Page 49 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Time to crawl back under your rock,’ he said, slamming the gate in Steven’s incredulous face.
Steven’s mouth twisted into an ugly shape as he hurled insults at them; Mattie didn’t know how she’d ever thought him attractive.
She waited until he finally ran out of steam in the face of their indifference.
‘Do you think he’s finished?’ Tom asked her.
‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ Mattie said. ‘Also, I owe you two eggs, if you still fancy a fried-egg sandwich.’
‘Yes, please, I’m famished,’ Tom said, holding out his arm so Mattie could tuck her own through it. ‘Shall we?’
‘We shall,’ Mattie agreed.
‘Don’t you dare walk away from me!’ Steven shouted. But Mattie proceeded to do just that and yet … she couldn’t bear to let him have the final word.
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Merry Christmas, Steven,’ she called out brightly. ‘And I hope you have a really crappy new year!’
After stopping off in the tearooms so Mattie could pinch a box of eggs, they worked their way through the shop with damp sponges to clear up errant blobs of cake batter.
The top of their stairs had come off worst but Tom said that he didn’t mind doing the mop-up if Mattie did something more exciting with the eggs than fry them sunny side up. ‘Maybe one of your famous four-cheeses omelettes?’ he suggested.
She rejuvenated the stale end of a loaf of sourdough by dousing it in water then sticking it in the oven as she whipped eggs and grated cheese. Once Tom had finished cleaning up, he sat down at the little kitchen table so Mattie could present him with a three-cheeses omelette on refreshed sourdough toast with a parsley garnish. Then she promptly burst into tears.
‘Oh, Mattie,’ Tom said unhappily. ‘I really am starving but I can hardly eat if you’re crying.’
‘I didn’t mean to cry,’ Mattie sobbed. ‘I don’t even know why I am crying.’
‘Maybe if you splash your face with cold water. That’s what Posy does when she’s tearful,’ he mumbled through a mouthful of omelette because it turned out he could manage to eat while in the company of a weeping woman. ‘And she should know, because she cries on average about five times a day at the moment.’
‘And I don’t even have pregnancy hormones,’ Mattie hiccupped, but she got up from her chair and her own omelette to splash cold water on her hot, tear-streaked face, and she did feel a little better.
‘I’ve got a bottle of Malbec, quite a decent one, on the one shelf in the one kitchen cupboard which I’ve been able to claim as my own,’ Tom said. ‘If you fancy a glass. And if you’re having a glass, then it would be rude to make you drink alone.’
Mattie didn’t need to be told twice and actually she did feel much better after she and Tom had eaten their supper and finished a glass of wine. Maybe it was because Tom hadn’t bombarded her with questions, but was happy to sit in silence. And not the awkward silence that they usually found themselves in. This silence was warmer, maybe even companionable.
‘Thank you,’ Mattie said when Tom poured them both a second glass. ‘Not for the wine. Well, yes, thank you for the wine but also thank you for what you did back there. For getting rid of him.’
‘It did look as if you had things under control,’ Tom said, though they both knew that was a lie. ‘And I meant what I said about you being a strong, intelligent woman who didn’t need to be rescued, but I couldn’t just stand there and let him talk to you like that. It made me very angry,’ he added in a quiet but dark voice.
‘All this time, these last two years, I’ve hated him for ruining my life,’ Mattie said, ‘but now I realise that he’s not worth even my hate. It takes a lot of effort and energy to hate someone, and I’d be much better off using that time to work on new recipes.’
Tom took a long, meditative sip of wine. ‘Did he really steal your recipes?’
‘He really did. I had a big notebook that I’d written everything in,’ Mattie said with a sigh and she waited for that fiery hit of rage to punch her in the stomach – now it felt like more of a gentle prod. ‘Sometimes it can take months to get a recipe just right. Adding in a little more of one thing, taking out a little bit of something else, experimenting with flavours and textures. It was my life’s work. I was only twenty-four, but I’d been writing my recipes in that book since I was ten, and he stole it.’
‘Did you confront him about it?’ Tom asked.
‘Not at first. At first, he convinced me that I’d lost the book. And that I only had myself to blame for being so careless.’
Mattie wasn’t looking at Tom or even at their little kitchen. She was two years, and a world away. In another tiny little flat that looked out over the rooftops of Paris.
It had been two weeks before Christmas and she’d strung garlands of fairy lights across the ceiling and found the smallest Christmas tree in all of Paris, and decorated it with miniature baubles, placing it on the windowsill.
Their miniature home had looked homely, cosy and festive until Mattie had pulled the place apart looking for her recipe book, which wasn’t where it always lived in a drawer in the kitchen.
By the time Mattie had finished it looked as if a tornado had torn through. ‘Maybe you left it at L’Institut,’ Steven suggested in a bored voice.
‘But I never take it to L’Institut. You know that I don’t,’ Mattie insisted, as she lay on the floor and swatted a hand under the sofabed, though there was no earthly reason why the recipe book would have migrated from the kitchen drawer to under the sofabed, as Steven pointed out.
