Page 64 of The Cake Fairies

“Aw, how poetic, Nigel,” Polly simpered into her cup, the hit of the alcohol flushing her cheeks to a rosy hue that Annabelle hadn’t seen since she’d ridden the wheel with Alex. She knocked back the remnants of her own drink, eager to put that thought to one side for the millionth time.

Changing the subject completely, it warmed the cockles to see the way Nigel’s personality was transforming into a token father figure. And now the notion of that made Annabelle thoroughly homesick. What she’d give to fall into her own father and mother’s embrace right now, to listen to the waffle about their tiny garden being marred by the frost, the slugs eating the cabbages, and the hideously steep price of fish.

“All these weeks ferrying us about – haven’t they taught you anything?” she asked Nigel.

“They have as it happens: to be prepared for every freakin’ eventuality with you two troublemakers on-board.”

“Forget diamonds, forget gold;cakeis the most powerful commodity on planet earth,” Polly corrected him tersely. “Capable of breaking the social ice, the outer nightclub tension…”

“I don’t relish a re-enactment of that, thank you very much… like something straight out of the Brixton bleedin’ riots.”

“Until we burst its bubble with our cake pops,” declared Annabelle’s motor mouth.

There she went again.Their cake pops, which would never have come about if it hadn’t been for the probable love of Polly’s life, whom she’d singlehandedly scared away like a sad, perverted flasher in a raincoat.

Subject change! The weather… the comparative price of McVities shop-bought cake (and apparent size shrinkage) in 1969 versus 2019. Anything!

Roll on the official season of the holly, and the arrival ofIvy.