Page 42 of A Copenhagen Snowmance

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The kilt.

Oh. My. God.

Anna has to hand it to Jamie, he knows how to pull out the big guns.

Having purportedly accepted her decision last night, from what she can see, he’s switched tactics today.

He’s not badgering her, or touching her or even venturing near the subject of “them”, but he’s around her, being charming, thoughtful and wafting that scent of his close to her, causing something to coil in her core.

And now he’s just walked into the room, freshly showered, hair tamed – ish – in a thin, knitted grey V-neck over a white T and … the kilt.

Anna sinks a visible gulp.

This is a battering ram to her resolve.

“I told you I had a kilt,” he says, the smirk on his face saying he knows exactly what he’s doing to her and her nether regions. Damn him. He fights dirty – and on Christmas Eve, a time of peace and goodwill, no less.

She ducks her head, focusing on serving up their food, to hide the long, centring breath she’s letting out.

Though small, it’s the perfect Christmas spread.

They’ve worked on it together all afternoon, having decided that just because it’s only the two of them for Juleaften, it doesn’t mean they can’t have a full Danish Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve.

On each plate there’s a roasted breast of duck, red cabbage, caramelised new potatoes, blanched half-apples with redcurrant jelly in the middle, all swimming in brown gravy.

“Looks great,” says Jamie, walking behind her to collect the wine bottle, passing her in the narrow space between the far counter and the kitchen island, which makes her shoulder blades flex.

She rolls her neck for inner strength. As he moves away, around the island, she’s finding it ridiculously hard to drag her eyes from the kilt.

The perfect fall of the worsted wool over his equally perfect bum, the seductive sway of the tartan pleats as he moves.

His easy swagger suggests he is absolutely aware.

Argh. Her perving is verging on the obscene.

Still serving, she stands on her own foot, hoping the pain will snap her out of the ogling.

“The smell alone takes me back to Vivi and Mads’ Christmases.

Roast duck is Christmas for me,” says Anna brightly.

She’s also dressed for dinner – nothing too fancy but still an upgrade from the leggings she’s been walking around in all day.

A satin midi skirt and a loose wool sweater on top, both in navy.

Yeah, so the thick home-knitted socks don’t quite go, but warm feet are always a priority in Anna’s book.

She’s added some make-up – just enough to make it look like she’s made an effort.

A playlist with The Three Tenors singing Christmas carols plays low in the background, and outside there’s light snow falling. It isn’t forecast to get heavier, so there’s no anxiety about that. It’s just Pretty Snow.

Jamie pours two glasses of red wine and holds one to her. They clink the glasses.

“Slàinte Mhath,” he says, as she says, “Sk?l.” They drink, their eyes locked the whole time.

“What did you do last year for Christmas, Jamie?” Anna asks, as they settle down to their meal, clambering for the safe ground of regular conversation.

“I went home to see my dad. This year, though, what with the planes and everything, it’s a good thing we decided I’d stay here. He’s having dinner with my uncle’s family.”

Lucky for her, Anna thinks. He’d have not been home when she’d knocked on his door. She might never have met him. The thought gives her a pang in her gut.

“What’s your mother doing?” he asks.

“Well, apparently, she’s on some silent retreat. Which is bizarre. Normally, she’d be in a bar somewhere, living it up. She does like a party and on Christmas Eve there’s usually revelling of some kind, wherever you are.”

“You hadn’t planned to join her? Greece would have been warmer than here.”

“So true,” she says with an overegged sigh. She certainly wouldn’t be in knitted socks. And yet, it hadn’t even occurred to her to try to get a ticket to Greece rather than back to the UK, when she supposes she could have. Athens airport most likely wasn’t snowbound.

“We haven’t done Christmas together for years,” Anna says.

“It works for us to meet up at other times. Ida isn’t big on traditional things and rituals, unlike most Danes.

There’s comfort and reassurance in scheduled events, but Ida feels it hinders freedom and is the ‘product of lazy thinking’.

” Anna rolls her eyes, remembering many of her mother’s monologues on the subject.

Jamie’s eyes widen. “Wow. I really want to meet her one day. She sounds like a maverick.”

Anna laughs. Obviously, it’s never going to happen, and even if it did, Anna would be a bundle of nerves as to how Ida would behave.

