The Night Before Christmas (9 page)

‘I know, I know it’s just … Katy, you’re not going to believe this, but …’ Before Lydia could say any more, Jackson appeared in the doorway, his honey-coloured hair all messed up, looking sleepy eyed and very kissable.

‘Thank God, at least it’s a little warmer in here,’ he said. ‘It’s freezing upstairs. Joanna refuses to get up until I’ve brought her coffee and got the fire going in our room. Do you have any matches?’

‘Kettle’s there,’ Lydia replied, nodding in its direction,
preventing Katy from offering to do it for him. She studied her toast, sensing his eyes on her as he found some mugs and switched the kettle back on, wondering if he recognised her at all, his play-acting at never having met her so believable that she was almost convinced herself.

‘I’m so sorry about the cold,’ Katy told him. ‘The boiler’s ancient, it’s given up the ghost again. Do you know anything about boilers?’

‘Pot boilers only, I’m afraid,’ Jackson said, running his hands through his hair. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not really very practical.’

‘Oh really? I’d heard you were rather good with your hands,’ Katy said, her giggles trailing off as she saw Lydia’s stony expression.

Fortunately, before Katy could pick up on any tension between the two of them, a whirling cyclone of children and dog swept into the room.

‘Daddy did very bad swearing when I got in bed with him,’ Tilly giggled, sliding back into her seat, with Vincent taking his place at her feet, all of them considerably cheered by the appearance of food.

As he sat down, Jake reached over and grabbed a piece of Katy’s toast. ‘But he is getting up now, even though he says his mouth tastes like a rat’s arse,’ the boy added.

‘Daddy said Vincent had better learn to swim,’ Tilly said, as she messily fed Vincent scrambled eggs. ‘He
said next time that sodding dog gets in his bed he’s going to drown him the lake, just like Mad Molly.’

‘There is no Mad Molly!’ Katy rolled her eyes. ‘Daddy is an idiot!’

‘Mummy!’ Tilly looked appalled. ‘How rude!’

Despite her mood, Lydia smiled at Tilly balking at her mum’s use of idiot when clearly her dad had just subjected her to worse.

‘Daddy is an idiot! Daddy is an idiot!’ Jake chanted, more or less in Lydia’s ear. Seeing her chance to not be in a room with Jackson Blake, Lydia jumped up with the sort of energetic enthusiasm she usually reserved only for shopping and court, and clapped her hands together.

‘I know!’ she said, cheerfully. ‘Let’s put on our coats and scarves and wellies and go and be the first to make footprints in the snow!’

‘But we’re not dressed,’ Tilly said, looking at her mother. ‘We can’t go outside in our jammies, can we?’

‘Who cares?’ Lydia clapped her hands. ‘It’s Christmas, we can do whatever we want …’ She hesitated. ‘We’re allowed, right, Katy, as long as we wrap up warm?’

‘Well, I suppose so, as long as you …’ Whatever Katy had been about to say was lost in the deafening cheers.

Amid the chatter and scramble to get dressed in as many layers as possible, Katy smiled at her, silently mouthing thank you, unaware of Lydia’s urgent need to be anywhere that Jackson Blake was not.

As the children got togged up in the lean-to attached to the side of the house, Lydia reluctantly slipped off her lovely boots and, still barefoot, borrowed the likeliest looking pair of wellies and a thick woollen coat that was probably Jim’s but looked the warmest candidate, and headed outside into the pristine white day.

It was a decision she instantly regretted, particularly as it turned out that the snowdrift she stepped into was considerably deeper than the height of her borrowed footwear. Icy snow leeched inside the rubber and her feet were instantly wet and freezing. Whimpering miserably, Lydia knew she couldn’t go back inside now, not until Jackson had made Joanna’s breakfast and left the kitchen. Not after she had done such a good job of looking fun and outdoorsy, attributes that, although she was sure Jackson didn’t give two hoots about, were nevertheless the best chance she had of clinging on to her dignity right now. Utterly uncomfortable, she waddled determinedly from one frozen foot to the other, supposing that five toes on each foot weren’t strictly necessary, anyway. Rigor mortis set in around her frozen face as she watched the children tear around after Vincent, who was bounding through the snow like a puppy reborn, yapping for joy as he buried his snout in the alien stuff and tossed it in the air. Lydia was finding it impossible to smile, even though she wanted to.

Looking around her at the breathtaking landscape that was so silently powerful, she thought that, if she
had to die of stubbornness-induced hypothermia, at least Heron’s Pike had to rank as one of the world’s top ten most beautiful places to do it.

