A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews

Chapter 25: 9 days until Christmas

Chapter 26: 8 days until Christmas

Chapter 27: 8 days until Christmas

Chapter 28: 7 days until Christmas

Chapter 29: 6 days until Christmas

Chapter 30: 5 days until Christmas

Chapter 31: 3 days until Christmas

Chapter 32: 3 days until Christmas

Chapter 33: 2 days until Christmas

Chapter 34: 1 day until Christmas

Chapter 35: Christmas Day

Acknowledgements

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About the Author

Also by Annie Darling

About the Publisher

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‘Goodbye! Do come again!’ With a bright smile, Matilda Smith ushered her last customer of the day out of the door of the Happy Ever After tearooms and hurried to lock it behind them. Her mobile phone, in the pocket of her apron, had been buzzing like a furious bee with incoming text messages for the last five minutes.

Mattie pulled out her still vibrating and flashing phone to read her messages; all of them from one person.

EMERGENCY MEETING!!!!!

The urgent capital letters left Mattie unmoved. She’d been on her feet since seven that morning and her feet were about to go on strike, so this so-called emergency meeting could do without her.

‘I thought Beige Anorak would never go,’ Mattie remarked of their most frequent customer. ‘I’ve a good mind to tell him that he can only hog a table of four for a maximum of one hour.’

‘At least he shared the table this time,’ Cuthbert pointed out as he slowly and lovingly wiped down Jezebel the coffee machine. Her old barista, Paloma, had left to go travelling and Mattie had despaired that she’d ever find someone who could handle the very temperamental Jezebel, until she’d met seventy-two-year-old Cuthbert Lewis.

Mattie’s phone vibrated again. Another message from a person who really needed to stop using shouty capslock and, instead, get to the point.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL, THIS IS A GENUINE EMERGENCY!!!!!

‘I bet it’s not a genuine emergency,’ Mattie exclaimed out loud.

‘Trouble at t’mill?’ Cuthbert asked.

‘Just the usual flapping from next door.’

Cuthbert cocked his head in the direction of the set of glass-panelled double doors to the left of the counter. ‘They are rather prone to flapping, it’s true. Whereas you and I are of a calmer disposition.’

Now that Beige Anorak was finally gone, Mattie could get on with washing the floor. She plunged her mop into the bucket of soapy hot water that she’d filled earlier. ‘We are a flap-free zone. Not like them.’

Mattie and Cuthbert were their own little fiefdom within the wider territory of Happy Ever After, the bookshop that lay beyond the glass-panelled double doors. The tearooms had their own traditions, their own way of doing things, their own set of rules, but they co-existed quite peacefully alongside the bookshop. They made sure that no customers brought books they hadn’t already paid for into the tearooms to spill food and drink all over them. They checked daily that Strumpet, the portly, gluttonous cat who belonged to Verity, Happy Ever After’s manager, was safely locked in the flat above the shop. There had been several incidents when Strumpet had staged a prison break and headed straight for the tearooms and the lap of anyone who had cake.

EMERGENCY MEETING IN THE MIDNIGHT BELL NOW!!!!!! WHY ARE YOU IGNORING MY TEXTS? HAVE I MENTIONED THIS IS AN EMERGENCY?

‘Why she can’t just toddle fifty metres and tell me in person, I don’t know,’ Mattie murmured, as she paused mopping to read yet another panic-stricken text message.

‘A lady in her condition can’t be toddling here and there,’ Cuthbert noted as he gave Jezebel one last affectionate buffing.

Cuthbert was right. Cuthbert was usually right about all things.

Mattie swirled the mop in a hard-to-reach corner. ‘Yes, but … but … she’s managing to toddle all the way to The Midnight Bell for a so-called emergency meeting,’ she said. ‘Shall I make your apologies?’

‘If you will. My Cynthia will already have my dinner on,’ he said of the love of his life, his wife. ‘Now you get your beauty sleep, my darling,’ he ordered his sidechick, draping a special cover over Jezebel. ‘It’s another busy day tomorrow, so you need your rest.’

It was so tempting to ask Cuthbert if he and Jezebel would like some privacy. Mattie shook her head, patted Cuthbert on the shoulder as she squeezed past him (it was a tight fit behind the counter) to empty the bucket and finish tidying away. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then, Cuthbert.’

‘Indeed you will,’ Cuthbert agreed, shrugging on his coat and donning a nifty trilby hat for the five-minute walk home to a flat in the beautiful, Art Deco 1920s Housing Association estate just around the corner.

Mattie’s phone trembled again.

DON’T IGNORE ME, MATTIE! WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME?

It probably would be a good idea to reply to one of these so-called urgent text messages, Mattie decided.

I’m not ignoring you. I’m doing my next-day prep and I’ll see you in The Midnight Bell when I’m done. I hope you’ll have a large glass of white wine and a bowl of cheesy chips waiting for me. Mattie x

She didn’t even need to take one full step to enter the tiny kitchen shielded from public view by a curtain adorned with little teapots. So tiny was the kitchen that if Mattie stretched out her arms she could touch the walls.

But she didn’t stretch out her arms, instead she washed her hands, then set to work making the flaky pastry for tomorrow’s viennoiserie: croissants, pains au chocolat, pains aux raisins and several other buttery, melt-in-the-mouth delights. The dough needed to chill overnight, which was why Mattie wasn’t currently quaffing Chenin Blanc in the pub.

Before she took off her apron and retrieved her handbag from the one cupboard that she had room for in the kitchen, Mattie pulled out her compact to confirm what she already knew: her face – skin the colour of the lightest, most delicate caramel sauce with a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose – needed a generous dusting of matte powder to tone down the effects of slaving over a hot stove all day. Adding a slick of tawny-pink lipstick, a re-application of mascara and a quick check that the two flicks of liquid eyeliner from this morning were still in place, all she needed to do was make sure that there weren’t any flour or grease stains on her black trousers and jumper, and Mattie was good to go.

It helped that she had a look and she stuck to it rigidly. Mattie had seen the film Funny Face at an impressionable age and even though she was now a very grown-up twenty-eight, she still wished that she was Audrey Hepburn, the bookshop clerk who jetted off to Paris with Fred Astaire and modelled for a fashion magazine when she wasn’t dancing to freeform jazz in seedy bars.

Not only did Mattie now work next door to a bookshop, she’d also been to Paris. In fact, she’d lived in Paris for three whole years and had danced to freeform jazz in seedy bars on several occasions. But that was long in the past and Paris was now dead to her, yet she still dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face: long, dark-brown hair caught up in a ponytail with a blunt-cut thick fringe which was the perfect foil for her permanently arched eyebrows, above eyes which were the exact same shade as a mink coat her grandmother had once owned.

And like Audrey, Mattie always wore black. Before Paris and especially after Paris, she wore black. In summer, a black cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and slim-fit black cropped cigarette pants, and the same pair of Birkenstocks she’d been wearing in summer for years. On winter days like today, she swapped the shirt for a jumper, the cropped trousers for a longer version and the Birks for a pair of black Chuck Taylors.

Wearing the same thing every day (Mattie had many black shirts, jumpers and trousers, both cropped and long – it wasn’t like she wore the same two pieces every day until they crawled to the wash basket of their own accord) was practical and quick. No agonising over a wardrobe full of different colours and styles. Which was just as well, because as Mattie stepped out onto the cobblestones of Rochester Mews and locked the front door behind her, she’d be unlocking it again at seven thirty the next morning. Such was the lot of someone who had a hell of a lot of breakfast pastries to bake before the tearooms opened at 9 a.m.