Page 10 of The Secret Holiday Kiss

‘And my parents shipped me off to boarding school, so I wasn’t around much after the age of eleven, except in the holidays.’

Daisy’s brain was mush. All these people she’d known once upon a time, but then mostly forgotten. It was giving her whiplash. She thought she would have remembered someone like Avery, but if he’d been absent from the village from eleven onwards, and she’d been deep in a pit of grief after her mum died, then focused on leaving as soon as she could, it wasn’t that surprising she’d forgotten him. ‘You don’t strike me as a boarding school type of person,’ she said.

Avery laughed, his smile unguarded. ‘I’m not. It was a disaster, for the most part. But I rebelled when I was young and my folks panicked. They thought I was on the wrong road, hanging out with the wrong boys, and that was their solution.’ He shook his head. ‘I understand why you’re interested in the house now. Coming back after all this time.’

‘Does that mean you’ll tell me who it belongs to? Or will belong to, when it’s finished?’

‘Mary and Winnie, who run the hotel.’ He nodded his head in the direction of the building. ‘They lived further east, but they’ve had this idea bubbling away for a while now. Usually one of them is sleeping next door anyway, but they still need their own space.’ He shrugged. ‘Hence buying the land, turning it into a home.’

‘Mary and Winnie,’ Daisy murmured. ‘They looked out for me, after my mum died and Dad was … absent. I wasn’t always receptive to their help.’ She winced. ‘I don’t remember seeing you at Harry and Sophie’s wedding.’

‘I was tied up on a job,’ Avery said. ‘I don’t live here, I’m in Norwich, but when May bought her cottage last year and it needed a lot of updating, I came up here to work on it. And you know what Mistingham’s like – I’ve been dragged back in. There’s no end of jobs need doing, from fixing front paths to building brand-new houses.’

‘I’ve got a client in Norwich,’ Daisy said. ‘He’s just bought a café.’

‘You’re in catering, then?’

‘No, I-I didn’t say?’

Avery shook his head.

‘I’m an interior designer. I mainly work on commercial properties, hotels and restaurants, but I can’t resist a good project. And the moment I saw this, I needed to know about it. It’s going to be incredible when it’s finished.’

‘I’m reassessing my impression of you. You’re not just nosy and infuriating. You’re professionally curious, a villager at heart and—’

‘I’m not a villager at heart,’ she corrected him. ‘This is all temporary. But I am professionally curious.’

Avery went back to his van, leaning into it, moving tools about.

Daisy followed him. ‘What is it? Why did you walk away from me?’

Avery turned. His eyes were stern, but his lips were twitching, and Daisy realized she was intrigued and annoyed by this man who had been her brother’s childhood friend. ‘I’m coming to terms with the fact that you weren’t impressed by my Jimmy Nail impression. That it was the house that caught your eye, not me.’

‘I—’

‘Also, my team will be here in ten minutes, and I should be a lot more prepared than I am, due to you waylaying me.’

Daisy’s cheeks heated. ‘You didn’t need to keep talking to me if you were so up against it.’ He didn’t look like he was running out of time: he seemed entirely relaxed.

‘I didn’t need to. No.’

The implied want was there, and Daisy knew she had to leave. She had to recalibrate, and she couldn’t do that while she was talking to him. ‘OK, well, I’d best be getting back. Lovely to meet you, Avery. Again.’

‘I can almost say the same. It’s certainly been a diverting interlude.’

‘Right. Well. Off I go, then.’ She gave him a tight smile, then turned away and strode down the lane towards the front of the hotel. ‘Off I go, then?’ she muttered to herself. She’d only been in Mistingham for a couple of days, and she was already regretting it. She should have booked into a hotel in London, or in Norwich.

The village was littered with fragments of her past that seemed ready to trip her up, including Harry’s schoolfriend, who was undeniably – and infuriatingly – much more memorable as a man in his forties with a dusty T-shirt than he had been as a boy in short trousers with muddy knees.

‘Why don’t I remember Avery Hudson?’ Daisy was in the kitchen, making herself a green tea. On her return from the village, she’d holed up in her bedroom and calmed her nerves by responding to emails and talking to Mo, who told her the building manager had agreed to their team tackling the leak, and organizing folders on her laptop that she had already organized. Multiple times.

‘I don’t know, why don’t you?’ Harry was distracted, looking at his phone while he attempted to fill the coffee machine one-handed.

‘You hung about with him a lot when you were kids, didn’t you? Then May got involved and you and she were best friends in a platonic way I never understood.’

Harry looked up. ‘What? You thought May and I should have got together?’

Daisy shrugged. ‘Boys could never be just friends with girls.’