“So, what did you have planned?” he asks, taking another sip of his wine. It’s a Barolo, and a good one. He’d overseen the drinks.

“Well, I had thought I’d go to the big Juleaften dinner they serve at the Danish Church by Regent’s Park.

Danes who are in London and away from family at Christmas can come and eat together.

I went last year, and it was lovely. Lots of fun.

Or else, I guess I would have spent the evening by myself. ”

Jamie pulls a sad face at her.

“Shut up. I am excellent company and perfectly happy to entertain myself.” Binge-watching some murder series might not be overly Christmassy, but there would have been a bottle of port to make up for it.

He holds his hands up. “Not judging. I might have been doing the same.”

“Don’t give me that. Someone would have invited you to join their dinner. You’re ridiculously popular.”

He busies himself with his duck. Something clicks in her head.

“Jamie, did you already have an invitation for tonight?” It hadn’t occurred to her that he might. She’d simply assumed he was like her, alone, and them having their own Christmas dinner was the obvious, yet only choice.

“Just two,” he says. “Three at most.”

“And you chose not to go?” She’s stunned.

“I’m sure they would have welcomed you, too,” he says, “but I didn’t actually ask them.”

“Why not? You could have gone. Without me, I mean. I would have understood.”

He rolls his eyes at her, like she’s being a dummy.

“Could it possibly be, Anna, that the idea of spending the evening with you, just us, sounded way more perfect to me?”

His honesty, even in light of her dismissing his offer, is disarming. It makes her blush. “Oh, well, OK. If you put it like that…”

He holds his glass up towards her. “Glaedelig Jul, Anna,” he says in his best Danish. And she returns it with a clink.

They eat, savouring the flavours of the Christmas meal, him as it’s something new, Anna as it’s pure nostalgia on a plate.

“You look happy,” he says, watching her.

“I don’t think I could ever be unhappy eating Danish Christmas food.”

“Well, they do say Danes are the happiest people on Earth.”

“I hear this all over the place whenever I say I’m from Denmark,” she says, one hand propping up her chin and the other running a finger around the rim of her glass.

“But I think we’ve been knocked off that top position by the Finns.

Having thought about it, though, I think it depends on your definition of happy. ”

“How do you mean?” asks Jamie. “Happy is happy, isn’t it?”

“The way I see it, here in Denmark if you have what you need you are content. If you are content, then you are happy. But having lived in other places now, I see it’s not always the same.

Some people feel they need more money, more material things, newer gadgets, always something more than what they have.

Never enough. So, it’s not the same. Contentment seems like a forgotten state in some places from my observation, but that might just be me. ”

“I haven’t thought about it that way,” says Jamie. “But Danes like their material things. I’ve seen their appetite for the designer furniture.” He gives the Carl Hansen chairs on the other side of the Hans Wegner coffee table a nod.

“Beautiful things designed to last,” she says of them. “Feathering nests with pleasing things. Part of conjuring Hygge, which is part of the contentment.

“Trust is another tenet of the contentment,” she goes on.

“Danish society functions on trust. ‘I will trust people I meet, and they will rise to that trust, and in turn trust others, who will rise to their trust and so on, and as a result society will function with decency.’ If you think and live like that, life feels less perilous and less likely to bite you in the arse, which, like tradition, feels reassuring and makes you more content.” She believes it, because she’s seen the flipside, how broken trust can banish contentment.

“I’m not sure when I last used the word ‘content’,” he admits.

“Precisely, but maybe because it isn’t thought of so much in the UK?

Words mean different things to different people,” she says.

“Take luxury, for example. If you ask people what luxury means, some will say it’s swanky hotels or expensive restaurants, exclusive consumer brands, but if you ask, say, new parents ‘What is luxury?’ I bet many will say that it’s waking up of your own accord in the morning followed by leisurely sex and then having a snooze after.

” Just like our morning the other day, she doesn’t say.

“That’s not something they can do with children, not unless the kids are having a sleepover elsewhere. For them that would be luxury.”

Jamie laughs. “How have you come about this information?”

“Ahh, that would be Katrine. She’s constantly telling me how she’d kill for a lie-in.”

They carry on chatting about their friends in both Scotland and Copenhagen, of things they’d like to see in the coming year, of her travel plans, while they polish off their platefuls and seconds – because, of course, in Denmark there’s always seconds.

The shame of sending someone home hungry would be unbearable.