Anything but Vanilla... (8 page)

‘I do know how to wash my hands,’ he said.

‘I don’t doubt it, but I’m afraid the Environmental Health Officer will require a certificate to prove it.’

He covered her hand with his own. ‘It’ll be tough, but I’ll try and live with the disappointment.’

‘I’m sure you’ll survive. On the other hand...’

She paused.

‘On the other hand what?’ he asked.

‘If you’ll take Basil’s place at Cranbrook tomorrow...’ his eyes narrowed ‘...I’ll ask Basil to run Knickerbocker Gloria until Nancy gets back.’

‘Excuse me? Are you offering me a job?’

‘I’ll pay you the going rate.’

‘That would be the minimum wage, I imagine.’

‘A little more than that.’

‘Don’t tell me...all the ice cream I can eat.’

‘At these prices?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I could offer you a discount on Rosie. If you’d like to hire her for a party?’

‘How about next year’s Christmas party at the hospice?’

‘We already do that for cost, but if you’ll come along and play Santa I could be persuaded to do it for nothing.’

‘It’s almost irresistible,’ he said. The ‘almost’ suggested that he’d manage. To resist.

‘Okay, I’ll let you help me make the champagne sorbet. Final offer.’

‘Without a hygiene certificate?’ His smile was slow, meltingly sexy... ‘Whatever would the Environmental Health Officer say about that?’

‘When I say help, I was thinking about opening the champagne. For the second batch. Since you’re so concerned about my nails.’

‘Now who’s being patronising?’

‘I’ll need a taster, too. Just in case Ria has been waving her wand over the mixture. After the great job you did with the cucumber ice cream, you’re my go-to guy when it comes to magic.’

And that did it. His laugh, full-throated and deadly, rippled through her like a gentle breeze, stirring up all kinds of blush-making thoughts. It was such a good thing that he wasn’t her type or she’d be in serious trouble.

‘I should have thrown you out when I had the chance, Sorrel Amery.’

‘It was never going to happen. I’ve got your measure, Alexander West.’ It had taken her a while but, whatever his relationship with Ria, her dreamy look was totally justified... ‘Okay, here’s my very final offer. All of the above plus dinner. I’ll bet there’s nothing but nut cutlets in Ria’s fridge.’ She lifted one of her own eyebrows. ‘Am I right? Or am I right?’

He shook his head. ‘I thought...’

‘What?’ He didn’t reply. He didn’t have to. He’d made it fairly plain what he’d thought. ‘That I was all front and no bottom?’

‘On the contrary. When I saw you bending over that freezer I thought you were all bottom and no front.’ His gaze drifted down to the open white coat, lingered momentarily on the neckline of her chemise. ‘Then you stood up and turned around.’

She opened her mouth, closed it, tucked a non-existent strand of hair behind her ear and then snatched her hand away, remembering how gentle, how warm his fingers had been as he’d done that.

‘The champagne goes in the syrup...’ She cleared her throat. ‘Whenever you’re ready. Then you can turn it on and set it to churn.’

‘When do you want me to taste it?’

‘When it’s just starting to turn slushy.’

‘What will you be doing?’

‘Checking on progress at the business end of the event. If you’ve no objections?’ she said, leaving him to empty the champagne into the syrup while she took a moment to call her sister.

‘Elle? Has the ice-cream bar gone to Cranbrook Park, yet?’

‘All done. Sean stayed and set it up with Basil. Everything is in place. How are you managing your end? You sound a bit shaky.’

‘Do I? Well, it’s been a shaky sort of a day, but I’m getting there.’

‘Any news of Ria?’

‘Nothing, but I can’t worry about her today.’

‘Is it going to be a problem, Sorrel? What about that new chocolate ice for next week? Is that made?’

‘No.’

‘Terrific. I can’t believe she’d do this to us!’

‘I’ll sort it,’ she said, turning away so that Alexander wouldn’t hear, ‘if I have to go to Wales myself and find her.’

‘Don’t leave it too long. Wales is a lot bigger than you think.’

She called her uncle next and once he’d confirmed that everything was ready for tomorrow, she said, ‘Basil, how do you and Grandma fancy running Ria’s ice-cream parlour for a week starting tomorrow?’

‘Serving proper old-fashioned ices? Banana splits? Chocolate nut sundaes with hot fudge sauce? Those fabulous Knickerbocker Glorias?’

