Page 69 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
Then he looked up from his ministrations and caught Mattie’s eye, but only for a second. Not even a second. A nanosecond, then he looked away, his gaze stricken as if he couldn’t bear for her to see him.
If memory served Mattie right, whenever she made her chilli chocolate brownies for shop events, Tom would haunt the refreshments table, snatching up yet another brownie when he thought no one was looking. So, that night, after her prep session, she set to work in the tearoom kitchen; tripling her quantities so she’d have enough brownies left over to sell the next day.
It was gone ten o’clock when Mattie finally left the kitchen carrying a plate with twenty-four chilli chocolate brownies piled high. She was pretty sure that she hadn’t seen Tom leave the shop at all and as she climbed the stairs, her heart quickened with every step, until it became a pounding as she opened the door to see Tom in the kitchen standing over the stove.
He looked up, glanced her way long enough that Mattie could see he still looked mortified, and then turned back to the oven.
‘I come bearing gifts,’ she announced in a perky voice, which didn’t suit her. ‘Chocolate is the universal panacea, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and I don’t have anything that needs panacea-ing,’ Tom said tightly: he could hardly look at her.
Mattie could feel herself start to bristle. She hadn’t done anything wrong! On the contrary, she’d rescued Tom from … Oh! Then she got it. Or at least she understood why Tom was looking so unhappy and kept avoiding her gaze. She couldn’t know what history there was between Tom and that horrible woman in leather but she’d been witness to her attempts to humiliate him. In much the same way that Tom had seen Steven gaslighting her.
Nobody in their right mind wanted an audience when they were exposed and at their most vulnerable. Mattie certainly hadn’t, but in the end she’d been glad that Tom had been there to help her when she couldn’t quite help herself.
‘Tom,’ she said softly, coming into the kitchen and placing the plate of brownies down on the table. ‘I know you’re a strong, intelligent man who doesn’t need rescuing, but just like when Steven was here and you stepped in, I couldn’t bear to see that horrible woman treating you like that. Please don’t be cross with me for having your back. Who even was she?’
He didn’t reply but carried on stirring whatever he was cooking, which made an awful scrapey sound that had Mattie wincing.
A dreadful thought occurred to Mattie.
‘Oh my God, is she … is she yourmum?’
‘No! God, no!’ Tom whirled around from the stove. ‘A world of no. How could you even think that?’
Mattie held up her hands in despair. ‘You never talk about your family! You’re not giving me a lot to work with here, are you?’ She came close enough to Tom that she could place her hand ever so lightly on his arm, so he’d hardly be able to feel her touch through the cotton of his shirt and the wool of his hideous cardigan. ‘We have a house rule …’
‘We have more house rules that I can remember,’ Tom conceded in a more Tom-like way than he’d sounded for hours.
‘We have a house rule that states that what happens up here stays up here, so anything you want to tell me, any confidences you might want to share, I’ll take them to the grave,’ Mattie promised. And then she couldn’t bear it any longer: she took the fork, the non-stick saucepan-destroying fork out of Tom’s hand, and tossed it lightly in the sink. ‘I have a bottle of vodka in the freezer. Christmas gift from Stefan from the Swedish deli for helping him out with sourcing—’
‘It’s against my principles to accept Christmas gifts, you know how I feel about Christmas …’
‘Oh, shut up. It’s bad manners to turn down free premium vodka,’ Mattie said, steering Tom into a chair. ‘Just the thing to counteract the chilli heat from my brownies.’
She got two shot glasses and two side-plates down from the cupboard and let Tom have half a brownie and a couple of generous sips of vodka, before she tried again.
‘So that woman … Not your mother, then?’
Tom had just taken another generous sip of vodka, which might have been the reason why he shuddered.
‘God, no, please stop saying that,’ Tom begged. His expression grew serious and he put down his glass so he could knit his fingers together, as he always did when he was anxious. ‘She was my PhD supervisor, for a brief period, and she was my girlfriend for a little bit longer than that.’
Not spitting out a mouthful of vodka took all of Mattie’s powers of restraint, as it was she choked as it went down her throat, eyes watering, as Tom gave her a slightly exasperated look.
‘Girlfriend?’ she spluttered, frantically searching for some way to process what she’d just heard. Her gaze settled on the frayed cuff of Tom’s woolly cardigan. ‘You don’t seem her type.’
‘Oh, I wasexactlyher type,’ Tom said a little bitterly. ‘I was young, hopelessly naïve, easily flattered, just how Candace likes her men. But, ironically, when I decided that I was going to write my dissertation on the effects feminism has had on romantic fiction, she went right off me.’
Again, so much to process. ‘She what? Can you rewind?’ Mattie asked.
So, Tom rewound to when he arrived in London to do his PhD, with a first-class honours degree from Durham University and very little experience with women apart from a few short-term relationships and six months with a girl called Lizzie, who’d cheated on him with her landlord.
‘I was dazzled by Candace. She’d written three books, was a leading expert in the semantics of erotica and had gone down in university legend for throwing a copy of Freud’sGroup Analysis of the Egoat a boy who’d had the audacity to fall asleep in one of her lectures. I was besotted. I had no idea that I was just the latest in a long line of wet-behind-the-ears postgraduates that she seduced and then recreated in her own image.’
They were two shot glasses of vodka down so Mattie felt brave enough to ask the question that had been haunting her for the last fifteen minutes. ‘Did she … did she … get you up in leather too?’
Tom shut his eyes. ‘Yes.’ It was barely a whisper. ‘It gets worse than that. I was going to write my dissertation on recurring themes of sadomasochism in romantic novels. Her mother was a very successful romantic novelist in the eighties and Candace hates both romantic novels and her mother. Now, of course, I realise that it’s a classic anti-Oedipus complex—’
