Never Kiss a Man in a Christmas Sweater
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DEBBIE JOHNSON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperImpulse an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2015
Copyright © Debbie Johnson 2015
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Debbie Johnson asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access
and read the text of this e-book on screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,
downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or
stored in or introduced into any information storage and
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whether electronic or mechanical, now known or
hereinafter invented, without the express
written permission of HarperCollins.
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008169442
Version 2018-02-15
Praise for Debbie Johnson
'A sheer delight'
Sunday Express
'Has all the best ingredients for a holiday read: the beautiful West Country, a family-run farm, and a mystery man with Poldark-style charms'
Yours Magazine
'The perfect summer story – a funny and moving read set in glorious modern-day Poldark country'
Bestselling author Jane Costello
'A summer romance with an abundance of country charm, Pippa’s Cornish Dream by Debbie Johnson is a standout title for this season'
Book Chick City
'A beautifully addictive read'
Reviewed the Book
'Just wonderful'
Lisa Talks About
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Debbie Johnson
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Bonus Material
The Birthday That Changed Everything
Part One: Oxford – 39 and counting…
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Coming Soon from Debbie Johnson …
Also by Debbie Johnson …
If you like Debbie Johnson you’ll love Lynn Marie Hulsman …
About the Author
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
The third time she encountered the man she now knew as Marco Cavelli, Maggie gave him a Christmas present to remember. A broken leg and two fractured ribs. Gift wrapped with a few facial abrasions and a very festive black eye.
Of course, it was all his fault. He was cycling on the wrong side of the road, in heavy snow, listening to loud music that drowned out her warning cries as the two of them veered towards each other. Two unstoppable forces, both covered in fluffy white stuff, both bundled up in hats, gloves and scarves. Only one of them looking where they were going.
Sadly, he took the ear buds out just in time to hear her cries of ‘you complete arsehole’, ‘what the hell do you think you were doing?’ and ‘oh shit…hold on, I’m just calling an ambulance.’ Ever the lady, she thought, adding a few even worse words in her own mind.
As she crawled across the ice to reach him, her jean-clad knees soaked through with icy snow, teeth chattering and fingers trembling as she dug her phone from her pocket, she decided that Sod’s Law had well and truly shafted them.
It was her first day off in over a month. The first day she’d had entirely free from sequins and bows and velveteen loops and concealed zips and hooks and eyes and taffeta and lace. The first entire day free of pin-pricked fingers and nervous brides and half-cut mother-in-laws and last minute nervous breakdowns.
And what a day it had promised to be. Gloriously cold and frosty, the sky stretching overhead, a clear shining plain of dazzling blue; virgin snow turning the garden and the streets around her house into a joyful white confection.
Oxford in the snow. It was stunning, and never failed to knock her socks off. Though not literally, as she was wearing two pairs. She cycled carefully into town to do her shopping, excited beyond belief about what was waiting for her at the antiquarian book shop off the Broad. She’d been paying for it for months, and now, finally, it was hers. Briefly. Then, within a matter of weeks, it would be Ellen’s. She couldn’t wait, and realised as she pedalled up towards St Giles that there’d been a sneaky role reversal in her house: Ellen was too cool for Christmas now. It was Maggie who was the little girl.
Aah, who gives a stuff, she thought, as she navigated the slippery roads, keeping a careful look out for the bumbling backpacked tourists who wandered in front of her like blind sheep, and the few students who were still around.
Term had finished the day before, and the whole city had been clogged with cars – all loaded up to the rafters with duvets, dirty clothes and crumb-shedding toasters as they headed off home for Christmas. It was a different Oxford once they’d gone – quieter, less congested, but a lot less lively as well. They’d avoided the snow, which had snuck in like a thief in the night, laying an inch thick on all but the busiest roads.
She’d arrived safely, if a little soggy, at Kavanagh’s Books of Note. She’d gleefully accepted the brown-paper wrapped package that had cost so much, and stashed it in her backpack before getting back in the saddle and heading towards the Covered Market, where she planned to treat herself to some hot chocolate and a small shed-load of tiffin. It was Christmas, after all. Almost.
Along the Broad she went, past the colleges of Balliol and Trinity, before veering off onto the ancient cobbles of Radcliffe Square. As she jiggled along, threading her way around the scarf-wearing academics heading to the majestic Bodleian Library, she noticed the lights were still on – it was after nine, but the hallowed halls of learning were still glittering with electricity, throwing tiny neon clouds through the glass. Must be all that dark wood panelling, cocooning them from the dazzling sunshine of the day. The steps up to it were dusted with snow, the cobbles coated and damp.
