Escape for Christmas by Ruth Saberton Page A

hell-raising rock star with whom Laurence was embroiled in a boundary dispute, and Cal’s page-three-girl ex Fifi, to whom she’d taken a shine. After this, the choice of cake was immaterial. Gemma had slunk away at this point, nobody noticing her as Laurence and his mother hurled insults at each other. She’d soon been in the bakery deciding whether she needed to buy more hundreds and thousands to decorate the Victoria sponges.
    The very same sponges she’d woken up at the crack of dawn to bake before she’d left for yesterday’s book signing, and totally forgotten to ice…
    “Feck!” Gemma leapt out of bed, frantically removing her tracksuit, socks and sweater and hurling them on the floor, and raced into the bathroom. One tepid shower later, she’d probably caught pneumonia but at least she was dressed and ready to head for the house. She had less than an hour to sprint up the drive, ice and decorate the cake and wrap Daphne’s present (which was a Star Trek DVD – the original series, of course, because Daphne had a huge crush on William Shatner in his sixties’ heyday). It seemed just about possible.
    It was a beautiful December morning: the sun had remembered its purpose and was managing to cast some warmth onto the wintery countryside. Still, last night’s heavy frost remained, and as she set off down the drive towards Kenniston (her poor Beetle was still stuck in the mud in Stag Wood), Gemma’s Dubarry boots crunched on the iced mud and cracked the puddles. The lake glittered in the sunshine as though a thousand fireflies were dancing across it, and for once Gemma understood what Capability Brown had been thinking when he’d decided to place it there. It might make the Lion Lodge damp and add an extra twisty-turny five minutes’ walk onto the journey to the house, but it also made a perfect mirror for Kenniston. The house’s upside-down double shimmered in the water.
    It was hard to be cross on such a glorious morning. Birds sang, mistletoe grew thickly on the summits of trees, and even her breath looked pretty as it rose into the blue sky. Gemma was still annoyed with Laurence and Angel – last night’s misadventures made her hot with embarrassment even in these sub-zero temperatures – but she was starting to admit that there was a funny side too. Maybe once she and Cal were away from here and just on their own, they’d be able to laugh about it? Cal generally found the humour in any situation. She just needed to be a more like him and less uptight.
    I never used to be uptight, Gemma thought as she reached the house and scooted around the back to the converted kitchen wing that now served as Cal’s artisan bakery. Maybe it was yet another coming-up-to-thirty thing?
    For once the bakery was quiet. The industrial dough mixer was whirring away to itself and the big bread oven was humming as loaves rose heavenwards. Only Daisy, Cal’s apprentice from the local college, was present. She appeared to be hacking at a giant block of cheddar with a knife and stabbing bits of cheese onto cocktail sticks. Gemma liked Daisy, who was as fresh and perky as her namesake, and she gave her a wave.
    “I can’t stop,” Daisy said breathlessly. “I’m making two hundred cheese-and-pineapple sticks and they have to be stuck in a melon and look like a hedgehog. And there are sixty party sausage rolls in the oven. Not made by us, either. These are from Iceland; she insisted.”
    “Crikey,” said Gemma. So Lady D had plumped for the retro theme after all. She guessed this also meant that the mad rock star and Fifi Fluff-for-Brains were coming too. Angel would be thrilled. This would make great telly.
    While Daisy carried on with her nineteen-seventies special, Gemma washed her hands, put on a white coat, hairnet and cap (the days of cooking in her own kitchen and sampling the mixture as she went along were long gone now that she and Cal had a registered business) and fetched the sponge cake, jam and cream and a