Christmas with Her Ex(15)

Winsome hoped Lady Geraldine couldn’t notice her nervousness. Now that she’d shaken off Connor, after their tea she was finally going to the boutique to see Max.

But in the meantime this was lovely. Meeting an old friend in the bar carriage, with the pianist now in residence playing some soft, classical music and the occasional Christmas carol thrown in.

Geraldine said, ‘Maybe a set of these would make a lovely engagement gift for my Charlotte and her Nico.’

Winsome shook her head. ‘You said they’d only met yesterday? In Venice? When they both saved that man’s life.’

‘Yes… ’

She wondered if that was a tiny niggle of doubt in Lady Geraldine’s voice.

‘But they’d met before,’ Geraldine said. ‘Years ago, at Charlotte’s hospital. Fate has just thrown them back together and… ’ She sighed again. ‘It’s obviously meant to be. Like your Connor and… what was her name again?’

The conversation paused for a moment as the steward removed the plates that had contained tiny sandwiches and replaced it with a platter of warm scones, adding small silver pots of jam and clotted cream.

‘Mmm… ’ Lady Geraldine eyed the cream. ‘Proper Cornish clotted cream, by the look of that.’

‘Kelsie,’ Winsome said, as she followed her example and picked up one of the scones. ‘Kelsie Summers. But I don’t think she and Connor are about to fall into each other’s arms, like your Charlotte and Nico. She jilted him, in fact, fifteen years ago and I have the feeling he hasn’t forgiven her.’

‘Really?’ Lady Geraldine spread the jam and clotted cream onto her scone and was just about to take her first bite but the conversation became more enticing than the calorie-laden treat. ‘They must have been very young. Oh, do tell… ’

Their voices dropped to a more discreet level until Lady Geraldine turned her attention back to her scone, but her expression was thoughtful.

Their voices became generally audible again. ‘We might be able to help things along,’ she suggested.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The dinner seating is very strict, I hear.’

Winsome knew that for a fact. ‘It certainly is. I’ve tried to change tables at the last minute on some of my previous journeys and it almost never happens.’

‘It’s not the last minute yet,’ Lady Geraldine said firmly. ‘And if we both had a little chat to the maître d’, I’m sure we could persuade him to juggle things a little.’

‘In what way?’

‘By making an extra table available. We’ve still got a lot of catching up to do, haven’t we? We haven’t even started talking about that terrible business with Deirdre Wilkins defrauding the charity so that she could run off to the Maldives with that “personal” trainer of hers.’

Lady Geraldine’s smile revealed how much she enjoyed an occasional bit of juicy gossip. ‘If we asked to be seated together, that would mean leaving both your Connor and this Kelsie and my Charlotte and the lovely Nico alone at their tables.’

Winsome had to admire her friend’s ingenuity. ‘Yes… if we made sure they gave them a table for two or didn’t put another couple to join them at one of the bigger tables.’

‘It would be so romantic, wouldn’t it? Everybody dressed up and the lighting all soft and lots of delicious champagne to add to the atmosphere?’

Winsome smiled. ‘Why don’t we ask our nice steward to go and see if the maître d’ might be able to spare us a minute or two?’

‘Afternoon tea was delightful,’ Winsome assured Connor. Unfortunately he was already back in her compartment when she’d gone to freshen her make-up. ‘Though Geraldine did look unwell.’ Her own stomach felt a little queasy too but that was probably because it was nearly time.

Nerves. She was damnably nervous and she shouldn’t be. It was ridiculous because she was eighty years old. But inside she didn’t feel eighty.

She felt like a young girl on a first date. With a new boyfriend.

Thumping heart—Lord, she hoped it wasn’t angina—and sweaty palms. At least menopause was long gone. She smiled grimly, but in fact she had nothing concrete to go on to assume the man she’d pushed to the back of her mind still felt the same as he had twenty years ago. Even then she’d been sixty, for goodness’ sake. But their eyes had met and something had passed between them.

Her heart gave another flutter and she almost giggled like a little twit. She shouldn’t have had so much wine at lunch but she’d needed the courage to face him.