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Ditsy shook her head. “Even better. Your very own tour guide, free of charge.”
Mia had a horrible feeling she knew exactly where this was going. But Ditsy was freakishly strong for a seventy-six-year-old, and Mia could see no clear way of escaping that didn’t involve pushing her employer to the ground. It was tempting, she admitted, but possibly not the best of career moves.
“It just so happens today is Mia’s afternoon off, and she is sadly lacking in plans.” Ditsy grinned at her own cleverness. “She’d just love to show you around town, get you familiar with us, help you get a real feel for the place.” Mia wasn’t sure how it was possible to make a tour sound quite so suggestive.
“A real tour guide would be very helpful,” Tony said, grinning this time. He really did have a very attractive smile. “I’m here for some business, you see, and if it goes well, I’m hoping to be spending quite some time in Aberarian.”
“With your family?” Mia asked, keen to nip this one in the bud before Ditsy got any more excited.
“Oh, I’m not married,” Tony told her. “Just haven’t found the right woman yet.”
At that, Ditsy pushed Mia off her stool, slung her handbag and jacket into her stomach, and shoved her toward the door. “Well, then. You two have fun!”
As the shop door shut the musty smell of the A to Z shop behind them, Tony burst into laughter. Mia, trying very hard to stay cross with Ditsy, managed to keep a straight face for all of ten seconds before joining him.
“We start our tour,” she told him when she was finally calm enough to speak, “with the irrepressible Ditsy Levine, proprietor of the strangest shop on the North Wales Coast and perpetual matchmaker.”
“I like her,” Tony said, in between chuckles. “After all, her matchmaking got me a guided tour of Aberarian.”
“That it did,” Mia agreed, gazing around the small town square and down the main street and wondering how long she could spin it out for. Since Ditsy had gone through so much trouble to set her up, she supposed she should make the most of it. “So, what do you want to see?”
“Everything,” Tony said, tucking her hand through his arm like they’d known each other for years instead of minutes. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
Mia swallowed, wondering exactly what Ditsy had let her in for. “Let’s start with the beach.”
* * * *
“Are these all the bookings there are for the weekend?” Charlie Frost stared at the almost-blank page in front of him, knowing before she answered that Magda was going to say yes.
“So far,” Magda said, because she was tactful and, Charlie knew, because last time she’d gently suggested perhaps they should look at closing the kitchen for a couple of days midweek, he’d bitten her head off. She learned fast, it seemed.
He sighed. “It’s all we’re going to get, and you know it. What about the...” He waved his hands in what he hoped was an illustrative manner. “Thing with the dairy delivery. Did you get it fixed?”
“All sorted. And there’ll be some walk-ins,” Magda said, her Polish accent managing to sound hopeful even as she peered over his shoulder and winced. Charlie wondered again how a twenty-two-year-old girl who’d come to Britain to experience the bright lights of London had ended up practically running his restaurant in Aberarian, and decided he was just grateful she had.
“Not enough.” Charlie slammed the book shut. “I’ll have to go see Joe. Cut the order.” He could phone, of course, or even email, but that would mean staying in the almost empty restaurant, watching his dreams continue to circle the drain.
Magda nodded, her eyes understanding. “I can look after things here.”
The early lunch crowd–all of two tables–had almost finished anyway. And as yet there was no sign of a later lunch crowd. Charlie supposed they might get a couple of stragglers, if they were very lucky, but otherwise he was shutting up shop at three and then he was free. Magda had the reins for the night, and Kevin had control of the kitchen. Charlie had plans–a tasting with Mia, meaning he’d be on the customers’ side of the restaurant that evening. Then a midnight showing of It Happened One Night at the Coliseum. There were worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
“Thanks.” He stored the book on the shelf under the front desk. “It won’t take me long.”
The fresh air as he walked along the front to Joe’s shop was a pleasant relief from the vanilla potpourri Magda had installed on the reception desk at the StarFish. Her theory was, people came to eat the fish, not smell it. Charlie felt people should really expect a little fish stink from a seafood restaurant.
