Page 10

What was so irritating about this particular Molland sister?

Her inner critic piped up with an answer: Because Susie never threw herself at him back in the day, not like you did.

So embarrassing. Temperance squeezed her eyes shut for a minute, silencing her saboteur and the roll of nerves in her stomach.

‘Oh, hello there, Tee!’ Susie said in a big, panto-like voice. ‘If you’re not up to much there’s this huge delivery to get inside.’

‘Um, sure. I can help.’

Abel’s face went from wide open to shutters down in a split second as he took in Temperance walking towards them over the car park tarmac. ‘We’re covered, but thanks.’

‘Seriously, I can—’

‘It’s probably an insurance thing,’ he cut in. ‘If you’re not an employee then you’re not covered for an accident from carrying heavy stuff.’

Susie frowned. ‘Well, you’re not an employee, for starters. And when have you ever known Margie to be bothered about health and safety? Temps is fine, come on. She can stick to the tiny mixer bottles if you’re really worried about her.’

His mouth opened as if to protest again, before he clamped it shut and took a deep breath. Temperance would never know if it was her involvement or the idea that Abel could be worried about her that he objected to.

‘Whatever you like. Let’s just crack on.’ His shoulders hunched almost up to his ears, he turned on the spot and stalked into the pub .

Whoever had dug out the cellar to The Witch’s Nose hundreds of years ago had been a lot shorter and a lot narrower than Abel Gulliver.

As the three of them trooped up and down the well-worn steps, he was having to stoop to get through the passageways and occasionally Temperance would hear his whispered curses as he shoulder-barged yet another doorframe painfully.

They carried the boxes in awkward silence, like those funny little penguins that click-clack up the toy mountain to race down the other side and back up again in an endless manic loop.

Once Susie had stacked a box, she would patiently wait to one side for Abel to come down into the storage room to stack his, before she slipped upstairs again when the coast was clear.

But Abel had no time to give Temperance the same grace and he would head back up the narrow staircase while she was still halfway down, forcing them into a tussle for what little space was available.

She would have to duck her head under his chin, the stubble on his neck within a whisper of touching her forehead for one spit-second.

Abel would lean so heavily back on the white-washed walls behind him in those moments that Temperance fully expected him to merge into the rough plaster and disappear.

At one stage she thought it best to move the box of tiny orange juice bottles she was carrying out of his way, but she mistimed the move and winded him in the stomach instead.

‘Oh! Sorry! It’s so . . . cramped in here.’

‘S’fine, yeah,’ he spluttered, taking the steps now two at a time in a bid to escape.

Temperance’s cheeks burned in the dim lighting as she went on her way.

She added her box to the pile and took a minute to count her breaths in and out.

Going from twelve years of silence to only millimetres of distance between them was a lot.

It was too much. Her hands felt clammy but her mouth was dry.

‘Get a hold of yourself, Temperance,’ she chided herself quietly, her sharp tone echoing around the stone walls.

‘You’re not seventeen anymore. You don’t go weak at the knees.

’ But being that close to Abel on the stairs, just for a heartbeat, feeling the warmth of his breath, watching his tongue lick his bottom lip .

. . Temperance’s thoughts had not been the sensible, twenty-nine-year-old kind. They were embarrassingly adolescent.

How was it going to go, having Abel Gulliver suddenly back in East Prawle?

Could she strike up a conversation in the bakery queue, all nonchalant?

Could she casually chat to him at the bar, like he didn’t just vanish all those years ago with no explanation?

OK, he left a note and his hoodie, but that hadn’t really explained things at all.

And when she’d touched that hoody twelve years ago . . .

Temperance shuddered in the cool of the cellar at the memory of what she’d felt in its fibres.

It was only the first day of her powers waking up inside her – her seventeenth birthday – and this was the very first strong emotion she’d ever read.

The tingle in her fingers still felt overwhelming and uncomfortable that day, like driving a car before you feel ready and worrying you’ll veer off the road and cause a fireball of damage.

Being told she was a witch had sent Temperance into a spin, to say the least: she was looking for the reassurance of Abel to ground her again.

Rain or shine, he was the one she could depend on and she had raced to their usual meeting spot to find him.

But there was only his hoodie. And even without any magical experience behind her then, she didn’t have any trouble interpreting the feelings thread through the sky-blue material .

Stomach-churning disgust. Deep regret. Panic .

Temperance saw herself and Abel, their lips millimetres apart, closing the gap in agonising slow motion.

His eyelashes, his hand on her wrist. But as their kiss connected, the vision went black and cloudy.

Her skin crawled, her heart screwed into a knot.

She felt everything Abel felt: and he was sick to his stomach that they had done it.

He wanted to run away. The next thing she saw was him throwing things into a bag, his mum standing behind him, her face drawn and anxious.

They were talking, it was emotional, but something about the memory made the words distort and bleed, so Temperance couldn’t make out a thing they were saying.

She could only pick up the anguished tone that wrapped around everything they said.

Temperance’s fingertips had brushed the hoodie sleeve that day before her hand shot back, as if it had been scalded. She could still feel the memory coursing through her veins, even after she’d broken contact.

In the years that followed, Temperance rarely found a lingering emotion that had the same effect: like a riptide that could pull you under and deep, deep down.

The intensity of what she’d read told her in one heartbeat that everything she thought she knew about Abel was no longer true.

It made her question whether it ever had been.

Having a week with Abel Gulliver now meant a week to save him.

