Page 105 of The Cornish Cream Tea Holiday
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think anyone would come. I thought Port Karadow had become a ghost town at the worst possible moment.’
‘Everyone was at the beach,’ Meredith said, hugging her. ‘Watching Ben’s triumph.’
‘It would have been a triumph, if he hadn’t left halfway through.’ Finn gave Thea her third hug, then released herso that Scooter, who had been wagging his tail madly, could bounce up on his hind legs and lick her cheek.
‘Scooter!’ Ben admonished. ‘I thought I’d trained him out of that.’
‘Some things bypass all the rules though, don’t they?’ Finn said, grinning at his friend.
‘What do you mean?’ Thea asked. ‘Why did you leave early, Ben?’
He winced. ‘You didn’t turn up, and when Meredith came to collect her food, she said she couldn’t get hold of you. I wasn’t surprised that you weren’t there: not after the way I’d behaved. But when you didn’t reply to her messages or calls, I started to get worried.’
‘He made me go to Sunfish Cottage,’ Finn added, ‘to see if you were there. Your friend Esme answered the door, but she said she didn’t know where you were. She’d been busy all afternoon, apparently.’ Finn’s raised eyebrows made it clear he knew exactly how Esme had been busy.
‘Esme and Alex are together,’ Thea said.
Ben frowned. ‘They are?’
She nodded, her cheeks burning. She thought of all the humiliations that had piled up on her over the last few days; the misunderstandings and missteps. She glanced behind her, at the open doorway and the fallen beam. The mistakes.
‘I was worried about you,’ Ben said again, forcing her attention back to him. ‘I wanted to apologise to you, anyway, before you went home. I understand why you weren’t there this afternoon, but a small – I suppose arrogant – part of me hoped you might still come.’
‘I hadn’t decided,’ Thea admitted. ‘I didn’t want to distract you. Obviously, the decision was taken out of my hands.’
‘I wanted you to distract me,’ Ben said, with a hint of a smile. ‘I’ve missed you, and I’ve behaved like a dickhead. I’vebeena dickhead. Yesterday, at the harbour, when I turned my back on you – I was pathetic, and I’m so sorry.
‘You had already explained everything, and I didn’t listen. I was still angry about Damien: the way he’d betrayed me, the way they’d both acted, so when Esme told me what you’d said to her, and I added that to the way you’d been talking about Alex … I decided that it was going to happen again. Despite the way you were around me, the way we got on, I didn’t think it was real. Too good to be true, I guess.’ He shrugged, then glanced at Finn and Meredith, who were standing there, grinning at them both. ‘Do you have to be here?’ he asked.
‘You wanted our help,’ Finn said.
‘And you brought us in your van,’ Meredith added. ‘We deserve to see this.’
‘Romantic declarations are my speciality,’ Finn went on. ‘If you want me to—’
‘No,’ Ben said firmly, then turned back to Thea. ‘Meredith told me you got this place? That it’s going to be your bookshop?’
‘If I haven’t completely destroyed it before we can even get the bat man in.’
Ben’s smile kicked up a notch. ‘You won’t have. That beam was on a countdown, anyway. I’m so fucking glad you weren’t underneath it when it fell.’
‘Or Sylvia,’ Thea said, suppressing a shudder.
There was a moment of quiet contemplation, all of them trying not to imagine the worst. Then Ben took a deep breath and said, ‘Thea. I am beyond happy that you’removing here, and – despite the way I’ve behaved the last couple of days – I wondered if you might like to try that film night again? I could cook the lasagne this time. I could—’
‘Have another shower at my place?’ Thea finished, and Ben glanced at Meredith and Finn, his cheeks colouring. Then he turned back to her, and his smile became a grin.
‘That, too. If you’ll have me?’
Thea’s heart thrummed, and her fingers itched to touch him: his hair or his hands, or the collar of his shirt, so she could tug him closer. ‘Yes please,’ she said. ‘I would really like to have you.’ She reached up on her tiptoes, and as his hands came around her waist, she threaded her fingers around his neck, into his hair. Then his lips were on hers, giving her what was, undoubtedly, the best kiss of her life. So what if they had an audience? She would happily declare her feelings for Ben to the whole of Port Karadow, hold an event at her new bookshop solely to talk about how much she liked him. She tuned out the whistles from her new friends, and Scooter’s barking, and gave her mind over to just feeling: Ben’s lips, the soft hair at the nape of his neck, the way his body fitted so well against hers.
When they broke apart, breathless, eyes latching onto each other as if they couldn’t give up contact altogether, Ben’s smile was as wide and confident – asunequivocal– as she’d ever seen it.
‘You gave up your barbecue gig to come and find me?’ Thea asked, remembering the story he had been in the middle of telling.
He nodded. ‘I needed to make sure you were OK.’
‘Well, I wasn’t, entirely, but thanks to you – to all of you – I am now. Very OK. More OK than I’ve been in a long time. How was Marcus Belrose?’
