Christmas Wishes, Mistletoe Kisses

CHAPTER FIVE

THE other three stopped talking and looked at him. He grinned, walked over to the row of pegs and pulled off a fluffy knitted hat and matching scarf. ‘Come with me,’ he said as he walked back towards Louise, whose eyes were wide and round, then he linked the tips of his fingers with hers and pulled her up to stand.

Her mouth moved, but no sound emerged.

He tugged her in the direction of the hallway, to the large gilt mirror he’d seen hanging there on his very first visit after Louise had moved in. He stood behind her and, while she continued to stare at him in the mirror, he pulled the dusky purple hat over her head. It was one of those tight-fitting ones with no embellishment or bobbles, and the crocheted hem came down level with her eyebrows.

Better. But she still looked like Louise Thornton. He scowled at her reflection and her eyebrows raised so they disappeared under the hat. It was the hair. That long, glossy dark hair was her trademark- instantly recognisable, indefinably her.

He brushed the hair framing her face back behind her ears and twisted the strands into a loose plait. When his gaze flicked up to the mirror again, she was staring at their reflections, her mouth slightly apart, and then she shivered and shook his hands away from her shoulders. He broke eye contact and busied himself wrapping the scarf once, twice, around her neck, letting it stand up so it covered the lower half of her face. Somehow his hands had made their own way back on to her shoulders with the flimsy pretence of keeping the scarf in place.

Only the eyes gave her away now, but there wasn’t much he could do to diminish their impact. She could hardly wear sunglasses on a chilly autumn evening. That would only draw more attention to her.

‘There.’

She was motionless, the only movement her eyes as they flicked between her own reflection and his. ‘I’m wearing a hat and scarf. Is that your stunning plan?’

‘No one will be able to pick you out of a crowd in this. It’s going to be almost pitch-dark, after all. Top it off with a big dark coat and you’ll look just like the rest of us.’

‘I am like the rest of you.’

He knew celebrities weren’t a different breed of human being, so he could almost agree. But there was something about Louise Thornton that defied explanation, that made her unlike anyone he had ever met before. And he really hoped he didn’t feel that way because she was famous. He didn’t want to be that shallow.

They stared at each other in the mirror a good long time. Her shoulders rose and fell beneath his hands.

‘Mum, look!’

The stillness was shattered and suddenly he was moving away and Jack and Jasmine were running into the hallway, bundled up in coats and hats and jumping up and down. Jack was tall for his age and Jasmine petite, making them almost the same height. It took a few seconds for him to realise that Jack’s overexcited squeaking was coming from underneath Jasmine’s hat and scarf. Louise looked from one child to the other and burst out laughing. She pulled the fluffy hat with earflaps up by its bobble until she could see her son’s eyes.

‘If you’d have kept quiet, I’d have had no idea that you two had switched coats!’

Jack jumped up and down. ‘Can we go? Can we?’

Louise rolled her eyes again. ‘Okay, we’ll go.’

Their cheers echoed round the tall hallway and up the elegant sweep of the stairs. Pounding footsteps followed as they raced back into the kitchen. ‘You can wear your own coats and hats, though,’ Louise called after them.

When the silence returned, she looked at him. ‘Do you really think it’ll work?’

‘Of course, everyone is going to be craning their necks and looking up at the sky. They won’t even pay attention to who’s standing next to them. And, let’s face it, it has to be a better disguise than your last attempt!’

She pulled the hat off her head and spent a few seconds defluffing her hair. ‘You don’t beat around the bush much, do you?’

He shook his head. Why waste time using inefficient words when you could use a few that hit straight to the heart of the matter?

Louise unwound the scarf and held it, together with the hat. ‘Was it really that bad?’

He nodded and tried very hard not to smile. ‘You looked like a celebrity trying very hard to not look like a celebrity. I mean, a pink track suit with the word “Juicy” splashed all over the…um…back.’

She gave him a knowing look. ‘Oh, you noticed that, did you?’

If Ben Oliver had been a man prone to blushing, he’d have been as pink as Louise’s ‘Juicy’ jogging bottoms at that moment. Thank goodness his body was far too sensible for such displays of emotion. He gave her the sort of look a headmaster would give a gum-chewing schoolgirl. ‘It was hard not to.’

‘When are the fireworks going to start?’ Louise looked first to the left and then to the right and clung a little harder on to the rope strung between rusting metal poles in front of her. Lower Hadwell’s village green bordered the river just upstream from the main jetty and the fireworks had been set up on the stony beach with a clear boundary marked out to stop excited children getting too close.

‘Twenty minutes.’ Ben’s voice was calm and reassuring, but it did nothing to soothe her. ‘Don’t worry.’ His hand rested lightly on her shoulder and she jumped.

Don’t worry. That was easy enough to him to say. Every time he let his guard down, someone didn’t jump in front of him and pop a flashbulb. In recent years, she’d stopped letting down the wall she put up between herself and the rest of the world. Life was just too dangerous to lay herself open in that way. Only now the tabloids labelled her ‘stuck-up’ and ‘fake’.

She sighed and, as her warm breath flowed out of her mouth, cool night air laced with wood smoke and sulphur filled her nostrils. She smiled.

Her family-well, what had been left of her family once Mum had died-had always attended the little firework display in the local park each November. The fireworks themselves hadn’t been all that spectacular, but her memories were of cosiness, laughter and a feeling of belonging.

Then she’d met Toby and all that had changed. Had her family life really been that bad? On paper… probably.

As the eldest of five, with an invalid father, she’d had to fill her mother’s shoes. The role had been too big for her. Like a little girl playing dressing up in her mother’s high heels, there’d been obstacles she just hadn’t been able to negotiate. In her dramatic teenage way, she’d imagined herself as a modern-day Cinderella-albeit looking after a much-loved family. She’d become cook, cleaner, carer, sympathetic ear, referee…

But what their lives had been lacking in money and glamour, they’d made up for with love. And she hadn’t realised all families weren’t like that until there was a big gaping hole in her life.

‘Mum? Can I have a hot dog?’

Louise blinked and then focused on Jack, who was tugging on one of her arms.

‘Pardon, sweetheart?’

He tugged so hard she thought her shoulder would work loose from its socket. ‘I’m really hungry. Can I have a hot dog?’

The smell of onions, caramelising as they cooked on the makeshift grill on the far corner of the green invaded her senses. Hot on its tail was the aroma of herbs and meat. Her nose told her that when Jack said ‘hot dogs’ he didn’t mean skinny little frankfurters but bulging, meaty local sausages, bursting out of their skins and warming the soft, floury white bread that surrounded them. Her mouth filled with saliva.

‘Jack, you’re going to pull my arm off! Give me a second to think!’

She was safe here at the front of the crowd. No one could see her face, only half lit from the bonfire off to the left. But over there by the grill, a generator grumbled as it provided power for a couple of harsh floodlights, making it as bright as any runway she’d ever walked down when she’d been modelling.

‘Um…’

Ben took hold of Jack’s hand, his eyebrows raised in a question as he searched her face. ‘Why don’t we let your mum save our spot here and we can go and get the hot dogs? If that’s okay with you…’ he added a little more quietly.

Her face relaxed so much in relief that she couldn’t help but smile. She nodded and almost breathed her