Christmas at the Little Clock House on the Green Read online

  ‘So,’ Daniel said, grabbing her attention again. ‘We give Crispin’s friend of a friend the swerve and ask Sarah to design the e-vite, and we announce the opening of Cocktails & Chai along with the other businesses?’

  God, he was good for her, she thought. He was never frightened of the dramatic streak that ran through her and was perfectly trusting that she knew when to let logic overrule emotion in business decisions. He totally had her back. And she’d never felt more able to be herself…

  ‘I love you,’ Kate said.

  The words came out super-naturally considering it was the first time she’d said them, but as Daniel inhaled sharply, tears made glistening pools of her eyes, which was why she didn’t see Oscar swiftly pulling a goggle-eyed Juliet out of the room to give her and Daniel some privacy.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kate started babbling. ‘Totally the wrong time to drop the L-bomb. At work of all places. I couldn’t pick somewhere romantic? All the times you’ve said the words to me and I haven’t said them back. Oh—,’ she broke off as Daniel closed the distance in one easy stride, swept her up into his arms and kissed her.

  As his mouth sealed across hers, a familiar buzz lit across nerve-endings and ignited to spread through her veins. As his lips rubbed, coaxed, revered, she felt more of the slippy-slidey, twisty-tangled conflict inside of her settle.

  ‘Wow,’ she said.

  ‘Wow,’ he echoed with a grin. ‘And then there’s also this,’ he held up the key he’d had cut to Myrtle Cottage.

  He’d given her the key to his place, Mistletoe Cottage, weeks ago. Presented it as a point of practicality and with his matter-of-fact tone that she found so sexy, how could she refuse? Even as she’d worried exchanging keys was moving fast, she’d still taken that key and let herself in with it that night and stolen into his bed to surprise him.

  Yesterday she’d found herself buying his favourite brand of bread. The one with the sixty-three different types of seeds that dropped down the grill of the toaster and worked their way into the strangest of places. The one he liked to wolf down when he returned from his morning run before he got into the shower. Before then getting back into bed with her, claiming he was the perfect wake-up call.

  He was, but that was beside the point.

  The point was they were leaving more and more bits of themselves at each other’s places … and, well, what did that all mean?

  Only this morning she’d realised that the coat she’d been vaguely thinking of wearing today, was probably still at his place.

  Had he hung it up?

  Did he care that it was there?

  Did he want to move in with her?

  Wait! What?

  This past summer had been a crazy spectacular rollercoaster of competing with Daniel for The Clock House while falling for him, hook, line and sinker. There was still so much they were finding out about each other and now – already – to be thinking about moving in together?

  Kate swallowed and stepped out of his arms. It was enough they had keys to each other’s cottages.

  Moving in together would be, well, three words: Way, way too soon.

  Okay, that was four words, but you get what she’s thinking, right?

  To cover her pounding heart, she reached for her pen and her ever-present pad of post-it notes.

  She’d be totally cray-cray adding more pressure to their relationship. They hadn’t even opened The Clock House yet.

  Leaning down she forced herself to concentrate on what she should really be thinking about, and proud that her handwriting didn’t show any sign of “moving-in-together” shakiness, she wrote: Find someone to manage Cocktails & Chai, and underlined it four times.

  Chapter 2

  Crouching Dragon, Hidden Bartender

  Emma

  Emma Danes blew a strand of rapidly frizzing blonde hair out of her eyes and looked on in horrid fascination at the human pretzel facing the class.

  ‘… And as you bend your body down to the earth,’ the yoga instructor drawled, ‘bring your palms to the floor, squeeze your triceps against your inner thighs, and tip your body forward until your feet leave the ground and your body-weight is resting on your hands.’

  Um … yeah … no way was she attempting that balancing pose Emma decided as the butterflies fluttered wildly inside her. She attempted that, pee was probably going to come out!

  Honestly, of all the yoga-joints in all the world, you’d think she’d have noticed that the one half a block from her apartment had a super-advanced class at eleven thirty on a Monday morning. Then again, normally at this time on a Monday she was taking an acting class.

