The Present: The must-read Christmas romance of the year!. Charlotte Phillips

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СКАЧАТЬ capable of hefting a few boxes about,’ she said. ‘I do not need your superhero powers today.’

      ‘You piss about with basic common sense safety rules often enough, and you will break something, probably your own head. Simple fact,’ he said, exasperated. ‘And it is not going to happen on my watch. Stop arguing, and give it here.’

      He held her obstinate gaze until she gave in with an eye roll and handed over the second box.

      ‘It’s just a couple of bits,’ she called after him as he negotiated the loft ladder in half the time and none of the danger.

      ‘Where do you want these?’

      ‘Just in the kitchen, please. I’ll get on with the next lot.’

      Exactly what he was afraid of. He dumped the stuff on the ground floor in record time and arrived back in the attic just as she was poking about next to a teetering stack of boxes and junk.

      ‘Look, anything you want shifting, just ask will you? That mountain of stuff is one wrong move away from burying you.’

      She looked up at him in surprise, obviously lost in thought, and he tried to disconnect his brain from the thought that, for some reason, on her, scruffy looked alluring. She was dressed for the dust today, no expensive jeans in sight by the look of it. Her wavy hair was caught up in a ponytail from which it was already escaping. She wore a faded pink T-shirt, jeans with paint marks on them, and an ancient pair of Converse.

      ‘Okay,’ she said, looking the mountain of stuff up and down. ‘Thanks. I hadn’t really thought of a good way to dismantle all this.’

      ‘No kidding.’

      ‘I’m trying to find something that will give me a lead on the Christmas decs. There must be something, right? So far I’ve found a ton of teenage photos of me – STRAIGHT in the bin. Old clothes. A load of old saucepans. Nothing from anywhere near as far back as the decorations. The thing is, I’m going one box at a time here, and I haven’t a clue what I’m really looking for.’ She flipped the top open on the nearest box and peered inside. ‘I could still be here next bloody Christmas at this rate.’

      She glanced up at him, and somehow managed to combine a smile with a frown. For no good reason, he decided on impulse that the attic floor could wait an hour. What the hell, he had time on his hands, and an hour was hardly going to affect his usual policy of getting the work done so he could make his good next escape. He still had a week before he needed to get ready for his next excursion. Snowboarding in Austria.

      ‘Sounds to me like you need a system,’ he said. He leaned past her and took the highest box down from the next row, the one that had been most on the brink of falling on her head, and put it down next to her. Slit the top open with his Stanley knife, and turned back to lift down the next one.

      ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Have a quick check what’s in them, and if it looks like it might be in the ballpark, we investigate further. If it’s nothing, then you can deal with it later. I’ll just shift the boxes around and we can narrow it down between us. And if it happens to be your baby photos, I’ll just have a coffee break while I check through them.’

      She laughed.

      ‘I’m surprised Gran hasn’t already subjected you to them over coffee.’

      ‘Actually, she has. You had a great line going in crazy hair.’

      He dodged sideways as she threw an old cushion at his head. It landed on the floor behind him and sent up a cloud of dust.

      Fifteen minutes later, and things had speeded up considerably.

      ‘How come you do this kind of work?’ she asked, pulling a couple of garish orange table mats out of a box. ‘Bloody hell, look at these. Like a seventies’ acid trip.’

      As she checked and dismissed them, he stacked boxes to the side of the loft hatch, and every so often took a few at a time downstairs to free up space.

      ‘House and garden maintenance? Because it can be picked up and put down, and I can make money doing it wherever I happen to be,’ he said.

      ‘I was kind of expecting something more like “I like working outside, and the creative side is great”,’ she said.

      He shrugged.

      ‘It maybe was that when I started out. The garden design was more of a thing back then. Things change over time; you know how it is.’

      The initial satisfaction of building up a successful business from scratch, doing the work he loved, had gone into a nosedive when Sean died, from which it had never really recovered. She was looking directly at him now, sitting cross-legged next to the most recently discarded box. A lock of hair had escaped from her ponytail, and as he watched she blew it out of her face. He avoided her gaze. He had absolutely no desire to get into his work-life balance, with her, or anyone else.

      ‘Most people say, because I had a talent for it at school,’ she persisted. ‘Or because carried on from when I was doing a summer job, or because I like working with my hands and running my own business.’

      He stopped work for a moment and sat down on one of the joists.

      ‘My father is a carpenter,’ he said, ‘so I kind of fell into that trade because of him. I wasn’t crazy on school, and I loved watching him work when I was a little kid. He used to take me out with him on jobs in the school holidays. It kind of slotted into place when I finished school, I went out with him, learned on the job. And the garden stuff is like a natural add-on to building fences and decking and sheds. I did like being outside, you’re right, and for a while I was really flying with the regular hours, I built the business way up, I had more work than I could cope with.’

      ‘For a while?’ she said. ‘What about now?’

      She had gone back to sorting through some old junky-looking ornaments now, not looking at him. The business had been the last thing on his mind since Sean had gone. Beyond the fact that it funded the distraction he needed, his interest in it was pretty low.

      ‘Now it’s more about what I do in my own time. I’m not going to lie on my deathbed thinking: I wish I’d fixed a few more fences. Not when every day could be my last. So I work from one trip to the next. I’ve got a few local clients like Olive, and I have a guy who covers for me when I’m away. And I pick up other work ad hoc. I can do that anywhere I go, people always want house maintenance work doing, it’s a good source of instant cash if you get stuck.’

      ‘You mean you work to pay for your holidays?’ she said. ‘That’s no big deal, we all do that.’

      Not to the degree that he did.

      ‘When I finish one trip, I think that’s it for a while, but before I know it I just get restless and start looking for the next thing, the next place, or whatever. I work for a bit, and then get away again.’

      Get away really was the right description. The distraction just never lasted long enough.

      ‘And what kinds of places do you go to?’

       Anywhere that doesn’t make me look back and make comparisons.

      He pulled down a couple of black bin liners and added them СКАЧАТЬ