‘It’s a new one on me too,’ Elliot replied, placing an arm around Jude’s back to help power her up the slope. ‘But Minty’s a liability, never happy unless she’s getting her own way.’
‘Och, she’s not that bad, once you’re used to her, and she’s ever so lonely.’
‘Is she?’
‘Think about it. Massive house, all alone up there, nobody to talk to…’
‘That’s the problem,’ snorted Elliot. ‘She keeps coming up with hare-brained schemes and resurrecting mad old traditions when she could be kept out of trouble with a partner to do normal stuff with.’
‘You sound like Mrs Crocombe,’ Jude laughed.
‘You take that back!’ Elliot said with an exaggerated gasp, stopping Jude and threatening to kiss her – which, with a wicked smile, she surrendered herself to immediately.
Elliot’s kiss was just as deep and delicious as the first one they’d shared when they were bookseller holidaymakers and getting to know one another back in the summer.
She pulled him closer, lifting onto her tiptoes to make up the height difference, and for a moment they forgot all about Minty and trying to figure out how on earth Elliot was going to encourage Moira – the smartest, most contrary donkey ever to have lived, and a terrible influence upon the younger ones in the stables – out of her warm bed on a winter’s night to listen to tuneless carols played on recorders and the vicar droning on in the estate chapel.
‘Let’s get home,’ Jude said eventually, dazed and breathless and remembering their warm bed waiting for them and Elliot’s even warmer body.
‘And quick, too,’ Elliot agreed.
As they neared the turning for the bookshop, they wordlessly walked along the little passageway and into the square where the white shop sat beneath its conical roof, crooked like a witch’s hat in a children’s book.
It was almost completely in darkness, except for the fireside glow inside. Jude broke from the nook beneath Elliot’s arm to ascend the steps and peered through the door, her hand raised as though she would knock. It was only six o’clock, after all, and the Icelander hadn’t had much of a welcoming committee so far.
Yet the sight of Magnús, slumped motionless in the low armchair in front of the fire, staring into the flames, all the lights turned off, gave her pause. She could only see his face in profile but he looked solemn and set-jawed. Turning, she tiptoed back down the steps.
As she and Elliot left the new bookseller to his contemplation, she whispered, ‘He’ll take some work, that one. He doesn’t know yet.’
Elliot didn’t say a word, only dropping a kiss on the top of Jude’s bobble hat, fully understanding her meaning. That bookseller didn’t yet understand what a stint in Clove Lore could do for a lost and brooding man.
Magnús would have to find out in his own time, as Elliot had done, that Clove Lore was no ordinary Devonshire village and that the shop, with its cramped bedroom, its window seat overlooking the Atlantic breakers in the distance, the café with its faded lace curtains, and the creaking shelves crammed to the rafters with a treasure-trove of books,certainlywasn’t any ordinary old bookshop.
Passing beneath the strands of bright Christmas bulbs lighting their way up the hill, Jude smiled up at Elliot, thinking as she often did these days how lucky she was to live in this place, and the pair made their way home to their house out along the main road with its little Garden of Eden backyard and her gorgeous kitchen, where the couple fully intended to live out their lives together, weathering every storm life brought to them.
Chapter Four
First Night at the Bookshop
The thing about Magnús Sturluson’s bookselling holiday was that it had been reserved almost twenty-four months ago as a bit of a joke.
You’d have to know Jón, Magnús’s brother, and his dry, wicked sense of humour to understand why it seemed like a good idea to gift him a holiday doing his actual day job, only three thousand kilometres south and where he didn’t know anybody.
The reservation of a spot on the waiting list had been made as a Christmas gift back when Magnús had worked in his very own bookshop, Reykjavík’s Ash and the Crash.
He’d named his shop after the two things Iceland was most famous for overseas (apart from Vikings, whales, cracking Eurovision songs, and lovely knits): the great ash cloud that had sent news anchors everywhere into a sweaty panic as they tried to sayEyjafjallajökull, the name of the volcano that was grounding flights all over the world, and the financial crash of 2008 when the country was almost bankrupted by a handful of moneymen left unsupervised with the nation’s economy.
The name had seemed good and droll and eminently suitable for a touristy street near the hop-on, hop-off bus stop in the centre of Reykjavík. Footfall, the letting agent had promised him, would be excellent.
Now that the shop had gone massively bust and Magnús had lost all his capital and almost all of his pride, the name didn’t seem funny at all.
‘You practically live in your bookshop,’ his brother had joked. ‘We can’t get you out of the place. This way you take a holidayandsell books. Just the right thing for you and Anna.’
‘I have three million króna of books to sell right here! Why would I sell an Englishman’s booksandhave my brother pay for the privilege? Who will run my store while I’m gone, huh? You all have your own jobs.’
Nobody had seemed to mind that he was close to hyperventilating, scratching his fingertips inside his neat, sharp beard and running his hand over his dark-blond head as though this might somehow soothe him. Everyone had smiled knowingly as if to say,This again! You worry too much.
His father, often a little exasperated with his middle child who, according to family legend, had worn a tense and earnest expression since the day he was born, had patted him on the shoulder, saying ‘Þetta reddast; it will be fine,’ and walked him to the dinner table where his mum was serving up the Christmas EveHangikjötwithuppstúfur.
