The Little Vintage Carousel by the Sea: A gorgeously uplifting festive romance!. Jaimie Admans

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СКАЧАТЬ village but I didn’t want to get too close. It looked like the kind of place you might walk into and never be seen again.’

      ‘Thanks, that’s even more comforting.’ I know he’s only joking but I narrow my eyes when he grins again. ‘Not all of us are lucky enough to get a perfect little cottage with a landlady who makes us mac and cheese, you know.’

      ‘It was an amazing mac and cheese too. I’d ask her for the recipe but I doubt I’d get further than getting the cheese out of the fridge without burning the cottage down so it’s safer if I don’t.’

      ‘I’d say your inability to cook is endearing but I’m even worse. I doubt I could get further than a bowl of uncooked macaroni and a block of cheese. Sounds good, right?’

      ‘If you ever want to cook for me, that’s the cottage.’ He leans forward and reaches his arm past me so I can see where he’s pointing. I follow his grease-covered finger towards the first cottage on the cliff, the closest one to the road where I stopped on the way down here, a delightful little picture-worthy stone building with a grey slate roof, surrounded by a lot of greenery and a garden hidden behind a rhododendron hedge. Even from this distance, I can see that it’s just as perfect as I’d pictured it, although it’s difficult to concentrate with his arm so near, and the movement has sent a wave of his tropical shower gel towards me, along with the sexy scent of oil on skin and an undercurrent of sea air.

      ‘I mean it, you know?’ He suddenly turns serious. ‘You’re welcome to come over anytime. If your hotel is anywhere near as bad as it looks from the outside, or if you want a nice view or a bit of company or something …’

      ‘Thanks, Nathan.’ I cut him off because I’m surprised that he’s offered, that he genuinely seems keen to see me, and that he doesn’t think I’m a nutter for coming here. I should probably say something else but I’m a tad flustered.

      He looks like he wants to say something else too, but he doesn’t. ‘How long are you staying?’

      ‘A couple of weeks,’ I say, deciding it’s best to keep it vague. ‘It’s kind of a working holiday. As long as I’ve got a laptop and an internet connection, I can work anywhere. My boss probably only gives me a cubicle in the office so she can check I’m not slacking off. She’s let me bring my work with me. She was really understanding about the whole phone thing. She thought I should get it back to you as quickly as possible.’

      ‘Nice boss.’

      How can I tell him? He’s just told me he’s not interested in a relationship, and I’m definitely not, so what am I going to say? I’m here to write an article about whether you’re going to fall in love with me or not? The answer is already a resounding ‘not’, so what am I here for? To make up an article about us falling in love? Neither option makes me sound any less off my rocker.

      ‘Well, it’s my own fault for being so careless.’ It takes me a moment to realise he means the phone when he looks at me. ‘Or so distracted.’

      I go red for no reason.

      ‘To be honest, I’m kind of enjoying being without it. Pearlholme is the kind of place you come to disconnect, and this little old thing …’ he pats the pocket of his dungarees ‘… is perfect for that. It can phone, it can text, it can take an awful picture, and it’s got no internet, which is a welcome break to be honest. Do you know, I actually slept soundly last night rather than tossing and turning for ages over something I’d just read on Twitter or watched on Facebook.’

      ‘You don’t have the apps on your phone.’

      ‘So you went through my apps but you didn’t go through my browsing history? You’d make a terrible investigator, do you know that?’

      He’s smiling as he says it and he doesn’t seem annoyed with me. ‘I didn’t even think of that. I didn’t want to invade your privacy too much.’

      ‘You didn’t want to open my browser and find I was into unicorn porn or something like that?’

      I raise an eyebrow. ‘Is that a thing?’

      He laughs. ‘I have no idea. I promise I’m not into anything weird. If you had opened my browser, you’d have found Google News and searches for how to make a Pot Noodle more interesting.’

      ‘Can you make a Pot Noodle more interesting?’

      ‘It’s really a case of with or without the sauce packet. Some bloke on YouTube tried putting it in a sandwich, which just looked … ick. And I’m always being careful not to strain something with my adventurous cooking.’

      Surely it’s not normal to just sit here and smile at someone? Everything about him makes me smile. I feel comfortable sitting with him, and I’m suddenly so, so glad I came. I know it won’t lead to anything more, and I don’t want it to, but I’m just glad to have met him. He feels like someone special.

      I shake myself. I have to stop it. I’m here to further my career, nothing more. ‘So, are you okay? You said on the phone that you felt better than you had for months. Had you been feeling bad?’

      He gives me a sideways glance and his dark eyes turn soft. ‘I can’t believe you heard that. Or cared.’ He looks out at the sea again. ‘Yeah, I hate London. My last job was restoring an Edwardian organ in the basement of a London museum. I felt like I hadn’t seen daylight in months. I couldn’t have asked for a better job at a better time than this.’

      I glance at the giant tent behind me. There’s not much of the carousel to see. He hasn’t opened the tent from this side, so all that’s on show is the greyish white canvas of the marquee covering and enough space for Nathan to work around it. ‘Do you get many jobs like this?’

      ‘It’s been a while since I was sent anywhere quite as perfect as this, but yeah, I go out to fix things in situ if I can. Our workshop is on the outskirts of London, so we get stuff brought in there or shipped to us, or we go out to jobs like this one. There’s six of us there and we all have different specialities. My boss is one of the leading antique restorers in the country, so people go to him with whatever they need doing and he decides which of us is best suited to the job. I’m lucky that I mainly fix big old things because I’m more likely to get to go out to jobs. I’m probably sixty per cent away and forty per cent in the workshop. The guys who fix up furniture and small easily moveable things are almost always in the workshop.’

      Which explains his absence on the train for weeks at a time. It’s easy to tell how much he likes being outside. It’s something I’d never really thought about until I wandered through Pearlholme, but I don’t get much fresh air either. I’d always thought I got enough on the walk from my flat to the tube station every day and the lunchtime walks to the nearest sandwich shop, but there’s a difference between London fresh air and real fresh air.

      I can’t help looking at his hands again as he leans down to draw mindless patterns in the sand at his feet. ‘Do you know they’ve invented these really clever hand coverings for people who do messy jobs … called gloves?’

      Instead of being offended like I feared he might, he laughs, a warm sound that shakes the wood we’re sitting on. ‘I need to be able to feel what I’m doing. See this?’ He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the small metal thing he was rubbing earlier. ‘They’re the bearings that allow the carousel to turn, and because it’s so old, they’ve got gunk all around them where it isn’t supposed to be. I’ve got to be able to feel СКАЧАТЬ