Chocolate Wishes by Trisha Ashley Read Free Book Online Page B

that I would have the back bedroom overlooking the courtyard, leaving the front for Jake, even though it was slightly larger.
    When I finally looked at my watch it was already noon and I had been there for hours, although it felt more like minutes! I left hastily, retracing my path through the Old Smithy and the house, locking the doors behind me, one by one.
    When I emerged the road was momentarily deserted, though to the right I could just see Felix’s swinging sign for Marked Pages, the first of the High Street shops. They were increasing steadily in number: as well as the Spar near the Green and an old-established saddlers, there was now a new café-cum-craft gallery (Witch Crafts), a delicatessen and a couple of gift shops. Another teashop was in the throes of being renovated.
    The Shakespeare find at Winter’s End a couple of years ago had really revitalised the village, so Grumps was lucky to have got the Old Smithy, especially at what seemed tobe a very advantageous price. I wondered how he’d managed that.
    There was no sign of Felix and Poppy until I crossed the road to the Falling Star and saw them waving at me from the bow window of the snug. Mind you, if I didn’t know them so well, I wouldn’t have recognised them behind the thick bull’s-eye glass panes, because they looked like dubious sea creatures seen dimly lurking in green waters.
    As usual I tried to avoid stepping on the clean square of pavement as I went in, because it seemed an unlucky thing to do. Mrs Snowball was now sitting behind a tiny reception desk under the stairway (the inn lets rooms, mostly to business reps), knitting something voluminously pink and fluffy while watching a portable TV. She looked up at me, described a suspiciously pentagram-like shape in the air with one needle, and grinned gappily.
    Oh God, not another of them? She’d never done that before!
    Slightly shaken, I turned right into the snug, where Felix was now at the bar buying me a ladylike half of bitter shandy (I was driving, after all). He turned and gave me a hug – a tall, loose-limbed man with soft, light brown eyes, floppy hair and the sort of nose that has a knobbly bit in the middle. It’s a nice face, in its way, but you can’t call it handsome.
    ‘Hi, Chloe – you look lovely,’ he said warmly, though I was just wearing jeans garnished with cobwebs and the odd streak of garden slime, but he’d probably just said exactly the same to Poppy, because he’s nothing if not kind. I sometimes think I’m imagining that he’s trying to move our relationship onto a new, more romantic footing and actually I do truly hope so, because I like things just the way they are.
    ‘Is that my drink? I’ll carry it, then you can manage the other two,’ I said, kissing his cheek. He smelled, not un-attractively, of old leather book bindings.
    ‘Look what Felix found for me!’ called Poppy, gaily waving a paperback copy of I Had Two Ponies by Josephine Pullein-Thompson. ‘The last one of hers I hadn’t got!’
    ‘Great,’ I said, sitting down next to her. She smelled of sweet hay and horses, and I expect I was permanently chocolate-fragranced, with just a hint of scented geranium, so anyone with a good nose could guess blindfold what the three of us did for a living.
    ‘I thought I had a Heyer for you, Chloe, but the cover was torn,’ Felix said.
    While Poppy loves old children’s pony adventure books, I collect vintage Georgette Heyer hardbacks in those lovely, misty, dream-like paper jackets. Felix also looks out for the rarer volumes Grumps would like to add to his already huge, esoteric and eclectic library, which is probably where most of his income goes.
    Poppy was almost as excited about my moving to the Old Smithy as I was. ‘But I still think it was mean, not letting us view it with you.’
    ‘I just wanted to see it on my own the first time,’ I explained. ‘I’ll have to come back and measure for curtains and furniture, so perhaps if you can