Page 37 of The Wedding Game

‘Front door.’

‘I got that. Who is it, is probably more what I mean.’

‘Probably Tamara.’

‘Who …?’

‘My best mate.’

‘Your best friend is agirl?’ I didn’t see that coming.

Josh nods, slowly starts moving out of bed, pulling on some clothes. ‘She’s a bit early, though.’

‘Early for what?’

‘Ice-cream tasting. Come on, this’ll be a fun way to spend the morning – eating ice cream for breakfast. We don’t get to do that very often as adults, do we?’

Josh leans over the bed and gives me a quick kiss, before pulling on the rest of his clothes and moving towardsthe stairs, giving me a grin as he disappears round the corner.

I lie still for a minute before getting up and ready. I thought we were having a lie-in. And Josh’s best friend is female. No eligible bachelor for Scarlet in this direction then – she won’t like that at all.

Tamara’s downstairs. She’s also just wandered straight in through the front door without knocking or … Does she have her own key?

I dress, whip on a little bit of make-up and brace myself to meet Josh’s best friend.

The second she starts speaking I can hear she’s posh. But being called Tamara, there were no surprises there, were there? She bounds towards me as I enter the kitchen, embracing me in a too-tight hug and masses of natural icy-blonde hair. ‘Hello-o-o,’ she trills. ‘I’ve heard so-o-o much about you! Josh won’t stop going on and on,’ she says at a hundred miles an hour. ‘Lexie this and Lexie that …’

‘Oh. He’s—’ I stop myself finishing with the wordssaid nothing whatsoever about you.‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ I rally back.

Tamara keeps talking at speed.

Her smile is infectious and her figure is an eye-catching hourglass shape. My gran would have made a comment along the lines of ‘good child-bearing hips, those’, which is what she said about Scarlet, who is similarly shaped, when they first met. She never said that about me, because I’m straight up and down. I waited years for boobs to arrive and, when they did, it was as if they forgot to appear properly.

‘I chose Daphne’s for you, did you like it?’ Tamara asks.

‘Daph— Oh, the restaurant in Chelsea.’ Josh had said a friend recommended it. ‘It was wonderful. Good choice. Thank you.’

‘Phew! I googled for hours and hours.’

‘Yougoogled? I thought you’d been there?’

‘No. Josh asked for help and I wanted to make sure you had a lovely time, so I looked at so many reviews for different restaurants, and proximity to the station and the hotel and …’ she continues, and I cast a glance at Josh. He obviously knows all this information, but I’m finding it just alittlebit odd.

Tamara moves about the kitchen, making two mugs of tea, and after a while, still talking so quickly about the farm and ice cream and asking how Josh and I got together, she goes back to the cupboard for a third mug and a teabag. She’s clearly at home here.

‘I think the lavender might be a bit bold,’ she says, switching the chat to ice cream after she’s decanted some into a variety of bowls for us. ‘I think we should focus on flavours everyone recognises, or a diversification thereof … like this one: blackberry ripple, for example. Tell me what you think.’

She hands me a spoon and I take a bowl. I’m drawn into her captivating presence. This is all happening so quickly. Ten minutes ago I was in bed. I taste some ice cream. The lavender is surprisingly nice and I admit as much.

‘I honestly don’t know,’ Josh says, dipping his spoon in and taking a mouthful from my bowl. ‘It’s a bit like perfume. But it doesn’t hurt to broaden our horizons a bit, and it’s notlike we have a huge production line. It’s small batch and artisan, so we can diversify as much as we like in as many quantities as we like and see what sells out, up at the farm shops that have already agreed to trial us. It’s your baby, though, Tam, so you tell me what you want to do.’

‘It’s only my idea,’ Tamara says. ‘It’s your product.’

Josh and Tamara talk non-stop. Their knowledge about dairy production goes over my head, but their enthusiasm is infectious and I nod in all the right places. They talk in acronyms, like a shared code.

Eventually Tamara stands up at a speed I wasn’t prepared for, hugs Josh and then me, which is sweet, tells me how lovely it was to meet me and that she wishes me a safe journey home later on and hopes to see me again soon.

‘Lexie’s not going back to London just yet,’ Josh chimes in. ‘She’s going to stay for a couple more days.’

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