  Or at an audition.

  Or knocking on her agent, Penny’s, door, calling out ‘Penny’ three times in rapid succession.

  Poor Penny. She must be so over everyone going Sheldon on her.

  Thinking of Penny, she stared hard at her lucky bag crocheted in raspberry, denim and sunshiny yellows that she’d casually tossed at the foot of her yoga mat.

  Just imagining the phone inside ringing with the news had her heart bouncing down to her stomach and getting caught up in the excitement swirling there. It was as if she’d swallowed a giant ball of tangled-up Christmas lights and someone had plugged them in to test out the techno, techno, techno light setting.

  But she’d deal with the reduced-to-jelly nerves all day long because she hadn’t got this wrong.

  Today was the diem and she was going to carpe every last drop out of it.

  She’d nailed the audition and the call-back. The screen-test couldn’t have gone better and all the great feedback she’d received surely meant that finally the hard work, the sacrifice, the rejection, ahem, rejections, were going to be worth it.

  Planets had aligned.

  Unicorns had gathered.

  And after years in La La Land, Emma Danes was finally getting the lead part in the rom-com of her dreams.

  Filming on location in England, here she came.

  She bent her head to hide the proudly joyous grin spreading across her face and decided to attempt the yoga pose after all.

  Halfway through rearranging her body she heard the buzz from her bag and looked up to see it gently vibrating. With a soft yelp, she leaped upon it and uncaring of where she was, fished the phone from out of her bag, and whispered, ‘Penny?’ into it.

  ‘Sugar Bean? Are you sitting down?’ There was a short silence and then, ‘I’ve just heard back and I don’t know what to tell you. I’m so sorry.’

  The earth’s gravitational pull came to a clattering halt.

  That was surely the only reason Emma could possibly be sinking to her yoga mat in a tangle of disbelief. It couldn’t possibly have been Penny’s greeting, her tone, her actual words or Emma’s amazing powers of deduction that was very definitely suggesting…

  Emma squeezed her eyes shut.

  No, no, no.

  She hadn’t got the part?

  Really and truly?

  ‘I know this wasn’t what either of us was expecting to hear,’ Penny said, her usual nasal tone enhanced now that it was laced with sympathy.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Emma whispered, too shocked to process how very much not fine it was as Failure danced onto the stage of her heart and took a flourishing bow.

  ‘I’m just as pissed as you, Pinto Bean. You were perfect for that part.’

  She’d really thought so too.

  Damn it.

  Slowly she looked around her at the rows of exceedingly bendy people all having contorted their bodies into crouching poses with minimum effort.

  She didn’t do minimum effort. She did maximum effort.

  And still came up short, it seemed.

  Bitter disappointment and a strange sense of embarrassment became besties, holding hands as they rushed through her veins, stealing her energy. Stealing her joy.

  She held her bag out in front of her like it was poor Yorick’s skull and stared accusingly down at it. So much for being lucky.

  With her pho
ne still pinned to her ear, she pulled herself upright, shoved her feet into her shoes and then fled the yoga studio with its mirrors shamelessly reflecting her dazed expression for everyone to see.

  Outside, as she made her way back to the sanctuary of her apartment, the bright sunshine, gentle breeze and ridiculously cheerful Christmas music from one of the Prius’ in the endless parade of traffic combined to mock her for daring to assume it had finally been her turn to get the big-break.

  ‘Did they say why?’ Emma asked, picking up her pace, eager to escape the feeling that she was being followed by one of those giant arrows with stupidly over-sized light-bulbs illuminating the words ‘Not Good Enough’.

  ‘Only that someone unexpected expressed interest and after reviewing her tapes, they decided to go with her.’

  ‘Tell me it’s a name, at least.’

  ‘Oh, A-lister, for sure,’ Penny stated in solidarity.

  Emma let herself into the apartment she shared with two other actresses, her smile perilously close to wobbling.

