Christmas at the Little Clock House on the Green: An enchanting and warm-hearted romance full of Christmas cheer

Chapter 6

Season’s Greetings

Emma

‘Em, heads up. Incoming.’

Emma looked up from concentrating on measuring out a shot of tequila and just managed to catch the bottle of water being thrown at her.

‘Take the water and grab five minutes.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Emma looked at Bar Brand’s manager, Rudy, like he was insane and then jerked her head pointedly at the three-deep throng at the bar.

‘Not actually kidding,’ Rudy confirmed. ‘You haven’t had a break since you got here and this is your third double shift of the week. DiNozo’s going to cover you.’

Emma felt Tony (DiNozo’s actual name) bump her hip as he reached over to grab the jigger from her hand. He flashed her one of his trade-mark grins. ‘What are we making?’

‘Looks like you’re making a Mulholland Drive,’ she said, whipping off her black apron and stepping back. ‘Apparently I’ll be seeing you in five.’

‘Make it thirty,’ her boss threw over his shoulder as he loaded a tray of drinks.

Thirty? Rudy was certifiable if he really thought she was going to be able to sit upstairs for thirty whole minutes on a busy Friday night.

But as if he knew she was about to argue, he added a, ‘That is a direct order, Danes.’

‘Sir, yes Sir,’ Emma shouted back, giving him a mock salute as she backed out of the bar doors into the kitchen.

‘Jeez, Emma, is there any chance you could come through the doors and not nearly knock me over?’

‘Sorry, Jade. You’re going to have to direct that stellar sarcasm, we’ve all come to know as wit, at DiNozo for the next few.’

‘Sure thing, shirker. Nothing I like better than having to repeat an order eleven million times over to the guy who can’t think for smiling at the ladeez.’

Emma grinned because the way DiNozo was looking at Jade it really wasn’t going to take too much more of her wince-worthy wit for him to decide that the best way to silence that mouth of hers was probably with his. And once they locked lips…

With a happier heart than a few moments before, Emma walked through the busy kitchen and headed up the steep staircase to Rudy’s office.

Flinging open the door she took two steps and flung herself down on the fake leather Admiral’s chair. If she lowered her aching limbs to the equally fake Chesterfield sofa shoved along the wall beside the filing cabinet she was pretty sure she’d fall asleep and sleeping on the job?

Yeah.

Tended to be thought of as one of those things you didn’t do.

Moving a crate containing a new brand of vodka off the desk, she decided thirty minutes was enough time to check Rudy had added all the forms for Christmas parties to the spreadsheet she’d set up for him.

She got so engrossed that when the office door opened and in walked Rudy, she turned in surprise.

‘Relax,’ he said, holding out his hands. ‘Break’s not over. I couldn’t take the chemistry down there any longer.’

‘Jade and Tony? It’s True Love, Rudy. Can’t stand in the way of it.’

Rudy groaned. ‘You and your match-making. Why can’t you let Tinder take care of all that?’

Emma shuddered. Dating via an app took all the romance out of it. She knew because she had the unbroken heart to prove it. Dating in the movies was a whole lot different to dating when you worked in the movies. In Hollywood it was virtually impossible to even get a date without using an app and once you did, if you wanted anything more than a casual hook-up, then anyone from within the industry tended to only be interested in what you could do for each other’s careers and anyone from outside of the industry tended towards petty jealousies or secretly wanting into the industry anyway.

‘Tinder takes care of one thing and one thing only, Rudy. When it comes to matters of the heart, human intervention works best.’

At least it did for others. If only she was as good at match-making herself as she was her friends. It was like when you saw an outfit in a shop window and knew instantly who it would look good on, but when it came to choosing one for yourself, you just couldn’t see it.

Maybe she was just blind to ‘Eligible Guy Reveal Yourself’, because she only had eyes for, ‘Let The Actress See The Role’.

‘What am I going to do if they discover that the path to true love doesn’t involve working together?’ Rudy asked.

‘They’ll be fine. Trust me. Think of it this way, won’t it be nice to be around Jade when she’s singing like Cinderella instead of spitting nails?’ She grinned, and then gestured to the screen, ‘You need to order more glassware if you’re really going to say yes to this number of private Christmas parties.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Danes, listen up.’

‘It should be okay,’ she continued, not really listening-up. ‘As long as you don’t double book anyone.’

‘Stop about the holidays for a moment. Look, you keep running around here like you’re indispensable, I’m going to start wondering what I’d ever do without you.’

‘What are you talking about?’ She turned towards him and blinked. ‘When I get The Call, you’ll just hire someone else.’

Rudy gave her a long measured look and then shrugged. ‘Okay. Yes. This is what I would do. But would they be as good as you? Would they practically run the place when I’m not here?’

