Tickled Pink by Christina Jones

Author:Christina Jones [Jones, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Humorous, Fiction
ISBN: 9780007305339
Google: N1oFO6ZRGf4C
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2008-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

The Crooked Sixpence was packed. Lola, who had hardly had time to eat her Sunny Dene dinner and hurl herself into a bath before evening opening time, stood nervously in the doorway.

Self-conscious wasn’t in it. The jeans and the boots and the black off-the-shoulder top may have looked the business in Oxford, with the dim lights and the loud frenetic music and Ellis’s charming company. In the cold light of her bedroom, Lola thought she looked like a sad travesty.

There’d been no time to canvass opinion. When she’d arrived back from Oxford, Dilys and Norrie – doing the dinners with Dom, who was back from university for the Easter vacation, but without Posy who had apparently been at the shop and The Crooked Sixpence most of the day – told her they’d promised themselves a rare treat, a night out at the pub and kept winking and grinning like sly children. Mr D and Mr B were no better, behaving like real prima donnas and singing Vera Lynn songs in high falsettos. Flynn didn’t even show up. So, throwing her long black coat over her new image, Lola had rushed to the pub and just hoped nobody laughed.

She closed the door behind her and nudged her way through the crowd to the bar. Flynn and Posy were serving three-deep customers, the Pinks were playing darts, there was a crowd round the fruit machine, and several young girls, including Posy’s friends Nikki and Amanda, in very short, tight dresses, were trying to outmanoeuvre Glad who was hunched over the jukebox.

‘Hi,’ Posy grinned. ‘Have a good day?’

‘Great, thanks.’ Lola didn’t remove her coat. ‘What about you?’

‘Frantic. Dashing around doing the courier stuff for Ellis and then between here and the shop. Flynn helped me scrape the last of the flyposters off the windows and wash the paintwork, but I haven’t got much further. No brilliant ideas of what to do with it yet.’

‘We’ll have to give it some thought,’ Lola clasped her coat even more tightly round her. ‘You’re really busy in here tonight. What was it like at lunch time?’

‘Hectic,’ Flynn squeezed past Posy. ‘We coped fine, though, didn’t we? Apart from a bit of trouble with the cops . . .’

‘What?

‘Just a bit of after hours drinking, what with us still not having all day opening,’ Posy shrugged. ‘We, er, forgot the time. But it’s all right, honest. They were ever so nice about it.’

‘Yeah,’ Flynn grinned. ‘They said they might have to keep an eye on us in future, but we told them once you were in charge there’d be no more of that sort of thing. Anyway, how did the shopping and the girlie stuff go?’

‘Wonderful,’ Lola still clung on to the coat. ‘But are you sure the police were okay? I mean, I don’t want anyone to think I can’t run this place. And I certainly don’t want the police checking up on me every half an hour.’

Flynn shrugged. ‘Trust me. It’ll be fine. Just a bit of teething trouble, that’s all.

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