Page 7 of The Sugar and Spice Bookshop Bakery

‘But what about your cake?’

‘Oh, I wasn’t baking anything.’

‘No? Didn’t you mention a mixer?’

‘I couldn’t sleep either,’ she sighs. ‘I had stuff preying on my mind too. The kind of stuff you just keep churning over and over.’

‘Ah, I see.’ There’s a pause. And then he adds softly, ‘Likewise.’

And despite the fact she can’t see him, she knows that he understands. Or perhaps it’s because she can’t see him. Because he sounds sympathetic, and because there’s something kind of anonymous about this whole situation, she blurts out, ‘My mother thinks I’m here to run the bakery, but I don’t want to and I don’t know how to tell her.’

‘Parental expectations,’ he says. ‘So difficult.’ If she’s not very much mistaken, there’s pain in his voice.

Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to be a farmer. That was the trouble with these farming families – it was often just expected that the eldest son would take over when the time came.

And then suddenly, the lights come back on.

The man standing in front of her isn’t a gruff sheep farmer at all, but the Italian man who passed her earlier. The one who hadn’t offered to lift her bags out of the boot.

Louise stands there, open-mouthed, blinking repeatedly as her eyes adjust to the brightness. She had been chatting away to this guy in the dark and felt completely at ease – well, once she’d decided he wasn’t an axe murderer or a burglar – but now she can see him, words elude her.

She hadn’t realised how tall he was.

Or how attractive.

She closes her mouth. Forces her eyes to stop blinking.

And then she thinks: Blimey. This feels like a real-life meet-cute. I thought this sort of thing only happened in books.

Three

Louise can’t sleep.

Again.

Only now, it’s not the thought of breaking the bad news about the bakery to her mother that’s keeping her awake. She’s going over her encounter with Jack, replaying their conversation in her mind, as if she’s watching it as a movie. In her head, there is subtle lighting, the way there would be in a film – just enough that she can make out the concern on Jack’s face when he first comes in and the smile in his eyes when he joked about wearing a stripey burglar costume.

They had located the fuse box, and he had checked it and found no issues, concluding that the sudden loss of power and its equally sudden return must have been a power cut all along and nothing to do with Louise plugging in the new cake mixer.

‘Come to think of it,’ he’d said, ‘the street lights had gone off.’

‘And you didn’t think to mention that when we were fumbling around in the dark hunting for the fuse box?’ She’d laughed.

‘Sorry. I was distracted.’

‘I was worried you were an axe murderer.’

‘Well, as it happens, I am highly skilled with an axe,’ he’d said. ‘But I’ve never used it to murder anyone. Although, I have to admit I’ve been tempted.’

‘Oh yes?’ she’d said.

‘Long story.’

A long story that he clearly hadn’t wanted to share.

*

The following morning, Louise puts the kettle on and opens the kitchen cupboards. She’s craving her usual caffeine hit and the jar of instant that her mother has left just isn’t going to cut it.