Cathy's Christmas Kitchen: A heart-warming feel-good romantic comedy Read online

  Cathy's Christmas Kitchen

  A heart-warming feel-good romantic comedy

  Tilly Tennant

  Books by Tilly Tennant

  Worth Waiting For

  Cathy's Christmas Kitchen

  The Waffle House on the Pier

  The Break Up

  The Garden on Sparrow Street

  Hattie’s Home for Broken Hearts

  The Mill on Magnolia Lane

  The Christmas Wish

  The Summer Getaway

  The Summer of Secrets

  An Unforgettable Christmas Series

  A Very Vintage Christmas

  A Cosy Candlelit Christmas

  From Italy with Love Series

  Rome is Where the Heart is

  A Wedding in Italy

  Honeybourne Series

  The Little Village Bakery

  Christmas at the Little Village Bakery

  Hopelessly Devoted to Holden Finn

  The Man Who Can’t Be Moved

  Mishaps and Mistletoe

  Mishaps in Millrise Series

  Little Acts of Love

  Just Like Rebecca

  The Parent Trap

  And Baby Makes Four

  Once Upon a Winter Series

  The Accidental Guest

  I’m Not in Love

  Ways to Say Goodbye

  One Starry Night

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Hattie’s Home for Broken Hearts

  Tilly’s Email Sign-Up

  Books by Tilly Tennant

  A Letter from Tilly

  Worth Waiting For

  The Waffle House on the Pier

  The Break Up

  The Garden on Sparrow Street

  The Mill on Magnolia Lane

  The Christmas Wish

  The Summer Getaway

  The Summer of Secrets

  A Very Vintage Christmas

  A Cosy Candlelit Christmas

  Rome is Where the Heart is

  A Wedding in Italy

  The Little Village Bakery

  Christmas at the Little Village Bakery

  Acknowledgements

  *

  To the people who cared for us when we needed it most.

  One

  Not for the first time Cathy wished her mum had written this stuff down. Her gaze swept the worktop as she tied a band into her honey-blonde hair to get it out of the way. Whenever she did this there always seemed to be one stubborn, greying lock that wanted to escape, and it did so now, falling into her eyeline. She blew it out of the way, not bothering to try to tether it back with the rest of her waves – it would only come loose again anyway.

  Flour, eggs, butter, baking powder… all the usual ingredients, but Cathy knew there was a secret ingredient – if she could just remember what it was. But the days of her mother writing it down were long gone, along with the days when Cathy could have watched more carefully and made notes. There were other recipes, of course – there were books and books, recipes all over the internet – but they wouldn’t be the same. They wouldn’t be her mother’s recipe.

  With a heavy sigh she went over to the kitchen table and sat down. Her eyes were drawn to the window, where the November sun streamed in and lit the room with the sort of clean, fresh daylight that came only with the brightest and coldest of winter days. The tiny kitchen of her even tinier cottage was a little dated and in need of redecorating, but it was as welcoming as any, and right now it was warm and cosy, while outside a hard frost glinted on the ground.

  The cottage stood on the outskirts of the northern town of Linnetford, a small path through a rose garden leading to its wisteria-garlanded front door, and had once been the dwelling of the tollkeeper in the days when travellers had to pay to use that stretch of road. The road that ran alongside was now covered in tarmac rather than cobbles, and it was far quieter these days as most people travelled through Linnetford and the surrounding Staffordshire countryside on the motorway or ring roads. In fact, it wasn’t often the road outside Tollkeep Cottage was troubled by much traffic at all, and it was certainly never troubled by the tailbacks that plagued the nearby A road.

  Cathy had been for a brisk walk early that morning, soaking up the views, marvelling at how much prettier their grimy old canal path looked with an azure sky above it. And every so often she’d almost make some comment along those lines to her mum, but then she’d remember that her mum wasn’t there and the loneliness would threaten to overwhelm her again. But of course it was silly anyway because her mum’s wheelchair wouldn’t have made it along the towpath – they hadn’t been walking that way for years, not since her mum had been confined to that chair. Still, she would have liked it.

  She turned back to the ingredients lined up on the worktop.

  ‘Nutmeg!’ she said with a sudden smile. ‘See, Mum, I worked it out after all.’

  But then her smile turned into a vague frown. She was talking to her mum as if she was here again and that really had to stop. Spending her days talking to an empty house wasn’t good for her. She needed to get out, make new friends, find new things to do with her time now that her duties as a carer were over – but what? She’d spent so long caring for her mum she hardly remembered what sort of things she’d liked doing before.

