Page 73 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Hello,’ Tom said, swallowing hard.
‘Hello,’ Mattie said, clutching onto her pastry tongs as if they were the last lifebelt on theTitanic. ‘I’ve got a bit of a sore head this morning. Have had to ban Cuthbert from playing any of his awful Christmas carols until after lunch.’
‘That’s verging on blasphemy,’ Cuthbert said mildly. Then he went back to whistling ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, which was annoying at the best of times (both whistling and song choice) but especially when Mattie was mildly hungover, sleep-deprived and kiss-sore. Because she’d kissed Tom last night. And Tom had kissed her back.
‘Anyway, last night is a bit of a blur,’ Mattie lied. ‘There was a lot of vodka.’
Tom nodded gratefully. ‘So much vodka. I have complete amnesia. By the way, I’m out tonight,’ he added with what seemed to Mattie heavy emphasis, as if he was worried that she might be getting ideas that they’d have another cosy night in and end up kissing each other again. Not that he could remember that they’d already kissed, or so he claimed, even though it had been some pretty stellar kissing.
‘I have plans too,’ Mattie said, though the plans mostly involved a pizza delivery and lights out before ten.
‘Great,’ Tom said.
‘Great,’ Mattie echoed. She brandished her tongs. ‘Are you going to order something, then?’
Tom’s croque missus had become something of a daily habit, but this morning he said that Meena had already made him a bacon sandwich when she was frying bacon for the pig-in-blanket rolls in the upstairs kitchen. ‘Just a maximum-strength black coffee, though I am still quite peckish. Maybe a couple of croissants to keep me going until lunchtime.’
After that, Mattie would have been quite happy to avoid Tom for the foreseeable future, but she had promised Posy to check in at the shop. And Posy wasn’t to know that last night Mattie had known the touch of Tom’s lips. Oh God! She had to stop thinking about the kissing, the really good kissing, especially as Tom had no memory of it.
Thankfully, checking in at the shop didn’t require much more than poking her head around the Classics arch and shouting over the heads of the heaving throng of customers, ‘You all right, Nina?’
‘I suppose,’ Nina called back rather plaintively – but if she really needed help, then she’d have asked for it. Nina was hardly a shy, retiring wallflower incapable of expressing her needs and desires. Ha!
It wasn’t until after the lunchtime rush that Mattie even had a chance to look at her phone to see that she had five missed calls from Posy and numerous text messages demanding to know why Mattie was screening her calls.
‘About time!’ Posy squawked, answering Mattie’s call on first ring. ‘Put me on speaker and take me through to the shop!’
‘Everything all right, Pose?’ Mattie asked, though she didn’t appreciate Posy’s peremptory tone. ‘Is there something preventing you from calling Nina or Tom yourself?’
Posy gave a growl of pure annoyance. ‘They won’t take my calls.’
The tearooms were busy but not horribly so and Sophie, who’d gone AWOL for ten minutes, had now returned with suspiciously tousled hair and noticeably reddened lips, so Mattie was free to do Posy’s bidding.
‘You’ve been calling them a lot?’ she guessed as she walked through the anterooms.
‘I wouldn’t say a lot. I don’t think calling every half hour is excessive,’ Posy mused.
‘Kind of is. So, how’s the bed rest working out for you?’
‘I’m horizontal as we speak,’ Posy said. ‘I even have my feet propped up. I’m very calm. Goodness, how long does it take to walk a few metres to the shop?’
‘You don’t sound very calm, Posy,’ Mattie said, stepping into the main room of the shop and grabbing a passing Nina by the arm. ‘Got Nina here for you.’
Nina was already trying to make a run for it while making slashing motions with her hand.
‘AM I ON SPEAKER?’
‘Yes, and no need to shout,’ Nina said with a dramatic rolling of her eyes. She wriggled free of Mattie’s grip and pulled a book off the shelf she was standing by. ‘You’ve all but perforated my eardrum!’ Then she turned to the customer she had in tow. ‘This one is very good. It’s a contemporary version ofVanity Fairthat saves you the bother of actually readingVanity Fair.’
The customer nodded and Nina took her over to the counter to pay, with Mattie following like a little dog, while Posy complained non-stop about Nina’s inability to answer a phone.
‘I’m perfectly able to answer a phone,’ Nina said. ‘I just didn’t want to talk to you for, like, the twentieth time in one hour.’
‘That’s a total exaggeration!’
‘You wouldn’t be checking up on Verity like this.’
Posy growled again – it couldn’t be good for her blood pressure. ‘That’s why I’m calling. I’ve spoken to Very and she says that she’s not coming back tomorrow!’
