‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s Blair. Blair Pfenning. Blair who took you out to lunch? That Blair? You know? Yesterday?’
Carmen found her heart jumping. Goodness. Well. This was a surprise. She had trained herself not to expect it. And also, he was a knob. But …
Maybe he couldn’t stop thinking about her. I mean, she had thought he was a bit jumped up but still, it had been … it had been such a lovely treat. At a moment when she didn’t have a lot of treats, when she had had a tough old time of it, and she certainly didn’t have a lot of people taking her out to lunch, especially not Champagne and dragon phlegm lunches.
In his cosy hotel room with underfloor heating, Blair Pfenning stared at the contact list the publicist had left behind, with several precautions to make sure he could get his own plane, and how much she’d miss him but she had a major thriller writer flying in to London and … and he’d waved a hand magnanimously and announced that he wasn’t a baby even though he was secretly furious and feeling very annoyed. He needed a full-time assistant to follow him around; he was far too important to get to the airport by himself.
‘I’ve booked the cab for nine,’ she’d said. ‘It’s a black cab, so it can get through the traffic faster.’
‘Fine,’ he’d said shortly, and quickly put all his clothes through the hotel’s express laundry service so he’d at least feel he was getting his money’s worth.
Then of course she’d flounced off back to London on the train – and he was now completely stranded with a cancelled flight, which she couldn’t help him with as her train had run into snow just south of Newcastle and appeared to be stuck till the Army could get to it.
Blair had been curt in his sympathies.
She had, however, left the contact sheet with him. He’d thrown it in the bin, but then bent down and retrieved it. Surely someone could sort him out.
‘Oh yeah. Hi.’
He sniffed. She should be thrilled to hear from him. People normally were.
‘Thundersnow?’
‘It’s a stormy meteorological event … ’
‘No, I know what it is. It’s what’s cancelled my bloody flight to LA.’
Carmen looked at the message. She had absolutely no idea what he wanted from her. Did he think she knew some special way to fly him out of Edinburgh to LA? Or was he just bored? Was he flirting with her?
She had of course googled him the previous evening, in her bedroom, well away from Sofia’s prying eyes. Divorced. She had a look at his ex-wife. She was an extraordinary-looking supermodel with a slightly tight bitter look around her mouth, although to be fair that was when she was simultaneously being asked by the Daily Mail whether she regretted divorcing Blair when his book How Divorce Can Make You Happier Than Ever! had just sold its three millionth copy.
That morning, when she’d finally woken again, tired but somehow refreshed, she’d gone to the front door, accompanied by the yawning children. The dark hadn’t quite left the sky and the snow was still falling in spirals – more gently now – but there were pink streaks across the rooftops between the gaps. It was gorgeous. And now this.
Clutching her phone, she went upstairs for breakfast.
School was indeed cancelled, much to Sofia’s disgust, even as Jack and Phoebe were yelling with joy and dashed to pull their wellies on over their pyjamas. Skylar was trying to get them to eat their soaked oats. It wasn’t very good of her, she knew, but she felt a slight satisfaction in the children listening to her, and as soon as Phoebe started to talk about last night, the other two shushed her immediately.
‘Whatever happened to my Valvona and Crolla hamper?’ Sofia was complaining, looking in a cupboard. ‘I was going to donate it to the homeless.’