Emma’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Are you planning on going somewhere?’

‘Maybe. This place is doing well. Makes me think I might like to open another one.’

Terrific. Was everyone moving onto something except her? ‘Where?’

‘New York.’

Huh. If only she’d actually made the move to trying theatre. She’d have been in with a shot of getting a job to pay rent while going for auditions.

‘I guess I’m asking what you want more,’ Rudy said. ‘Your name in lights? Or, maybe, your name above this door?’

Emma started shuffling the pile of party requests. He wanted her to run this place for him while he scouted out and set up a bar in New York? ‘I want my name in lights, Rudy. You’ve known this from day one.’ Her heart felt heavy because, okay, day one had been three years ago and she hadn’t been able to make it happen.

Rudy looked at her shrewdly and then got up and headed for the door before pausing and saying, ‘You don’t have to answer now but think about it will you?’

Left alone in Rudy’s office once more, Emma didn’t know what to think. Could she really manage this place for Rudy? Could she really give up chasing The Dream in favour of being surrounded by people who were pursuing that very same dream? Every night, could she watch happily as one by one they started their new adventures and made it in the industry, or would it make her bitter?

Not much of an adventure for her, she thought and immediately felt awful because sweet, sweet Rudy was offering her more options than she’d given herself for the last three years.

With a huge sigh she pulled up her emails hoping to distract herself.

She was young and single with talent.

When did she get to start her adventure?

Idly she clicked on a new email from Kate:

To: WritingHer‌OscarAccep‌tanceSpeech

From: Kate Somersby

Subject: Season’s Greetings

Attachment: Invite

Emma, Hi!

Beyond excited to show you the mock-up of the invitation we’ll be sending out.

Can you do me a massive favour and give me your honest opinion? We’ve been working on these for so long I’ve got analysis paralysis!

Oh, can you pay particular attention to the last business and give me your thoughts?

Intrigued, Emma clicked on the attachment and was hopelessly enchanted when an old-fashioned cream-coloured linen envelope, whizzed across her screen and came to a stop, looking like something straight out of a Jane Austen novel. It had her name and address written on it in flowing script, like it had been written with fountain pen and sent by messenger to end up on a silver tray, waiting to be sliced open with a beautifully engraved letter opener.

A second later and it was turning itself over and opening up right in front of her eyes.

The flowing script in the middle read:

This Christmas you are cordially invited to the grand opening of The Little Clock House on the Green…

Oh, wow. Emma squinted past the cursive script. Was that the actual Clock House in the background? It looked so stately, so fabulously and so quintessentially English, that she felt an unexpected pang of home-sickness.

Which was completely ridiculous, since LA was her home, not England.

The envelope closed up again and divided into four triangles with a number and a ‘play’ symbol in the centre of each one. Charmed she clicked on the top triangle of the invitation and as it ‘unsealed’ itself to open up, she read:

Beauty @ The Clock House

Day Spa

Manager: Kate Somersby.

Smiling, Emma clicked on the second leaf and with a smile on her face watched it magically open up to read:

Hair @ The Clock House

Hair Salon

Manager: Juliet Brown

She clicked on the third:

Hive @ The Clock House

Rentable Co-Working space

Manager: Daniel Westlake

And then she clicked on the last one:

Cocktails & Chai @ The Clock House

Tearoom/Bar

Manager: Emma Danes

Emma stared at the screen in shock.

Absurd excitement shot through her, exploding like fireworks. Reaching out she quickly clicked back onto the email to make sure she wasn’t imagining things.

How about it, Emma?

Fancy coming to Whispers Wood and setting up Cocktails & Chai?

p.s. I can help out with airfare.

p.p.s. On days off you could finally get to visit where Jane Austen lived.

Ooh, that was sneaky.

Kate knew she’d wanted to do that for as long as she could remember.

p.p.p.s. And as Jane Austen once famously said … If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.

Chapter 7

Making Cow Eyes

Emma

Emma adjusted her grey wool beanie to a more attractive angle and wrapped her dusky-pink pashmina more securely around her shoulders as she wrenched open the front door of Wren Cottage.

She was late.

So very late for her first day at The Clock House.

She hated being late. Stupid jet lag. Now she was going to feel on the back-foot all day as well as feeling nauseous from the butterflies hurling hand-grenades at the walls of her insides.

Quickly she bent down and shoved her feet into the pair of boots sat outside the front door.

Holy moley, they were beyond freezing. Why in God’s name did people in this country leave perfectly good footwear outside? It was barbaric.

Honestly, mid-November in Whispers Wood could not be more different to mid-November in LA.

