‘Nope. It’s fine,’ I say breezily and slam the till shut.
‘Serve our first customers while I was gone?’
‘Not one,’ I say. ‘I haven’t turned the sign yet though.’
‘Do you want to do the honours?’ he asks, and for such a big guy there’s something unexpectedly light in his deep voice that shows his excitement.
As I’m reaching for the sign, he stops me, saying, ‘Is that your phone? You’ll want a picture of this, hold on.’
So, as I flip the sign from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’ I hear him snapping away, and I smile awkwardly. ‘Right, we’re open.’
‘We are,’ he says, and I catch a little smile at the corner of his mouth again that tells me he really has been looking forward to coming here for ages, just like me. ‘So… the café?’ He nods at the flour.
‘Oh, rightumm.’ I panic a bit. I haven’t really given it a second’s thought since I arrived, what with all the excitement. ‘We’ll just have to muddle through with what we have: a teensy kitchen and a few chairs scattered here and there in the shop. The advert mentioned a “cosy café nook”. So much for that!’ I shrug, a bit disappointed, if I’m honest.
‘You haven’t seen it?’ he asks, amused again. ‘Grab the keys.’
He strides for the door and I follow him outside. Round the side of the bookshop there’s another set of steps and another door with glossy sky-blue paint. He stands back and lets me unlock it and step inside.
‘Here it is, our café,’ he says.
A sullen little voice in my head wants to correct him, saying, ‘it’smycafé’, but I don’t say it out loud because I’m too excited at the sight before me and I quickly forget my tetchiness.
It’s exactly how I’d imagined a seaside tearoom attached to a tumbledown bookshop would be. Lace curtains on café rods at the windows, four little round tables and a counter. There’s a filter coffee pot, a big silver urn, lots of little silver milk jugs and a jumble of mismatched chintzy china cups and saucers on shelves behind the counter and three empty cake stands with domed glass lids.
‘OK,’ I say, nodding. ‘This is OK.’ I slip behind the counter and push my way through the beaded curtain into a back room scarcely big enough for one person, where I find shelves stocked with jars of jam. There’s just enough room for the fridge and double oven. I’ll have to mix my scones on the counter top in the café, but that’s OK.
Even with its tiny proportions I recognise the familiar feeling of cosiness and industry, just like our bakery back home. I know I can do this already. In fact I’m grinning as I turn to shout to Elliot to bring the baking ingredients through and I’m met by his chest in close-up. ‘Oh!’
He’s holding the strands of the beaded curtain aside and filling the doorway, glancing around the little kitchen too.
‘Sorry,’ I squirm, and he lets me squeeze by, and that’s pretty much how the rest of the morning continues. I show him how to bake scones from Grandad’s recipe book and he fills up the room; he sits on a café chair to write the prices on the chalk board, accidentally snapping two pieces of chalk in half and laughing drolly at how this kind of thing happens to him all the time, and I trip over his feet as I shake out the tablecloths. Everywhere I go, there he is.
I’m feeling claustrophobic by the time the heat from the oven and the morning sun elevates the temperature in the little café by at least a thousand degrees and that’s when Elliot pulls aside a curtain on the other side of the café revealing a low door that links to the back of the bookshop. Tying the curtain back, he crouches to squeeze through the door and I can’t help but feel relieved that the space has suddenly opened up and I can breathe again.
I prop the café entrance door open and let the sea air in, trying not to think about the dorky way Elliot stooped to get out the room and how I can hear his boots clomping on the bookshop floorboards next door and I’m wondering if, contrary to first impressions (that this guy is tall, shifty, dangerous, and…dammit, handsome), he’s actually a bit of a big clumsy nerd. Either way, he’s still an interloper in my escapist fantasy of seaside bookselling and I’m going to steer clear of him as much as I can.
The seagulls start calling to each other and lining up on the outer wall of the cottage garden opposite the café steps and I fix them with a stare and tell them they’re not allowed any of the scones, which are now looking fat and golden beneath the glass domes on the countertop so don’t eventhinkabout coming in here.
Elliot’s been for a shower – what kind of bookseller drifts off for a shower mid-morning and leaves the shop unattended? Proof, if it were needed, that we’re not going to get on at all. He pops his head through from the shop, strands of damp black hair falling over his light eyes. What is that colour anyway? Golden brown? No, light amber. Is that even an eye colour? I look away sharpish.
‘Any customers yet?’ he asks.
I shake my head. ‘You?’
‘Not one, and it’s almost ten. Wanna swap? I’m pretty sure I can serve up a mean cream tea and you can get to know your bookshop.’
That’s all he has to say. I tell him there’s a huge supply of clotted cream in the fridge – and he laughs, telling me he knows as he was the one who brought it in off the step early this morning – and I leave him to read his book in the café.
He’s plucked a battered copy ofDrums of Autumnfrom a shelf, which makes me wonder if he’s read the first threeOutlanderbooks already – because that’s the fourth in the series – and I try not to think about what this says about his reading habits and his personality, but dammit, I’m begrudgingly impressed. When he reaches for reading glasses and slips them on – the frames are thicker over the brow like a nineteen-fifties newsreader and just the perfect shape for his face – I’m annoyed to feel myself wilting at the sight of him. I stumble over the raised threshold under the doorframe as I hurry to leave him to his time-travel historical romance and I stake my claim once more to my bookshop.
Chapter Eleven
‘Ornamental teapots?’ I say, and the old lady blinks at me expectantly. She arrived with the rest of her bus tour group five minutes ago and they’re swarming through the shop, touching everything and carrying bundles of books to and fro, and never actually coming to the till to pay for any of them.
‘That’s right. Present for my daughter-in-law. Collects them, and books about them. Got any?’ Her accent’s hard to place, Londonish maybe, putting me in mind ofEastEnders.
‘Well,umm, I don’t know, to be honest…’
