needed to bring my core temperature down by a few hundred degrees. There was barely enough light to see the jumbled mess of tools and old decorating supplies, but I plunged straight in, knowing what I was looking for while Nick hung back, eyeing the spider webs.
‘You’re not scared of creepy-crawlies are you?’
‘I wouldn’t say scared exactly.’
‘Weren’t you just in Australia? How did you cope?’
‘I wasn’t in the outback. I spent most of my time over there in a hotel room trying to sleep.’ He gave a rueful chuckle. ‘I spend most of my time anywhere around the world in hotel rooms trying to sleep.’
‘Oh right.’ That mention of frequenting hotels disquieted me. I was ready to berate myself for letting a couple of make-out sessions erase my suspicions about him being the Hotel Hopper but as I watched him my mind immediately disregarded the hotel bit again and pondered his trouble sleeping. His jaw was set as he inspected a particularly large cobweb draped along the top of the window frame. With the thick black frames of his glasses surrounding his eyes, I couldn’t tell whether he had smudges of fatigue beneath, but it wasn’t unlikely.
‘My dad used to swear by soursop tea to help him relax if he was struggling to sleep.’
‘Soursop tea?’
‘Yeah. Soursop trees grow in Jamaica. He used to get the dried leaves over here from the herbal health shops and then boil them up.’ I pressed my lips together, remembering the tang of the hot tea on my tongue when he gave me a sip, sitting on his lap in his leather chair. One or two sips was always enough but now I suspected his cuddle was the real sedative. ‘It’s kind of like sour green tea. I don’t know if it works.’ A lopsided smile caught at me, from that bittersweet tangle of remembering and missing him. ‘He was always pretty chilled though.’
‘He’s…not with you any longer?’ Nick’s voice was so quiet, I struggled to hear him.
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘He died when I was eleven. The big bastard C.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He’d gone so pale and still that he would have rivalled the snowman the kids were making outside. I could have said the usual ‘it’s okay’ or ‘thank you’ but I wanted to give him the space to tell me about his mum. There would be no more natural time for him to mention it, and my breath froze in my chest waiting, because if he didn’t – if he couldn’t tell me or didn’t want to – did that mean he just wasn’t interested in letting me get close to him? I know I said to him last night that this was only going to last for the few days he was staying here but…I wanted him to tell me.
The silence just stretched on until I sighed. ‘It’s shit. Losing a parent. Losing anyone.’ I shook my head. I hated that terminology, even though I used it. ‘Losing’ someone. It’s not like you’d misplaced them. You knew where they were…and where they definitely weren’t.
I swung my gaze around the clutter once more, because looking at Nick and knowing that despite how close it felt between us when we were kissing and joking around, he was not ready to be vulnerable with me, was making me feel lonely and cold.
And that was fine. I was on my own and I wanted to stay that way for a while anyway. I certainly didn’t want to be vulnerable around anyone either. Especially not men who would be flying off soon and might even be writing a blog post on my Christmas nightmare to share with millions of people. This was the wake-up call I needed. Nick and I were not anything but two people finding some use for each other over a difficult Christmas. I needed to shake off this clingy veil of disappointment and get back to the job at hand.
I pointed to a grey shape over in the corner. ‘Think you can brave the mini-beasties enough to dig that out with me?’
Nick cleared his throat. ‘If you promise to come to my rescue if they attack?’
He was obviously trying to move on as well. Good. This was all good. And sensible. And fine.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.’ I forced a bright smile and we started to move things around to clear a path to a wheelbarrow tucked underneath a tarpaulin.
Nick pushed it outside with relative ease and then attempted to move it along the lawn. The wheel sank into the snow and when he pushed his weight against it to power it through, his feet slipped. I made a grab for him around the waist, but his momentum carried us both down, so he ended up face first in the snow and I was on his back, the extra weight driving him in deeper.
I rolled off before he suffocated and he lifted his face up, spitting out snow and swearing. I couldn’t help it, I was laughing again and even though he must’ve been freezing, he laughed too.
‘This isn’t funny,’ I managed to say.
‘Stop laughing then,’ he told me but that only made us both crease up more.
‘Seriously though—’ I took a deep breath ‘—what do I do now?’
‘I’ll give it another try. It might not be too bad once it gets going.’ He struggled up and this time he held out his hand to help me up, but I pulled away as soon as I was standing. There was no time for more kissing, and I wasn’t sure it was a wise idea anymore, no matter how much I wanted to. ‘And otherwise we just carry up as much as we can and go back for the rest.’
‘Just leave it out on the road?’ I screwed up my nose.
‘It’s colder than a fridge out here. I think it’ll be okay.’
‘All right.’
