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old room so you’ll have to make do with this one.’ Tom was now smiling as if his superior intellectual prowess had once again triumphed.

      ‘Not fair. We’ll toss again,’ Mattie demanded and she wanted to stamp her foot so much that her toes curled up in her Converse.

      But in the end she lost the toss – though she wouldn’t have put it past Tom to have a special double-tails pound coin solely so he could win coin tosses – and had no option but to smile thinly and say, ‘Fine, I hope you’ll be happy in your needlessly large room.’

      ‘Thanks, I’m sure I will,’ Tom said with another mocking smile, and it wasn’t until she was finally back on her home turf that Mattie could give way to her true feelings.

      ‘I hate him!’ she exclaimed, to the surprise of Cuthbert and several customers.

      ‘“Hate” is a very strong word,’ Cuthbert admonished, putting his hands over a couple of Jezebel’s levers as if he didn’t want the coffee machine to hear any harsh words.

      ‘It’s not strong enough,’ Mattie said as she stomped into the kitchen, which sadly had no door that she could slam.

      

      The very next evening, the last they all had free until after Christmas, Verity moved out, Posy moved her books out and Tom and Mattie moved in.

      The logistics were not ideal. In fact, the logistics were a nightmare. Mattie had come home from work yesterday and worked long into the night packing up all her worldly possessions while mainlining black coffee.

      Then she’d squeezed a day’s baking into a morning so that after the lunchtime rush, she could hightail it back to Hackney to finish her packing.

      Meanwhile, to mark the auspicious occasion, Happy Ever After and the tearooms closed their doors at 3 p.m. so that the Afternoon of Moving Many Things could get underway. ‘It won’t take long to shift a few boxes of books,’ Posy had said blithely but Posy had lied.

      Despite quite a few fraught text messages about timings, when Mattie turned up at four in her mother’s car, Posy’s books were still being carried out at the same time that Verity and Johnny were trying to get her blue velvet armchair down the narrow stairs without breaking it.

      There wasn’t much room to park in the mews, what with two vans being there already. Mattie was just about to reverse out when there was a furious hooting behind her and she was hemmed in by yet another van. She could just make out Tom’s face in her rear-view mirror as he gestured frantically at her.

      She was tempted to gesture back with her middle finger. ‘Ugh, he has zero chill.’

      Her brother Guy, who’d come to help, immediately swivelled around then squawked when Mattie dug him in the ribs. ‘I know someone else who has zero chill,’ he complained. ‘I just wanted to see if he was cute.’

      ‘Well, I saved you the bother,’ Mattie said, inching the nippy little Nissan forward so she could park in the far corner of the mews, next to the derelict row of abandoned shops, which Sebastian kept talking about redeveloping. ‘You’ve already met Tom so you should know that he’s not cute. He’s the anti-cute and I have plenty of chill, thank you very much.’

      Guy exchanged a look with Mattie’s friend, Pippa, who’d also come along to help. ‘If you say so.’

      ‘Come on,’ Pippa admonished. ‘I’ve told you this three times already, but it takes teamwork to make the dream work.’

      Mattie tried not to roll her eyes. Pippa worked for Sebastian (it was how Mattie had come to hear of the then-vacant tearooms, and how Pippa had wangled a couple of hours off) as a special projects manager, which meant she had great organisational skills and was a big fan of a stirring pep talk stuffed full of inspirational quotes.

      ‘I do say so,’ Mattie said because she was chilled and also because she would rather die than let Guy have the last word. Besides, she could bicker with Guy, her older brother by all of two minutes, without so much as breaking a sweat. In fact she could do all sorts of things with minimum fuss. She could multi-task the lunchtime rush, a special last-minute order for a birthday cake and wrangling Jezebel because Cuthbert had slipped out for five minutes, without getting pink in the face or swearing or mucking up a customer’s order for a macchiato with almond milk and no foam. There were only two men who brought out the unchill in her and Tom was one of them, which didn’t make him special, it just made him really, really annoying.

      The three of them got out of the car at the same time that Tom descended from his van, which was now blocking the entrance to the mews, because he might have a PhD but he had no common sense.

      In honour of the Afternoon of Moving Many Things and the need for manual labour, Tom had ditched his bow-tie and cardigan and was wearing a moth-eaten jumper over his shirt in a very unattractive fawn colour. And he hadn’t come alone … he’d brought some people with him. Unlike their tweedy BFF, Tom’s friends (were they really his friends, though?) favoured tight jeans and tight, plunging T-shirts revealing lots of muscled he-vage. They all seemed to have tribal armband tattoos and a lot of product in their hair. More product than any hair really needed. Mattie didn’t want to stare but Guy was already striding over.

      ‘Tom!’ Guy and Tom had met several times before at various Happy Ever After events, including the opening of the tearooms. Now they shook hands and Guy grinned because he was having no truck with the blood of thine enemy etc. and also he could never resist trying to get one up on Mattie. ‘Shall we help Very and Posy move stuff out so we can move in sometime before midnight?’

      ‘I was just going to suggest the same thing,’ Tom said, which Mattie sorely doubted. ‘After all, the light’s already fading. It’ll be dark soon.’

      ‘I’ll make coffee,’ Mattie decided, because what with Guy and Pippa, who was already consulting the spreadsheet she’d put together to achieve a favourable and time-effective outcome to moving all of Mattie’s goods and chattels, and Tom and his three … helpers, nobody needed her to heft heavy boxes. Also, Mattie couldn’t risk injuring her whisking hand.

      ‘I’d rather have a tea,’ Posy called out from one of the benches in the middle of the mews where she was best situated to supervise things. She was wearing a huge puffa coat and had a travel blanket tucked around her, though for a late-November afternoon, it was actually quite temperate.

      ‘Why do you need tea? Are you cold? You should have said!’ Sebastian Thorndyke was at his wife’s side in an instant. ‘I did say there was no need for you to come, Morland.’

      ‘And I said that I wasn’t going to give you an opportunity to cart my treasured collection of Chalet School books to the nearest charity shop,’ Posy replied. ‘And I don’t want tea because I’m cold, I want tea because I’m thirsty.’

      Sebastian dropped to his knees in front of his wife, uncaring that he was wearing a suit that probably cost more than Mattie earned in a month before tax. ‘Are you dehydrated? Are your kidneys hurting? Is the baby pressing on your kidneys?’

      Posy patted his hand fondly. ‘I can be thirsty just because it’s about an hour since my last cup of tea.’

      ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on,’ Mattie said and though she found Sebastian quite overbearing, he did dote on Posy and seemed to make her ridiculously happy. He also wasn’t even dressed remotely appropriately for the occasion. ‘I wouldn’t have thought a suit would be practical if you’re lugging boxes of books about.’

      Sebastian’s haughty face looked even haughtier. ‘I don’t lug,’ he said, as if Mattie had accused him of a little light breaking and entering. ‘I pay people to lug. In this case, Sam and his young friend, the unfortunately named Pants.’

      Right on

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