Read Christmas At The Cupcake Cafe for Free Online Page B

amazing.’
    Austin heard the emotional tone in her voice and cursed internally. He hadn’t wanted to think, hadn’t wanted to even consider, what it meant if he was offered a job here – and it seemed to be shaping up to be more than that. Not just a job; a real career; an amazing opportunity. Given the state of banking at the moment, he was lucky to have a job at all, never mind a career that was going places. And the idea of making some real money for once, instead of just bobbing along … Issy had the café, of course, but it was hardly a big earner, and it would be nice for the two of them to do some lovely things … take a nice holiday … maybe even … well. He didn’t want to think about the next step. That was a bit too far in the future. But still. It would make sense, he told himself firmly. For whatever lay ahead. It would make sense to have a nest egg, to have a cushion beneath them. To be secure. Together.
    ‘Well, they havebeen very nice …’ he conceded. ‘How’s Darny doing at school?’
    Issy didn’t want to say that she’d seen him in the playground in the company of a teacher being marched quickly to the gate. She tried not to get too involved in the school, even though she worried about Darny, the smallest kid in the year, and the only one without even one parent, almost as much as Austin did.
    ‘Hmm,’ she said.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘Making Christmas cake. It smells amazing!’
    ‘It smells foul,’ said Darny down the speaker phone. ‘And she won’t let me taste it.’
    ‘Because you said it smells foul,’ said Issy, unarguably. ‘And it’s about twenty per cent proof, so you can’t have it anyway.’
    ‘Austin would letme have it.’
    ‘No I wouldn’t,’ came the voice down the phone.
    ‘When we have proportional representation,’ said Darny, ‘I’ll have more of a say around here.’
    ‘If you get on to teen voting rights, I’m hanging up,’ warned Austin.
    ‘No, don’t …’ said Issy.
    There was a silence as Darny gave the phone a rude gesture, then, muttering darkly about how things would change around here when teens got the vote, he grabbed a bunch of bananas and disappeared upstairs.
    ‘Has he gone?’ said Austin eventually.
    ‘Yup,’ said Issy. ‘He seems in a pretty good mood tonight, actually. Maybe school wasn’t as bad as all that.’
    ‘Oh good,’ said Austin. ‘Thanks, Issy. I didn’t really think puberty was going to kick in till a bit later.’
    ‘Oh, it’s not too bad yet,’ said Issy. ‘He’s still talking to us. I think that goes altogether soon. Although his trainers …’
    ‘I know,’ said Austin, wrinkling his nose. ‘I’d kind of stopped noticing the smell before you came along.’
    ‘Hmm,’ said Issy. There was another pause. This wasn’t like them at all. Normally there was no end to the conversation. He would tell her what was up at the bank; she would mention funny clients or whatever it was Pearl and Caroline had had their latest fight about.
    But what she was doingwas the same as always. For him, life seemed to be becoming very different.
    Issy racked her brains to try and think of something to talk to him about, but came up short – compared to New York, her day had been the usual: talking to sugar suppliers and trying to convince Pearl to let her hang some tinsel. And the rest of the time … well, she couldn’t say this, because it felt like it would be unfair on him, that she was blaming him for being away, or turning into one of those awful clingy women she didn’t want to be, always moaning at their other halves. So she couldn’t tell him that pretty much all she’d been thinking of, all that was filling her head, was how much she missed him and wanted him home and how much she was dreading him uprooting their lives just as, for the first time in years, she felt she was coming into safe harbour.
    So she didn’t say anything at all.
    ‘So what’s up?’ said Austin, confused. Getting Issy to