Page 46 of The Secret Holiday Kiss

‘Not a chance.’ Daisy shook her head. ‘That timescale’s as long as a piece of string, and Christmas is coming up. You’ve been managing this whole thing in my absence, so let’s get everything up to date.’

‘You’re a gem, Daisy.’

‘I don’t know about that. Speak soon, Mo.’

Once they’d hung up, she tapped her iPhone against her lips. She didn’t feel any pressure to be at the site of the disaster in London. She was perfectly fine with Mo running the show, and he seemed entirely happy to be doing it. It should have been her most important project, but her panic had led to her running away, and now it felt … empowering, that she’d let it go, that she’d given up some control. Or maybe she was simply kiss-addled.

As she got to the end of the list she was compiling for Lars, she realized she had forgotten to ask Avery about the Black Shuck. Was he aware of the legend? Was that why he was scared of dogs? Had he had an encounter with something horrible? She would have to ask him at their next rendezvous.

Excitement sparked through her at the thought. Then she remembered that – aside from the internet which, these days, was so full of misinformation it was hard to know which sites to trust – there was one other place she could look for details about the local legend.

Harry’s study was gloomy without the lights on or the fire lit, but the lingering smell of woodsmoke was comforting, somehow: how a room like this should smell. Daisy switched the light on, the dogs padding in after her, checking on familiar corners because Harry often had them in here with him when he was working.

The rain was still falling, and Daisy imagined curling up in one of the armchairs in front of the fire, watching the flames, without her iPad or her to-do list or any phone calls to make. The thought was faintly ludicrous.

Two of the walls were covered in books, and she wondered if some of them had come here after the bookshop had closed down – though it could only have been a fraction of the stock her dad used to have. A lot of the books were modern, a mixture of paperbacks and hardbacks, non-fiction and novels. Daisy used to love reading, but she’d felt a strange resentment towards it when her dad abandoned her and Harry for the bookshop, and by the time she left Mistingham, she had no interest in it at all.

Her unexpected gift, the spooky detective story that she was over halfway through, had reminded her how easy it was to get immersed in a story. Though perhaps she was taking it a bit too far. She was about to give up searching when a title caught her eye: Legends of Norfolk by R. S. Bias. This was exactly what she’d hoped to find, exactly the sort of thing her dad had tried to sell to customers. She should ask Harry for the keys to the shop, have a proper nosy around the empty space with his blessing.

She took the legends book off the shelf, turned on the lamp above one of the armchairs and settled into it. Clifton stood in front of the chair, looking up at her plaintively.

‘Come on, then,’ she said, and he hopped up, pressing his sharp little claws into her thighs before settling on her lap. ‘You’re a lot heavier than a cat,’ she told him, but she didn’t mind. Darkness and Terror lay on the rug at her feet, and Daisy leafed through the pages, searching for a section about the Black Shuck. She wasn’t disappointed – it had its own chapter – and she started to read, to glean all she could about the devil dog that was supposedly roaming the countryside, and seemed so similar to the one in The Hound of the Baskervilles, even though that was set in Devonshire.

She kept reading, trying to absorb the slightly florid passages. Thoughts of the hell hound mingled with the Sherlock Holmes story, alongside snapshots of Avery holding his hands up, stepping back from Darkness and Terror on the manor doorstep, his face pale. It was all a jumble in her mind, a mind that was suddenly very tired. The rainfall was a soothing thrum against the glass, and Clifton was warm on her lap, and the book was quite dense, not as pacy as her Sherlock Holmes, and …

When Harry gently shook her shoulder, waking her up, still in his coat and smelling of the cold, it was dark outside and she realized she’d been asleep for over two hours. Two hours, in the middle of the afternoon, and she hadn’t achieved a single thing.

Chapter Fifteen

The first meeting of the ball committee took place on the last day of November, at five o’clock so that Sophie and Lucy – freed from work and school – could attend. The oversized lounge that would be the site of the ball looked magical, with lamps lit in the corners, the fire crackling in the hearth and the Christmas tree that Sophie, Harry and Daisy had spent the whole of Sunday putting up and getting right, twinkling at the far end of the room.

‘Daisy said we should go for a silver, gold and pink theme for the ball, so that’s what we’ve done with the tree too,’ Sophie said. It had taken hours of hard work and two bottles of red wine, which meant that, even though it was twenty-four hours later, Daisy’s headache hadn’t entirely gone.

‘How are you coping with the pink, Harry?’ Jazz was laying out strips of coloured and glitter paper with Lucy, ready for the marathon paper-chain-making session.

‘I am man enough to realize it’s not a horrible colour scheme,’ Harry said. ‘And when it comes to design, I am entirely at Sophie and Daisy’s mercy. They’re the professionals.’

‘Your ideas are as good as ours,’ Daisy said. ‘You’ve renovated this entire place, and there’s still time to change the colours if you decide you don’t like them.’

Harry put down his tray of drinks: teas and coffees and lemonade for Lucy. ‘Who are you and what have you done with my sister?’

Daisy laughed. ‘I’m just saying that everything’s flexible.’

‘Flexible isn’t something you do,’ Harry said.

‘Flexible is something I’m trying,’ she countered, ‘on account of my rigid life plan not entirely working out.’ She shrugged, not wanting to elicit any sympathy. And she loved the colour scheme; it trod a fine line between classy and Disney, and if you were going to put on a Christmas ball, what was the point of being subtle about it?

Harry looked chastised. ‘Sorry. I know you’ve been through a lot.’

‘I wasn’t asking for pity, I was just explaining why I’m trying to be flexible. Delegating tasks. Redoing things that don’t work the first time round. Being … spontaneous.’ Like kissing hot men on building sites. It had been two days since Avery and the kiss, and they had exchanged messages since, though more about the house than what had happened between them.

Except that, in their last exchange, when she had told him she was hosting a ball-planning meeting that evening, he had signed off with ‘catch you later Secret X’. She liked how clandestine it was, the fact that nobody in this room, not her brother nor his sister, knew what had happened, or that they were planning on doing it again.

‘Spontaneous is great,’ Jazz said. ‘Spontaneous is where all the best stuff happens.’

‘I’m starting to realize that,’ Daisy replied, trying to hide her grin.

‘Avery’s getting on well with Mary and Winnie’s house,’ Daisy dropped into the conversation half an hour later, when she, Sophie and May were planning out the dance cards. Sophie was going to create them using her notebook-making tools and techniques.