Page 38 of Make You Mine This Christmas

‘Time for dinner, perhaps?’ asks Otto hopefully, his eyes almost identical to Stella and Luna’s giant chocolate-drop eyes.

‘It’s a good job I’ve been cooking something up, isn’t it?’ Esther sighs in that teasing way that long-married-but-happy couples do.

‘You’re good to me.’

‘Well, someone has to keep you fed. If I left it to you, we’d be having burnt soup.’ She gives him a playful wink and glides from the room.

Christopher follows her, and in need of something to do, Haf kneels to play with the dogs again.

‘Which room should I put Haf in?’ she hears Christopher ask.

‘Well, yours, dear. We’re not running a convent.’

Why are they both so clueless? Why did they not think of this? Obviously they’re going to have to share a bed.

Sharing a bed with the man you’re fake dating in the same house as his sister that you would absolutely love to share a bed with, and accidentally sharing a couch after a drunken party feel like two very, very different things right now.

They’ve only been here an hour or so, and already things seem way less simple than they did when she agreed to it.

Oh God, Ambrose was right. I am a massive plum.

Christopher awkwardly returns to the living room and says, ‘I’ll show you to your room,’ in the tone of a butler rather than her boyfriend, fake or not.

She follows him out, too nervous to even make a joke about his current resemblance to Lurch.

The copy ofCarolis still on the sideboard where she left it when she got the Betty’s box out. She can’t just leave it there in the open, not now. It’s gone from being a memory of a missed connection to a glaring symbol of lies and presumed infidelity and God knows what else Kit is thinking. Haf clutches it to her chest.

Christopher leads her up two flights of creaky stairs, carrying her backpack for her. ‘We’re on the top floor, I’m afraid,’ he says.

Christopher’s childhood bedroom looks over the back of the house, and through the window, all Haf can see are miles and miles of fields. The isolation seems even more oppressive.

Exhausted, Haf drops face down on to the bed.

Christopher closes the door with a soft click. ‘Christ, sorry about this. I did not think she’d let us share a room. Laurel was in the spare room for years.’

‘Yeah, but that was when you were teenagers, right?’ she says, turning her face so he can hear her.

‘And after that.’

‘Huh. Maybe she just likes me better.’

‘God, why is this so complicated?’

Haf bites back a rueful laugh because, boy, he has no idea. And how can she tell him? He looks like he’s going to faint over the concept of them sharing a bed. How is he going to cope with knowing that only a few hours ago she was thinking about snogging his sister?

‘We’re both grown-ups. We can share a bed. This is fine,’ she says, with more confidence than she feels. One thing has to be cleared up, or she’s going to go completely potty. ‘It’ll be like, I dunno, camping.’

‘Camping?’ he asks incredulously. ‘Have you everbeencamping?’

‘Yes, obviously,’ she huffs. ‘I grew up in Wales. What else are you supposed to do?’

‘Most people don’t share the bed when they camp.’ He laughs, then blushes scarlet just as Haf realises that her experience of sharing a sleeping bag with Zahra from the year above, which was incidentally a strictly non-platonic activity, might not actually be a universal one.

‘Forget about the camping. Point is, I’m all right with it. Are you?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Phew, well, okay. That’s one thing sorted. Maybe we should have... agreed some ground rules about this fake dating.’

‘Well, we would have if we’d had a chance to chat on the train.’