Alerted by the muted ringing of her phone, Honor groped for the bag she’d abandoned beside the bed last night, screwing her eyes up against the morning sunlight. Behind her, Martyn moved to close the space that had opened up between them. She held on to the edge of the mattress so as not to fall.
And, in her ear, Ru complained, ‘So I’m here and Aletta’s here. Where are you?’
And she was awake. ‘Oh crap, I overslept! Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be there.’ She let go of the mattress cording to touch ‘end call’ and fell from the bed, rolling on to her feet as she ran for the shower. No matter how short of time she was, a shower, after the night, was a must. With a towel turban over her hair she washed briskly, wincing as parts of her protested because she hadn’t used them for too long.
A fierce scrub of her teeth and she was flying back through the hall to the bedroom, ignoring Karen’s best stepmom voice in her head: ‘No way can you deal with your daily hygiene routine in that amount of time, young lady!’
Martyn still sprawled across the sheet, eyelashes resting down on his cheeks, each individual muscle in his body defined by the morning sun. She drank him in as she tried to ease open her underwear drawer. Surreal to think that the reason that he looked like something from a magazine was . . . because he was something from a magazine. ‘Ow! Fuck!’ she hissed, as the drawer shot out and banged her knee.
‘I love to hear you say fuck. Right now, it’s my favourite word,’ observed Martyn, without opening his eyes.
‘And if I’m not out of this door in five minutes, you’re going to hear me say it a whole lot more. I was such a hero when I sent Robina and Sophie off to their music festival and said I’d be there to open the tearoom. And now I’ve spoiled it all by beinglate—’ Robina. Her heart hopped to think how Robina would feel if she knew what Honor had spent the night doing with Martyn.
‘Fuckinglate,’ he augmented.
She laughed as she pulled on her white T-shirt and buttoned her black skirt. No time to do anything much with her hair and last night’s fairly glam crimped look had, with sweaty sex and sleeping for only about three hours, turned into a haystack. She brushed it into a ponytail high on her head and jammed a black baseball hat over it, hoping it wouldn’t make the Teapot look as if it got its staff from McDonalds. Snatching up her bag, she shoved her feet into her favourite-for-waiting-on-tables flat soft sandals and dropped a kiss on his hair. ‘’Bye now.’
He opened one eye and reached out a hot hand to her bare leg. ‘Hang on and I’ll drive you.’
She stepped out of reach. If she let him touch her she’d never get to work. ‘In the “nuddy”?’
He grunted a laugh. ‘That soundssowrong in your accent.’
‘I don’t have an accent, honey. You do.’ She blew him a kiss.
* * *
Although she’d made a lousy start by catapulting into the tearoom, red-faced and breathless and nearly forty-five minutes late, Honor quite enjoyed her first day ‘in charge’ at the Teapot. With no cakes cooking and no Robina taking up all the room with abandoned utensils, obliging everyone else to act like her kitchen porters, much of the stress and irritation was gone. The already cooked slabs of cake stood waiting and there wasn’t even a mammoth clean down to do, although Honor had realised with regret that she hadn’t specified Robina clear up after her middle-of-the-night bake-in. Probably Sophie had taken care of it.
Whilst Aletta rolled cutlery into yellow paper napkins, Honor and Ru cut the cakes horizontally and sandwiched them back together with the frosting Robina had left in a huge jug inthe refrigerator. A shake of chocolate flakes and even without Robina’s artistic chocolate leaves and roses on top they looked delicious.
Honor washed her hands, looking around to see what had been left undone. ‘So, Aletta you concentrate on waiting tables, clearing tables and sanitising, me and Ru will fill orders and clean dishes, OK? We should be able to dash out and clear or take orders sometimes, too.’ Aletta, looking incredibly wholesome and apple-cheeked, was too dreamy to be let loose in the kitchen, where teamwork and organisation was the way to a right mind.
Aletta agreed with a smile and a wave of her pen and order pad.
Honor’s eye fell on the potato oven, cold and empty. ‘The baked potatoes! Can you wash some, Ru, please?’
His ball hat on back-to-front, Ru stuck his head around the corner to inspect the potato rack. ‘Only got two.’
‘Damn,’ Honor groaned. ‘One of us better take some money from the cash register—’ She dived into the pantry and fetched the wooden cash drawer from the shelf where it usually spent the night. Every compartment was empty apart from those containing small change. ‘Oh.’
Looking as if he was trying not to laugh, Ru patted her shoulder. ‘I suppose Mum needed some spending money.’
Reaching resignedly for her purse, Honor sighed. ‘Your mom can be a real pain in the ass, do you know that? We better hope the first customers have change.’
* * *
By the middle of the day, in between thinking about the night before and wondering where the thing with Martyn was going, Honor had cried, ‘Holy crap!’ more times than she could count — especially when Kirsty made it downstairs, looking likea nightmare, to order a white china pot of peppermint tea and point out that the potatoes might only be meant to take an hour-and-a-half, but took at least two so a blast in the microwave would be helpful, the frosting should have gone back into the fridge and that Aletta was letting half the neighbourhood youth hang out around one of the tables outside without buying anything to eat or drink, behinds on table and feet on the chairs. ‘And it’s frightening off the paying tourists.’
‘I thought we were goddamned quiet, all of a sudden.’ Abandoning a stack of clean plates noisily on the counter, Honor marched outside, flapping her arms and shouting, ‘Get off that table! Go!’
The teenagers laughed and scattered as if they were used to being shooed away like a flock of seagulls. Even Frog just grinned, ‘Chill, Yankee Doodle,’ and mooched away down the street without getting in her face about it.
By six o’clock, Honor was dead on her feet. Aletta had left on the dot of four-thirty, evidently feeling no need to pitch in and work extra. ‘Let’s put up the closed sign,’ Honor yawned, when she saw the time. Staying open till six easily fulfilled her end of the deal, as Robina’s usual policy was to stay open until she felt like doing something else.
Honor definitely felt like doing something else. Almost anything. Her feet burned, her back ached, her eyes watered from massive, uncontrollable yawns. She had had way too little sleep, which was fabulous in some ways but pretty damned hard in others.
Ru vanished the moment they’d cleaned down, leaving Honor to count the takings and retrieve what she’d paid for the potatoes, throwing a tea towel over the drawer and locking it in the pantry — Robina’s idea of overnight cash security.