When he tried again with the wheelbarrow, with a little more judgement and a little less brute force, it did move. Not quickly but it did move. He got hot enough from the exertion to take off his lovely big coat and he lined the wheelbarrow with it. I worked at clearing the snowdrift that mounted up in front of the wheel every couple of metres while Nick took a breather.
I did offer to help but maybe he wanted to prove something or maybe he was just being a gent because he insisted on carrying on. By the time we went past the hotel, the kids had gone inside and when we finally got to the bottom of
the hill, the butcher was waiting for us.
We loaded up all the meat and poultry into the wheelbarrow, wrapping it up in Nick’s coat so its packaging didn’t tear on the rough bottom of the barrow, and we watched the butcher’s van drive away.
Nick stood for a moment, hands on his hips, his breath gusting out in big steamy clouds.
‘In my mind, this seemed a lot easier,’ I admitted apologetically.
‘It was a good idea,’ he insisted. Little curls of hair were clinging to his forehead and I couldn’t resist the impulse to unstick them and push them back. But when I touched him, the tingle was undercut with anxiety and I pulled my hand back again quickly.
‘Maybe on the way up we should take a handle each and push together,’ I suggested.
‘Okay.’ He looked at me for an extra beat, as though he was thinking of saying or asking something else, but then he grabbed the handle of the wheelbarrow.
We started up the hill. Slowly. I didn’t want to think about how much weight we were trying to push up a snow-covered hill.
‘I should have listened to Julius Mundey,’ I huffed.
‘That old bloke who’s always complaining? Why? What did he say?’
‘That the road needed to be shovelled and gritted.’
‘Somehow I don’t think that would’ve been any easier than this.’
A honking noise interrupted us and we both turned to see a black 4 x 4 creeping towards us. It pulled to a stop when we didn’t race out of the way and Stephen stuck his head out the driver’s window. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Pushing a wheelbarrow of meat up a hill,’ I replied, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Did you have any luck with the turkey?’
He opened the car door and jumped out into the snow. ‘No. It’s madness out there. I tried three supermarkets in the nearest town; then I went to the next town after that and tried the two supermarkets there. Nothing. But I did get a goose.’
‘Okay. It’s a bird. That’s something. People probably won’t notice right? Is it a big goose?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to fight it.’
‘Helpful, Stephen.’ Nick’s voice was sharp. ‘I think Beth’s more concerned with whether it’s big enough to feed everyone.’
‘I don’t know. It was all I could get.’
‘Of course.’ I hurried to answer before they could start bickering. I almost wished I’d let Noelle spill the beans about them the other day, like she so desperately wanted to. It might’ve helped me cope with being in the middle of their tense but frustratingly subtle conversations. ‘Thanks for going out there. It was kind of you and a great help.’
Stephen gave me a small nod and then moved his gaze between Nick and I to the point where I wondered if there was lipstick all over Nick’s face, even though I wasn’t wearing any. ‘Shall we get that meat in the boot and up to the hotel then?’
‘What an excellent suggestion.’ I scooped up one of the gammon joints, its squidgy pink meat shifting around into the plastic wrap in a way that made me feel nauseous. Stephen popped the boot open and I followed him around to put the joint inside next to a very small-looking goose. I wouldn’t want to fight any size of goose when it was alive to be fair, but Stephen’s comment had led me to believe it might be a bit bigger than that.
Nick carried the side of beef over and went back to the wheelbarrow with Stephen.
‘You used your dad’s coat to line a wheelbarrow and piled meat on top of it?’
‘I was getting hot and it made sense. I can get it dry-cleaned.’
‘She should get it dry-cleaned for you—’ Stephen broke off as I appeared next to them. We each took a cut of meat and Nick hung his dad’s coat over his arm. His dad’s. They had different fathers. And where were either of them this Christmas? Goodness, things were complicated with the Cartwrights. Complicated and none of my business.
We unloaded by the kitchen back door and I took Lydia’s car keys from Stephen, sending them both on their way with thanks and assurance I’d be fine for the rest of the day without any further help.
Nick’s eyes were clouded as we parted and later when he, Stephen and Dorie were sitting together having lunch, he had the manner of someone who’d had his man-parts stapled to the chair but was trying to pretend everything was fine. But his man-parts were none of my concern. Or they shouldn’t be at any rate.
As soon as I was done with lunch, I had to deliver Lydia’s car back to her. I could afford half an hour out of my day to talk to her. I knew she was going to bend my ear about Nick, but I also knew that having thirty minutes away from the hotel and all its complications was likely to do me some good.