‘All of the above,’ she said, laughing, mostly with relief that he sounded so enthusiastic. ‘I’ll organise a couple of students to come in and do the running around, but I want a really good show. Maybe you could create a bodacious sundae of your own?’

‘Well, who could resist an offer like that? I’ll have to check with Lally, of course, but you can count me in and I’m sure she’ll be happy to help out, but what about the Jefferson event?’

‘No problem.’ She glanced at Alexander, who was standing over the churn watching the sorbet begin to chill. He really should be wearing a hat... ‘I’ve got a volunteer ready and willing to stand in for you.’

‘If you’re referring to me, I did not volunteer for anything,’ Alexander said, without turning around.

‘Oh, and tell Gran there’ll be one extra for supper, will you? I’m going to have to bribe him with steak and ale pie.’

EIGHT

Ice cream is like medicine; the secret is in the dose.

—from Rosie’s ‘Little Book of Ice Cream’

Alexander, as a matter of instinct, absorbed the sounds around him. In the rain forest it was a lifesaver. Here it was only the hum of the freezers, the whirr of the churn, the street sounds filtering in from the front of the shop. They were safe noises that he could filter out, allowing him to focus all his attention on Sorrel.

Her urgency, the slightest hesitation as she assured ‘Elle’ that she was coping, her determination as she turned her back on him, lowering her voice as she told her sister that she was prepared to go to Wales and find Ria. Good luck with that one. He registered the warmth in her voice as she spoke to someone called Basil, the hint of a giggle that made him want to smile.

Just being in the same room as her made him want to smile. Something he hadn’t anticipated this morning when he’d discovered the extent of Ria’s problems.

‘Steak and ale pie?’ he asked, since he had obviously been meant to hear that last part.

‘Unless you’re a vegetarian like Ria,’ she said, ‘in which case you can share Geli’s tofu.’

‘Who or what is Geli?’

‘Angelica is my younger sister,’ she said, joining him at the business end of the kitchen to check the mix. ‘The animal lover.’

‘And Elle?’

‘That’s Elle for Lovage, Big Ears, although I’d advise you to stick to Elle when you meet her. She’s my older sister.’

‘The one with three little girls.’

‘All under the age of five.’

‘Good grief.’

‘She makes it look easy and her husband is a fully engaged father,’ she said. A shadow crossed her face so quickly that it would have been easy to miss. ‘He’s a dab hand with a nappy.’

‘Good for him.’

‘Yes...’ Again that shadow, before she shook it off, looked up. ‘Grandma is also called Lovage, but everyone calls her Lally.’

Sorrel, Angelica, Lovage, Basil; he was sensing a theme... ‘Steak pie is absolutely fine with me, I just didn’t expect to be having dinner with The Herbs.’

She pulled a face. ‘“And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it.”’

The face was meant to be comic, but he sensed that it masked some more complicated emotion and that if he probed a little, this supremely assured young woman might just fall apart. ‘From the ease with which you trotted out the quotation, I’m sensing a lack of originality,’ he said, sticking with the superficial. Ria was emotion enough for any man.

‘A teacher who thought she was being particularly clever gave us that nickname when I was at primary school. My mother’s name was Lavender.’

Was... He noted the past tense but didn’t comment. He already knew more than enough about Sorrel Amery.

‘The full set, then. So Fenny is presumably Fennel...’

‘Just Fenny, actually. No one would call a little girl Fennel. But you’ve got the general idea. Her sisters are Tara and Marji.’

‘Tarragon and marjoram? What would the baby have been called if she’d been a boy?’

‘Henry.’

He grinned. ‘Good King Henry?’

‘You certainly know your herbs, although actually it’s a family name on her father’s side. Look, I’m sorry I can’t offer you something more exciting by way of dinner, but I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow and you’re not dressed for any restaurant I’d care to be seen in. It’s The Herbs or nothing.’ Then, as he shrugged, ‘Do. Not. Do. That!’ She turned away before he could respond and he glanced down at his shoulder where the gap in the seam had widened noticeably.

‘I could take my T-shirt off if it bothers you so much,’ he offered, barely able to suppress a grin.

‘No!’ she said, with more vehemence than entirely necessary. ‘Forget the T-shirt. Here, taste...’ She stopped the machine, took two plastic spoons from the pot, tasted the mixture, then handed the second spoon to him. ‘What do you think?’