Past the sea wall, the yellowy-gray sand stretched out to the currently distant sea, revealing shells and stranded jellyfish along the shoreline. The tide had turned, though. Only a matter of time before the detritus of the ocean washed away again.
Joe’s fishmonger and butcher shop was empty except for Joe himself, stacking cockle shells on the fish counter and staring balefully across at the abandoned butcher’s counter, his apron spotless.
“Slow day?” Charlie asked from the door, amused as always that Aberarian, realizing it wasn’t big enough to support both a butcher and a fishmonger, had managed to combine the two so effectively.
“Saturday.” Joe’s voice was glum. “Used to be one of our busiest, when Dad ran the place. Everyone came in for a bit of something special for Sunday tea from the other side. Now they just go to the Tesco in Coed-y-Capel.”
“Not everyone,” Charlie said.
Joe’s face brightened. “That’s right. So, got a nice big order for me this week, have you?”
Charlie winced. “Actually...”
“Might have guessed.” Joe knocked over his cockle shell tower with two fingers. “Come on then. Give it to me.”
Sliding the amended order sheet across the counter, Charlie watched Joe’s eyebrows grow closer to his receding hairline as he read. “Business not much better for you either, then.”
“It’ll pick up in the summer,” Charlie said with a confidence he didn’t really feel. He wasn’t sure StarFish would make it to another winter if it didn’t.
“It’s already June.”
“When the school holidays start,” Charlie clarified. That gave them another month to hope.
Joe tossed the order form into an empty filing tray. “You know what we need? A night off. A night of the blissful forgetfulness only supplied by drinking too many pints of ale at the Crooked Fox. Tonight. You in?”
“Can’t,” Charlie said with a shake of the head. “Mia’s coming over for a tasting session for the new menu. Then we’re heading over to the Coliseum.”
This prompted an impressive eyebrow waggle from Joe. “A date? A real one? A really real date?”
“No. A standing arrangement where Mia tells me which of my dishes suck and what has too much chili for the locals, then we go to the cinema to see something in black and white, pretty much every Saturday. You know this.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know this.” Joe leaned farther across the counter. “What I don’t know and what, to be honest, is the only interesting thing to speculate about here, is when you’re going to finally just snog the hell out of her.”
“Joe...”
“Hell, bring her to the pub tonight. Couple of rum and Cokes and she’ll be begging you to kiss her.”
“It’s not like that,” Charlie said. “We’re friends.”
“Only because you think she’s too screwed up for love.” Joe rolled his eyes as he said it. “Be honest, if it wasn’t for the whole thing with her father making her crazy, you’d have dragged her into bed with you last year. Once you’d finished moping about Becky the Bitch.”
“She’s not crazy. She’s just...” Charlie searched for the right words to describe Mia. Beautiful, sensitive, insecure, utterly uninterested in him... “Wary. Wouldn’t you be?”
“If it were me, I’d have emigrated to Australia. Only place people might not know what he did.”
“Besides, I don’t
want another relationship. They only end badly.” He’d much rather have Mia as his friend than as someone he’d once loved and now couldn’t bear to look at because she’d ripped his heart out and fed it to the fishes.
“That we agree on, my friend,” Joe said, nodding sagely. “Next week for the pub, then?”
“It’s a date,” Charlie promised with a grin.
Amazingly, Charlie thought while walking home along the front, he did feel better. Enough that he could go back into his kitchen and not want to attack the freezer with a chef’s knife. Maybe it would be okay. There’d be walk-ins on Saturday night. And it wasn’t even July yet. Things would pick up when the sun arrived, when the holidays started.
He just had to be patient, that was all.
Reaching the corner of Water Street, where the town met the coastline, he saw the StarFish sign hanging a few feet away, the scent of the sea and the spray still splashing up from the beach, and he remembered exactly why this had been the perfect place for his dream restaurant, with his dream girl. The place to raise a family and grow old.