Chapter Thirteen
I parked up in the tiny slip road behind Lydia’s shop and checked the time on the dashboard clock. It should only have taken me two minutes to drive down from the hotel, but I hadn’t been behind the wheel in aeons and – 4 x 4 or not – driving in a foot of snow was not the easiest reintroduction.
I shoved the wooden gate at the back open, pushing against the pile of snow on the other side and slipping through when there was enough of a gap. The courtyard was dwarfed by an industrial-sized bin, made even bigger by the sheet of snow undisturbed on top of it. There were bags of rubbish next to it. Using the broom propped by the back door, I scraped the snow off, so its weight was no longer pinning the lid of the bin shut. It whomped to the ground. The kids at the hotel would’ve been able to make an excellent snowman with that little lot. Once I threw Lydia’s rubbish in her bin, I let myself into the workshop without knocking. Since Lydia was expecting me, I figured the likelihood of catching her in a clinch was low – plus the mini avalanche should’ve alerted her to my presence.
Lydia’s workshop was not the warmest of places, but it was a damn sight warmer than outside. I couldn’t seem to get the cold out of my bones since the walk down the hill to meet the butcher a few hours ago and my arms were aching.
I could hear Lydia talking to someone in the shop, so I filled the kettle and flicked it on. Getting a head start on the beverages might help make the visit pass more efficiently.
Oh God. I was becoming my mother. Everything was a time-management exercise while I kept an inner eye on the hotel like Sauron.
Well, that wasn’t strictly true. I’d definitely stopped thinking about the hotel last night when I was snogging the face off Nick.
The kettle began to rattle and steam, which I happily blamed for the flush stealing over my face and the hasty unzipping of my coat. I moved closer to the door to see what was taking Lydia so long.
Down the short hallway, I could make out half of Lydia’s bottom as she leaned on her counter, chatting to a customer. The other voice was familiar. Annie, who worked in the greengrocer’s. I was about to join them and say hello but the subject of their conversation caught my attention and I decided to listen in instead.
‘So, you were up at the hotel with them?’
‘Yes. We all went up together in my car. It was a stroke of luck really. If they’d been at home, they probably still wouldn’t have made it to the hospital, and they wouldn’t have had that lovely American girl to help out.’
‘Very lucky. Who is she again? I thought I heard she’s a writer.’
‘Yes. Noelle Kingston.’
‘Never heard of her. D’you think she knew what to do because of researching for one of her books?’
‘No.’ Lydia laughed. ‘She trained as a midwife. I’m not sure internet research can prepare you for delivering a baby.’
‘Do they do it the same over there in America though?’
‘I assume so. They have the same body parts, don’t they?’ There was laughter in Lydia’s voice again.
I was going to have to tell Noelle that she was now an instant celebrity who would go down in Loganbury history. The American novelist who delivered a baby in the middle of the worst blizzard in living memory. She’d have to come down and sign some books in the bookshop, take advantage of their n
osiness.
‘There was someone else there wasn’t there? Gracie said she saw a man driving your car who wasn’t Ben. Same one who was in the pub with Beth the other night. A city type. She’s not back together with that London boyfriend, is she?’
‘No. Beth is definitely not getting back together with him.’ Lydia sounded like she would put me in a headlock if I even hinted at the prospect. ‘He was just another guest helping out. Ben needed to support Rachel; he wouldn’t have been able to drive in the snow.’
Some of the coldness eased out of my bones. My mum picked her best friend well. Despite loving a gossip and knowing she needed to offer titbits to get some back, it was not Lydia’s nature to run anyone down.
‘But why was Beth out with him the other night? People said it looked like a date. And then she was dancing with someone else?’
‘I think she was just being hospitable. You know Rosie’s up in Norfolk looking after her dad. Beth’s been running the hotel for her. Doing a grand job.’
‘That’s lovely to hear.’ There was a rustle and a pause in the conversation. ‘I do hope she stays. These youngsters, they always go scurrying off to the big city thinking it’s more interesting. Anyway, I better be off. Have a Merry Christmas now, won’t you?’
‘Merry Christmas, Annie.’
I took a long step over towards the kettle, as the bell on the door to the shop tinkled and Lydia came into the workshop.
‘You’re here.’ She rubbed my arm and took over making the tea. ‘Were you eavesdropping?’
‘Yes. I’d feel bad about it if you two weren’t gossiping shamelessly about me and everyone else.’
‘Fair point.’ Lydia smiled and tapped the teaspoon against the mug. ‘So, how is it going then, honey?’ She handed me a cup of tea. ‘You look tired.’
‘That’s ’cause I am. Late nights and early mornings.’ I laced my fingers around the mug and leaned against the edge of her worktable. ‘I have to get back soon.’
‘They’ll survive up there for half an hour.’
