Page 68 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Hmmm, let me think.’ The woman rested one long, red talon on her chin. ‘A bit too vanilla for me. What else have you got, Tommy? I know it’s not really your forte, but you could at leasttryto think outside the box.’
This hide-clad harpy knew Tom?Tommy?This woman who was now resting her hand proprietorially on the bottom of the young man that she was with.
Mattie thought her brain might short circuit. What was going on?
For one split second Tom rested his forehead against the top rung of the ladder. His shoulders rose and fell as he took a deep breath. ‘I suppose if you wanted to go outside the box, then you could try werewolf erotica. Mermen are quite popular with our more adventurous readers,’ Tom said in a very polite voice.
‘Bor-ing!’ the woman declared. ‘Though I can’t imagine why I’d expect anything else from you, Tommy.’
That was enough! No one was going to talk to Tom like that on Mattie’s watch, or treat him so appallingly. The only person who was allowed to treat Tom appallingly was Mattie, but that was in the past and they were friends now, and friends didn’t let their friends get spoken to like that.
Mattie took a step back only so she could step forward, as if she was coming into the little room for the first time. ‘Tom! There you are!’ she cried in quite a breathy voice. All three of them turned to look at her. The woman flicked her eyes over Mattie, standing there in her apron with her name embroidered on it, then looked away with little interest, as did her manchild a second later. Tom’s expression verged on horrified, even though Mattie was there to rescue him, so by rights he should look a lot more relieved.
‘Here I am,’ he confirmed. ‘Did you need me for something?’
‘Well, the shop’s really busy. And there’s an Italian man who no one can understand, but I know you talk Latin so I thought you might be able to get the general gist of what he wants,’ she said, fluttering her lashes for all that they were worth.
‘Well, yes, I suppose ancient Latin and modern Italian do share some similar ethnography,’ Tom agreed gravely and Mattie would have done anything for him to crack a little conspiratorial smile at her. Hell, she’d even settle for a smirk, though usually when Tom smirked it annoyed her beyond all measure.
‘And there’s this other woman who wants to know what order to read Jane Austen’s novels in, and we all decided that you’d be the best person to answer that, and something very complicated and technical has gone wrong with one of the iPads, again you’re the only one who knows how to do complicated and technical stuff and … and …’ Mattie paused because she was running out of breath, and also for dramatic effect.
‘And?’ Tom prompted.
Mattie giggled girlishly and ducked her head. ‘And I missed you!’
‘You … did?’ Tom asked uncertainly because he might have several degrees but he certainly didn’t have a clue.
‘Of course I did,’ Mattie assured him with another outrageous flutter of her eyelashes as he finally climbed down from the ladder. ‘I’d hurry if I were you. The Italian man was becoming quite agitated.’
Head down, Tom brushed past the leather twins and when he got to Mattie, he patted her arm in what might have been a silent ‘thank you’ or just a ‘you’re blocking my exit and I need to get the hell out of here’.
Either way, Tom was gone so Mattie could look the other woman dead in the eye, her expression as icy as her voice: ‘Can I help you with something?’
The woman returned Mattie’s frosty look with amusement. ‘No, dear. I’ll wait for darling Tommy to come back.’
Mattie folded her arms and she could feel her features harden, was pretty sure she had a warning glint in her eye because manchild took a hasty step back. ‘Tomwon’t be coming back. As manager of our bookshop—’
‘Romantic fictionbookshop,’ the woman said like romantic fiction hardly counted as reading.
‘As manager of our bookshop,’ Mattie repeated as if she hadn’t been rudely interrupted, ‘the week before Christmas he’s rather busy, so if you want to buy a book, I can help you. And if you just want to waste our time, I can show you where the door is. What’s it to be?’
The woman pursed her rather thin but blood-red lips together so tightly that they all but disappeared and shot Mattie a positively malevolent look.
There was a moment of silence so tense and thick that Mattie could have chopped it into thin slices with her sharpest knives, then Miss Leather 2018 dropped her gaze first, because Mattie had right and reason on her side.
‘Don’t worry, dear, we’re going,’ she said. ‘Come on, Ally.’
She clicked her fingers at her companion as if he was a little dog. He quickly came to heel. ‘It’s Alex,’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘And I still need to buy a Christmas present for my sister. It’s why we came here in the first place.’
‘We’re leaving,’ his lady friend said in a quiet and furious voice, sweeping away through the anterooms in a cloud of black leather and Dior’s Poison until she got to the main room and was forced to stop sweeping and inch her way through the crowds. She even had to say, ‘Excuse me,’ through gritted teeth to two young couples who were blocking the door as they waited for their Mistletoe Booth pictures to come tumbling out of the slot.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Ally/Alex mouthed at Mattie, though he didn’t have anything to be sorry about other than his questionable taste in girlfriends.
Then they were gone.
Mattie breathed a deep sigh of relief and looked around the shop for Tom. He was currently doing something to Bertha with a Philips screwdriver while Nina stood over him. ‘Be gentle with her,’ Nina admonished. ‘Don’t think much of your bedside manner, Doctor Love.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, stop calling me that ridiculous name,’ Tom snapped. He wasn’t being sarcastic or weary or even lofty but snapping like a man who was at the very end of his very last nerve.
