‘I must have done, but I never really thought about it.’
‘There’s no romance in your soul at all, is there?’
‘I’m a city girl – what can I say?’
‘Maybe we’ll make a country girl of you yet.’
‘Good luck with that.’
Aidan looked at her. ‘You are cold, aren’t you? Here…’ He took off his sweater. ‘You can’t put it on obviously,’ he said, draping it round her shoulders. ‘Better?’
‘Much. But now you’ll be cold.’
‘Nah, I’m used to being outside, aren’t I?’
‘Wandering round looking at all the places in your granddad’s stories?’
He laughed. ‘Working. But sometimes wandering round too.’
‘You love those old stories, don’t you?’
‘I loved him, that’s why. I loved his story and they came from that. He was so happy and grateful to find a home here he made an effort to know everything about it. He found out where everything was, all the interesting places, all the history. And when he heard a story or a myth – click… he filed it in his brain and he remembered it, and then he told them to us. Blake was never quite as keen to listen, but then he never could stay still for five minutes.’
‘Is Blake going to ask Tia to marry him?’ Emma blurted out. As Aidan turned to her with a shocked look, she blushed. ‘I’m sorry, I overheard something at the bar.’
‘I suppose we ought to have been quieter then. He wants to.’
‘But you don’t think he should?’
‘I don’t know… I don’t want him to get hurt if she says no. What do you think? Will she say no?’
‘I have no idea. I know she really likes him, and even if she says no it wouldn’t be anything he’d done wrong – it would be because she’s not ready yet.’
‘That, to me, suggests you do think she’ll turn him down.’
‘I’m as much in the dark as you are.’
‘Well,’ Aidan said with a sigh as he looked back up at the moon, ‘I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
When Aidan and Emma went back into the pub, the table that Tia and Blake had been sitting at was empty and they were nowhere to be found.
‘Did you see Blake leave?’ Aidan asked Walt.
‘No,’ Walt said.
‘I did,’ June put in. ‘About ten minutes ago. He left with Tia. I must say, they didn’t look very happy.’
Aidan and Emma exchanged worried glances. That didn’t sound good at all. It sounded very much as if Blake had asked the question and she’d turned him down, but they couldn’t know that for sure. And it wouldn’t explain why they’d gone off together, unless, perhaps, they’d gone somewhere quiet to talk it over.
Emma sent Tia a text, but after fifteen minutes with no reply, Aidan decided to phone his brother.
‘Where are you?’ he asked tersely. ‘I don’t need details, just want to know everything’s alright.’
He nodded shortly as he listened to the reply, and then he ended the call and turned to Emma.
‘They’re at your place, talking things over – that’s all I know.’
‘She must have said no.’
‘I’m guessing that too. I suppose they’re figuring out where that leaves them. This will be kind of a big deal to Blake.’
‘I suppose he’ll feel foolish for asking?’
‘More than that… That’s why Stacey dumped him. He asked her and she told him she hadn’t realised he felt that way about her. She’d just been having some fun and she didn’t want anything that serious. He felt like an idiot for not seeing it. She gave him the elbow and that was that. Since then he’s kept a distance, just having fun himself. I really thought Tia had changed that…’
‘She has,’ Emma said. ‘She loves him as much as he loves her, but her circumstances aren’t the same. He knows that, right? He knows it’s only time that’s in the way now? If she’s said no now, I’m sure that won’t be no forever, because I’ve seen the way she looks when she talks about him and I know that if she hadn’t just been through that divorce, if this had been a year from now, she’d have said yes in a heartbeat.’
‘As long as she tells him that.’
‘I’m sure she will.’
‘There’s nothing we can do for a while anyway,’ he said. He angled his head at the bar. ‘Another drink?’
‘As I can’t go home, we might as well,’ Emma agreed.
Last orders had been called and Emma and Aidan were pleasantly tipsy. Despite their worries about Blake and Tia, they’d managed to have fun. Aidan had told her more stories about Honeymoon, but these ones had been more down to earth. He’d told her about the time Nell had single-handedly fought off an out-of-town robber who thought he’d take a shot at the shop by hitting him with a broom, and the time Betty, June’s friend, had been in the background on a TV news report and mooned the camera to win a bet. Emma couldn’t believe some of the things she was hearing, and by the end of the evening she was looking at some of the drinkers in the Randy Shepherd in a whole new light.
‘Well,’ she said, downing the last of her drink and noticing that the pub was almost empty now, ‘I suppose I’m going to have to go back, no matter what’s going on at the cottage. I can’t hang around here all night. I just hope they’re not doing anything unmentionable on the kitchen table.’
‘You could come back to mine… I mean… God, that sounded all wrong, didn’t it? I meant, just to wait if you’re worried about going back home.’
‘Um…’ Emma began, not wanting to make things worse but wondering if there had been any subtext in Aidan’s offer and how she might feel about that. But she didn’t get the chance to think of a reply because, as they left the pub, they saw Blake and Tia walking towards it.
‘We thought we ought to come and get you,’ Tia said.