As he bent to dip into the mix his gaze intersected the point where the top of the silky thing she was wearing skimmed the top of her breasts and the last thing on his mind was sorbet.

He had absolutely no argument with her front. Or her rear...

‘Well?’ she demanded, when he took his time over filling the spoon, tasting the sorbet.

‘It sort of sparkles on the tongue.’

‘Right answer,’ she said, briskly.

She was a little underdressed for the part but she was back in Businesswoman of the Year mode. It should have been off-putting. On his brief trips home his chosen partners were party girls who expected nothing more than a good time for as long as he was around.

Having kissed her, he thought perhaps he was missing out. Maybe he should widen his horizons...

‘Is it sweet enough?’ she asked. ‘Bearing in mind that it’s served with a touch of cassis in the bottom of the glass to add sweetness and colour, and berries threaded onto a cocktail stick.’

‘I have to imagine all that?’ He managed to imply that it was a foreign concept, but the truth was that his imagination was focused on other things. What her hair would look like loose about her shoulders, how it would feel, sliding against his skin... ‘What kind of berries?’

‘Raspberries and blueberries.’

‘Pretty,’ he said, putting the spoon in his mouth and sucking it clean. ‘And—bearing in mind that I’m using my imagination regarding the liqueur and berries—there’s nothing I’d add, although...’

‘What?’ she demanded after a long, thoughtful pause, clearly anticipating another ‘eureka’ moment involving some magic ingredient.

‘I’m prepared to bet you a week’s rent that it’ll go long before the cucumber ice cream.’

‘You really need to get over your hang-up about savoury ice cream,’ she said crossly, switching the churn back on to freeze the sorbet. ‘Look at the whole picture, the combination of tastes. Too much sweetness is cloying.’

‘No danger of that with you, is there?’ he said, leaning back against the work unit.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Sorrel—genus
Rumex
—used for medicinal and culinary purposes, is characterised by a bitter taste whereas...’ Sorrel, torn between relief and annoyance that Alexander had teased her about the taste, paused in the act of dumping her spoon in the sink and turned to look at him ‘...
lovage
, pungent and aromatic, is used in herbal love baths and
Angelica archangelica...
’ He paused. ‘Is your sister angelic?’

‘Only if you’re an abandoned dog.’ She gave him a sideways look. ‘Of course, you’re a botanist.’

‘Only by accident. I’m actually a pharmacologist, but I specialise in medicinal plants.’

‘Which include herbs.’ She frowned. ‘Ria is incredibly knowledgeable about herbs. She makes a wonderful healing cream using lavender.’

‘I never leave home without it. We’ve a lot to learn from the past as well as primitive societies.’

‘And that’s what you do?’ she asked. ‘Find the plants that people have been using for centuries and bring them home to find out what it is that makes them so special?’

‘We’re losing them at a frightening rate. Losing them before we even know they exist. It’s a race against time.’

‘They’re a lot more important than rare orchids, I guess.’

‘More important,’ he agreed, but then his face creased in a broad grin. ‘But nowhere near as erotic.’

* * *

‘No one is going to miss you driving down the High Street in that,’ Alexander said a couple of hours later as Sorrel opened the rear doors of her van so that he could load up the ices.

‘That’s the general idea,’ she said, pausing momentarily to admire Geli’s artwork. The van was black, with Scoop! drawn in loops of vanilla ice along each side and with a celebratory firework explosion of multicolour sprinkles, bursting in a head-turning display from the exclamation point to splatter the roof and the doors. It never failed to make her smile. ‘And it means that you won’t have any trouble following me,’ she said, going back inside to fetch more ices.

‘Following you?’ he asked, doing just that and reaching to take big cooler containers she was carrying.

‘Home...’ They were both hanging on to the container and much too close. ‘For supper?’ They were much too close. If she moved her fingers an inch their hands would be touching. If she touched him he would kiss her again...

She surrendered the load to him, turned and grabbed another container from the freezer, letting her face cool before following him to the van. He’d pushed his load deep inside and took hers and did the same with that.

‘How are we doing?’ he asked.

We
. He was saying it now...

‘Um... A couple more trips should do it.’ He took the last load out to the van while she collected her bag, double checked that everything was switched off and set the alarm. ‘Where are you parked?’ she asked.

‘I’m not. Ria took the car and I was too bushed to go home last night. I walked in.’

