Saving the Cake(4)

I put my glass down. “Okay,” I said. “Alright. Fine. I’m calm. Where’s a pen?”

Don grabbed a pen for me, together with a pad of paper.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked suddenly. “You don’t even know me.”

He blinked, as if caught by surprise. “You’re the story,” he said at last. “If you don’t bake the cake, I go home empty-handed.” But he held my gaze for just a second too long.

I could feel myself flushing. I looked very firmly down at the pad and started writing the list of ingredients, but it took me four attempts just to spell raisins.



“You don’t have to come,” I told him. “Look, I know I got a little…tense.”

“Tense?”

“—but you really don’t have to come with me to buy stuff. I can handle shopping. You go back to your hotel. I’ll call you when the cake’s ready.”

“Go back to my hotel and do what?” We were standing outside the cottage and he looked up and down my street—which is pretty much the only street in the village. “It doesn’t look as if there’s a whole lot to do here.”

“What do you mean?” I’m quite defensive about Fenton-on-the-Water, tiny though it is. “There’s a post office and a pub.” I sighed. “Fine. You can come.” I did my best to make it sound grudging.





Chapter 4


As we walked past the duck pond, I tried to figure out why he was hanging around. Was he that worried his story was going to disappear on him?

I looked at our reflection in the water. I’d remembered to take off my apron, for once (I didn’t always remember, when I dashed out to pick up an ingredient, which the locals thought was hilarious). That left me in a deep green scoop-neck top and a long skirt. Next to me strode Donovan, a little piece of America transplanted to rural England. We made for a very odd couple—me all curves and roundness and him all hard lines and tailored perfection, clean-cut and yet ruggedly handsome—

I coughed and looked away.

“Have you always lived here?” he asked. “One of those small-town girls who never left?”

I looked at him, surprised. “Do I seem like a small town girl? I’m from Chelsea.”

“Is that near London?”

“That’s in London. I lived there for years, with my husband. The cottage used to be our weekend place. Then, when we divorced, he kept the apartment and I moved in here. And the locals, bless them, accepted me.” I gave him a sideways look. “You hate it, don’t you?”

He was poking at the cobbles with the tip of his shoe. “I don’t hate it. It’s just very…different. Like you.”

I stopped dead. “Different? To whom? How am I different?” I could suddenly see my ex-husband again, with his arms around Yvonne’s waist. I’d run into them one too many times at our old haunts, which was exactly why I’d insisted on taking the cottage, even though the apartment was worth far more.

“Different to the women in LA.” Then he caught my furious expression and his face fell. “Wait—I didn’t mean—”

But I knew exactly what he meant. He meant I wasn’t some stick-thin model. “Come on,” I said, setting off at a brisk pace. “No time for dilly-dallying.”

He hurried after me. It was a few minutes before the tension eased enough for him to speak again. “Dilly-dallying?” he asked in low voice.


I felt myself flushing again. “Shilly-shallying,” I said irritably.

“Shilly-shallying? You talk like Mary Poppins.”

“I’m ecstatic that I amuse you.”

“It’s—“ This time, he stopped before he said too much.

“It’s what?” We’d arrived at the general store. I turned to him, one hand on the door handle. “Cute? Quirky? British?”

“Nothing,” he said. He actually looked flustered himself, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why.



The journey back was less tense, but also slower. Less tense, because retail therapy always helps, even if it’s just seventeen bags of flour and kilos of raisins. Slower because we were laden down with bags. Well, he was.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to carry something?” I asked. I was walking behind him, ostensibly so that I didn’t leave him behind, but mainly so that I could admire the way his ass moved.

“I’m just fine, thank you,” he said, teetering slightly to one side. I’d told him not to put all the flour in one bag. I looked over at the duck pond as we passed it again. For just a second, we looked like an actual couple walking home from doing the shopping. Then I reminded myself how silly I was being.

A hundred yards from the cottage, the heavens opened again. It was a full-on downpour, this time, more like a sheet of solid water than raindrops. “Save the flour!” I yelled. “If it gets wet, there’ll be lumps!”

He looked at me for a second as if I was crazy, but then whipped off his jacket and wrapped it over the open top of the bag. Together, we sprinted to the cottage.

By the time we made it to the door, we were soaked through. Everything seemed to happen very fast. There was a mad scramble through my purse for the key, then we were pushing the door open and spilling into the hall and he was upending the bag to get the paper sacks of flour away from the wet fabric and kicking the door closed behind him and—