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Covent Garden in the Snow: The most gorgeous and heartwarming Christmas romance of the year!
Jules Wake
‘A delicious Christmas delight’ – Sunday Times bestseller Katie FfordeThe perfect Christmas romance for fans of Karen Swan.Tilly Hunter has fabulous friends, her dream job as a make-up artist with a prestigious opera company and Felix, her kind and caring husband to be. It looks set to be the most perfect Christmas yet!But when a monumental blunder forces her to work closely with new IT director Marcus Walker, it's not only the roast chestnut stalls on the cobbles of her beloved Covent Garden that cause sparks to fly…Super serious and brooding, Marcus hasn’t got a creative bone in his sharp-suited body. For technophobe Tilly, it's a match made in hell.And yet, when Tilly discovers her fiancé isn’t at all what he seems, it's Marcus who's there for her with a hot chocolate and a surprisingly strong shoulder to cry on … He might just be the best Christmas present she’s ever had.
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HarperImpulse
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2017
Copyright © Jules Wake 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com) | Cover design by Books Covered
Jules Wake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008221973
Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008221966
Version: 2018-02-16
Table of Contents
Cover (#ub9ddc4b8-180f-5442-8fc6-eb4ac55fa2e9)
Title Page (#uacb4ad59-5e13-5f8e-90f8-8bf2d40a8e01)
Copyright (#u5f4eb8e3-bca8-5676-af2e-4ec15362ace7)
Dedication (#u0af5f4a1-8f5d-54f4-b6ce-b941e9499ff4)
Chapter 1 (#u3ef46ea9-f82d-5f7b-9eea-4d740cee169c)
Chapter 2 (#u1d6d6569-2ac0-566d-abe9-675049cbb04a)
Chapter 3 (#ub5f85ab8-bbeb-5577-90bf-05dd4c620bd3)
Chapter 4 (#uef2cd0f1-9257-50ad-962e-2de2f3e31ba5)
Chapter 5 (#uf9f9522c-9f4c-51c4-8702-f6e29ca85348)
Chapter 6 (#u1a622b30-5df0-55ff-bee8-9a5eb2750d39)
Chapter 7 (#u48a6348a-a818-5304-9c2b-08bd2ea7e85b)
Chapter 8 (#u41f79fd6-c3d2-589e-a990-bb988b90de9a)
Chapter 9 (#uda4043bc-4321-5d2a-865b-03cba61a8bf5)
Chapter 10 (#u93e2f71a-b603-565f-86f1-e62461be5828)
Chapter 11 (#ua86f630b-cafe-5a57-bfab-a04dffc7889a)
Chapter 12 (#ue760db9a-609e-5a8e-b671-3b4e36aac18c)
Chapter 13 (#u5add8843-b66f-53af-9bcc-f356744caa16)
Chapter 14 (#u9d596fe9-0d9a-5def-ae9e-ccbd143cf400)
Chapter 15 (#u4d779565-f6b4-52fa-821f-2f57532e9f89)
Chapter 16 (#uacaefbe0-8aaf-5a39-bfbf-b3aab8d1978c)
Chapter 17 (#uad32e777-fd9d-573a-817d-773da681f4ce)
Chapter 18 (#u09c09222-6442-5964-9b8b-c5b97a4ac0ec)
Chapter 19 (#u5a3a783d-8565-5a7b-8a92-c57732764089)
Chapter 20 (#uaebc1263-2a73-5922-8529-335bac28b22b)
Chapter 21 (#u54db4efa-2efb-55ee-b3b2-80fe8b5473f8)
Chapter 22 (#u64614281-5f3f-5d63-b8f9-77c118cd358d)
Chapter 23 (#uf6877d87-d969-5e5e-a707-e67d5c8035b5)
Chapter 24 (#u44f986bd-3537-5edb-a8d4-9b3d7aadf8a6)
Chapter 25 (#u4d22b411-b46b-5a5a-ac13-a1ba0ec1ef0a)
Chapter 26 (#u8f5b1438-c67c-53c9-8cec-5bfac212f123)
Chapter 27 (#u92373bd1-8e8c-573c-8a79-178e1a22a084)
Chapter 28 (#uc54d4738-5679-511a-94e0-e181b4f0824e)
Chapter 29 (#ue5a59c88-1eea-52a7-90ed-3a27d90808ec)
Chapter 30 (#ub917176b-8ab6-5ead-9e16-84fe71de56ac)
Chapter 31 (#ucb8856d4-03c0-5f84-bb46-fc7bdb50b5e2)
Chapter 32 (#uac9fb073-7cde-5775-93a8-4a19dc940b04)
Chapter 33 (#u983c55c6-385d-5b2a-83af-78e617b8f460)
Chapter 34 (#u9c9feaed-4841-5b43-9988-506279944933)
Chapter 35 (#u9c1c1b79-e211-5709-90e3-06641a5cf63c)
Chapter 36 (#uf416f1f4-0291-5327-bc1d-c6d2ebe99e7b)
Chapter 37 (#u8e0397e8-b58c-57ce-9e94-a6ed6b26e2b9)
Chapter 38 (#ud90ec6ad-5b3f-540e-8f04-241283e9cb48)
Chapter 39 (#u1674a48c-f01a-5080-b6a8-a5ea4d959dc6)
Epilogue (#ue8ad9934-29ed-5f4c-acef-94a90e3c0080)
Acknowledgements (#u2e21c522-0a54-56de-a7fc-a18e467231dd)
Keep Reading… (#u7c1cfdb8-1542-5ccf-b4e4-39ed08002965)
About the Author (#u6b27c073-0f72-532d-8cef-90acd892c45a)
About HarperImpulse (#u28b2d7b7-0d62-579e-804d-f2676ef07e5e)
About the Publisher (#u9d31b2f7-49b8-55f8-9758-76e2277c361b)
For my Mum, Di, the real make-up artist and my children, Ellie & Matt, whose love of theatre has been infectious.