But it also meant seven days full of reminders that he’d once been so horrified by Temperance’s major crush on him that he’d packed up and left East Prawle forever.

He’d abandoned a lifelong friendship without so much as a backward glance.

That kind of wounding rejection had crushed her for years: she didn’t need to keep feeling echoes of it in the pub, on the green, or at the beach, or even just glimpsing out of her bedroom window.

Especially not when she had the shop to run in her mum’s absence.

Her heart squeezed as she realised she wished her mum was there – just then – with a cup of tea and some sage advice.

She was jolted out of her reverie by Susie calling down the stairs, ‘That’s the last of the drinks. Just kitchen supplies to do now. I’ll put the kettle on!’

As Temperance left the cellar room and put her foot on the first stair, she looked up and saw the tall shadow of Abel filling the doorway at the top, the strip-light behind him drawing a sharp outline of his head bent uncomfortably under the low ceiling.

Why was he just standing there like that?

Like the Hunchback had been evicted from Notre Dame.

At the sound of her trainers hitting the stone steps, he suddenly moved off and into the light.

Temperance entered the pub kitchen a few minutes later and found Abel fiddling with the electronic kitchen roll dispenser and Susie stacking what seemed like a hundred spare blue rolls of paper in the walk-in cupboard.

‘This fiddly bast—what’s wrong with just a roll on a stick? Why has it got to be automatic and hands-free? This isn’t a bloody spaceship. It’s a pub,’ he muttered, wrestling to get the front of the dispenser off.

Susie came out of the cupboard with her hands on her hips.

‘You try getting some paper off the roll while you have an exploded bottle of sweet chilli sauce all over your hands and halloumi burning in the deep-fat fryer and Margie bellowing for service. A busy pub does need a fancy paper towel thing so just treat my baby gently, OK?’

Abel, suitably admonished, went back to jiggling the container less violently.

‘What shall I do?’ Temperance ventured .

‘Tea, please ,’ Susie spoke from behind a rack of lightbulbs, tea towels and ash trays.

‘Coming up.’

Temperance tried to be normal as she made the tea, standing right next to Abel.

She tried to stand normally, move her hands normally, drop the tea bags in normally.

But every now and then she would realise she’d been holding her breath, watching him in her peripheral vision, and all the air would come stuttering out of her mouth like an avalanche.

Something about being in his orbit made her forget the most basic things.

It was just so fascinating to see how he’d changed and how he hadn’t: he had a good few inches of extra height, but still the same silver slice of a scar behind his right ear.

Temperance bet that if she ran her fingers over it, it would feel the same, and her hand even lifted briefly in the air before she snatched it back.

Abel had never pressed his mouth into such a rigid straight line in the old days and his lips were maybe a little fuller now too, but that easy laugh Temperance had seen him give Susie earlier was classic Abel – his eyes closed in happiness, his head shaking twice, and the way each burst of laughter seemed to charge through his body and make his whole being lighter, warmer.

But studying this new version of Abel was like looking at a museum exhibit behind glass: Temperance would never get close enough to really understand him.

And mooning over a boy was not going to solve any magical doom riddles.

Temperance needed to distract herself from the way his strong hands were gripping at the dispenser, rattling it, the swear words he was murmuring under his breath that sent a strangely delicious shiver along her spine.

So she took up a mental checklist of all the boring little things she’d need to run Stevie through in the shop: how the till got rebooted, where the receipts were stored, the accounts software.

Plus, all the things she’d need to hide from her: their ancient cauldron, the drawers full of dried herbs, the fact that sometimes she went—

A sharp flash of bright purple preceded a short but loud pop and Abel jumped backwards. ‘Fuck!’

Before she knew what she was doing, Temperance had moved towards him, taken him by the wrists and blurted out, ‘Are you OK?’

Abel looked too stunned to be able to register that she was now right in the middle of his personal space, even closer than they had been on the stairs. ‘The damn thing shocked me! How do you get a static shock off plastic and paper?’

He blinked and set the paper roll he’d been holding down on the work surface, next to the big industrial hob. ‘Any chance that tea is ready? I could do with eight sugars in mine.’ He blew out an exaggerated sigh and smiled.

But the minute he lifted his eyes to Temperance’s, almost hidden under a frown of concern, it was like a director had called ‘Action!’ and Abel switched back into his grumpy old sod performance. He yanked his arms away from her touch and Temperance fought hard not to flinch.

There was a deep tingling in her fingers: the same sensation she had when reading magic, but right now her hands were only held in mid-air, her fingers still shaped around the dimensions of Abel’s wrists as if refusing to believe they were no longer making physical contact.

‘What’s going on?’ Susie emerged from the stock cupboard, her cheeks pale, and Temperance could tell by the way her little sister was flexing her hands that she too had the same strange sensation.

‘Honestly, nothing. I’m just . . . ready for a break. That mine?’ He pointed at one of the teacups and Temperance nodded dumbly.

Susie’s eyes bore into Temperance but she could only give the tiniest, mystified shrug. She’d felt the wave of magic in the air, but she had no explanation for it.

Abel sniffed. ‘Is it Earl Grey, this? Something smells floral in here. Or like lavender?’

‘Argh!’ Susie lunged forward and threw a tea towel over Abel’s abandoned paper roll, which now had a column of flames licking up one side. She went to switch off the hob burner, but all the dials were set to zero. ‘What the . . .? How?’

‘It smells like wildflowers,’ Temperance said, almost to herself. ‘But burnt.’