He blinked at her in disbelief as if something that embodied an entire kitchen’s worth of mess could be boiled down to one tiny word. ‘For an army?’
‘Ha!’ She grinned. ‘Funny. Just a little something for us for during the week.’
‘Snacks,’ he repeated, as though computing the word had caused his mainframe to glitch.
And what a mainframe it was…
‘Yes. Snacks.’ Crossing to the oven, she opened the door to inspect the progress of the cupcakes. Another few minutes ought to do it. ‘You know those things you consume in between established meal times to get you through and give you joy? Or do you only consume Rice Krispies, green apples – which are, by the way, the boring-est apples to ever apple – and Waitrose frozen meals for one?’
Yeah, she’d snooped in his freezer.
‘They’re tart,’ he said defensively. ‘And locally sourced.’
Paige would probably have found his defence of green apples – of which she was also fond despite their inherent boringness – endearing at another time but Oliver Prendergast didn’t get brownie points from her just because his shirt looked soft and snuggly and he bought British.
‘And anyway,’ he continued, distracted by his continued perusal of the messy benchtops, as if glaring at them would cower them into some kind of self-cleaning mode. ‘Food is just fuel for the body.’
Oh, dear lord. He was one ofthem. What in the hell had Bella red-velvet-cake-is-life seen in this guy? Yes, he was a hot, posh Brit and there was no doubt he and Bella made a striking couple but he acted like he was eighty years old living from one bowel motion to the next. She was amazed there’d been no Fybogel in his pantry.
‘Well, that’s very sad.’
‘I like food.’ His brows knitted together in a serious V as he dragged his attention from the kitchen havoc. ‘Just not… obsessively.’
Spoken like someone who’d never had to think about a single thing he put in his mouth unlike someone with hips and thighs and ass that so generously made a home for extra calories in case they ever found themselves in a series ofSurvivor.
‘Hmm, okay. I bet I can change your mind about that. How about we start with some French toast?’
‘Oh.’ He shook his head. ‘I usually just have…’
‘Rice Krispies?’ Paige cocked an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, they’re all gone. The milk’s pretty low too. I’ll buy some more when I hit the supermarket later. Take a seat, it won’t take me a jiffy to cook up a batch.’
Clearly caught between his manners and the mayhem, Oliver hesitated slightly before giving into the chaos. ‘You want some juice?’
He turned to the fridge and Paige watched him as he noticed she’d done a little redecoration. ‘What the…?’
Paige pressed her lips together to stop the laughter rising in her throat from spilling out. Oliver was staring at her handiwork aghast. A magnetisedGet Shit Donepad was the least horrifying thing attached to the previously pristine surface. Four crayon drawings belonging to her niece and Bunky’s older sister by three years – Lulu – sat pride of place attached by fridge magnets.
Lulu was as cute as her name implied but slightly obsessed with witches from fairy tales. The drawings were very good, if a littledramatic.Thankfully her parents – Paige’s brother Wilf and his wife Marissa – were unfazed by their daughter’s artistic expression and gave her carte blanche to explore her talents.
Although Wilf did often joke that one day Lulu would come into her higher power and then they’d both be frogs.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Paige said on a little laugh as Oliver turned startled, questioning eyes on her. ‘Lulu – that’s my niece, she’s the artist – did them for me for Christmas and made me promise I’d take them with me.’
Given Paige was also a little leery of being turned into a frog one day, she had no qualms about currying favour with Lulu.
‘And I didn’t know,’ she continued, ‘if you’d have any fridge magnets so I brought some of my own.’
Oliver glanced at the magnets as if seeing them for the first time which was fair enough – the art was scarily dominant.
They were a collection of the gaudiest, tackiest fridge magnets she could find at the charity shop. One from Blackpool featuring the pier circa 1970s, a Lady Di button magnet from the eighties, an Alton Towers Christmas offering from the nineties and, the pièce de résistance, a retro Arsenal fridge magnet from the noughties that she’d sourced online because Bella had described in great detail how very,verymuch Oliver Prendergast despised Arsenal.
He stiffened the second he saw it, his jaw clenching, and Paige suppressed a grin as he adjusted the drawings so he could pluck it off the fridge. Turning to her, he shook his head. ‘Absolutelynoway. This stays here over my dead body.’
The clench of his jaw told her he was seeing red. Arsenal red, no doubt.
Paige lifted an eyebrow. ‘You’re not a Gunners fan?’ She couldn’t give a fig about football but this reaction had definitely been worth it.
‘Man U all the way.’