Chapter 1 (#u8164f706-3044-517b-bc20-2cb23245d5aa)
To: Felix@nutsmarketing.co.uk
From: Matilde@lmoc.co.uk
URGENT – Possible loo roll crisis
Working late tonight, pls record the Arsenal game and don’t forget loo rolls!!! Can you get some when you go shopping tonight – and remember no gummy bears or chocolate peanuts, we need food we can actually cook with!
And have you seen my book, The Rosie Project, I’ve got a horrible feeling I might have left it on the train.
Tilly x
No! No! Stop! Despite knowing it was probably completely hopeless, I stabbed at the keys on the keyboard, bracelets clinking like maracas as I watched the computer screen. It was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice all over again. With horrifying speed, the number of emails leaving the outbox increased.
Five!
Then ten!
Twelve, eighteen, twenty-one, thirty-three.
‘Oh hell.’ This couldn’t be happening. Emails with the title Urgent – Possible loo roll crisis which should have gone to Felix were busy whizzing off to goodness only knows where.
Jeanie, my boss, glanced up from the wig she was working on.
‘What have you done now?’ she asked, rolling her heavily kohl-lined eyes as she came over to stand behind me. ‘Don’t tell me, you’ve sent another email to Alison instead of Felix? Attached a picture of Dr Who instead of our leading man and sent it to the head of costume at La Scala?’
Give me a make-up palette, a couple of pencils and the right hair-piece, and with a deft touch of shading and brushing, I can transform a sixty-year-old granddad into an irresistible Lothario. Give me a computer and there’s more chance of me splitting the atom in my own kitchen with an egg whisk.
I blame my biospheres; apparently, I have dodgy ones. Mobile phones give up the ghost on a regular basis and I can’t wear a watch without it losing time. Me and technology are a disaster. I just don’t have the patience. Even so, I thought I’d cracked email.
Unfortunately, once you’ve clicked that mouse, there’s no going back. It’s Pandora’s Box all over again. And just like Pandora, how could I resist. After all, what’s a girl, on the wrong side of twenty-nine, to do, when it’s coming up to Christmas and her fiancé seems to be spending more time potting snooker balls than checking out her erogenous zones, and some random person sends her an attachment called ‘Santa Baby’.
It sounded cute and harmless. When I opened the attachment up, it was even cuter still – a very handsome Santa danced across my screen to the tune of jingle bells before dropping his trousers to reveal a full moon of pert buns, flashing a very naughty grin over his shoulders. The moment I moved the cursor to try and close the picture, Santa started zinging about, bashing the edges of the screen with the speed of a demented bluebottle.
Although amusing at first, after the initial dancing, his frozen image didn’t do much but ricochet off the sides of the screen as erratically as a pinball on speed. It was only when I tried to close the thing down that everything went haywire.
Now, as I watched the identical subject lines of the emails racing, like armed and dangerous carrier pigeons from the inbox, regarding the imminent loo roll crisis at home, I guessed something more sinister had been going on.
Flipping dip, the numbers in the outbox were still going up.
Fifty-six, sixty-nine …
Did I even know that many people?
The whirring from the hard-drive under the desk was getting louder and faster, with the intensity of a plane revving up. I didn’t think kicking it was going to help. Any moment now it might take off.
Jeanie pointed one of her neat, shortly trimmed nails at the screen. ‘It’s six weeks until Christmas. What’s that?’
‘Santa baby apparently, except I can’t get him to go away.’
She shook her head. ‘You didn’t open an attaché, did you?’
Now was not the time to correct her casual misuse of the English language.
‘Who? Me?’ I gave her a big smile and a shrug of my shoulders. ‘Might have done. Oops.’
