Anything but Vanilla

chapter SIX



A balanced diet is an ice cream in each hand.

—from Rosie’s ‘Little Book of Ice Cream’

Sorrel had assumed Alexander would take the spoon from her but instead he leaned forward and put his lips around it. His hair fell forward and brushed against her wrist, goosing her flesh, and he put his hand beneath hers to steady it when it began to shake. Then he raised heavy lids to look straight into her eyes.

They were dangerously close.

It was a rerun of that moment when he’d been opening Ria’s bills. He’d turned to look at her then and the down on her cheek had stirred as if he had touched her, the effect rippling through her body in ever widening circles, like a pebble dropped into still water. It was utterly physical, her body bypassing the brain, whispering seductively, ‘Forget safe, forget dependable. Forget Graeme...’

She’d taken an involuntary step back, shocked by such a powerful response to a man whom, while undeniably attractive, she was not predisposed to like. But lust had nothing to do with liking. It was an unthinking, mindless, live-now-pay-later physical response to the atavistic need of a species to reproduce itself. A lingering madness, as outdated, as unnecessary, as troublesome as the appendix. It meant nothing.

And yet, with his palm cradling her hand, face-to-face, the effect was amplified; not so much a ripple as a tsunami...

Even as she floundered, out of her depth, going under, he released her hand, turned away, reached for his mug and filled it from the tap.

That was what she needed, too. Water. Lots and lots of cold water...

She had to settle for drawing in a deep, slightly ragged breath while his back was turned.

‘Was it that bad?’ she asked, needing to say something, pretend that nothing had happened. His throat rippled disturbingly as he drained the water and she swallowed, too. ‘The ice cream?’

He glanced at her, then at the cup. Shook his head. ‘No. Not at all. You just have to get past the expectation that it will be sweet.’ He appeared to be completely unaware of the effect he’d had on her, thank goodness. ‘How are you serving it?’ He nodded towards the ice cream.

‘Oh... A teaspoonful squished between tiny triangle-shaped oatmeal biscuits so that it looks like a miniature sandwich.’ He pulled a face, unimpressed. She began to breathe more easily. ‘You don’t approve?’

‘I’ve tasted some oatmeal biscuits that closely resembled cardboard.’

‘These won’t.’ And gradually she eased back out of the quicksand of feelings running out of control, climbing back onto the firmer ground of the stuff she understood. ‘I picked them up this morning along with your bacon roll. Peter produces all our baked goods. Biscuits, tuiles, brandy snaps.’

‘Our?’

‘Scoop! is a family business. My older sister started it with the unexpected gift of a vintage ice-cream van. My younger sister—the animal lover—is an art student. She does the artwork for the PR and runs the website.’

It was probably best not to mention her grandmother, who helped style their events, or her great-uncle Basil, a fabulous maître d’ at the big events and, when called upon, happy to don a striped blazer and straw boater to do a turn for them on an ancient ice-cream bicycle that he had lovingly restored.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What do you do?’

‘Me?’ She was the one who was going to turn their brand into a household name but she decided that, rather like the extended family, in this instance it was an ambition better kept private. Alexander’s eyebrow, like her pulse rate, had been given more than enough exercise for one day. ‘I’m the one who’s stuck here making ice cream when I should be in the newly restored Victorian Conservatory at Cranbrook Park, ensuring that the ice-cream bar is installed and fully functioning and that everything is in place for a perfect event.’ The eyebrow barely twitched. ‘Meanwhile, for your information, the biscuit we chose bears no resemblance to cardboard but is a thin, crisp, melt-in-the-mouth savoury oatmeal shortbread.’

‘If Peter Sands baked it, I’m warming to the idea.’

‘You know Peter?’

‘I wouldn’t have a bacon roll from anyone else.’

‘Great,’ she said, not sure whether he was serious, or simply winding her up. The latter, she feared. Unless... ‘You’re his landlord, too, aren’t you?’

‘I am, but I don’t sleep with him, either,’ he said. ‘In case you were wondering.’

