Page 70 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Eh?’
‘It’s not important,’ he assured her. ‘Suffice to say that my dissertation was going to be a savage takedown of the romance genre and its readers, who were all desperate to be dominated by an alpha male so they could abrogate all responsibility for their sad little lives.’
‘Oh, Tom,’ Mattie couldn’t keep the disappointment out of her voice. She was no expert but she’d read enough romance novels about women setting up their own successful cafés and cake shops to know that ‘romance novels arenothinglike that.’
‘Well, yes. I arrived at the same conclusion as soon as I began reading a cross-section of them. I’d realised that romance novels, which were largely written by women for women, were social history documents about the way that gender roles had evolved over the last fifty years. I’d argue the case, as I did when I defended my dissertation, that more than anything, romance novels are also unclaimed feminist texts.’
‘But surely Candace must have been pleased about your feminist awakening.’ Mattie frowned. Candace had looked very much like a woman who had no truck with any man who thought he was better.
‘She was furious. Didn’t like dissent in the ranks or anything that interfered with her own rigid academic agenda.’ Tom sighed unhappily. Then he poured out another measure of vodka into his shot glass and downed it in one, wincing as the liquid fire hit his belly. ‘She humiliated me in front of the undergraduate class I was teaching. Called me a milksop and said the reason I couldn’t wrap my puny and quite unremarkable mind around the concept of the alpha male was because I was as far from an alpha male as it was possible to get.’
It was Mattie’s turn to wince. ‘Ouch. That’s brutal.’
‘Especially as I was standing there all trussed up in the leather trousers she’d bought me,’ Tom said with a full-on shudder this time. ‘It all but destroyed me. Everything I believed about myself, I suddenly doubted.’
‘But she didn’t destroy you,’ Mattie pointed out. ‘You’re still here. You’re still in one piece and youdidwrite your dissertation about feminism and alpha males and romance novels, and now you’re anactualdoctor.’
‘All of that is down to Lavinia,’ Tom said and just saying her name made his face light up and his voice grow warm and tender. ‘I came to Bookends to buy some reading material. Solely because it was guaranteed that I wouldn’t see anybody I knew while I was stocking up on bodice rippers.’
The Bookends that Mattie vaguely remembered from the two occasions that she’d visited it to talk to Posy about taking on the tearooms had been a run-down shop full of dark wood and dark corners. It was amazing the difference that Posy’s grey-with-clover-pink-accents paint job and some strategically placed spotlights had made to the interior. Not to mention the whole rebranding as a ‘one-stop shop for all your romantic fiction needs’.
‘It’s just as well that Posy or Verity or Nina didn’t serve you,’ she mused, grinning at the thought.
Tom pulled an anguished face. ‘I go hot and cold just thinking about it. But it was before Verity and Nina’s time, thank God, and Lavinia got to me before Posy did. I kept coming back. Not just to buy books but because I looked forward to our conversations about them and, being Lavinia, she encouraged me to trust my instincts and my intellect instead of trying to mould them to fit into the narrow box where Candace wanted to put them.’
‘I would have loved to have met Lavinia,’ Mattie said because everything she’d heard about the former owner was delightful; a kind, caring, mischievous woman who didn’t suffer fools, though Mattie couldn’t help but think of herself as foolish. While Tom had been confessing how he’d been naïve enough to fall prey to Candace, Mattie couldn’t help but think of the wide-eyed, impulsive girl she used to be. A silly foolish girl who’d wasted two years of her life loving Steven.
‘Lavinia would have liked you.’ Tom splashed more vodka into their glasses, his hands now a little unsteady. ‘She’d have been thrilled to have the tearooms open again. Lavinia loved cake.’
‘She definitely sounds like my kind of woman.’
‘On Fridays, she’d go on what she’d call a bun run,’ Tom recalled, with a faraway look. ‘She’d take a taxi to Patisserie Valerie in Soho and get us all our favourite cakes. Lavinia loved a good Bakewell tart. For her eightieth birthday we had a gigantic one with her name iced on it sent all the way from the actual town of Bakewell.’
Mattie was quite partial to a Bakewell tart herself and immediately her mind was racing with things that she could do with frangipane as a tribute to Lavinia. Maybe a play on a Bakewell tart with fresh raspberries and …
‘… anyway, when Candace tried to get my PhD funding stopped, Lavinia saved the day. It helped that she was particularly pally with the Dean of the English Department, so I was assigned another, far more simpatico supervisor and Lavinia offered me a part-time job so I could jack in delivering pizzas.’
The shocks just kept on coming. ‘Youcan drive a moped?’
Tom grinned, which wiped away all the strain that this trip down his own memory lane had caused him. ‘That’s the part that surprises you?’
Mattie grinned back. ‘Well, yeah. I mean,youon a moped!’ She gave Tom a thoughtful look. ‘Why didn’t you tell Posy and Verity any of this? I’m sure they’d have been nothing but supportive.’
‘Yes, the two women who have had a four-year running gag about writing me up in the mythical sexual harassment book,’ Tom said dryly.
‘I thought Nina had invented the sexual harassment book.’
‘Verity,’ Tom confirmed.
‘No!’
‘Yes!’ Tom put his glasses back on, though Mattie preferred him without them. Not because he was more attractive without his glasses (and where had that little idea come from?) but because he looked more unguarded, approachable.
‘How funny though, that Bookends then became a specialist romantic fiction bookshop,’ Mattie mused.
‘Yes, hilarious. I tried to persuade Posy it was a bad idea but she was having none of it,’ Tom said with a sniff.
‘And all this time you pretended that youhatedromantic fiction.’
