Page 25 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
Phil nodded vigorously. ‘All the time. The ladies can’t get enough of them. I’m fighting them off.’
Mattie pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t laugh and got up from the table to fetch the tin of shortbread she’d brought up from the shop. ‘Are you sure about that? And do you want a top-up?’
Another cup of tea and two of her cranberry and orange shortbread cookies, and Phil was bearing his soul to Mattie: her shortbread was like a truth serum.
‘I’m going to be honest with you, Mattie,’ he said, eyes fixed on her so she wasn’t sure if he was about to spin her another yarn.
‘OK …’
‘You’ve got to admit, me and the boys: we’ve got all the moves and we’ve got all the chat. We’ve got, like, top bants. The ladies love the banter, right?’
‘I’m not sure that the ladies do actually love …’
‘But we just can’t pull.’ It seemed Phil didn’t really want to hear what the ladies genuinely loved, and Mattie realised that this might be part of his pulling problem. ‘We’re talking a serious love drought. Drier than the Sahara. Drier than the Gobi. Drier than the … the …’
‘I get it,’ Mattie cut him off. ‘I suppose you need to think about what you’re doing wrong. Maybe if you scaled back the chat-up lines and had more of a friendly discussion, that might work better for you.’
‘No! Because then you’re friend-zoned before you’ve even had a chance to connect on a deeper, more spiritual level,’ Phil said sadly. He looked mournfully at Mattie. ‘Like, now you and me are in the friend-zone. Nothing’s ever going to go down between us.’
‘Oh well, worse things happen at sea,’ Mattie said cheerfully and clinked her mug against Phil’s. ‘Here’s to friendship.’
‘Not that anything ever could happen,’ Phil continued. ‘Tom has warned us all off.’
Mattie bristled then, every tiny little hair on her body standing to attention. ‘Oh, did he?’ she queried tightly.
‘Said it was bad form to crack on with his flatmate. That we were all punching far, far above our weight and even if you did fancy one of us, probably because you’d suffered a blow to the head, it would only end in tears and that he’d be the one to suffer the consequences.’ Phil took a sip of tea. ‘That’s pretty much a direct quote.’
There was quite a lot to unpick from Phil’s verbatim retelling. Surprisingly, none of it was that unflattering. Tom would probably have been well within his rights to tell his friends to steer clear of Mattie because she was a bad-tempered shrew who hated everything, but instead he’d inferred that Mattie was far too good for his friends. Which was rather decent of him and also sounded a bit too good to be true.
‘What else did he say about me?’ Mattie demanded because Tom must have had plenty of other things to say about her and none of them that good.
‘Tom, Tom, Tom! Why is every girl I meet obsessed with Tom?’ Phil put his head in his hands.
‘I amnotobsessed with Tom!’
‘Like, every time one of us puts the moves on a lady and she tells us to sling our hook, then bloody Tom, though I love him like a brother, just slides right in there and within seconds he’ll have her smiling and giggling and giving him her number.’
‘Tom? Our Tom? No!’ Mattie scoffed.
‘Straight up!’
‘Does he wear his bow-tie and that hideous cardigan with the leather patches on the elbows when he’s out on the pull?’ Mattie asked, and she wished that she were recording this conversation on her phone so she’d have later evidence that it wasn’t part of some fever dream.
‘He does, though sometimes he wears a tweedy jacket that looks like something my granddad used to wear when he was working on his allotment.’
Mattie pinched her arm hard because she still wasn’t sure if this was all a dream. Now, more than anything else in the world, Mattie wanted to see Tom out on the pull, with her own eyes. She wanted it more than she wanted her own chain of little tearooms. She wanted it more than she wanted to have a cookbook published. More even, than she wanted Nigella Lawson to follow her back on Twitter.
‘What onearthdoes he say to them?’ she asked, but before Phil could answer, there was the sound of a tread on the stairs. ‘Quickly, tell me!’
Phil grinned and leaned forward as they heard the front door open. ‘I wish I knew, because if I did, then—’
‘Philip!’ Too late, Tom was there in the doorway and Mattie fancied that there was a panicked look on his face, to see one of his best buddies and his flatmate/thorn in his side all cosy with tea and biscuits. ‘I thought you were going to wait in my room.’
‘Mattie offered me tea and these amazing cookies,’ Phil said. He grinned again. ‘You know I can never refuse a beautiful lady.’
‘You could at least try,’ Tom said stiffly, though he didn’t pour scorn on Phil for describing Mattie as a beautiful lady.
‘Plenty of shortbread to go round,’ she offered, holding up the plate. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