‘Snowball fight!’ Jake announced with sudden ruthless terror, giving Lydia precisely no seconds to duck out of the way of the freezing, if thankfully soft, snowball that exploded on her nose.

‘Oh, you little …’ Galvanised into action, she kneeled down, desperately attempting and failing to gather up the powdery snow to fashion into a ball, while the children, who had remarkable aim and dexterity for such small people, pelted her with round after round of perfectly formed missiles, most of which hit their mark, despite Vincent’s best efforts to catch them mid-flight.

‘Not fair!’ Lydia complained fruitlessly. ‘Give me a chance … Haven’t you heard of the Geneva Convention?’ Apparently they had not, because within minutes her face was red raw, and her hair and layers of clothes were soaked through and clinging to her damp skin. Just as she was about to surrender, and beg for a quick death, reinforcements came out of nowhere. Lydia was still struggling with only her third pathetic snowball, when four or five perfectly formed spheres shot over her head in quick succession, one of them landing squarely on Jake’s shoulder, prompting him to yell like a banshee.

‘This is war!’ he shouted. Lydia spun round to find Jackson re-arming.

‘I haven’t had this much fun since I was a kid in Central Park. Get behind me, ma’am,’ he joked, doing his best GI impression. ‘I’ll be your personal human shield.’

‘Charge!’ Jake had scooped a wad of frozen snow off the top of a bench and was running at them with an excited, snappy, yappy Vincent in tow and a screeching Tilly in hot pursuit.

Stepping in front of her, Jackson turned his back on the oncoming assault, just as Vincent hit with the full force of four paws, knocking man onto woman and both of them into the thick snow. From somewhere, buried as she was underneath Jackson’s chest, Lydia heard Jake triumphantly shout, ‘Subject destroyed, retreat!’ and Vincent’s barking recede into the distance. Wriggling upwards, she opened her eyes to find Jackson on top of her, his nose millimetres from the frozen tip of hers. For one perfect, happy moment, Lydia forgot everything except that it was so very good to see him.

‘Hello, you,’ she said, smiling faintly, in spite of everything.

‘Lydia Grant,’ he whispered. ‘It’s been a very long time.’

‘So you do remember me, then?’

‘You are not someone I am likely to forget.’

As they stared at each other, Lydia realised that, even through the many layers of clothes she was wearing, it felt as if there were nothing separating her from her
former lover. She could feel the rapid beat of his heart against hers, and was overwhelmed by a sudden ache to touch him, to entwine her fingers in his hair and kiss him, just as she had done hundreds of times before. That would have been tricky, though, considering he was now the property of her best friend, and they weren’t supposed to know each other.

Coming to her senses, Lydia struggled to break free, but Jackson had her pinned to the spot, reluctant to let her go.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked him, desperately. ‘Look, if you want to act like we never met, fine, I get it. But don’t chase me out here and find an excuse to roll around with me. You’re with Joanna now, and whatever we had is over, isn’t it?’

‘I … I know.’ Jackson looked embarrassed, and for one triumphant moment Lydia thought she’d gained the moral high ground. ‘I only came out here to get my phone. You’re … er … wearing my coat,’ Jackson said, still making no move to get up.

‘What? What on earth is it doing hanging up on the coat rack? Why didn’t you hang it up in your room like a normal person?’ Lydia fumed, uncaring that her anger was not precisely rational. ‘Oh, get off me! Get off me right now!’

At last Jackson obliged, clambering up and brushing the snow off his body before extending a helping hand to Lydia.

‘Just go away,’ Lydia instructed him, realising with horror that her bottom appeared to have gone completely numb.

‘Don’t be so silly, take my hand.’ Grudgingly, Lydia accepted, letting him pull her to her feet, but blocking his attempt to brush off some of the caking of snow. Jackson glanced up at the house, lowering his voice. ‘Lydia, we need to talk. Get some things straight.’

Lydia pushed her wet hair off her face and sniffed. ‘Look, it’s fine. I get it. You went off me, you disappeared like the cowardly bullshit artist you clearly are, and I got over you. And now, for some reason that God alone knows, you’re going out with Joanna Summer, one of my very best friends. I presume we have to pretend we don’t know each other, because otherwise her pretty little nose might be put rather out of joint if she found out that the latest love of her life had once spent several solid weeks screwing her best friend in fifty different ways!’