  There was cooking, of course. They’d both liked cooking. They especially liked baking and had often baked together, right from when Cathy had been a little girl barely old enough to reach the tabletop. She’d stood on a chair, tongue poking from the corner of her mouth as she mixed the batter, her mum hovering close, soft brown eyes the exact same shade as Cathy’s own watching every tiny wobble, ready to catch her if she fell. Cathy’s arms would ache and the batter would be lumpy but her mum would put it into the oven for her anyway and they’d eat the cake together and Cathy’s mum would pretend it was delicious. And then, one day, Cathy’s practice paid off and what she made started to become delicious for real.

  She pushed herself up off the chair and returned to the worktop, reaching into a high cupboard to look for the nutmeg. ‘Come on, Cathy – snap out of this!’ she admonished herself. She knew her mum wouldn’t want her moping around forever.

  And the truth was, Cathy was sick of moping, even though she didn’t know how to stop. It had been three months since her mother’s death but it had been no shock, and she’d had plenty of time to prepare herself. Even so, it had still caught her off-guard, still left her with a hole that she didn’t know how to fill. She’d got herself a little job now on the flower stall of a local market, but it was only for a few hours a week and it still left her alone a lot.

  Relatives and acquaintances had all offered advice on how she could fill her time, ranging
from joining a gym to putting herself on Tinder, but none of it had particularly appealed, and some of it had sounded downright horrifying. As for friends, she didn’t have many of those – tending to her mum’s every need hadn’t left a lot of time for socialising over the last few years. At thirty-eight she was almost beginning to feel too old to be starting again like this, rebuilding a social life and forging new friendships at a time when most women her age would have had all that firmly established. And as for hobbies, she wasn’t much good at anything really.

  She weighed out the flour and tipped it into the same stoneware mixing bowl her mother had used for all the years Cathy had lived in that house with her. That mixing bowl was older than Cathy herself and she certainly had no idea where it had come from. Her mother had always said it made the best cakes and Cathy was inclined to agree. Then she measured out the baking powder and the butter and counted out the eggs before putting the oven on to heat.

  That was when she heard the letterbox clatter the arrival of the post and went to look. She was still getting letters to do with her mother’s estate, not to mention various other official documents that she had to deal with, so she’d found it was better to go through the post as soon as it arrived in case she needed to make any lengthy phone calls before office hours were over for the day. She’d had to do all that alone too, and at times the sheer volume of official things she’d needed to sort had felt utterly overwhelming. She’d found she could cope slightly more easily if she didn’t let it build up.

  Picking up the little bundle, she took it back to the kitchen and sat at the table for a moment while she opened everything. It was all fairly routine and boring – nothing to worry about today. But right at the bottom of the pile was a leaflet from a cancer charity advertising a coffee morning at St Cuthbert’s – the local church – and asking for attendees, as well as donations of cake and hot drinks.

  St Cuthbert’s… it was funny. Cathy had fond, if rather vague, memories of that old church. She hadn’t been there for years, but before his death, her dad had been a regular. He’d even persuaded Cathy’s mum to go to the odd service too, which had been some feat because, as she’d got older, Cathy had come to realise that religion was one thing her mum was no great fan of. After the death of her father, neither Cathy nor her mum had ever set foot in there again, but Cathy still had those flashes of memory – of holding her dad’s hand as they filed in, the tuneless singing of hymns, the feeling of the smooth cold wood of the pews as they took their seats, and the smiles of old ladies after the service as they patted her on the head and told her dad what a pretty little thing she was.

  Those memories gave her a melancholy smile now, as they always did, though she thought less and less of them the older she got. Nowadays, she wondered whether half of what she remembered was even true at all. She’d been five years old when he’d died and so five years old the last time she’d been to that church service, and memories that old couldn’t always be reliable.

  Cathy read the leaflet carefully, glanced back at her mixing bowl and then put it down again. She wouldn’t know anyone and it would be terribly awkward. What if everyone there already knew each other? What if nobody talked to her? What if she spent the whole time sitting alone and watching everyone else chat? It would be horrible and certainly wouldn’t do much to make her feel better.

  But then, what if the people there were lovely? What if, by going, she helped someone, even if it was only in a small way? Wasn’t helping the one thing she did really well? She’d cared for her mum for all those years, after all, and if she didn’t know how to do anything else, she at least knew how to do that. Wouldn’t that give her the sense of worth she was so sorely missing now that her mum – her reason to get up in the morning – was gone? Wasn’t it worth the risk? Surely the people who went to the coffee morning couldn’t be that dismissive and uncaring that they’d sit by and see her there alone without coming to talk to her? They must be nice people if they were there for charity, surely?