She was heading down the side of St Mary the Virgin, with its towering spire and dizzying staircase, looking all the more like a postcard through the fuzzy haze of still falling snowflakes. Inside, she could hear the sound of angelic voices rehearsing their Christmas carols – a crowd of undoubtedly less-than-angelic little boys transforming the Holly and the Ivy into something splendid and magical.
Then it was on, towards the High Street, accompanied by the random thought that Ellen might not like the book at all. That maybe she should have jacked in the idea completely, and given her the equivalent in cash. Maybe she’d prefer beer tokens to a first edition. Maybe she was just holding on to an image of her little girl that was long gone, eaten alive by the coltish young woman she now shared a home with. When Ellen bothered to come home at all, that was.
Later, she admitted to herself that possibly – just possibly – she’d been a little bit distracted. The much-used passage down to the High was relatively clear of snow, and she’d stepped up her speed just a tiny bit. Teeny tiny – so much so that her legs had hardly noticed the difference.
Sadly, that teeny tiny acceleration meant that when she saw the other bike – heading straight towards her and at what seemed like an impossible speed for a non-motorised vehicle to achieve – it was too late to do anything but screech like a banshee and hope for the best. Which was kind of her motto for life – she should probably get it printed up onto a T-shirt.
Catching a glimpse of startled, deep hazel eyes and a look of horror as he realised what was about to happen, they both attempted to swerve. Too late.
The next thing Maggie knew she was flying through the air, her bike free-wheeling into the wrought iron railings, the spokes crumpling and crunching as they slammed into them. She clenched her eyes shut as the world turned upside down, and braced herself for a crash landing. It came, with a dull thud, her backside skidding along in a pool of frost and slush and her helmet bouncing off the floor in a way that made her go temporarily cross-eyed.
For a moment she was too stunned to move. She lay there, feeling the moisture creep through the many layers of her clothing, a slow, paralysing sog of freezing cold snow wrapping itself around all her limbs. If this was a cartoon, she thought, Tweety Bird would be flapping round my head right about now. Wearing ear-muffs.
She lay still for a few seconds, allowing the fog to clear, before blinking her eyes and cautiously running a mental and physical check on her battered body parts.
Legs: yep, still moving. Arms: definitely all right. Head? A bit jiggered around, but essentially okay. Probably no worse than usual, anyway. It was only a searing pain running from her coccyx that was giving her any trouble. She’d landed on her arse – which, thankfully, had enough padding on it to have saved her from anything more serious. Three cheers for fat-bottomed girls.
She looked up and around, saw other people making their way towards them. Saw the man – the stupid, stupid man, with the big hazel eyes and the inhuman ability to cycle at 700 miles per hour – lying spreadeagled a few feet away from her, his few tortured, jerky movements making an abstract art snow angel around his big, twisted body.
She crawled up onto her hands and knees, and inched in his direction, all the while yelling words of both anger and concern. He’d knocked her off her bike. He was an idiot, and deserved a good shouting at.
Her backpack had spilled open, and her precious edition of Alice in Wonderland was lying tattered and torn and dirty, soaking slush up into its beautiful illustrated pages. And her bum hurt. A lot. She felt like karate chopping him in the nether regions. Except…he seemed to be in a lot of pain. And that leg of his was kind of pointing the wrong way. And…shit, where was the phone? And why couldn’t she feel her fingers?
As she got close enough to see his face, she realised who he was. It was Him. The Hot Papa from the Park. The Man with the Tux. The Guy Who Made Christmas Jumpers Sexy. The gorgeous American hunk-a-rama who had accidentally tripped in and out of her life over the last few days.
She glanced around, saw his bike. The bike with the child seat fitted on the back. The bike that was crumpled and buckled and lying abandoned by the rear wall of Brasenose College.
“The baby!” she shouted in complete panic as she finally reached him. “Where’s the baby?”
Chapter 2
The first time she’d seen him had been less dramatic, but in its own way just as memorable. She’d been with Ellen, in the park. Three days earlier.
“I think I might die of oestrogen poisoning if this carries on,” Ellen had said, looking on in disgust at the scene playing out in front of her.