  ‘Take a couple of days then come see me,’ Penny instructed. ‘Keep the faith, okay? There’s always traditional pilot season coming up.’

  Emma supposed it was. If you discounted that it was October and that the month that signalled the start of the season was at the beginning of a whole different year to this one. Tossing her keys onto the sofa, she wandered over to stare at the fridge, aka the shrine where she and her flatmates stuck scribbled notes to each other.

  Em, I got that audition and Jacinta’s on set all day otherwise we’d be here to celebrate with you. Moo Shu Pork and a bottle of cheap bubbles inside. Congrats! Lily xx

  Emma sniffed.

  ‘Lima Bean? Are you crying? There’s no crying in baseball,’ Penny said, channelling her best Tom Hanks.

  Emma opened the fridge and stared at the celebratory feast wondering how many other beans Penny could call her and with her appetite no longer amounting to a hill of them she shut the door and turned around to head into her room.

  ‘I don’t think I can do another pilot season, Pen.’ People probably thought it was easy to play a corpse. It wasn’t like you could get a note that you were too wooden. But do you know how hard it was to lay on concrete, caked in fake blood, staring into the distance unmoving/not breathing while the actress that actually had lines kept pausing to ask what her motivation was?

  It was hard.

  Especially when the actress asking about her motivation was playing a zombie!

  Needless to say that pilot hadn’t been picked up.

  ‘Of course you can do another pilot season, Jelly Bean. This is how we do. You’re an actress. Says so on your ID, right?’

  Ha!

  Nope.

  Actually, it didn’t.

  Under the heading of occupation she tended to go with what paid her regular wages.

  Bartender.

  That’s what she wrote on any form that needed her to state her occupation.

  Said it all, Emma thought, unable to even summon the energy to cry.

  With her spirit whimpering: my moxie, my moxie, my kingdom for my moxie, she shucked her bag off her shoulder, pushed open her bedroom door, pulled back her duvet, and tired beyond all reason, climbed in to bed.

  Muttering a quiet, ‘Bye Penny,’ she hung up and closed her eyes on the day that sucked harder than a sucker fish in charge of sucking clean all the Sea Life aquariums in all the world.

  Chapter 3

  Pity and Pitiful

  Emma

  Emma had no idea how long she slept for, but she awoke to a dark room and the remnants of a weird dream about fifty-seven varieties of bean auditioning for the lead part at Bar Brand – the bar she’d been working at for three years.

  Pushing herself upright she reached for her phone.

  Five missed calls.

  None of the numbers belonged to Penny, so she guessed she knew what she could do with the absurd hope the actress the studio had decided to go with had caught a sudden case of really bad numb-tongue.

  She texted her flatmates to tell them she hadn’t got the part, but that she was okay (greatest piece of text-acting ever, right there) and that neither needed to rush back because celebrating had been replaced with one of the greatest comforts known to woman: a long soak in the tub and a re-run of Pride and Prejudice.

  If she dragged her armchair over to the bathroom door, piled up all her books and set up her laptop at the right angle, she could watch Darcy-Colin emerging from the lake, while she submerged her aching heart in the bath.

  The next message turned out to be from her mother. With a curious detachment that belied the usual trepidation she felt when listening to messages her mother left, she got up and padded out to the kitchen to open the fridge. Her mother was on a cruise with – actually Emma didn’t want to think about what number boyfriend this was. She knew she quite liked this one though. For a start, he was age-appropriate. Fingers crossed he’d last the distance, or at least the length of the cruise, because no way could she deal with her mother having nothing else to focus on but her and how she Had Not Got The Part she might have bragged was in the bag.

  Reaching into the fridge she grabbed the Moo Shu pork, a carton of noodles and the cheap champagne.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, turning around to greet several imaginary people, ‘so glad you could make it. Welcome to my pity party, help yourself to drink and canapés …’

  Pretty convincing, she thought, as she opened a kitchen drawer to grab a pack of chopsticks. Who wouldn’t want mad-skillz like hers on the set of a rom-com?