‘We wondered if you were hiding here until we were done,’ Blake added.
‘Kind of,’ Aidan said.
‘It’s sorted now,’ Blake replied. He looked at Tia. ‘See you tomorrow?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ she said, and started walking back the way she’d come.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow too?’ Aidan said to Emma.
‘I’d like that,’ she replied. ‘Call in for a cup of tea on the way to the station tomorrow if you have time.’
‘I will. Thanks for tonight – I enjoyed it.’
She smiled. ‘Me too,’
They left her to go their own way and she strode to catch up with Tia.
‘Well?’ she asked.
Tia glanced at her. ‘Well what?’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Blake asked me to marry him.’
‘Um… I kind of know about that. So am I to congratulate you?’
‘I said no.’
‘Oh.’
‘I told him I wasn’t ready.’
‘I suppose that was kind of tough.’
‘He was a bit upset. Offended, you know. It must have taken a lot of courage to ask in the first place.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘I told him I love him. Just because I turned him down it doesn’t mean I don’t love him – it just means the timing is off. I asked him to wait until we get Honeymoon Station Hotel up and running.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s why we came here and that has to come first. We’ve come this far and we have to see it through now. I promised you at the start my relationship with Blake wouldn’t get in the way and it won’t.’
‘But I never expected you to turn down a proposal!’
‘I know.’ Tia gave her a small smile. ‘But I have. We’ll finish this thing because it’s about more than a business – it’s about proving to ourselves that we can do it. We need this, Em, you and me. You stuck by me when it got tough, and now I’m going to stick by you. When we’ve done it, when those doors are open, then maybe I can think about something as big as marriage. Not before.�
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‘So what’s going to happen with you and Blake? He hasn’t… well, he hasn’t ended things, has he?’
‘It might be weird for a while but I told him I love him and I’m willing to carry on if he is. There’s no reason I can see to break things off, and it’s not like I’m never going to commit.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said he loves me too.’
‘So you wait?’
‘Yeah, we wait. And…’ Tia turned to her with a wry smile. ‘In a way, it does us a favour.’
‘How’s that?’
‘The longer it takes to finish the work at the station the longer he has to wait to revisit the question…’
‘So he’ll work like a demon to get it finished?’
Tia’s smile grew, and Emma couldn’t help one in return, even though it felt a little inappropriate. ‘Exactly!’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Winter had set in. The hedgerows were often frosted over, the trees bare and melancholy and the fields shrouded in mist until late in the morning. Walks with Aidan – when he and Emma had time for them, which was rarer these days – were always closer to home now, bundled up in coats and hats and sometimes with hot chocolate or coffee they’d bought at Honeymoon Café. June’s little cottage had a wood burner that kept things cosy and Emma and Tia were snug enough in there, no matter how cold it was outside.
If only they could say the same for the days spent working in the bitterest winds. Despite their efforts and their determination to weather any storm to carry on, the hotel was still very much closed. Their hopes of offering Christmas breaks were a distant memory now, and every day felt like a battle with the elements just to keep work going. The shell was there, at least, watertight and secure, and it was beginning to look as majestic as the station had looked in its glory days. The interior was a different story. There was still plastering to be done, central heating and wiring, fixtures and fittings and finishing touches.
While Emma had been laid up with her broken arm she’d been busy creating social-media accounts and a website for the hotel. With no finished product to show, she’d started to document their progress in a blog and had gathered quite a few interested followers already, including railway enthusiasts who sent her endless photos of the station as it had once looked – monochrome snapshots of moments that would never be again with blurry figures in old-fashioned clothes – and accounts of its history. She’d shared them all with Aidan, who had listened with interest as she read them out and pored over the photos with her during his many visits to the cottage.
They’d been out to the café and the pub too, and Emma was always struck by how concerned everyone was for her welfare. There had been gifts of food and flowers and promises of help any time she needed it. Things were finally looking up – at least the village was beginning to feel like home. Even Sid had decided to be courteous whenever she saw him out and about – though hardly friendly – and there had been no more posters or protests. She suspected he probably fumed in private but didn’t dare do much about it now that everyone liked Emma and Tia so much.
By the end of October her cast had come off and she’d been able to help out on the site again. The others had been careful to give her the lightest work, and often there wasn’t enough of it to keep her going until the end of the day so she’d find herself wandering around asking people what she could do. She’d be set on tasks like filling planters with flowers (even though there was nowhere to put them yet) and restoring the old station signs, growing more and more frustrated by the day that she wasn’t being given any proper work to do. The others were trying to protect her, but she didn’t need it.
At night Emma and Tia would trawl through paperwork, filing receipts and guarantees for materials or pieces of equipment and keeping up to date with the social-media following they were so painstakingly building, applying for permits for this and that, checking eco requirements and health and safety rules, researching markets and room rates so they could figure out who their own target market was and what they should charge. Tia found it dull but Emma was happy to do these tasks because they felt like safe ground, like things she was well used to doing. A spreadsheet or a file – those were things she could understand and deal with. They were certain; they had an indisputable answer to any question; they told you exactly what you needed to know.