That was it, she thought, her toes curling and clenching inside the boots. When she got in tonight she was bringing these puppies inside and shoving them by the fire – once she’d plucked up the courage to ask again how to switch the fire on, that was.

Quite sure her toes were going to drop off if she didn’t get moving, she half-shlepped, half-slid along the icy path and came to an abrupt halt at the front gate.

‘Wow. Cow.’

Master of the understatement. That was her all over. Because, excuse me, but what the hell was an actual four-legged, real-life, black and white, farm animal doing standing in front of her, plain as day?

Emma closed her eyes and then opened them again.

It was still there.

And it wasn’t moving.

Oh God. Why wasn’t it moving?

Was it dead? Did cows die standing up?

And why was it staring at her, with those … cow eyes?

Slowly, Emma reached out and unlatched the little wrought-iron gate separating her from the cow and tugging it over the frosted tufts of grass, pulled it open enough to slip through.

The cow looked at her as if to say, ‘Hi there, it’s all good. Wanna chew the cud with me?’

Emma shook her head because, you know, Day! As in, she had one. Had places to be and people to meet and she really didn’t fancy her first phone call to Kate to be along the lines of a sickie that went, ‘I’m sorry I can’t come to work today, I’m trapped in my house by a cow.’

‘Shoo,’ she whispered, watching her breath turn misty as it left her mouth. When nothing happened she mustered her courage and, feeling brave, flung a hand out from under her shawl to make a shooing motion.

Her actions had zero effect.

‘Hey, you? Mr Moo? Please shoo,’ she tried again a little louder, totally wishing she was eating Moo Shu pork, or doing anything that felt in any way familiar to her old life in LA.

She wasn’t sure this really fulfilled the ‘adventure’ brief she’d sold herself on when packing her case to make the move back to the UK, although, she’d only been here one whole night and one whole day so perhaps she should give it more time.

Or maybe the jet lag was screwing with her reasoning?

She blinked again in case it really was jet lag that had her imagining a cow had come to visit the tiny cottage Kate had helped her settle into when she’d arrived in Whispers Wood.

No. It wasn’t her imagination.

The cow was still there. Filling up her entire view because, as it turned out, cows were genuinely fear-for-your-life enormous close-up.

As an antidote to not getting her dream role, not being able to get out of the wrought-iron starting gate wasn’t quite the look she’d been going for.

Wisps of frosty fog wrapped themselves around her, and as the damp air seeped deep into her bones she was closer to admitting she may have misjudged this opportunity. What would Rudy think if he could see her now?

She’d thought this would all be so very quaint, hadn’t she?

How could you have been this wrong, Ems? This, So. Completely. Wrong.

All it was, was freezing, she thought, wondering if she could get out of the back garden of the cottage and find her way to The Clock House, thus avoiding the cow-staring scary start to her rural adventure.

Emma looked around helplessly and then, leaning closer, risked cricking her neck permanently to check out the pair of feet she could see approaching.

‘Is someone there?’ she asked.

‘Whack it on its arse,’ said a male voice.

‘What it on what?’ Emma asked.

There was a sigh, and then, ‘Give it a good slap on its hind rear and it’ll move right on by.’

Emma stared suspiciously at the cow’s rear-end. The instruction sounded a bit Fifty Shades Darker.

‘Thank you but I’m not into that,’ she said, not quite under-her-breath enough.

‘Look, do you want it to move, or not?’

She did. She really did. It was time to swap out her What Would Bridget Jones Do for a more kick-ass What Would JLaw Do? She licked her lips and stared again at the cow. ‘So … just sort of … hit it?’

‘Sometime today would be appreciated.’

‘And you know to hit it because?’

‘It’s Gertrude.’

‘Well.’ Emma folded her arms. ‘I have to tell you that I am none the wiser.’

‘But you are getting older. And so am I.’

A head popped around the rear of the cow and to Emma’s surprise it had a face belonging to it that stopped the breath in her lungs.

Maybe it was the fact that she faced imminent death by cow, but Emma’s powers of observation all narrowed down to one impressive: Valhalla-lujah.

The man was all dark and dangerous with Viking hair and beard and eyes the colour of the pints of Guinness that Bar Brand served up on Paddy’s night.

Eyes that, despite being framed by lashes that could compete with Gertrude’s, she could see were now drawn into a deep scowl.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said. ‘Hold these will you and I’ll move her on.’

Without thinking, Emma held open her arms and allowed Mr Heart-Wrecking Handsome to deposit a weighty pile of magazines, what looked like rolled-up plans, a laptop and a tape-measure the size of a dinner plate in them.

The next thing she knew she was staggering against the sudden weight, her feet sliding across the ice in opposite and modesty-mocking directions.

