Page 44 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Now, where’s the kitchen?’ Steven said, as if Mattie hadn’t even spoken. ‘Ah! Here! And I can hang my coat on the hook on the back of the door. So, this is where the magic happens. God, it’s poky …’
Mattie hadn’t imagined it. Not any of it. This was what Steven did. Rode roughshod over everybody else in the guise of doing them a favour, of helping out so they’d feel beholden to him. And he did much worse things than that …
She all but ran into the kitchen to squeeze past Steven, yank open the drawer of the cupboard to the left of the cooker and pull out her recipe book. Surely she wasn’t imagining the gleam in Steven’s eyes as he saw what Mattie was holding.
‘Ifyoumusthelp, then the butter’s in the fridge. Use the unsalted. Flour and dry ingredients in here.’ She gestured to a cupboard. ‘You do remember how to make a laminated dough, don’t you?’
Steven smiled as he opened the fridge door, making himself at home. ‘I’m insulted that you’d think otherwise,’ he said.
‘Right, well I’ll be back in a minute,’ Mattie said, grabbing a couple of sheets of paper from the worktop, new recipes she was fine-tuning, and heading back to the bookshop.
She was just in time. Posy was waddling out of the door with Nina, and Verity was bringing up the rear.
‘I’m fit for nothing but a takeaway curry and maybe one episode ofQueer Eye,’ Posy was saying as Mattie burst through the arch.
‘Wait! Don’t leave!’ she cried out. All three of them turned to look at her.
‘Everything all right?’ Verity asked with a concerned look on her face. ‘Is this going to take long?’
‘Two minutes,’ Mattie promised. ‘I just need you to lock my recipe book in the safe.’
‘Okaaaay,’ Verity said with a frown because as requests went, it was pretty weird. ‘I can do that. Any particular reason why?’
‘So that no one can steal it,’ Mattie said – it sounded ridiculous but she didn’t care. All she cared about was not losing another two years’ worth of recipes that she’d painstakingly created and finessed and tweaked over and over again.
‘Who would do that?’ Posy asked, leaning against the door jamb. ‘Can I wait until tomorrow to find out? Sebastian’s just pulling up outside.’
‘Go! I’ll explain everything tomorrow,’ Mattie said and with a grateful smile, Posy left and Mattie could follow Verity through to the office, Nina bringing up the rear.
‘Is that bloke still here?’ she demanded. ‘An ex-boyfriend, obviously.’
‘How can you tell?’ Mattie asked, watching intently as Verity turned the dial on the old-fashioned safe. It was where they kept the day’s takings when they hadn’t had a chance to get to the bank, the till float and, most importantly and the reason it was a fire-retardant safe, a first edition of Noel Streatfeild’sBallet Shoes, which was Posy’s most prized possession.
‘If I ever went onMastermindthen ex-boyfriends would be my specialist subject,’ Nina said, pulling on hat and gloves. ‘And I couldsmellthe badness coming off him in waves. A right wrong ’un, yeah?’
‘The wrongest ’un,’ Mattie said and her shoulders slumped in relief as Verity placed her recipe book and worksheets in the safe, then slammed the door.
‘Do you want me to get rid of him for you?’ Nina asked, her tone all seriousness. It was a tempting offer. Mattie didn’t doubt that Nina could see Steven off in a spectacular fashion. She wouldn’t put up with any of his clever powerplays. No, Nina would probably yawn in his handsome face and drawl, ‘Why are you still here?’
Alas, Mattie had to face down her own demons. ‘No, but thank you for the offer. I think I need to deal with him myself. I have some things I need to say to him.’
‘Don’t forget, Tom’s upstairs if you need him,’ Nina called after her. But Mattie didn’t need Tom. She certainly didn’t want the man who’d ruined her for all other men to meet the man who thought she hatedallmen.
The thought of all the love that she’d never be either giving or receiving because of Steven put a spring in Mattie’s step, and as she marched through the darkened anterooms back to her domain, she steeled herself to confront him.
‘There you are! I wasn’t sure of quantities so I reckoned starting with about five hundred grams of flour would give you about twenty-five pastries,’ Steven said. He was already slowly mixing the dough with Mattie’s beloved KitchenAid mixer, which had belonged to her grandmother.
‘Hmm. I usually double up,’ Mattie said, opening the fridge to take out some dough that she’d made earlier, plus a packet of her favourite Normandy unsalted butter. ‘Look, I’m perfectly capable of doing this by myself. I don’t know why you’re here and actually, I don’t even want you here so—’
‘I missed you, Matilda,’ Steven said softly. ‘I miss everything about you.’
‘Really?’ Mattie asked, raising an eyebrow and starting her dough. ‘Because, according to you, there wasn’t one good thing about me.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Steven said, shaking his head, and he was doing that thing that he did with his eyes. Furrowing his brow and gazing downwards as if he was in deep, existential pain, like he was the innocent victim in all this. ‘You know I loved you, even though there were times when you made it very difficult to love you.’
Fortunately, Mattie had reached the part of pastry making that required her to place her unwrapped butter between two pieces of greaseproof paper, then bash seven shades of hell out of it with her rolling pin.
It was something she always enjoyed doing. It relieved the stresses of the day just as effectively as Pippa’s Boxfit classes and wasn’t such a strain on her upper arms. But never before in the history of flaky pastry had one woman gone to town as hard on the butter as Mattie was doing.
