Flora's Christmas of New Beginnings: A hilarious and heart-warming festive romance by Ferry Kirsty

Author:Ferry, Kirsty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Choc Lit Contemporary Romance: A Joffe Books Company
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Marmoset?

The next day I was up quite early, boiling the kettle and making a nice cafetiere of coffee. It was a new day, and I wanted to put the gripes of yesterday to one side and try to enjoy the rest of the holiday. Paul was right. It had been a long day, and I knew myself that Maxine was very demanding. I had to think of the long game here. If he’d given her a little time yesterday, it left today free, and then come Christmas . . . yay! We’d have that time back. Surely, even she wouldn’t be awful enough to demand attention over Christmas?

Did marmosets even celebrate Christmas? I suspected Maxine probably did, even if others of her breed didn’t.

So, enthused, refreshed and trying to put all thoughts of marmosets out of my head, I’d decided that I quite fancied a trip to Monk’s House.

After talking to Edie the previous day, I felt more of a connection with Virginia Woolf’s home than Jane Austen’s. And that adaption of Emma where they’d used the village green here instead of Box Hill was just so bad it had almost put me off Jane’s work — which I suspected wasn’t the thing the producers had been aiming for.

I’d been reading up about Padcock and which other costume dramas had been filmed there, and although there were several more Jane Austens on that list, which were not as bad as that one, the fact remained that Edie’s gran, who had lived in this village, had actually met Virginia’s family.

It was good enough for me.

The kitchen door opened and Paul came through it, fully dressed. He was never really the sort of person who had slouched downstairs dressed in PJs with tousled hair, and even though we were on holiday, he had his standards and that was it.

‘Good morning,’ I said, smiling at him. ‘I made proper coffee.’

He nodded and sat down. ‘Thank you. Pointless wasting money at the tea room every day, isn’t it? When we’ve got the proper coffee equipment here.’

You might have realised by now that we’d never actually been on holiday together. We’d actually never spent more than twenty-four hours in each other’s company, to be fair. He was usually working, and we were both busy people. So this was a side of Paul I was unused to seeing. At home in London, on our rare mornings together, he was not averse to going to cafés and having coffees. Although, if I was honest, I realised that leisurely morning trips to coffee shops had become rare — ooh, from about the third Saturday in June, if I needed to put a date stamp on it: a date stamp which said “paaaaarrrrrrtttteeeeee!” Since then, Paul generally had to be in the office for marmoset-related business well before I had to be at work, or he had things to catch up on over the weekend.

I felt the proverbial gilding rubbing off the proverbial

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