‘No.’ She wasn’t wondering that. Not at all. ‘As for the florist, the delicatessen and the haberdashery in between...’

He shifted, as if she’d caught him off guard, and suddenly everything clicked into place. It wasn’t just this corner. The entire area had been given a makeover three or four years ago. Cleaned up, refreshed, while still keeping its old-fashioned charm.

‘Ohmigod! You’re that West!’

‘No,’ he said, waiting for her to catch up. ‘That West died in nineteen forty-one.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she said, crossly. Maybridge had been little more than a village that had grown up around a toll bridge when James West had started manufacturing his ‘liver pills’ in a cottage on the other side of the river. The gothic mansion built in the nineteenth century on the hill overlooking the town by one of Alexander’s ancestors was now the headquarters of the multinational West Pharmaceutical Group. ‘Your family built this town. Could I feel any more stupid?’

‘Why? The name was dropped from the company after some scandal involving my great-great-grandfather and a married woman. You could stop a hundred people in the town and not one of them would know that the W in WPG stands for West.’

‘Maybe, but I did,’ she admitted. How could she not have made the connection? Too many other things on her mind... ‘I did a project on the town history for my GCSE. I got in touch with their marketing department and they gave me a tour of the place.’ She shivered. ‘All that marble and mahogany.’

‘And the building is listed so they can’t rip it out.’ It appeared to amuse him.

‘They have close links with the university, too. Research, recruitment.’

‘They’re proactive when it comes to headhunting for talent.’

‘I know.’ She was going to enjoy this next bit... ‘They offered me a place in their management scheme.’

‘And you turned it down?’ He sounded sceptical. Unsurprising, if rude. No one turned down an offer from WPG. But no one else had Scoop!

‘Why would I want to sit in the office of some giant corporation, moving figures around, when I could be dreaming up ways to make someone’s day with the perfect ice cream?’ She regarded him thoughtfully. ‘I’d have thought a man who chose mosquitoes and bats over the boardroom would have understood that.’

‘Touché.’ He grinned appreciatively and she responded with a little curtsey.

‘Sadly, I don’t have the rents from half Maybridge to support my lifestyle.’

‘Who does? While my great-great-grandfather built this end of the High Street, his property portfolio, like WPG, is run by a charitable trust.’

‘So you’re not Ria’s landlord.’

‘I sit on the board of trustees.’

‘Which no doubt philanthropically supports your plant-hunting expeditions?’

‘All plant hunters need a patron with deep pockets. They do reap the benefits from my finds.’

‘So, what do you get out of it, apart from mosquito bites?’ she asked.

‘The glory?’ he suggested. ‘The fun?’

Which pretty much told her everything she needed to know about Alexander West. She might have got the wrong end of the stick when it came to his relationship with Ria, but she’d had him nailed from the start.

‘If fun’s your thing,’ she said, grabbing the opportunity to score another point, ‘you should have been at the Christmas party WPG threw at the children’s hospice in Melchester last year. They booked Rosie and we decked her out as Santa’s sleigh, flying in from the North Pole with ices for everyone.’

‘With you as Santa’s Little Helper, no doubt.’

‘Actually I was the ice-cream fairy.’ There was no point in denying her involvement, there was photographic evidence on their blog. There was no reason why he would bother to look up Scoop!, but it paid to cover all contingencies. ‘My sister was pregnant at the time so she couldn’t fit into the costume.’

He grinned. ‘I’m sorry I missed it.’

‘Me, too. You wouldn’t be giving me so much grief about our competence. Meanwhile, time is short. Would you care to venture an opinion on whether this recipe needs more lime, or a little mint perhaps?’ she asked, clutching at straws as she tried to recall the exact taste of the ice cream they had sampled in Cassie’s kitchen. Work out what ‘magic’ ingredient Ria might have added when she’d prepared the tasting samples.

‘Neither.’

He took the spoon she was still holding, turned it over and pulled it through his lips, sucking off every last trace of ice in a deliberately provocative manner. Or maybe she was reading things into his actions that she wanted to be there.

No, no, no! What was she thinking?