One rainy Monday evening they were doing just that. Emma was on her phone looking at a hotel in Sussex that offered rooms in old London buses, while Tia tackled the accounts. Tia always did the accounts, because Emma said she was better at figures and, as she’d run her own business before with her ex, she’d know what everything meant without having to look it up. Tia had argued that Emma was better at maths, but Emma had reminded her that maths at school was a very different animal to maths in the real world – knowing what x would be if you took y from it was hardly going to tell you how much you had to spend on shelving for your reception area.
With a cough, Tia took off her glasses and turned to Emma.
‘You want the bad news or the bad news?’
Emma looked up from her phone. They’d decided on a working supper and the remains of their slow-cooker sausage casserole were still on the table.
‘Bad news?’ Emma asked uncertainly. ‘I mean, what do you want me to say to that? Can’t you give me a less scary-sounding option?’
Tia turned the laptop so that Emma could see the screen.
‘Oh,’ Emma said, taking a closer look at the spreadsheet. ‘Oh shit.’
‘My thoughts exactly,’ Tia said.
‘How did it get so low? I thought we had more than that to play with.’
‘I’ve only just got this all up to date and all the receipts for everything on here. And of course, we’re running way over… There’s the rent on this place rolling on that we hadn’t budgeted for, and we have to eat. The projections we started out with were based on us living at the hotel by now… Actually, they were based on us pretty much having been open for a couple of months by now.’
‘Do you think we could move into the hotel as it stands? It would save some money, wouldn’t it?’
‘I suppose we could rough it – but that’s not really the issue at this point. It won’t recoup the money we’re already short of – that horse has already bolted. I don’t even know if there’s enough here to finish… We’d have to do some more calculations and see what we could cut back on.’
‘But we don’t want to scrimp on the building.’
‘I agree, but I don’t know what else we can do.’
Emma blew out a long breath as she looked again at the screen. ‘I could see about borrowing more from the bank.’
‘With what collateral, Em? We have nothing – neither of us even owns a house now.’
‘Yes, but we have the hotel.’
‘We’ve already borrowed against that. I don’t think we’d get any more.’
Emma ran a hand through her hair and gazed at Tia. ‘There must be something. We’ve got to find it; we’ve come too far to fall at the last hurdle.’
‘I guess we could try the bank,’ Tia said, though she didn’t sound hopeful. ‘If they say no, I just don’t know what we’re going to do…’
Emma almost knocked Darcie over the following morning as she hurried to catch up with the others at the station. She’d spent the last hour on the phone to a very uncooperative and unsympathetic bank manager only to hear the one thing she’d been afraid of. It had been obvious from the start of the call that he wasn’t going to give them any more money, but he’d gone through the motions with an imperious tone, and by the end, she’d felt utterly humiliated and dearly wished she hadn’t bothered making the call.
Afterwards she’d spent some time scouring the web for some kind of alternative solution but didn’t know if she could trust anything she saw. There were loan companies that promised quick cash with no strings attached, but when Emma took a closer look she’d decided that their honest company na
mes ought to be something like ‘We Love Kneecap Smashing’ or ‘No Pay, No Legs’. She’d have to talk to Tia later to get her take on the situation. She’d even thought about taking her aunt and uncle up on the offer they’d made a few months before of loaning her money if she needed it to get through the winter, but she’d already had a chunk from her dad and, not knowing when she’d be able to pay it back and even if what they could offer would be enough, she’d rejected that solution for the time being too. In the end she’d decided there was no point getting further behind on their build to mess around at home with this stuff and so had headed out, still turning it all over in her head as she walked. One thing she knew for certain – they’d come this far and through so much to get here, she wasn’t about to lose it all for the sake of a few thousand quid.
Darcie was carrying a bucket of soapy water, having just cleaned the windowsills of Honeymoon Café.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry!’ Emma squeaked. ‘In my own world, wasn’t watching where I was going at all!’
‘It’s alright,’ Darcie said cheerfully. ‘You missed me, so no harm done. I was just thinking we haven’t seen you for a few days.’
‘And then I go and knock you over. You need to be careful what you wish for.’
‘I know,’ Darcie said. ‘I just wondered if everything was alright? How’s your arm?’
‘Well on the mend now,’ Emma said. ‘We’ve just been busy, you know…’
She wasn’t about to tell Darcie that they’d been keeping out of the café to save money. Knowing that Darcie and Tariq relied on the trade too, she and Tia had felt guilty about that, even though they’d both agreed that their daily takeaways ought to stop, for now at least.
Darcie gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but Blake told us about your cashflow problem. Will you… Do you think you’ll be OK?’
Emma tried not to frown. Of course Tia would have told Blake – she told him everything – and Blake probably told Tariq, who would have told Darcie. Emma could have been annoyed about it but what was the point? Honeymoon was just that sort of place, and the sooner she got used to it, the easier it would be to deal with it.
The Hotel at Honeymoon Station : A totally heartwarming romance about new beginnings Page 25