Page 105 of The Twelve Dates of Christmas
Kate reached the Hemingways and something in her memory clicked.
“A Moveable Feast!”she cried out. “It’s Hemingway!”
Edward pushed a tome back into place.
“What?” he said.
Kate ran her finger along the row and picked out Ernest Hemingway’s memoir,A Moveable Feast. She let it fall open and sure enough, the book was hollowed out through the middle, with a key sitting at the bottom.
“How on earth?” asked Edward, scratching his head.
“It was the steamer trunk,” said Kate. “That was the first clue. Hemingway accidentally left a steamer trunk at the Ritz in Paris andthey kept it for him in storage, and when he found it again later it was full of his old notebooks from the 1920s. That was the catalyst for his memoirs. I can’t believe I remember that,” she said more to herself than to Edward.
“A Moveable Feast,”said Edward.
Kate grinned and offered the book to Edward. He shook his head.
“You do it,” he said. “You found it. Well done.”
He smiled at Kate. He really did have a lovely smile; what a shame it only made an appearance at the curtain call. Kate slipped the key into the lock on the final box and retrieved the key to the exit. Edward held out his hand and Kate shook it.
“It was lovely to meet you,” said Edward quietly. “Under different circumstances...”
“What do you mean?” Kate asked.
“You can tell your boyfriend I didn’t lay a finger on you,” he said.
“My boyfriend?” Kate echoed.
But Edward gently lifted the key out of her palm, slipped it into the lock, and turned the key. The door clicked open and Edward slipped out through it and was gone before Kate could argue or get an answer.
Kate left the study and followed a corridor that led out into another bar. Edward wasn’t in it. She approached the bar and ordered a drink.
“I seem to have lost my date,” she said to the woman behind the bar.
The woman smiled.
“Happens to the best of us,” she said.
“I don’t suppose you saw a tall willowy chap in a blue stripy jumper pass through a moment ago?”
“Good-looking chap? Shaved head?”
“That’s him!”
“He looked like he was in a hurry,” said the woman. “Headed straight for the exit. Did you scare him off or chase him off?”
“Neither,” said Kate. “I don’t think.”
But she had a horrid suspicion that Richard might have had something to do with it.
Kate took her drink and wandered through to the bar nearest the street exit. She sat and waited for Richard to finish. She hoped she was wrong about him. But who else would have said something to Edward? And what on earth must he have said to make Edward view her as though she were an infectious disease?
Twenty minutes later Richard’s team entered the bar. Richard was making jokes and they were all laughing as though they’d been friends since college, not strangers on a date night. Richard’s date seemed enthralled by whatever story he’d been telling, and she looked up at him doe-eyed and attentive. Kate fumed.
Richard spotted Kate and left his new friends—with much protestation on their part; he kissed Echo on the cheek, and with a wink that could have meant something or nothing he strode across the bar and plonked himself on a stool to face her.
“What say we get out of here and go somewhere a little more intimate,” said Richard.