She hit the ground with an audible bump.

Oh, my, God.

Years of yoga, Pilates and dance and who knew all it was going to take for her to finally be able to do the splits was a British country lane, a cow, and a Viking!

She blew a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes and looked up just in time to watch Gertrude walking off down the road, bovine hips swinging like Jessica Rabbit.

‘Sorry. Are you all right? Here, let me help you up.’

Emma righted her beanie so that she could get an even better look at the Viking. ‘Oh, I think you’ve done more than enough under the circumstances,’ she harrumphed and then thought that on the bright side at least the heat in her face was bound to trickle down to her toes.

‘It’s not often these days that a man gets to rescue a woman from the perils of nature.’

Was he kidding?

‘It’s not often these days that a man expects a woman to hold his papers for him while he wades into danger,’ she muttered.

‘Quite. Well,’ he muttered all very Mark Darcy. ‘As it happens they’re important papers and I didn’t see you getting it done.’

Emma felt her bottom lip protrude. ‘So I did a little cow-ering. Excuse me for being surprised to find I was trapped in my own home by the bovine beast of Whispers Wood. I’m sure I’d have worked out how to get her to move—’

‘Eventually,’ he replied with a slight twitch of his lips.

Her gaze stalled on his lips. Until she saw him notice. Then, with another rush of red to her head, she glanced at her watch and stammered, ‘Oh. Help me up will you, I need to get to The Clock House.’

‘The Clock House? Really?’ He hauled her to her feet as if she was as light as a leaf floating in the breeze and she tried unsuccessfully not to be impressed.

‘Yes. Really.’

‘That’s where I’m off to. We might as well walk together, I suppose.’

Don’t do me any favours, she thought and then tried to remember how to get to the village green. As compasses went, she had an excellent moral one. As for working out which direction to take to get, well, anywhere … not so much.

‘So you must be the famous Holly Wood,’ came the rich dark-roasted coffee voice.

‘Huh? Oh. No, my name is Emma Danes.’

‘Not Holly Wood? I could have sworn—’

‘No. I’m over from Hollywood, and I’m definitely not famous,’ she replied feeling a little funny that she might have been talked about before she had even landed. ‘I’m here to help Kate open Cocktails & Chai @ The Clock House. And you must be… ?’ Apart from a rural Viking God with super-sexy British accent, appearing out of nowhere to save me from cows named, Gertrude, that was.

For one awkie mo she worried she’d said rural Viking God with super-sexy British accent out loud because there was another quirk of his lips into a smile that made her heart sort of descend into her stomach like someone had snapped its strings.

And then he was introducing himself Bond-style, with a, ‘My name is Knightley. Jake Knightley.’

Chapter 8

The Art of Conversation

Emma

‘So if your name’s Knightley, have you come from Knightley Hall, then?’ Emma said, as she set off down the country lane beside him.

When he didn’t answer she thought he hadn’t heard her all the way up there where the tall people hung out, so she said a little louder, ‘That huge black and white building surrounded by all that precision-cut hedging on the other side of the village?’

‘Topiary,’ he murmured.

‘Huh?’

‘The hedging you’re referring to is called topiary,’ he corrected helpfully.

Ignoring the dictionary lesson, she said, ‘I thought it said it was called Knightley Hall when I passed it yesterday on my walk. That’s where you live?’

‘I do.’ He increased his speed as if he hoped she wouldn’t have enough breath left to chat.

Which bugged her because it was him who’d invited her along on the journey, not the other way around. ‘And your name is Knightley?’ she asked, trying to keep pace with him in boots that were at least two sizes too big for her.

‘It is.’

‘But your first name is Jake, not—’ Oh, God, don’t say George, Emma. Or My Mister Knightley. He probably gets that all the time. ‘Not … George, then?’ Damn, she’d said it.

‘George was my ancestor.’

‘Well, of course he was,’ she answered as if that made the most perfect sense in the world.

They walked together in silence until she decided that the best way to take her mind off the nerves that had reappeared was to engage in chit-chat, and the only person around to do that with was him, her reluctant Knight-ley. ‘With a name like Knightley, I’m guessing someone was a real Jane Austen fan, huh?’

‘Or Jane Austen was a real Knightley, fan,’ he answered.

Ha. Cute.

‘So, what are you, like, the owner of that huge estate?’

This time when he shot her a quick look she swore she could see the edge of caution in his frown. ‘I am,’ he stated.

‘But you’re quite sure you’re not Succinct of the world-renowned Succincts?’ she asked, puffing out a breath.

Jake turned to look at her again and then shrugged. ‘I talk. When it’s warranted.’

‘But do you make conversation?’ she quipped back and felt him doing the staring thing again.