She resisted the urge to fan herself as he leaned back against the sink, tapping the spoon against that seductive lower lip, and thought for a moment.

Provocation was the last thing she needed...

‘What it needs,’ he said, after what seemed like an age while she held her breath, ‘is a touch of cayenne pepper.’

‘Cayenne?’ The word came out in a rush of breath. She knew all about chocolate and chilli—she and Ria had been working on that for their next event—but no... ‘A cucumber sandwich is supposed to be cool. The epitome of English sangfroid.’

The very opposite of what she was feeling right now.

‘You asked. That’s my opinion.’ He tossed the spoon in the bin, clearly not bothered one way or the other whether she took his advice. ‘I imagine you’ve tried calling Ria?’

‘Yes, of course. It was the first thing I did. Her mobile is unavailable. I’m assuming she’s switched off to avoid being hounded by creditors.’

‘Is that what you’d do?’

‘Me? I’d never let things get to this point.’

‘Never say never.’

‘I don’t suppose you know of any other number she uses?’ she asked, refusing to rise to this new provocation. He had no way of knowing why she would never let that happen and she certainly wasn’t about to tell him. ‘I keep a separate phone for personal calls.’

‘You have that many?’

‘It’s just more professional,’ she replied, leaving the number of calls she received to his imagination. Although come to think of it Graeme didn’t seem to get it, either. He always called her on her business number, even when he had tickets for the hottest opera in town. Was that how he saw her? Even now? She wasn’t the only young entrepreneur he helped. But she was the only one he took to dinners, social functions. The damned opera.

Until today that hadn’t seemed important. On the contrary. It was the perfect partnership. He was the perfect date. Elegant, intelligent and undemanding. She appeared to be his. Well dressed, intelligent—and undemanding.

It had seemed perfect, but suddenly a vast, empty space yawned in the centre of their relationship. Would Graeme drop everything and travel halfway across the world if she needed him?

‘No one could ever accuse Ria of being professional.’ Alexander’s voice broke into her thoughts.

‘No.’ That was the point: Graeme wouldn’t have to cross continents. He’d be there. She shook her head to clear it. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve only seen her with an old BlackBerry,’ she said, catching up. It didn’t rule out the possibility that she had another phone, of course. One that was kept for special calls.

Just because Alexander’s postcards were a rare event, it didn’t mean that they didn’t talk to one another when he was lying in his jungle hammock.

It was a thought that jarred, although... ‘How did you manage to receive a call from her, if you were in a mosquito-infested jungle?’ she asked.

‘Despite my Victorian occupation, I have a twenty-first-century satellite link to keep in touch with the outside world. But to answer your question, Ria has never mentioned another number to me. I was rather hoping you might know of one. She did trust you with a key.’

‘She trusts you with her bank account.’

‘It was a condition of bailing her out last time.’ He put the cup in the sink. ‘Maybe Nancy can tell you what the magic ingredient is.’

‘I’m not having much luck with phones today. Her number went straight to voicemail, too.’ Which was odd. She wouldn’t have switched it off if she was job-hunting. ‘Maybe the battery’s flat.’ It was that kind of day. ‘I’ve left a message but if she hasn’t called me back by three I’ll go along to the school and catch her there. You’ve no objection if I ask her to come in to work tomorrow?’

‘Would it make any difference if I had?’ She didn’t bother to answer that. ‘I thought not.’ He shrugged. ‘You can ask but you’ll have to pay her.’

‘Friday is a busy day,’ she pointed out, ‘and we’ve been promised a heatwave for the weekend. You’ll shift a lot of ice cream. If you talked to the Revenue, explain that you’ve got someone interested...’

‘Forget it. I’ll be talking to the bank and Ria’s accountant about winding up the business.’

‘Actually, I don’t think you’ll find him at his office. I’m sure Ria mentioned that he’d been taken ill. A stroke, I think. So that’s one thing you can cross off your list.’

‘He has a partner.’

‘Selling ice cream is a lot more fun,’ she assured him. ‘Really.’

