Read Well Groomed for Free Online

adults,’ Tash counted. ‘Three sprogs and Linus.’
    ‘Ah, well, I know Linus likes a few chasers with his three o’clock bottle.’ Niall held up his hands with a big grin and downed a scotch in one. ‘You okay there, Pascal?’
    ‘Hmmph.’ Pascal – who had descended into understandable sulks sometime between peeling his eightieth and ninetieth sprout – looked up from his parsnip purée, grey eyes narrowed. ‘Lunch, he is ready in cinq minutes .’
    ‘That’s great, so it is.’ Niall was looking slightly worried. ‘Tash . . .’ He cleared his throat and jerked his head towards the stairs door.
    Halfway up them, they went into a huddle.
    ‘How many plates do we have exactly?’ he whispered.
    Tash covered her mouth, eyes widening as she gazed at him.
    ‘Six settings,’ she muttered through her fingers.
    ‘Will that stretch to ten?’
    Biting her lip, Tash shook her head. She knew her stepfather’s love of formal dining. Having so nobly set to work creating a lunch at which he was supposed to be a guest, and having cooked it with far more skill than she could ever have hoped for, Pascal would now want to sit at the head of a beautifully laid table, playing host with his usual bonhomie and aplomb, as though he was back in his Loire Valley manoir hosting a banquet for thirty.
    They had the table – a grand, creaking, stone-topped one which Hugo Beauchamp had given Niall as a moving-in present and Tash generally used for spreading out her art equipment. And they had enough chairs – just, if they used the sofa, the bathroom laundry chair and the three garden chairs out of the shed, she worked out. But their crockery and cutlery would never stretch. Why hadn’t she thought of that before?
    ‘Okay.’ She scratched her head, thinking fast. ‘You dash along to the Olive Branch – they’ll have finished serving lunch by now. Beg and borrow what you can – serving stuff too. Give Ange a present as a bribe – anything you can find. Or tell him I’ll paint a picture of the pub as thanks. Steal if you have to. I’ll set up what I can here.’
    While Niall, still pulling on his shoes, dashed along the lane, Tash rushed around the cottage to the bemused speculation of her family, pulling a duvet cover out of the laundry cupboard and spreading it over the table in place of a cloth, and ramming bits of the already bedraggled Christmas tree into a chipped vase between the two stubby candles in the centre.
    ‘Do you think she’ll stop for a moment?’ Alexandra hissed at Sally as Tash raced around in search of napkins. ‘Only I want to give her this present.’ She opened her coat a fraction.
    ‘Oh, there it is,’ Sally giggled. ‘I was wondering what had happened to that. Don’t show it to Matty, for God’s sake. He’ll start lecturing about one being for life, not just for Christmas.’
    ‘Oh, that’s so sentimentally English. This is a French pup, darling.’
    ‘You smuggled it?’ Sally balked.
    ‘No, no – well, not exactly.’ Alexandra glanced at Pascal who was whipping something in the kitchen now. ‘This is one of Rooter’s pups.’
    ‘Rooter?’
    ‘Great big hairy thing that one of Tash’s admirers gave to her while she was staying with us in Champegny.’
    ‘Yes, I remember.’ Sally thought back. ‘Looked like a large pampas grass arrangement on legs.’
    ‘And Rooter was none too pretty either.’ Alexandra cuddled her coat closer.
    ‘Was?’
    ‘Poor old darling breathed his last in Pascal’s herb garden last month.’ She looked rather tearful. ‘He went out with a bang – literally. He was on the job with one of my spaniels at the time. Poor darling, I was rather attached to the old thing. He’d been with us almost two years.’
    ‘Don’t tell me that’s the result?’ Sally pointed to her stomach in shock.
    ‘No, no – far too early for those to pop out, although God knows who we’ll palm that litter off on this time. The whole valley is populated with