Melting Ms Frost (3 page)

‘I like to know who I’m dealing with, that’s all,’ Aidan hedged with an easy smile. He’d been telling himself all night that it would be wise to ignore the crackle of anticipation Annabel Frost had sparked across his entire nervous system. Even though he’d seen no evidence of a wedding band or engagement rock glinting on her ring finger, it would be better to leave the lure of this particular provocation well enough alone. No sensible man would risk stirring up the kind of trouble he was contemplating – not on the job, not with a superior.

But there was the rub. Even though he liked to think he wasn’t totally lacking in wisdom, if there was one thing he’d always thrived on, it was risk. And maybe having been forced to play things safe for the past few years meant it was that very element that made this such an impossible prospect to resist. He’d certainly enjoyed sparring with her. And as an introductory round it had proved quite informative. He’d learnt that not only was she sharp-tongued, she was dismissive and emotionally closed, and he’d been left even more fascinated by her than before. Judging by the way she’d reacted to the various baits he’d set, he suspected that the only way he was likely to get past her cold exterior was by turning the heat up. High.

‘Better the devil you know, et cetera.’

‘Yeah,’ Tim puffed out a breath. ‘Well just remember you
are
dealing with the devil.’

Aidan looked at him. ‘If she’s really that bad why are you still working for her after a year?’ And Tim wasn’t the only one, Aidan had noticed. For all the badmouthing he’d been hearing, it seemed most of the staff at Cluny’s had been there long term.

Tim shrugged, his gaze wandering in the direction of the bar again. ‘The pay’s great, as you know. And it’s the best-run restaurant I’ve worked in.’ He raised his beer to his lips but paused as he seemed to think. ‘Even though she’s a nightmare, I guess the Ice Queen is bloody good at her job. She’s got that place operating like nowhere else I’ve ever seen.’

Aidan’s own take was that maybe Annabel Frost was bloody good at her job precisely because of her nightmarish reputation, not in spite of it – but he kept the thought to himself and wondered how much more information he could manage to get out of Tim without raising suspicions.

Tipping his bottle to his mouth, he drained the last of his beer. ‘That barely touched the sides. Got time for one more?’ He cast a glance over his own shoulder at the bar before flashing a smile at Tim. ‘My round, but you can order.’

‘Oh, Tony, you are wicked. You shouldn’t say such things … I know. Yes, I miss you too.’

Bag and keys still in hand, Annabel stood in the hallway of her flat, frozen with astonishment and anger as she listened to her mother’s voice coming from the other side of the closed bedroom door.

‘No, we can’t. Bel says I’m not to meet with you … Of course I can make my own decisions. But as I’m staying with her, I suppose it’s—’

‘Mother, that’s enough!’ Annabel grasped the handle to fling open the door, only to discover it was locked. ‘Hang up the phone now,’ she shouted, hammering on the white-glossed wood for good measure. Had her mother lost her mind?

There was a moment’s silence, a rush of hushed words, then her mother called out in an overly sweet voice, ‘Bel, is that you?’

‘You know it is. Now open the door.’ Annabel waited as she heard rustling sounds of movement approach and the click of the latch being released.

Shorter than her daughter but with the same green eyes and fiery colouring handed down from some distant Celtic ancestor, Ellen Frost opened the door in her nightie. ‘How was your day, darling?’ she asked with a bad attempt at a look of innocence and her eyes swimming with a bright film of gin.

The smell of the spirit hit Annabel straight away. ‘I can’t believe you’re in contact with Tony,’ she said, voice tight with disapproval.

‘I’m no—’

‘Don’t, Mum. Don’t lie to me. I heard you.’ She felt the weight of disappointment pull at her expression. ‘What were you thinking? You told him where you are for God’s sake.’

Her mother at least had the decency to look shamefaced at going back on their agreement. ‘Oh, Bel, I didn’t mean to. I only said I was with you, I remembered not to tell him where you live.’

Annabel sighed in frustration. That wasn’t the point.

‘So you see. No real harm done.’ Her mother smiled, and as easy as that relieved herself of any blame. ‘Poor thing, you do look tired, shall I make you a cup of tea?’ She patted Annabel on the cheek as she slipped past and wove her way down the hall to the tiny galley kitchen.