‘Maybe, but I didn’t fly halfway around the world to stand behind an ice-cream counter.’

Which begged the question, why exactly had he flown halfway round the world? It was none of her business. At all.

‘Okay,’ she said, with what she hoped looked like a careless shrug, ‘if I can’t tempt you, I’ll pay Nancy, but I’m not a charity. If I’m paying rent for the premises and paying the staff, I’ll buy the ice cream and bank the takings.’

That raised a smile. ‘The first sensible thing you’ve said today.’

Actually, it wasn’t. Ria might have the magic touch with ice cream, but she was the one with an instinct for business. Her offer to buy Knickerbocker Gloria might have been a throwaway remark but, the more she thought about it, the more excited she became.

It had been her sister who, without any business experience, had seen an opportunity and changed their lives. They’d all helped—she’d been the one who knew about regulations, accounting procedures, tax—but it was Elle who had seized the moment. Suddenly she was having a ‘big idea’ of her own. Maybe the ‘big idea’.

She was shaking a little as she grinned back at Alexander. ‘I’m glad you approve. So, do we have a deal, Alexander West?’

‘If you can pay a month’s rent in advance, Sorrel Amery.’

‘A month?’

‘It’ll take that long to prepare the accounts, negotiate a new lease with the trust, contracts. Take it or leave it.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t seem to have much choice. How much are you going to charge me?’ she asked. He wasn’t the only one who could ask a ‘catch’ question. She knew exactly how much rent Ria paid.

He didn’t ask for a penny more.

‘Will that be in cash?’ She was pushing her luck, but she didn’t want him to know that a month suited her very well. She needed time. ‘Without the telephone you won’t be able to use the card machine.’

‘A cheque would be tidier. Make it payable to The WPG Trust.’ Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he said, ‘Oh, no. You don’t carry a cheque book with you.’

He was teasing her?

She opened her bag. ‘Oh, look,’ she said, producing it. ‘This must be your lucky day.’

‘You think?’

The teasing glint remained, but realising how much trouble Ria was causing him, how much trouble she was causing him, she said, ‘No. I’m sorry.’ Then, because this was business, ‘My cheque for one month’s rent to be refunded off the price if I make an offer for the business?’ she pressed, firmly repressing the whisper of longing that shimmered through her as the suggestion of a smile, lifting one corner of his mouth, deepened a little.

‘To be refunded off the price if you buy the business,’ he agreed and offered her his hand. It was one of the traditional ways to close a deal. A kiss was another.

Kissing him would be fun.

Glorious fun...

For heaven’s sake! This was serious!

She grasped his hand firmly, like a proper business person. It was hard, callused, vibrating with power and this was him with jet lag...

‘I imagine you’ll want that in writing?’ he asked, losing the smile and releasing her so abruptly that she practically fell off her heels.

She took half a step back to regain her balance, physical if not mental. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you should put some cayenne pepper in that ice cream,’ he said, peeling himself away from the sink.

The air seemed to ripple around him as he moved, lapping against her in soft waves, goosing her flesh. Sorrel shivered a little and glanced after him. Did he have that effect on everyone or was it just her?

He didn’t look back, and, aware that she was standing there in a lustlorn trance, she was grateful. The click of the door as he closed it brought her back to reality, but even then it took a moment for her bones to remember what they were for. What she was here for.

Cayenne pepper? Really?

She crossed the kitchen and opened the cupboard containing the spice and flavourings and there it was. Right at the front.

Could he be right?

In the face of any other ideas it had to be worth a try, but how much was just a touch, exactly? She liked everything cut and dried. Laid out in straight lines. Business, life, gram weights. Give her a recipe and she was fine but this ‘touch’, or ‘pinch’ business—like the sizzle in the air whenever they came within touching distance—left her floundering.

She weighed some of the spice carefully onto the little ‘gram’ scale and then added it to a pint of the mixture in the tiniest amounts, tasting, adding, tasting, adding until suddenly the ice cream sprang to life. Not hot, but with just enough added zing to make it...perfect.

How had he known?