“It’s like all these yummy mummies have died and gone to totty heaven. Not a single one of them is watching their kids – they could be smoking crack or eating dog poo for all they’d notice. They’re obviously all just thinking about shagging, and I now feel like I need to scrub my entire brain with bleach. I mean – come on, he’s wearing a Christmas jumper! Surely it’s in the feminist rule book that you should never kiss a man in a Christmas jumper? ”
It was the first day of December, and the temperatures had plummeted overnight, as though the weather gods had consulted a calendar and decided to up their game. Ellen’s invective was accompanied by a cloud of warm air gusting in front of her; and trainer clad feet kicked impatiently at the frost-rutted soil beneath the bench.
Her usually pretty face was twisted in contempt as she ranted, and she shook her head sadly as she unscrewed her water bottle. They’d just reached the end of a three-mile run around the park, and Ellen looked untouched by the effort apart from a slight flush to her cheeks, and a few auburn tendrils clinging to damp skin.
That, thought Maggie O’Donnell, was what happened when you were 18, and your body hadn’t yet been battered by life, childbirth, or too many nights in alone with Colin Farrell movies and a box of cream horns.
She herself had been battered aplenty by all three of those things, though at 34 she was still in pretty decent nick. Internally, at least. Not decent enough to have spare breath right at that moment, though. Instead, she attempted to smile at her irritatingly athletic daughter, sprawled on the bench next to her, and looked on at the playground panorama that had annoyed Ellen all the way into an anti-Vagina Monologue.
Maggie had to admit she was kind of right, even if she was being overly judgey. There was a man. A real life, honest-to-goodness man, invading the territory that usually belonged solely to the female of the species – at least on a week-day.
He wasn’t just any old man either. He wasn’t one of the harried stay-at-home dads who sometimes turned up, covered in pureed peas and scuttling from the nappy bag to the swings with as much joie de vivre as a hippo with a hernia.
No, this man was…well, frankly gorgeous. Tall – over the six foot mark anyway. Broad. Brawny. Dressed in cold-weather duds of Levis, a sweater – one with a giant snowman’s face on it – and an expensive looking navy blue gilet. Dark hair that was starting to curl and looked like it was usually kept shorter. Yep – she could definitely see why the other mums had started to melt into a collective puddle of hormones on the frost-tinged grass. He looked like he’d stepped out of a rom com about a talented yet tortured rugby player.
She took a long drink of her water, sucked in a restorative breath, and continued to eyeball him as subtly as she could. Not, it seemed, quite subtly enough.
“Mum!” Ellen exclaimed, turning her piercing green gaze towards her. “You’re doing it too! It’s revolting – get a grip of yourself, you’re behaving like you’ve never seen a man before!”
“Well, sweetheart, I’m not sure I’ve seen one quite like that for…well, ever. And you’ve obviously never watched Bridget Jones’s Diary – a man in a Christmas jumper can be a force for good in the world.”
Ellen snorted, staring at the sweater – and the man wearing it – in a highly unconvinced fashion.
“Anyway,” Maggie continued. “Give a girl a break. I’m only flesh and blood, you know. It’s not like you hit 30 and you stop noticing, as you’ll discover yourself some day. And he is…easy on the eye.”
As she said it, one of the besotted mums walked straight into the slide, she’d been staring so hard, clonking her head in pure Carry On style and blushing furiously. Maggie bit her lip to stop herself laughing out loud. There but for the grace of God go I, she thought.
“Stop staring!” said Ellen, not quite managing to keep the giggle out of her voice. “You’re not a girl…you’re an ancient old hag. You’re well past your sell-by date.”
“I am so not,” replied Maggie, tearing her eyes away from the sexy stranger. “I may possibly be slightly past my best before date, but that’s as far as I’ll concede.”
“What’s the bloody difference, Queen of Tesco?”
“Well, if you eat something that’s past it’s sell by date, it’s bad. Pretty bad. Like, potential food poisoning bad. Think granddad after that barbecue when he used up all the old chicken and took the radio into the loo for two days solid. But the best before date…well, that’s more of a guideline. Advice. If you eat something after that, it just means it’s not at its best. It might not taste as good, but it probably won’t make you throw up.”
“And that’s you, is it?”
“Yes, that’s me. If someone – that man over there for example – was to eat me, I wouldn’t make him ill, but he might have tasted better.”
Ellen screwed her face up and made vomiting gestures with her fingers.
