Page 69 of The Twelve Dates of Christmas
“Listen, guys,” said the rep in the plum puffer. “The snow doesn’t look as if it’s going to let up, and I know some of you are worried about driving home.”
People in the group nodded their agreement. Some had come from miles away, and Kate herself had come a fair distance.
“So we think it would be best to head back to the meeting point and call it a day,” said the rep. “We’ll get some hot drinks down us quickly and make a move.”
Nobody argued. Kate had been having such a nice time with Phil that she’d pushed her worries about getting home in the Mini to the back of her mind, but now she was starting to feel nervous.
The fire pit in the yurt had already been extinguished. The hay bales were being neatly stacked to one side of the clearing and the sheepskins were being wrapped and stacked into the back of a Jeep. The hiking group huddled together outside and gratefully drank their hot chocolate.
The reps beetled about, packing things down and emptying the steaming urns onto the ground. A man carrying two bales of hay headed blindly toward a guy rope. Someone shouted, “Watch out!”
Too late. He caught his leg in the rope, and the force of his fall ripped the metal peg out of the ground. It whipped through the air toward where Kate and Phil stood. Phil saw it and quick as a flash pushed Kate to the ground and himself on top of her. The tent peg whipped above them and thwacked into a tree, taking a gouge out of the bark.
In the fall Phil’s jacket zipper had pinched the skin on Kate’s throat and made her yelp. As they untangled themselves, Phil assessed the damage and pulled a face.
“What?” asked Kate, “Am I bleeding?”
Phil shook his head.
“No,” he said. “It hasn’t broken the skin, but...”
“But what?” asked Kate, sitting up and rubbing her neck.
“Well,” said Phil. “It looks like a giant hickey.”
Kate laughed and groaned. “No! Really?”
A few of the group huddled round them to check that everything was okay. They laughed too.
“He’s right, I’m afraid,” said the woman in the Russian hat. “It’s a proper purple hickey!”
“I can’t even take the credit,” said Phil.
“All the love bite and none of the fun,” said someone else.
“I haven’t had a love bite since the nineties,” Kate protested.
“You have one now,” said Phil.
Brilliant,thought Kate. She could just imagine the stick she was going to get from Matt when he saw it. There wasn’t a chance in hell he’d believe it was a zipper injury.
The rep made many pleading apologies for the guy rope incident and begged Kate not to sue. Kate assured him she had no intention of suing the rep or Lightning Strikes for a fluke accident that had resulted in no harm at all.
•••••
The snow didn’t let up all the way back to the meeting point. All that remained at the site of the first refreshment stop was a shallow circle of new-fallen snow where the yurt had been.
By the time they reached the car park, Kate’s gloves had frozen stiff with the snow. It became clear very quickly that Kate’s Mini was not going anywhere. The car park floor was thick with snow and more-prepared people than her were setting to with shovels to clear paths around their wheels. Those with 4×4s looked on with concern at those without.
“I’ll take you home,” said Phil. His Range Rover engine ticked over with a deep purr while Phil helped to clear the car park.
“You can’t do that,” said Kate. “You live in Surrey! That’s miles away.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Phil amiably. “I’m not going to leave you here, am I?”
“And what happens when you get stuck on your way home?” asked Kate.
“They’re closing parts of the motorway,” shouted a man in a brown wax jacket, waving his phone in the air.