‘Don’t try and change the subject,’ Annabel said as she followed. ‘This is serious. I want to know why you were talking to that … that scumbag.’

‘Do you have to call him that? He’s not the monster you think.’ Tea obviously forgotten, her mother took a glass from the draining board and reached for the bottle of gin on the worktop, looking surprised to find it empty. Annabel was surprised too. She’d bought it only the previous day. A bottle gone in just over twenty-four hours wasn’t good. Especially when only one person was drinking.

‘He’s sorry for what happened,’ her mother continued, clutching the glass and looking around as though she’d discover something else to put in it. ‘That’s what he phoned to say, that he’s sorry. Deep down he’s a good man who just had a run of bad luck.’

Oh, that was too much. Tony Maplin was no such thing. He was a thieving, lying gambling addict who’d taken her mother for everything she owned.

‘He used you, Mum. He tricked you, stole from you and then deserted you – leaving you to deal with the bailiffs on your own! Have you forgotten that?’ She glared at her mother. ‘Because I haven’t. It will take me longer than a few gin-soaked days to forget the state you were in watching your whole life being pulled from under you, losing everything you owned.’ Everything except the damn mobile phone Annabel had given her for emergencies and hadn’t thought to change to a new number. Not that she’d thought for a moment that Tony would have the nerve to try to get in contact with her mother after the way he’d run out and left her. ‘That’s what Tony is, that’s what he does for you. And after all that I can’t believe you’re stupid enough to even speak to him!’

For her own part, Annabel doubted she’d ever forget the events of the previous week – from her mother’s hysterical phone call for help, to the subsequent dash Annabel had made to Norfolk, where she’d arrived too late to stop or postpone the process of eviction as the bank repossessed the house Ellen had shared with Tony.

Her mother stood rigid for a minute, fighting to hold back tears. ‘If you think I’m so stupid then perhaps I should go,’ she said stiffly.

Seeing the welling up doused the flare of Annabel’s temper with guilt. The poor woman had been through enough without her adding to the heartache. ‘No of course you’re not going anywhere.’ She put her arm around her mother’s shoulders. ‘You need to be here until we can get you sorted out. I know I seem harsh, but I just want you to be careful. I don’t want to see you get into another mess like this again.’

Releasing her hold, she took the glass from her mother’s hand and filled it with water from the tap. ‘Come on, it’s late. I think we’re both too tired for this right now. Let’s get you into bed.’

Annabel made short work of getting her mother settled for the night. Turning off the bedroom light, she was about to pull the bedroom door closed behind her when she heard her mother mutter bitterly into the darkness, ‘You think it’s so easy to judge but you don’t understand. You’ve never been in love.’

It was the gin talking, she knew, so she tried to let the hurt pass right through her. But she couldn’t deny the ring of truth to the words. If she’d never been in love it was because of what this woman’s choices had shown her it could be. ‘From what I’ve seen of so-called love, Mum, I’m happy to do without, thanks. Sleep well.’

It took her another half hour to go through her nightly ablutions and make up the sofa in the sitting room into her temporary bed. Climbing under the covers, she lay down and let out a huge sigh. What a night. One sticky situation averted, one still unresolved. Snagging her smartphone from the coffee table, she reopened the email she’d received the previous evening from Cluny’s owner and re-read it.

Annabel,

Thanks for letting me know of your intended return tomorrow. I trust that means your family emergency has been resolved.

During your absence, and in response to the staffing situation caused by Keith Dally’s unexpected departure, I took the liberty of installing one Aidan Flynn behind the bar as a suitable replacement. Comes personally recommended.

Am due in for dinner on Saturday so will see you then.

In haste.

Richard.

A
suitable
replacement? Richard Landon couldn’t have any idea just how
unsuitable
Mr Aidan Flynn was. Where on earth had he found the arrogant jerk? Before leaving work, she’d tried to find out a bit more about him – where he’d come from, how he’d been hired so quickly. But with the apparent speed with which he’d been ‘installed’ there was as yet no record of him on the computer, no employee file containing relevant details, and no signed contract. It seemed that Aidan Flynn had just appeared like a bolt out of the blue.