Jackson’s smile was infuriatingly sweet. ‘Wow, was it only fifty? Look, I’m so sorry about how I behaved when I saw you last night. You were the very last person I expected to see. Joanna hasn’t really talked about her friends that much, so I didn’t know how to react. It seemed the best thing to do at the time and, well, with hindsight it was wrong and appalling behaviour, but I’ve never been in that situation before.’ He seemed genuinely apologetic, which made Lydia hate him slightly more.

‘Sure about that, are you?’ she growled.

‘I appreciate it must be difficult for you, but—’

‘No!’ Lydia cut him off, with a chop of her red-raw hand. ‘It’s not difficult at all. You see, Jackson, you and I are the very, very distant past. I’m with Stephen now. I met him a couple of weeks after you allegedly “went back to New York”, actually, and yes, I am going to marry him. So you and Joanna can do what you like, as loudly as you like, which, by the way, is very loud and frankly rather vulgar. I don’t care. Now let’s just forget we ever knew each other and try and get through the next few days without ruining it for everyone, okay?’

‘Okay, but …’

Lydia did not stay to hear what he had to say. She forced her numbed feet to carry her indoors, perhaps not as gracefully as she would have liked, but just as fast as she could manage on her useless stumps of frost-bitten legs.

‘Bloody hell, darling, you look like you’ve been ravished by the abominable snow man,’ an immaculate, TV-ready Joanna declared as Lydia entered the kitchen with her hair plastered to her ruddy cheeks, and feet already painfully thawing out. ‘I wondered what could possibly be keeping Jackson from delivering my breakfast as promised.’

Joanna pretended to be stern with Jackson, who contritely kissed her on the lips.

‘Sorry, sweetheart, I was rescuing this fair maiden from very short bandits.’

As Joanna giggled, Lydia gritted her teeth, relieved even to see that Stephen had finally emerged from his coma, although she was still not talking to him after last night’s performance, or rather lack of one.

‘Hello, love,’ Stephen said a little sheepishly from the doorway. He looked like death warmed up, and was obviously nursing a shocking hangover. ‘You okay?’

Ignoring him, Lydia looked at Joanna, with her long red hair cascading down her perfectly white, silk dressing gown, and for one horrible moment she considered pouring the mug of steaming coffee that Katy had handed her over her dear friend’s head. And then she remembered that none of this was Joanna’s fault. Or Stephen’s. None of it was Jackson’s fault, possibly. Maybe it was just some cruel joke the universe had decided to play on her, Lydia Grant. Perhaps she’d committed some really terrible crimes against women in a past life, like making hipster jeans eternally fashionable or Pringles addictive, for which she was now being forced to atone.

‘I’m going to get dressed,’ Lydia said, quite calmly, she thought, considering the circumstances, looking at Katy. ‘And if any of my toes fall off once they’ve defrosted, I’m suing your children.’

It took some time to rub the blood back into her various extremities, and several more minutes thawing
herself out with a hair dryer, before Lydia began to feel human again. Once she’d raised her body temperature to acceptable levels, she found a pair of the aforementioned evil hipster jeans, that only a woman with no hips could ever truly look good in, pulled on a contrasting grey and white vest combo, and finished it off with a knee-length off-the-shoulder sweater that was probably a bit loosely knitted to be practical, considering the Artic conditions, but which looked sexy. And Lydia decided that, right now, looking as sexy as a quite short, quite curvy, brunette girl could when standing next to a quite tall and willowy, very beautiful, semi-famous redhead was more important to her than being warm, even if her very best efforts would pale into insignificance next to Joanna’s effortless beauty. She brushed out her hair, until it wended its way in long, dark ripples down her back, and smudged a little eyeliner around her chocolate-brown eyes, before applying the mascara she never usually went anywhere without. A few squirts of Coco Chanel and she felt, and more importantly looked, human again, and able to face the farce that her life had somehow descended into.

Returning downstairs, she found everyone – bar Jake, who was industrially building what appeared to be a very female snowwoman outside the window – in the sitting room, with plates of toast on their laps and mugs of steaming coffee balanced on chair arms.
Although Stephen was most certainly not off the hook, Lydia chose to take his toast from him and sit on his lap, wrapping her arms around him and planting a kiss on his cheek, quite amused by the sudden confusion on his face. The room was pleasantly silent for a moment, as everyone munched through bloomer bread, the only noise coming from Jim stoking the fire and Vincent snoring in the corner. Covertly, Lydia examined Jackson through her lashes. He had also changed clothes, and was sitting by the window, with Joanna curled up against him, looking utterly in love and relaxed. Alex had assumed her position in the middle of the sofa, with her feet up on the stool, resting a plate on her bump. David sat next to her, his head buried in a book about childbirth.