A Year at the Star and Sixpence by Holly Hepburn

Author:Holly Hepburn [Hepburn, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471163159
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

You are invited to a

Halloween Masked Ball

at the Star and Sixpence,

Little Monkham, Shropshire.

Join us for an evening of music, mystery and magic

8.00 p.m.

Saturday 29th October

Cocktails, canapés and curdled blood until

the witching hour

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Nessie?’

Nessie Blake looked up from the sheet she was smoothing over the mattress of the four-poster bed in one of the guest rooms to see Connor, the new cellarman, standing in the doorway. She’d have to stop thinking of him as ‘new’, she reminded herself as she straightened up – he’d worked at the Star and Sixpence since June, a temporary replacement who’d become permanent after Joss Felstead made it clear he wasn’t coming back. It was now early October, and Connor was as much a part of the team as she and her sister, Sam, were.

‘Is everything okay?’ she asked, frowning. It wasn’t like him to venture up to the guest rooms – the bar and cellar were his usual territory. In fact, if she didn’t know better she’d say he looked unsettled, or as unsettled as a strapping forty-year-old ex-fireman ever did.

‘There’s a man in the bar asking for you,’ he said.

‘Me?’ Nessie said, frowning. It couldn’t be one of the regulars – Connor wouldn’t be looking so wary if it was someone he knew. A journalist maybe, snooping around for gossip about Sam? Most of them had given up by now although they’d been pretty relentless in the days immediately after the headlines had hit, constantly trying to trap Nessie into commenting about her sister’s infamous fling with Lord Pargeter. But the press could be persistent, even when the story had gone stone cold.

‘He asked for you by name,’ Connor said. ‘Mrs Nessie Blake. No company name or card. Said just to tell you that you’d know him when you saw him.’

Before the Pargeter debacle turned their lives upside down, Nessie might have sent Sam to see who it was. But her sister kept out of the bar as much as she could these days, even now. And in any case she wasn’t on the premises: she was getting her hair cut. Nessie was on her own.

She was being over cautious, Nessie decided; it was probably a sales rep, or someone else who’d seen her name above the pub door. ‘Okay,’ she said, squaring her shoulders. ‘Give me a minute to finish up here and I’ll be there.’

By the time she walked down the stairs to the pub, Nessie had convinced herself it must be someone from the brewery, although it was practically unheard of for them to call in on a Saturday. So she was totally unprepared for the jolt of recognition that went through her when she looked across the bar and met the gaze of her husband.

‘Hello, Nessie,’ Patrick said, his blue eyes crinkling into a smile she’d once found irresistible. ‘It’s so good to see you.’

‘I can’t get over how good you look,’ Patrick marvelled, his gaze travelling over her face and hair in undisguised admiration. ‘Were you always this gorgeous?’

Nessie smiled uncomfortably.

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