Page 37 of Slow Burn Summer

She nodded, holding his gaze in the mirror. “I need to try,” she said. “I’m due on the Glynn Weston show this morning, and I’m running horribly late.”

He narrowed his eyes, clearly trying to decide whether she was having him on. He’d probably been told a few tall tales in his time.

“Famous, then, are you?” he said, and she could hear it in his voice, the creep of disbelief. He wasn’t to blame. Her hair was clinging to her sweaty forehead and she was probably purple in the face with panic.

“No,” she said. “I’m not famous. I’m an author. A new one.”

On that, her phone rang. The producer, of course. She clicked it on to speaker. “Where are you now, Kate?”

“I’m in a cab on the way over,” she said, trying to sound calm.

“Good, good. We can shift things around a tiny bit more, but it’s tight. Glynn’s show finishes in twenty minutes. Where are you precisely?”

She stared wide-eyed at the cab driver for the answer, who’d heard every word and suddenly fired the cab off down a side street at alarming speed, clearly on board with this now he’d heard it from someone other than Kate.

“Hang on to your hat,” he half shouted. “I’ll get you there as fast as I can.”

Her mobile went again. Liv this time, in a fit of laughter.

“Kate, what’s happening? I’ve got Glynn’s show on in the kitchen, he’s mentioned you’re having transport issues getting to the studio? He’s talked about the book already, and now he’s giving the nation live updates on your whereabouts. It’s become a whole thing, you’re not going to believe it when you listen back to the show.”

“Oh my God,” Kate groaned, swiping her hair off her dampforehead. “Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, Liv, I’ll tell you later.”

“Hang on, he’s just dedicating a track to you.” Liv paused for a second, then started laughing again. “It’s ‘She Moves in Her Own Way,’ by The Kooks.”

Hanging up, Kate could barely swallow, her mouth sandpaper dry.

A voice message buzzed in, from the producer again. “Kate, if you can get here in the next few minutes you can do the interview from your phone in the lobby. There isn’t going to be time to get you miked up and upstairs to the studio.”

“Bloody joggers,” the taxi driver yelled out of his window, running red lights and swerving bikes, fully into it now. “I’ve not read your book but I have read Glynn’s, cracking they are,” he said, and Kate could only agree. The radio producer called constantly for location updates, the cab driver shouting out street names as he hurled the car around corners, scattering runners everywhere.

“That’s the building we’re trying to get to,” he said, gesticulating over the bridge.

“I can see your building,” Kate told the producer. “I’m almost there.”

The driver took a final detour and screeched to a halt.

“Get out, you can do it!” he yelled, shooing her with both hands.

“Get in here, you can do it!” a tall guy with ear cans and a clipboard yelled from the revolving door, waving her into the building.

There was no time for introductions, just the nearest bench seat to fling her bag on and sit down to talk directly to Glynn, who was ten floors up.

“Kate Darrowby, you’ve made it at last, we hear you’ve hadquite the journey.” Glynn’s Irish voice landed familiar and warm in her ear. The producer stepped away and threw her an encouraging double thumbs-up, mouthing “You’re live,” most probably as a reminder not to swear, despite the morning she’d had.

“Oh, Glynn, I’m so sorry,” she gasped. “It was genuinely the journey from hell, my train just stopped moving. Stopped dead on the tracks! A whole hour just sitting there in a carriage full of soccer fans drinking lager for breakfast, and then there’s some kind of fun run in London, joggers everywhere. All of the streets are blocked. I seriously considered getting out of the cab and running with them, except I didn’t know where I was going and I’d never have made it in these heels. Honestly, I was a fireman’s pole away from complete disaster!”

“I get the feeling you and Bridget Jones might have been very good friends,” Glynn laughed, thoroughly enjoying her nightmare.

“One of the soccer fans offered me a can of lager for my nerves—I didn’t have one but it was a close-run thing, Glynn, I felt like it.”

He laughed down the line. “Oh, I would have so taken that beer.”

“The strangest thing happened while we were stuck there, though,” she said. “I was sitting there in a panic, and I looked across the table at the guy opposite me, and you know when you get that feeling you know someone, but can’t place where from? We both got that.”

Glynn gasped, always front of the queue for the gossip. “Oh, do tell!”

“Well, we got talking, and after a few minutes we realized wedidknow each other. More than that—we were at school together.”

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