Switching off the phone, which itself yielded no useful information to help answer her questions, she put it back on the table. Twisting to turn off the side lamp, her eye snagged on the photo frame sitting atop her bookcase. Even in the semi darkness she could picture clearly the age-faded image it held. Taken on a summer’s day in front of an old limestone built inn that bore a sign reading ‘The White Harte’, it showed a giggling five-year-old girl with a blaze of coppery hair held aloft in the arms of a laughing man dressed in chef’s whites. She felt a familiar ache in her chest as she stared at the photo, and realised that her earlier thoughts towards her mother had been unfair. She had known real love once, and had it tragically ripped from her. Who was Annabel to judge her for trying to find it again, even if she did seem to look in all the wrong places?

Switching off the light, she settled down and closed her eyes, but instead of her exhausted mind letting her slide into sleep it kept returning to the confrontation she’d had with the Irishman. Rather than feeling confident that she’d set him straight on expected behaviour at Cluny’s, she had a feeling there was more trouble brewing.

A glowering Annabel was the first thing staff encountered as they arrived for the lunch shift the following day. Positioned behind the reception desk, she made no secret of the fact that she was clocking everyone in.

Having fronted up in good time himself as it was Jon’s day off, Aidan was polishing glasses out of the washer when, at precisely eleven fifteen, she called a meeting of the front-of-house staff. There was a brittle edge to her ice-cold demeanour as she berated them collectively on the state of the near-perfect dining room. He noticed that no one argued with her as she set two waiters to work cleaning the inside of the already almost spotless plate glass windows, and two more on the equally immaculate mirrored panelling that ran the entire length of one wall above the banquette seating.

One of the kitchen hands was unfortunate enough to arrive at that point, eyes widening as he stepped through the door and saw the meeting underway.

‘Uh …’ he started, before freezing under the stare Annabel cast his way.

‘Don’t bother with an excuse. You’re late. You’re off this shift. Turn up on time to the next or you’ll lose that one too.’ He didn’t utter a word as he slunk straight back out of the door.

Before it had clicked shut, Annabel had moved onto the fingerprint smudges on the back of the wooden dining chairs setting the remaining serving staff to work polishing every chair in the place. For Aidan she picked the job of dusting the shelves behind the bar.

‘Already done,’ he said, feeling the air around him thin as every one of his colleagues sucked in a breath, presumably shocked by his audacity at having answered back. Annabel herself raised an eyebrow at him and walked slowly around to the back of the bar. As she inspected the shelves – which he and Jon had indeed started dusting last night, and that he had finished this morning – he fancied he caught a quickly concealed flash of annoyance when she failed to find anything amiss.

Plucking a glass from the half emptied washer, she held it up to the light. ‘The glasses need polishing.’

And as she’d been sitting right across the room from him there was no way she didn’t know that was what he’d been in the middle of doing when she called her staff meeting. ‘I’m just about thro—’

‘Mr Flynn,’ she interrupted him with a sigh of impatience. ‘That’s not a request nor is it up for discussion. It’s a direct order. I say the glasses need polishing. All of them.’ With a triumphant glint in her eye, she set the glass down on the bar with enough force to act as a punctuation mark before turning to stride off towards the kitchens.

The evening service was well underway by the time she decided he was due another dose of her authority.

‘Annabel,’ he acknowledged as she swept into his space.

She cast him a withering look before ignoring him in favour of carrying out a thorough inspection of the bar area, paying particular attention to the glasses.

‘I can assure you they’re all immaculately polished,’ he said, running his gaze just as thoroughly over her from head to toe. ‘Like you.’

That made her pause momentarily but she still didn’t engage with him.

He closed the distance between them so he could lower his voice. ‘What does it take to get that perfection all ruffled, I wonder? What makes you let that hair down?’

She narrowed her eyes on him. ‘That’s enough.’

He smiled, pleased to have her on the hook. He’d been right, it seemed that touching on the personal was the easiest way to bait her. ‘Are you always so defensive?’

‘The more relevant question here is are
you
always so offensive?’

Clever. She had a quick wit to go with the sharp tongue – he liked that. ‘Tell me what offends you the most about me,
a mhuirnín
?’ he asked with a grin.