‘You walked?’ It was the best part of two miles from Ria’s cottage and lesser mortals would have called a taxi.

‘I needed to stretch my legs.’

‘Obviously. No more than a gentle stroll in the park for a man who spends his days hacking through the jungle.’ The tension that had gripped her throughout the day had eased now that everything was ready and she couldn’t resist teasing him a little.

‘I took the short cut along the towpath. A walk along the river at dawn is a good start to any day.’

‘And no bats or mosquitoes to spoil the pleasure.’ Only the newly hatched ducklings and cygnets being shepherded along the bank by their parents, the white lacy froth of cow parsley billowing over the path and blackbirds giving it their all.

‘You have to walk along there in the evening if you want to see bats,’ he said. ‘Pipistrelles dipping and diving as they chase the insects.’

‘Yes...’ How long since she’d done that? Taken a run along the towpath in the morning before the day was properly awake. Walked along it in the evening, not thinking, not planning, not doing anything but absorbing the scents, the sounds around her? ‘We get them in the garden at dusk.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Maybe you’ll get lucky this evening.’

‘Will I?’

Alexander saw the touch of colour heat her cheeks as she realised what she’d said and he felt an answering heat low in his groin. For a moment neither of them moved, then Sorrel looked away, took her jacket from a hanger and slipped it over the silky top.

It should have made concentrating a whole lot easier but the image was imprinted on his mind and if she’d been wearing a sack he’d still see a tendril of escaped hair curling against her neck, her smooth shoulders, the silk clinging to her breasts.

That colour should have looked all wrong with her hair, but it was as spectacularly head-turning as the van. As spectacularly head-turning as the view of her legs as she slid behind the wheel.

When he didn’t walk around and climb in beside her, she peered up at him. ‘What’s up, Doc? Don’t tell me that you have a problem with women drivers?’

‘If I said yes, would you let me drive?’

She grinned. ‘What do you think?’

Women drivers in general didn’t bother him. It was this woman driver in particular that had him breaking out in a sweat.

This morning he’d had a clear vision of what he was going to do. Close down the ice-cream parlour and, once that was done, go and find Ria, reassure her that everything was sorted. She could stay and spend the summer with her friends if she wanted, or come home. No worries.

He’d spend a few days dealing with the paperwork that piled up in his absence but, that done, he could return to Pantabalik and continue the search for an elusive plant he’d been hunting down for months. The one that the local people sang about, that he was beginning to think might simply be a myth. Or that they were deliberately hiding from him, afraid that he would steal it, robbing them of its power.

An hour or two in Sorrel’s company had not just diverted him from his purpose, it had completely trashed it. Tired as he was, she had filled him with her scent, with colour, with her enthusiasm and distracted him with a straight-to-hell smile. Touched him with a look that had been filled with yearning for something lost. A memory that he had inadvertently stirred. He was good at that...

‘Don’t be such a macho grouch,’ she said, laughing at his apparent reluctance to surrender himself to her unknown skill behind the wheel. ‘I promise you, I didn’t get my driving licence from the back of a cornflake packet.’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ he replied. ‘Everyone knows that women get their driving licences with coupons they save up from the top of soap-powder boxes.’

That provoked a snort of laughter. ‘You are outrageous, Alexander West,’ she said.

‘Am I? What are you going to do about it?’

‘Me?’ She was looking up at him, her eyes dark and lustrous in the shade of the yard.

‘There’s only you and me here,’ he said.

‘Oh...’ Her mouth pouted around the sound, invitingly soft. All he had to do was lean in and kiss her. Rekindle the fizz of heat that had continued to tingle through his veins all day. Take her up on the invitation to sit in a darkening garden with the scent of wallflowers filling the air, listening to the last lingering notes of a blackbird, watching for the first swooping flights of the bats.

How lucky could one man get?

Even from this distance he knew the answer. He didn’t just want to kiss her. He wanted to draw her close, curl up somewhere quiet with her and go to sleep with the weight of her body against him. Wake up with her still there and see her looking at him just like that.

‘One of these days, Alexander West, someone will take you seriously and you will be in such big trouble,’ she said.

‘You think?’ He thought he was already in more trouble than he could handle. He would have happily fallen into bed with her, giving and receiving a few nights of no-commitment pleasure before kissing her goodbye and returning to work. But those sorts of relationships had rules. No eating with the family. Meeting grandparents, sisters. No getting involved.

Too late...