She’d seen Ria do the same thing, instinctively reach for a spice that brought an ice leaping to life on the palate. It was a kind of alchemy. And totally frustrating when you couldn’t do it yourself.

She needed Ria.

She needed Alexander.

No, Ria!

She checked the scales to see how much of the pepper she’d used to the last gram, updated the recipe on her laptop, rounded it up and added the full amount to the churn. Then she checked her phone. No messages.

She started making the Earl Grey granita.

It wasn’t one of their one-off recipes, but a standard they’d used before. Perfecting it was just a matter of timing to get the strength of the tea exactly right. No surprises, just concentration.

* * *

Alexander took a moment to gather his thoughts, concentrate on what he had to do in an attempt to shift the disturbing sense of losing himself.

It didn’t help.

He flexed his hands, still tingling with the electricity of the touch of Sorrel Amery’s fingers, palm against his. Cool, seductively soft, with contrastingly hot nails that exactly matched lips that were putting all kinds of thoughts into his head.

Dangerous thoughts.

It had been made very clear to him that his lifestyle and relationships were mutually exclusive. The era when women sat at home and waited while their men ventured into the unknown for months, years, had disappeared, along with the Victorians with whom Sorrel had compared him.

He’d made his choice and, while the passion for what he did burned bright, he’d live with it.

Alone.

He took a deep breath, then began to tackle the unpaid bills. When he’d placed the last of them in the out tray, he sat back and tried to piece together, from the fragments that had made it through the burble and static of a storm-disrupted uplink, exactly what Ria had said.

Sorrel wasn’t the only one to immediately think the worst.

Her words had been distorted, broken, but the urgency of her plea for him to ‘come now’, the certainty that she’d been crying had been enough for him to abandon his search and fly home.

Finding the insolvency notice, tossed on the hall table amongst a muddle of bills, had been something of a relief. Financial problems he could deal with, but now it seemed that his ‘Glad you’re not here?’ postcard, sent when he’d briefly touched civilisation a few weeks back, had triggered the downward spiral.

He felt for her, would clear up the mess, but he couldn’t allow her to carry on like this. It wasn’t fair on the people who relied on her. People like Sorrel Amery.

Unfortunately, in her case it was not just a simple matter of settling accounts and then shutting up shop. Despite her outrageously skimpy clothes, she appeared to have convinced sane men to hire her company. Sane men that he knew.

That took more than a short skirt and a ‘do me’ smile and in a burst of irritation he Googled Scoop!

There was more, he discovered. A lot more.

Scoop!’s website was uncluttered, elegant and professional. There were photographs of attractive girls and good-looking young men carrying trays that were a sleek update on the kind used by cinema usherettes and designed to carry a couple of dozen mini ice-cream cones or little glasses containing a mouthful of classic ice-cream desserts.

He clicked on one of the links—an ice-cream cone, what else?—and discovered Sorrel wearing a glamorous calf-length black lace cocktail dress with a neckline that displayed her figure to perfection. He’d seen something very similar in a photograph of his great-grandmother when she was a young woman.

Sorrel, unlike Great-grandma, was wearing the stop-me-and-buy-one smile that would have had him buying whatever she was selling.

Except that the smile wasn’t for him. What she was selling was her business and that was all she’d been thinking about today. While he’d been momentarily blown away by it, falling into the waiting kiss and sufficiently distracted by it to let her walk all over him, she hadn’t wavered in her focus for a moment. She’d only ever had one thing on her mind—ice cream.

Which was the good news.

He told himself that the bad news was that he was stuck with her. Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that. On the contrary, being stuck with her felt like a very good place to be.

He’d definitely been out of circulation for too long, he decided. What he needed...

He forgot what he needed as he clicked through the links to check out recent events and found himself looking at a photograph of a laughing bride about to take a mouthful of an ice that exactly matched the heavily embroidered bodice of her gown. He stared at it for a moment, a back-to-earth reality check, before he clicked through the rest of the photographs.

A school football team celebrating a cup win, their traditional ice-cream cones containing black-and-white striped ices to match their strip.