  She uncorked the bubbly, debated drinking straight from the bottle, and then put her voicemail onto speakerphone while she hunted up a glass.

  ‘Hi Emma, enquiring friend from across the pond is dying to know if you got the part? Can’t wait to post pics all over social media of when I knew you, back in the day.’

  Emma shoved a mouthful of cold noodles into her mouth. ‘Back in the day’ had been three years ago when Kate Somersby had walked into Bar Brand to write a review of the place. It had been Emma’s first day on the job and she’d been busy acting her way through her shift, doing the whole fake-it-’til-she-made-it routine until she got familiar with everything. Emma had immediately recognised the actress in Kate. Not the showy, this-is-who-I-be kind of acting, but more the, this-is-how-I-get-through-the-days face that she showed the world.

  She’d wondered what had happened to make Kate so eager to try on any other face that wasn’t her own. Plus, Kate’s British accent and it’s reminder of a home she hadn’t visited for years, had got her good. They’d become good friends, keeping each other up-to-date with their lives ever since.

  Taking a gulp of fizzy wine straight from the bottle she listened to the second message from Kate:

  ‘Me again. Did I get the day wrong? Hope I haven’t jinxed anything. Oh, are you busy rehearsing a) a love scene b) a love scene or c) a love scene. Tick all that apply. And call me or text me or email me or send smoke signals or something because clearly our telepathic link is down.’

  It was going to have to be a non-verbal communication, Emma decided, swapping phone for laptop so that she could compose better. If she had to actually use her voice, Kate was going to know right away just how devastated she was that she hadn’t got the part.

  As she munched on more food she emailed:

  To: Kate Somersby

  From: WritingHer‌OscarAccep‌tanceSpeech

  Subject: Won’t be giving up my day job after all.

  I didn’t get the part

  Emma xx

  There, she thought, pleased with her honest, to-the-point and most importantly, no-sobbing-to-be-heard composition.

  Minutes later she got a reply.

  To: WritingHer‌OscarAccep‌tanceSpeech

  From: Kate Somersby

  Re: Won’t be giving up the day job after all.

  Oh, EM, G! No coming to the UK to practise your British accent a la Renee Zelwegger??? Waaa
h—I’m so sorry, hun. I know how much you wanted that part. You would have been bloody brilliant. You ARE bloody brilliant.

  Kate xx

  Emma searched for the crying emoji and sent a whole line of them back and then immediately felt pitiful so followed it up with: Feeling sorry for myself will only last one millennia and then I’ll be all good.

  Minutes later she got back:

  You’ll be back to lighting up the sky-line with flames in no time, I know it! (((Hugs))) Kate xx

  Tears pricked as Emma replied: Well, back to bartending at Bar Brand, at least. Rent’s due in a couple of weeks. No rest for the wicked-ly untalented. Emma xx

  She was more than halfway through her food when she received her reply:

  Hey, if they ever do a remake of Cocktail, Tom Cruise doesn’t stand a chance. Seriously, a better part will come along. You just have to believe (and work your arse off) but the part in brackets I know you already do, Kate xx

  That produced a half-smile but then Emma flexed fingers eager to type something else. Picking up the laptop and the bottle of champagne, she headed back to her room to hop back onto the bed. After taking a thoughtful couple of gulps, she wrote: You sound like my agent, Penny. Emma’s hands paused on the keyboard and then she typed: Maybe it’s time I let the dream go! Emma, xx

  She pressed ‘send’ and raised her gaze to the dressing table under the tiny window. Sitting prettily on top were various photo frames containing affirmations she’d printed out. Why didn’t looking at them spur her on the way they used to?

  Over the last year, when her faith in her ability to land a good role had started slinking off to play hide and seek, Emma had seriously considered moving to New York or back to London to try the stage. She’d thought that perhaps the change of scene would herald a change of luck.

  If it wasn’t for the sly fear she’d end up doing the same thing – going to audition after audition without actually getting a part – except if she moved she’d be doing it in the freezing-cold, maybe she’d even have got on that bus or plane.