Page 51 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
She’d never been so relieved to see him. He knew she’d spent months on her recipes and he’d stand up for her, defend her – he’d tasted endless variations on each creation and had complained bitterly every time …
‘You’ll never guess what’s happened!’ she cried, jumping to her feet and running to him.
She tried to put her arms around Steven so he could comfort her, tell her that he was here to set the record straight.
But he didn’t put his arms around her, rather he thrust Mattie away, his thumbs digging into her collar bones with a painful pressure. ‘Oh, Mathilde, how could you?’ he demanded in a broken sort of voice. ‘I told you so many times that you needed to knuckle down and do some work, and instead you decided to take the easy route and steal my recipes!’
‘What?’ Mattie was so shocked that she giggled. The giggle became a laugh because this was a joke, right? And then the laughing finally became the tears that had been threatening for the last couple of hours. ‘That’s not true. You know that’s not true!’
It had been Mattie who’d told Steven that he needed to put the work in when he’d mock her for coming home each day and practising at least one bake before she went off to do her waitressing. Although she’d soon stopped telling him that, because it would just lead to a fight about how she was nagging him, trying to control him.
‘You know that it is,’ Steven said solemnly, turning his head away. ‘God, I can’t even look at you!’
Oh, he was good. Very, very good.
‘He produced a recipe book that hadn’t existed even a week before,’ Mattie said bitterly to Tom. Just remembering it all over again, made her feel cold and dirty. ‘I lived with him for two years. You’d have thought at some stage it might have made an appearance. He’d copied out all my recipes, not just the finals recipes. Copied every last correction and crossing-out. He’d even made sure to splatter them with butter and batter and God knows what else so they’d look properly authentic.’
Mattie had even started to doubt herself. Steven was so convincing as the innocent victim, so hurt that he’d been taken in once again by his notoriously volatile girlfriend, so indignant that his own marks might be in jeopardy. Had her recipe book really existed or had she made it up?
‘It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but that’s how good he was at manipulating not just me, but everyone else around him.’ Mattie put her head in her hands.
‘I did get a brief insight. Nasty piece of work,’ Tom said. ‘I wish I could tell you that he’ll get what’s coming to him, but life doesn’t always work that way, does it?’
‘Nah. Karma’s never as much of a bitch as you want her to be,’ Mattie said.
‘So what did you do?’ Tom asked, pouring the last of the Malbec into their glasses.
‘Well, I wasn’t going to back down. I insisted that I hadn’t stolen his recipes and because I’d had pretty much top marks in all my classes and coursework, they said I could graduate. Just a pass though, when I’d been set to get a distinction. Maybe even the Pupil d’Honneur, which was awarded to the most talented person in each year,’ Mattie recalled with a sigh. She’d only got a pass because one of the instructors, the elderly and usually terrifying Mademoiselle Belmont, had stuck up for Mattie, pointing out that not only had she been an exemplary student over the last two years but that she herself had been witness to an early prototype of two of Mattie’s finals pastries.
‘And Steven may be charming,’ Mademoiselle had spat the word, ‘but in two years he has never proved himself to be anything other than decidedly average.’
This was entirely true and Steven was always at his most savage on the days when Mattie excelled in one of their classes.
So Mattie was allowed to graduate, although she’d been cold-shouldered at the graduation ceremony two days before Christmas Eve. Her class had gone off to celebrate but it had been made clear that Mattie wasn’t welcome.
Steven hadn’t come home since the day of Mattie’s final but he turned up after the party, drunk and not at all contrite.
Mattie was a dry-eyed husk, without even the energy to shout at him and then be accused of being shrill. She had had the energy to pack all of Steven’s belongings in bin liners, though, and get Edouard, their landlord, to change the locks. It helped that Steven’s rent cheques invariably bounced and that Mattie kept Edouard and his family supplied with cake on a weekly basis.
‘We’re over,’ Mattie said through the gap in the door, security chain firmly on, when Steven demanded entry. ‘But you must have known that’s what would happen when you took my recipe book.’
‘You mean this recipe book?’ Steven asked, holding it up, breathing stale alcohol fumes in her direction. ‘Loving is sharing, isn’t it? That’s what you always say. Besides, you got to graduate, so why are you bitching about it?’
‘How could you do this to me? To someone you love? If you’d needed help with your finals prep, you know that you only needed to ask me and …’
‘Who says I love you?’ Steven had sneered. ‘Who could ever loveyou?’
‘And that was the last time I saw him until today,’ Mattie concluded. ‘Pippa brought me home two days before Christmas, and then six months after that I took on the tearooms and began to rebuild my life.’
Tom rubbed the tips of his fingers against his forehead as if he were struggling to take in everything that Mattie had told him. It wasn’t a story that she shared. Ever. She was so ashamed of how utterly she’d been taken in, made to look like a fool, betrayed by someone who’d claimed to love her. Even her mother and Guy only knew the edited highlights; that things had ended badly with Steven, so badly that all mentions of his name were banned. When they’d met Steven, he’d been charm personified, so they were at a loss to understand what could have happened to make Mattie so distraught.
‘But why would he take your recipe book? Only a complete bastard would do that,’ Guy had said. ‘And Steven wasn’t a complete bastard. I mean, he kept telling us how much he loved you. Said he was the luckiest man in the world.’
Having to tell them that Steven had said she was unlovable? Mattie couldn’t do that for the very simple reason that she was afraid that it was true. That she possessed every one of the character flaws Steven had described and that secretly everyone else thought so too.
Mattie had only confessed to Pippa because Pippa was the least judgemental person to walk the earth. When Mattie had poured what was left of her heart out on the journey out of Paris and back to London, not once had Pippa trotted out any one of her personal mantras. Not even, ‘Someone else’s opinion of you is none of your business.’ She’d just said, ‘If I ever meet Steven, I’m going to separate him from all of his vital organs with my bare hands, my tweezers and my eyelash curlers.’
So Tom was only the second person she’d told and he hadn’t made a single Tom-esque, acidic quip. He stood up to get another bottle of Malbec from the one measly shelf that Mattie hadn’t requisitioned (neither of them were going to be in any fit state to cope with the Christmas shopping crowds the next morning) and said, ‘Well, no wonder you hate all men.’
