Christmas at Hope Cottage: A Magical Feel-Good Romance Novel(11)

All three of them nodded.

Emma blinked. It was hard to picture this happening here. Very few things changed in Whistling, where the Brimbles had always run the local store, the Leas had always run the vicarage and there had always been a Halloway in Hope Cottage. As far as she knew, no one had ever run a tapas hut…

Evie shrugged. ‘Stranger things have happened.’

Emma doubted it.



* * *



When she went to bed that night, she thought of Jack. She hadn’t seen him since she’d moved to London, since she’d tried to put him and the family legacy behind her, relegate it to where she believed it deserved a place – in her past. She thought of how quickly he’d left when Sandro had mentioned The Book, the expression on his face, of disbelief, mixed with something that almost looked like fear. Some things, she thought a little sadly, fluffing the pillow beneath her head, never changed.





Chapter Four





Since she was a little girl, Emma had been taught that there was an art to cooking. A science too. Some things add texture and flavour. If you add cream to eggs it will go thick and rich. Some things though, when you add them, curdle and separate. Like oil and water. Or Sandro’s presence in Hope Cottage; at least as far as Emma was concerned, him being there was just making life even harder than it needed to be. He was just too damn loud, for one thing.

He was forever barging into the kitchen and disturbing her peace, chatting loudly on the phone, turning up the radio, his body jangling to some tune in his head, so that he would look at you while beating a drum on his knee, his whole being thrumming to its own secret music.

When he wasn’t making a noise, he was invading her space, moving aside the screen and trying to engage her in conversation.

‘Hola, Pajarita,’ he said the first morning after they met, his dark eyes taking in her bruises with a sad frown. Making her aware, suddenly, of the tangle of her sheets and the state of her unwashed hair.

‘What does that mean?’ she asked. ‘Pajarita?’

He gave her his mellow smile, a dimple appearing in his cheek. ‘Well, it’s like you, like a little bird with a broken wing.’ He mimed it, his arm making a flapping motion.

Her eyes popped in outrage. ‘I am not.’

Still, her grumpiness did nothing to dissuade him; if anything it seemed to fuel him even more. As the days passed, he was always there, strumming his guitar, to the delight of her aunts, helping himself to food, listening as Evie, Dot and Aggie worked on a recipe, his dark eyes wide as he turned to her in amazed delight. ‘Marvellous. Really marvellous, eh, Pajarita? Imagine curing arthritis like this, eh?’

She’d just roll her eyes, then head out for the sofa, trying to escape. That’s all she needed: more recruits for the family madness. Shoulders slumping when she’d realise that Pennywort, like Evie and her aunts, would stay with him. They seemed to bask in his attention. Making him endless cups of espresso and feeding him biscuits that they made just for him. Ginger snaps, peanut butter cookies, chocolate chip – nothing was too much trouble for him. Hearing his sighs of pleasure as he ate them made her grit her teeth, partly because she would have given anything just to taste one herself.

He was always around, or at least so it seemed, oddly for someone who owned his own business. Though to be fair, as she napped so often he might well be leaving and returning; she couldn’t always be sure.

Every morning of the first week that she was back, his dark, curly head would appear next to the silk screen and he’d offer her a cup of coffee, or suggest that she come to the window to see something ‘interesting’, or to ‘take a short walk in the garden’ or go with him while he picked up some groceries.

He didn’t get offended when she told him to simply ‘Bugger off.’

He would just leave, chuckling. ‘Maybe next time, Pajarita, eh? Adios.’

She had to swallow the urge to shout, ‘I am not a bloody little bird!’ Not because doing so would be mean, though partly it was that, and she didn’t like that that was who she’d become, but more because shouting would hurt like hell.

When he was gone there was quiet and stillness, and the blue calm of the kitchen. Quiet was one of the few pleasures she had left and she savoured it when it came, the way she had once savoured the first delicious bite of chocolate.

The second week she was back, shuffling into the kitchen in her robe, she looked around and sniffed, though it wasn’t like she could smell anything. Signs of his presence were everywhere. The different types of tapas in the fridge, neatly stored in glass containers. The shiny, new coffee machine that was constantly on, the Halloways providing him with a steady supply of espresso – she saw now that he’d left one behind, stone cold, half full and forgotten, while he dealt with some crisis at the Tapas Hut.

She picked the little cup up, but with her hazy vision, misjudged the distance and knocked it over, cursing as it oozed inky liquid onto the table that seeped into The Book. She grabbed a dishcloth and quickly mopped it up, pressing hard to make sure it didn’t soak into the pages. She flipped a page to dab on the other side, then paused with a frown as her fingers traced over the stubby ends of what looked like a set of pages that had been torn out.

She frowned. It had been years since she’d looked at The Book properly, but despite this, she knew the pages by heart – or at least, so she’d thought. The torn pages were between a recipe for mending fences and another for overcoming heartache. These recipes had always been there though, which meant that the torn pages must have always been there too, and she’d simply never noticed them before. It was strange. Not all the recipes worked. Even Evie admitted that. But they were kept all the same – they were lessons, or at least that’s what Evie had always maintained; they’d simply add an annotation in pen or pencil to explain what had gone wrong. But if that was the case, why then had this one been torn out?