A company reception, the ices in the colours of the company logo.

He found the ice-cream van, too. Rosie, like the dress that Sorrel was wearing, was a lovingly restored vintage and had made appearances at any kind of event he could think of from hen parties, birthday parties, weddings, even a funeral in the last few months and she—someone—blogged about her very busy life, including appearances in a television drama series that was filmed locally.

He scrolled down until he found what he hadn’t known he was looking for. Sorrel Amery dressed as the Christmas ice-cream fairy. The smile was, it seemed, not reserved for gullible men. She had her arms around a small, desperately sick child, giving her a hug, making her laugh. And this time it brought a lump to his throat.

There was, apparently, a whole lot more to Sorrel Amery than long legs and lashes that fringed eyes the green and gold haze of a hazel hedge on an early spring morning.

But he’d already worked that out. She’d been concerned about her ice cream, her ‘event’ but, despite being badly let down, she’d shown concern for Ria, too. That displayed a depth of character that didn’t quite match the skirt, the shoes or a kiss for a man she’d only set eyes on a minute before. A kiss that had left him breathless.

Apparently he was the one who was shallow here, leaping to conclusions, judging on appearances.

Sorrel hadn’t fallen apart when her day had hit the skids. After a shaky start, she’d buckled down, dealt with the problems as they had been hurled at her and, in the process, convinced him to do something that went against every instinct.

That took a lot more than a straight-to-hell smile.

* * *

Sorrel was squeezing the juice from a pile of pink grapefruit when he returned to the kitchen. Not the most enjoyable job in the world, but she was putting her back into it.

‘How long are you going to be?’ he asked.

‘As long as it takes,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to make more than one batch of this so I’ll be a while yet. As soon as I’ve got the syrup started, I’ll pop down to the school to catch Nancy,’ she said, checking her watch, before turning to look at him. ‘You don’t have to stay.’ She favoured him with a wry smile. ‘As you appear to have worked out for yourself, Ria gave me a key so that I can pick up stock out of hours.’

‘That sounds about right.’ Ria had a genius for making ice cream and if she’d been focused, seized the opportunities that clearly existed for someone with entrepreneurial flair, she could have been making serious money. He’d given her every chance, but it was obvious that she didn’t have the temperament for it. As Sorrel Amery had discovered, she was like Scotch mist: impossible to pin down. ‘I’m sorry she let you down.’

‘It’s not your fault and she didn’t mean to. She’s just, well, Ria.’

‘Yes.’ Infuriating, irresponsible, impossible to refuse anything... He’d berated Sorrel for handing over cash but he’d done a lot more than that over the years. Wanting to make up for her loss. His loss... ‘I’ve got your lease.’

‘That was quick.’

‘It’s a month’s sub-let, hardly complicated.’

‘Don’t underestimate yourself.’ She rubbed her arm against her cheek where a juice had splashed. ‘You must be absolute dynamite when you’ve had a good night’s sleep.’

‘When I’ve had one, I’ll let you know. In the meantime are you going to sign this?’ he asked.

‘I’ll be right with you,’ she said, squeezing the last of the grapefruit before peeling off the thin protective gloves.

She checked the date and signature on the original lease signed by Ria, then read through the sub-lease and the letter he’d written.

‘You’re my sponsor? What does that mean?’

‘All our tenants are sponsored by a board member. You’ll have to provide audited accounts and references before you’ll be granted a full lease.’

‘And will you sponsor me for that?’

‘I won’t be here.’

She flinched, as if struck. It was over in a moment and if he hadn’t been looking at her quite so intently he’d have missed it. ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘Um...this seems to be in order. Have you got a pen?’

‘You’re not going to read the actual lease?’

‘Are you open to negotiation?’ She glanced up, questioningly.

‘No,’ he said, quickly, handing her his pen.

‘Thought not.’ She signed both copies of the sub-lease and gave him back one copy. ‘You’ll find my cheque pinned to the noticeboard.’

She’d been that confident?

‘One month, Sorrel,’ he repeated. ‘Not a day...not an hour longer.’