  She glanced at her mixing bowl once again and smiled slowly. She’d cared for her mum and she’d done a decent-enough job, but maybe that wasn’t the only thing she was good at. She didn’t have fancy qualifications, but everyone had always said she sure could bake.

  Two

  ‘Not that I’d ever want you to leave me, of course…’ Fleur dumped a large vase of carnations onto the display stand currently positioned at the entrance of her market stall, French for Flowers. She’d called it French for Flowers because her name was Fleur, and someone had once pointed out the irony that she ran a florist. Before that it had been called Moody Blooms but then someone in the next town had decided to call their florist Moody Blooms and, on a whim, Fleur had decided to change hers. That was a long time before Cathy had started working for her. ‘But you could do a lot worse than set up your own stall in here,’ she continued. ‘There’ll be one coming up when Ernest retires and closes his key-cutting business.’

  Wiping her hands on her apron, she turned to face Cathy.

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’ Cathy glanced around with more than a touch of anxiety in her expression – even though it was unlikely anyone would be listening in on their conversation. The other stallholders were busy setting up for the day themselves or chatting to staff and early customers; they certainly didn’t have time to stop and strain to hear what Fleur and Cathy were talking about. She lowered her voice anyway. ‘I’d be in competition with the cake stall that’s already here.’

  Fleur hauled another vase filled with pink roses to the display. ‘So?’

  ‘They’d hate me.’

  ‘I reckon there’d be room for the two of you. Anyway, if their cakes are as good as yours then they’d have no reason to hate you. Half the time they sell out before the end of the day so I think there’s trade enough to go round.’

  Fleur sniffed hard. It was always cold in Linnetford’s old stone market building, even during the summer, and Fleur’s nose was always running. There had been a brief but doomed campaign by a few stallholders to move the market into a newer and more comfortable location, but most of the townsfolk were so fond of the old place – which had been a commerce centre during the Industrial Revolution, where goods were bought and sold by the gentlemen of ‘new money’ and the town made its wealth – that the bid was quickly snuffed out. And so Linnetford kept its draughty old market building, complete with vast glass roof panels, scrolled iron joists where pigeons nested and constantly plagued the caretaker, and wheat-coloured stone walls. The few who had complained were invited to leave and find themselves shop premises if they didn’t like it.

  ‘Last thing they’ve usually only got the factory-made ones they buy in left over; nobody wants them like they want the fresh ones.’

  ‘I couldn’t bake enough in my little kitchen to last all day on a stall either.’

  ‘Maybe you could if you got help. Or even hire a kitchen space… I mean, I don’t know how you’d do that but you could look into it.’

  Cathy shook her head. ‘Even if I wanted to, I don’t know the first thing about running a market stall. And I like working with you anyway.’ She paused, a worried expression casting a sudden shadow over her face. ‘Unless you don’t want me to work here anymore?’

  Fleur started to laugh. ‘Of course I do, you daft lump! I was just saying people would queue round the block to buy your cakes!’

  ‘I don’t know about that…’

  ‘Trust me – they would.’

  Cathy shrugged, though she was blushing from the compliment. ‘I like baking for friends, when there’s no pressure. If I baked to make a living I’d get so stressed about it, I’d end up cocking every recipe up and making everything taste horrible.’

  Fleur poked a finger between her dark braids and gave her head a lazy scratch as she studied Cathy for a moment. And then she seemed to shake herself and shrugged. ‘You’d know that better than anyone else.’

  Cathy wasn’t sure how to respond to this, so she didn’
t. She guessed that Fleur was touching on a lack of confidence in her abilities that even Cathy knew everyone could see plainly. She wasn’t offended by the comment; if she was totally honest with herself, she felt it was probably a fair appraisal.

  ‘Do you want the gerberas out front too?’ she asked instead. ‘It won’t be too draughty for them?’

  ‘Oh yes, they’re hard as nails are gerberas. Stick ’em out – they won’t mind a bit of cold.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ Cathy said as she cut open a parcel of vivid orange flowers and dropped them into a large vase, ‘they look so tropical you wouldn’t imagine they’d survive a British winter.’

  ‘A bit like me then,’ Fleur said with a raspy laugh. ‘Looks can be deceiving. Although…’ she continued, ‘sometimes I dream of a nice mild Barbadian winter. I’ve got my dad to thank for that, moving us to England without even asking me.’

  ‘I thought they’d come to England when you were very little?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Fleur tipped a bag of coins into the till for the day’s float.