The Night Before Christmas by Scarlett Bailey Read Free Book Online Page B

felt like three months’ worth of polite English sunshine was being burned off in a single fever-pitched day.
    Lydia’s day had not gone well. She had lost a case and her client was about to serve six months for dealing cannabis. Just her luck to get an exceptionally right-wing judge that didn’t see that her elderly client had only taken up buying drugs to ease the pain of her husband’s arthritis, picking up a few extra ounces for her neighbours in the sheltered housing while she was at it. Grounds for appeal were already in place, even if the process probably wouldn’t work fast enough to get her client out of prison before her sentence was up. Lydia was determined to have the conviction quashed, not only for a client’s sake, but because she hated to lose. More than that, though, she’d hated seeing the look on Janet Thorne’s face as she’d waited to be taken away, sitting quietly in the stifling holding cell, knowingshe wouldn’t see her disabled husband again for at least three months.
    Lydia had slowed down as she approached the tube station. She knew Joanna wouldn’t be at home, as she was doing the prime-time shift on BuyIt! TV. And she wasn’t looking forward to an empty flat, smelling of last night’s Indian food and beer binge that neither one of them had bothered to clear away. The pub over the road was thronging with drinkers, spilling out onto the pavement. Lydia wondered if the inside would be cool by comparison and relatively empty. Not normally one to drink in bars by herself, she had crossed the road without really thinking, and was standing at the bar ordering a long G&T before she knew it.
    The inside of the old-fashioned pub, although cool and spacious, was indeed largely empty. Pulling up a stool, Lydia positioned herself at the bar, and was just about to take out some client files to go over when she thought better of it and took out her battered but beloved Penguin Modern Classic edition of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Over the years, she supposed the book had become something of a talisman, a sort of lucky charm. To begin with, though, it had simply been her favourite book, one she had read and re-read ever since, at the age of twelve, her English teacher had handed it to her and said, ‘Look, I know how hard it must be, stuck in the middle of your mum and dad’s divorce. Try getting lost in a good book, I find it helps.’ She had lost countof the number of times she had read it since, but it always helped.
    Absorbed in the pages of her book, it had taken some time for Lydia to realise someone was watching her. She glanced up to catch the eye of a man across the bar, and looked down instantly, staring at the words in front of her without really reading them. In that fraction of a second, she’d gleaned that the man was rather tall, well built, wearing a pristine white shirt without a tie and had eyes that were blue enough for her to notice them across the room. Waiting for another moment or two, Lydia looked up again. The man was gone.
    ‘Film or book?’ a soft American accent asked her, causing Lydia to swivel round on her stool. There he was, leaning against the bar, his thick honey-brown hair a little longer than most men wore it, his open-necked shirt revealing tanned skin. He smelled divine, and those blue eyes …
    ‘Book,’ Lydia replied instantly, gratified to see he was impressed that she knew what his rather cryptic question meant.
    ‘Really? Really Capote’s Holly over Audrey Hepburn’s? The misery and bleakness over George Peppard bringing back Cat in the pouring rain? I would have thought most girls would pick the movie ending any time.’
    ‘The movie is wonderful,’ Lydia said. ‘And I love theidea of Holly getting a happy ending, but the book came first so it has to be the book … and, besides, I am not most girls.’ Lydia allowed herself to say the line she knew perfectly well he’d set up for her.
    ‘I can see that.’ He glanced down at his drink for a