“I think I might throw up now…don’t you realise it’s your duty as my mother to remain a completely asexual being for the rest of your life? I like to believe that you’ve only ever had sex once – a majestic coupling that resulted in my entry into the world. I’m not ready to acknowledge anything more than that without trauma counselling. So stop leching and let’s head home. I think you need a cold shower. Invite the rest of the penis-starved hordes to come if you like.”
“Okay,” said Maggie, laughing inside at the thought of the ‘majestic coupling’ that resulted in her getting pregnant at 16. Not the description most people would have used, taking place as it did in the back of a Datsun Sunny parked in a layby off the A40. “Message received and understood, Captain Puritanical. Just let me have five more minutes of acting like an asexual being perving over a complete stranger, and we’ll be off.”
Ellen harrumphed, crossed her Bambi legs, and stuck her ear buds back in to listen to music. Presumably to drown out the sound of the sighs whispering all around her.
Maggie gave her a sideways glance, then looked again at the playground. Apart from the man, the whole scene made her feel a little bit sad. Melancholy. The park was only ten minutes from their home in Jericho, and you could see the dreaming spires of Oxford city centre rising hazily out of the fog, distant and fuzzy and lit up like a Christmas tree made of mellow yellow stone. It was a beautiful view, and one that seemed to never change.
This was the park she’d been coming to for so many years now. There were distant, almost sepia-tinged memories of her own mother bringing her here as a kid. Then as a teenager herself – reckless and wild, swigging from huge plastic bottles of cider and spinning on the roundabout. A habit that may or may not have been related to the later majestic coupling in the back of the Datsun Sunny.
Then as a parent with a cute baby girl of her own in the pram, filling in the endless hours of life as a stupidly young mum, feeding the ducks and wondering what her friends were up to. And with Ellen as a toddler, Ellen as a little girl – and now Ellen as an almost-adult. If she closed her eyes, she could almost replay it, like a fractured dream sequence in a movie.
The swings might have had a lick of paint and the benches were new, but for Maggie, there were ghosts of Christmas past everywhere here, wrapped around the branches of every frost-tinged tree and echoing in every excited childish squeal she heard.
Ellen’s childhood – those days you take for granted, where you’re the centre of their lives – seemed a million years ago. The mums out there now looked tired, and messy, and frazzled like all mums do. They hadn’t yet realised how precious these times were – and how fast you lost them.
She dragged her mind away from pointless, bittersweet memories, and back to the present. He was still there. The Man. Mr Tall, Dark and Handsome. It wasn’t just the way he looked that was getting the ladies in a tiz – it was the way he was behaving with the little boy. His son, presumably.
A chubby faced cherub with unruly, deep brown curls, he was clearly what was known in the trade as ‘a bit of a handful’. That – in school gate speak – could mean anything from a normal energetic tot to a demonically possessed alien being whose head could rotate 360 degrees while humming the theme song from In The Night Garden.
He was about two, and at that stage where they only have three settings – running, falling over, or sleeping. The Man didn’t look tired though. He didn’t look frazzled. Not a smudge of pea puree in sight. He was glowing with health and vitality, and keeping pace with the kid as he jogged from swings to slide to climbing frame, laughing all the time.
The Man was always there with a supportive hand, ready to catch the boy when he fell, ready to wipe mud of the knees of his jeans, ready to pick him up and swing him round in circles until the giggling had infected everyone within hearing distance. The Man sounded like he had an American accent, and he was calling the child Luca, which only added to the unexpected glamour of finding him here, on a grey, frosty day in Oxford at the start of December.
If he was aware of the fact that every woman in the playground was hoping he’d need a spare baby wipe or directions to the toilets, he didn’t show it. He was focused on one thing only – being super fun time dad.
Yeah, thought Maggie, standing up from the bench and starting to stretch out muscles that were already sore. Asexual. Past my sell by date. And late for work.
Time to stop the drooling, and get ready for the rest of the day.
Chapter 3
The second time she saw him, she had her head up Gaynor Cuddy’s skirt. Gaynor was the first of her Christmas brides, and had come in for her final fitting. She was a larger-than-life girl, Gaynor, and had ordered an even larger dress – in fact, Maggie had decided, it was entirely suitable to feature in an episode of Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Even if Gaynor wasn’t, to her knowledge, a gypsy, and instead worked as a call centre manager and lived in quite a swish flat off the Woodstock Road with her boyfriend Tony.