“Why am I the sausage?” She frowned.
“Because I am smooth and soft like mashed potato, and you have a tough outer layer and a peppery temperament like a Cumberland sausage.”
She nodded, smiling. “Fair.”
“Nobody’s ever got me like you do,” Ryan said, looking searchingly into her eyes.
Sixteen-year-old Fred could never have envisaged how good it would feel to finally be held like a lover in Ryan Frost’s arms. Despite her tiredness she found herself enlivened by her enduring feelings, suffused with pleasure at being this close to him. “Making me feel warm and happy was always your particular skill,” she said, almost dreamily.
“I’ll be your own personal sunbeam for as long as you like,” he whispered, before pressing his lips to hers once more.
—
The drive homewas quiet, with both Fred and her mum in contemplative moods.
“You know, Liam doesn’t have to stay at the inn,” said Fred, when they’d pulled up outside the house. The decorations twinkling and flashing all over the garden resembled a fairground; all that was missing was a Hook a Turkey stall.
“Oh,” said Bella. “I didn’t know if…”
“It’s not like you haven’t had sleepovers before—hundreds and hundreds of sleepovers…” Fred grinned at her, and winked.
Bella snorted and nudged her. “Rude!”
Fred laughed. “But seriously, you and Liam have spent enough time apart. I don’t doubt that he’ll be moving in, sooner rather than later, so why is he sleeping at the pub and not here with you?”
“Are you sure?”
“Not that it should matter what I think—because this is your house—but if you need my approval, then you have it,in spades. Stop sneaking around like a couple of teenagers, and get him to stay here.”
“Thanks, darling. I will.”
“Good. Now let’s get inside. I need the aunts to make me some sort of rocket fuel cocktail, to get me through editing the first video. I am determined to get it uploaded by morning, if it kills me. If I don’t get my name off that Naughty List, I’m looking at a stocking full of coal come Christmas morning!”
29
Thursday, December 19
Fred had been holed upin the workshop until after 2 a.m. She’d edited some of the footage from the cracker workshop, the Christmas market and the beach into the video, to give a sense of the place in which Demeter and Hallow-Hart Crackers were rooted. Thanks to her years of industry training, she had produced a video that was both aspirational and informative, if she did say so herself. It was like the aunts always said: no experience is wasted if you learn from it.
Finally, she had uploaded the video to the Hallow-Hart Crackers Instagram, TikTok and Facebook accounts, and put a link to it in the newly generated newsletter. By the time she’d switched out the workshop lights and begun to wend her way back to the house, the snowy ground was covered over in a thick crust of glistening frost that crunched beneath her boots. The fairy lights illuminated plants frozen white and encrusted with ice crystals thatsparkled. Even the sea below sounded sluggish beneath winter’s cold soporific breath.
—
When her phonebuzzed her out of sleep with a message from Ryan, at seven thirty the next morning, she had been dreaming about being chased through the town by Krampus and all she’d had to defend herself with were giant slabs of baklava. She groaned when she checked the time, and opened the message. It was a picture of the Naughty List outside Frost Hardware. Though hers was still the recurring name on the list, there were four spaces where her name had clearly been recently rubbed out.
The caption Ryan had written beneath read,Baby steps! x
She smiled and typed back,Did you see the video?
He replied,I did. It’s brilliant. Did you see how many likes you got on TikTok already?
She propped herself up against her pillows and opened TikTok. It had almost three hundred likes; and when she pulled up Insta, it wasn’t far behind. There were plenty of comments—which she would respond to, once she was up and had a coffee to hand—and the shares were racking up steadily too. She still had a lot of work to do, there was no time to rest on her laurels just yet.
“Huzzah! You’re up. Now we can get those scallops in the pan,” said Aunt Aggie when Fred, showered and dressed, entered the kitchen forty-five minutes later. “Benj Frost dropped them off at Ryan’s request, first thing, after he’dbeen night fishing; he said you’d earned a treat. It’s been all go here! You, young lady, are the talk of the town.”
“In a good way, this time, thank the Goddess,” added her mum, smiling.
“It’s such a lovely video, everyone says so,” Aunt Cam said. “You get an extra rasher of bacon in your baguette for being so clever.”
