Page 21 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
Anna is awakened by her phone’s persistent ringing. And a pounding in her head. Thegløgghas a lot to answer for. Not least her actions of the night before. Which she lay awake replaying and worrying about for much of the night before finally passing out. Embarrassment can be very exhausting apparently. She hadn’t hung about when they got in, making her excuses and beelining for her room, thankfully a floor above him now, rather than on the other side of the wall, having moved her things up.
Having stressed about it most of the night, she’s decided she’ll take Jamie at his word and relax about The Kiss. He seemed OK about it being a drunken thing.
That kiss though…Anna’s fingertips drift to her lips, not for the first time, either, as she recalls the way he nipped at them, and parted them and?—
The phone starts ringing. Again. With a groan, Anna reaches for it and with a single eye looks to see who it is. Katrine, her commissioning editor and friend. Strange. She normally texts.
“God morgen,” Anna says, trying to sound bright and as if she’s been up for hours working on an article Katrine’s expecting.
“Anna?Er det dig?” Is it you?
“Of course it’s me, Katrine. You rang my phone.”
“Noooo, is ityou? In the news?”
What is she talking about? Both of her eyes are open now. A crack in the curtains tells her it’s snowing again. Seriously? More?
“What do you mean?”
“Check BT-online. It looks like you. Are you in town?”
“Hang on,” Anna says, deliberately not answering that last part. Katrine will string her up if she’s in town and hasn’t let her know.
Anna opens the Copenhagen newspaper’s app on her phone. She’s only kept it on there to cross-check any news she hears about Denmark in the UK press. That’s all. She only checks it now and again. Ish.
As she opens the app, and the lead stories come up, Anna takes a second to compute before having a little choke. Oh nonononono.
For once, the paper is leading with a feel-good story. The headline reads “Copenhagen Snowmance”. The rest of the screen is filled with a photo. The background is the Tivoli arch, lit up with its tiny lights, and its big, shiny Christmas star hanging under it, right over the heads of a couple. He has his arm wrapped around her waist pulling her in, she has her hand on route from jaw to neck, her foot lifted in the moment. Their faces aren’t clear as they are firmly fixed to one another in their kiss.
Anna’s eyeballs are popping out of her head and her stomach has slid down to her arse area. This is a nightmare. So much for forgetting it happened, or for staying incognito.
“Anna?” Katrine’s voice comes from the phone.
“Errr,” is all she can manage in response, but Katrine is happy to do the talking. “I saw it this morning when I woke up and I said to Rune, that profile looks like Anna, and she wears a hat just like it. And I keep looking at it and I’m sure it’s you, with your blonde bob. Are you here?”
She has no choice but to be honest. “Sort of, but only fleetingly, sort of fly-in-fly-out, no time to see anyone, and then snowmageddon started and I got stuck, so here I am.”
Thankfully, Katrine takes this at face value and doesn’t hold it against her, at least not at this point. This, it turns out, is because she has far bigger fish to fry. “And who, Anna, is that that your face is stuck to?”
Anna really doesn’t know how to explain this away, either, so can only go with the truth. “He’s the guy who rents my house here. We had too muchgløggat the kayak parade and in Tivoli, and this happened. It was an accident.”
“An accident?” Anna completely understands why Katrine is sounding sceptical.
After a deep sigh, she confesses to her friend, one of the very few people she has ever told what happened. “I saw Carl and Maiken and had no escape. And thegløggmade me think this was a smart way to hide, which in my defence did work, they didn’t spot me… But this”—she looks back the photo—“rather screws that up a bit.”
“Does Carl read BT?”
“Daily.”
“Yep, you’re screwed,” Katrine says.
“Not what I was wanting to hear.”
“What now?”
“I’ll keep hiding now until I get a flight back out and then I’ll vanish, and it’ll all blow over,” she says, far more confident than she feels.
“The paper is trying to trace you. They want to know who the couple is,” Katrine tells her, then adds, “I wonder if there’s a reward?”
