Page 1 of The Sugar and Spice Bookshop Bakery

One

The second Louise spots her, she ducks behind the steering wheel before she can consider how ridiculous she must look. A grown woman trying to hide in a car in broad daylight! For heaven’s sake.

But Miss Anderson is the last person she wants to see right now.

She reaches down under the seat, finds the lever and presses it, moving the driver’s seat as far back as it will go. Then she slides down into the footwell. It’s a tight squeeze, even though she’s only five foot five.

Her heart is thumping, her breath uneven. Every cell in her body is on high alert, fight or flight mode, and all because of a woman who must be what? Seventy? Seventy-five?

‘She’s a bully,’ she whispers to herself, to justify her actions.

Miss Anderson was her English teacher at secondary school. It was the one subject she really excelled in. She should have been her favourite teacher, and Louise should have been her favourite pupil, but that woman thrived on putting students down. She had quite the repertoire of cutting barbs, and quashed Louise’s dreams of becoming a writer, telling her she didn’t have any talent and would never make it. Even now, as a grown woman, Louise crouches in the car, feeling like a demoralised teenager, with Miss Anderson’s mean comments echoing in her mind.

You’re an adult, she tells herself. With a university degree and a successful career in publishing behind you. Well, successful for the first eighteen years at least. You do not need to be intimidated by one of your old teachers, no matter how mean she was.

Nevertheless, she stays in the footwell. Just in case.

Despite Miss Anderson, English remained Louise’s favourite subject because she loved books. Couldn’t get enough of them. She gave up on the whole writer dream – and she knew now that Miss Anderson had been right; it was notoriously difficult to earn a living writing novels and Louise probably wouldn’t have made the grade – and decided instead that one day she’d run her own bookshop. Failing that, she’d become a librarian or an English teacher herself, the kind who actually encouraged their students, like Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society as opposed to Miss Anderson, who was more of a Miss Trunchbull. It was only when she went to university and studied English Literature that she realised a career in publishing might be open to her.

She sighs. She’d loved being an editor.

Miss Anderson must be gone by now, surely.

Louise reaches up, pulls the handle to open the door and somehow extricates herself from the footwell, tumbling out of the car onto the pavement. It’s far from elegant. This isn’t the moment when she wants the man of her dreams to happen to be walking by, but he’s hardly likely to be. That kind of thing happens in the romance novels she edits – edited, she reminds herself; past tense now, since that part of her life is over – but not in reality.

She straightens up, smooths down her skirt, turns around and…

‘Louise!’

Miss Anderson is standing behind her, that perpetual look of disapproval on her face.

‘I heard you were coming back. Things didn’t work out for you in London then?’

Things didn’t work out…?

Louise’s cheeks grow hot. She’s come here to escape the shame of it all, hasn’t even told her mother the real reason why she’s returned. Miss Anderson can’t know, surely. Can she?

‘Lovely to see you, Miss Anderson,’ Louise says, even though it isn’t. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me.’

She opens the boot of the car and stands there, looking at her bulging, heavy bags. Lifting them in had been bad enough. She can’t summon the energy to haul them out.

Miss Anderson shuffles past on the pavement, puts her key in her front door, and with a last disdainful glance at Louise, steps into her house and closes the door behind her.

She’s gone.

‘Take a deep breath, Louise,’ she says to herself. ‘Don’t let her bother you. This is a fresh start, remember? Like Elspeth in Finding Forever in Florence and Sally in Love at Lighthouse Cottage.’

Louise had worked her socks off when she landed her first job at Austen and Green, rising rapidly through the ranks until she was a senior editor. Some of the most well-known and well-loved authors of commercial fiction were her authors, including crime writer Sheila Penhaligon and romance author Rosie Hartwell. Over the years, she’d edited countless romances that all began with the main character losing their job through some terrible injustice, and moving to a cosy little village in the countryside in Cornwall or Scotland or somewhere equally charming. They’d embark on a new life, running a café or sweet shop or some other delightful little business. If Louise were the heroine of such a novel, the business in question would be a bakery; her mother, Elizabeth, and her mother before her, ran the bakery here in Applethwaite until recently, when Elizabeth reluctantly decided to retire – she couldn’t manage the long hours, especially not after her right-hand woman, Mrs Danes, decided to go and live in Spain to be near her daughter. Now, the building is empty and Louise suspects it’s her mother’s dearest wish that she should take over. Continue the family tradition.

And if this were a novel, that’s exactly what she’d do, and it would all work out beautifully in the end. The business would be a roaring success – after a few hiccups along the way – and of course, she’d meet some gorgeous hunky bloke and fall madly in love and – after a few more hiccups – live happily ever after.

But this isn’t one of those novels. This is her life. Her actual sodding life. And she hasn’t lost her job because of some terrible injustice, but because she made a careless error that she can’t bear to think about. She’s so ashamed. And much as she loves baking, she has never wanted to run the family bakery. And the chances of a gorgeous hunky bloke suddenly materialising in Applethwaite? Unlikely.

Unlikely, and yet, she pictures the text in her head.

Suddenly, from nowhere, he appears beside her, and peers at her heavy bags in the boot of the car. ‘May I take those for you?’

‘Thank you,’ she murmurs, looking up into his deep blue eyes.