Sweetly Isolated (The Swallow Barn Cottage Series, Book 1)

Shut Up and Bake!

Author's Note:

And here's the second half of today's double update. We're almost there, my loves! I'm so grateful for all of you who have been with me every step of the way! Love, love you all!

K. xx

***

Christmas Day

Tina opened her eyes and stared at the window in her bedroom.

"Happy Christmas, Tina," she said.

She lay for a few minutes, in some odd numbness, her head empty - and then three narratives blasted in her brain at the same time. The DCI demanded to let him finally interrogate the suspicious widow; the space pirates had moved their orgy outside, and sea water was getting in the places where it wasn't welcome; and the events in the script were playing leapfrog and needed to be restrained and organised.

Tina pressed her hands over her ears and groaned.

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

"Shut up!" she shouted. "I don't want to write any of you! I'm heartbroken! I want to cry and feel sorry for myself! No, you know what? Sod it! I want it to be three days ago, and I want to wake up and have coffee and shag! I want– John! Do you hear me?! I want John!"

She took a shuddered breath in, rolled on her stomach, and pressed her face into her pillow. It was now just her pillow - but it smelled of him.

"I want John," she mumbled and thumped her head to the pillow a couple of times.

This obviously did nothing. Maybe, if she just lay like that for a few hours, it would hurt less. Alternatively, she'd have an aneurysm from all the daft writing that was blaring in her noggin like a cruiseship horn. She groaned and rolled off the bed. She obviously hadn't prepped the Sage the previous night - because you were crying in a bath until your head hurt so much you could hardly open your eyes, you moron - so now she had to spend another ten minutes washing the carafe and loading the filter. She plugged her ears when the Sage attacked the beans with a feral growl, and finally the divine aroma of coffee danced in the air.

When she poured coffee in her mug, she realised she was in a pickle. Everything - and she meant, everything - reminded her of him. She'd more or less cleaned up the dishes the previous night before she'd submerged herself into the Boiling Bath of Bawling. But there was his plate in the sink! On the shelf she could see the mug he'd been drinking his morning coffee from! When she'd taken cream from the fridge, she'd seen the containers with left-overs! He was everywhere!

Tina fled.

In the living room the space under the Christmas tree was empty. She'd always put the presents from Lyn and the girls under it the night before, so she could find them in the morning of the Christmas day. Tina felt her eyes sting, and she looked away.

She sat down on the sofa because she couldn't bring herself to be at the table in the kitchen where they'd had so many meals together - and then she jumped off the sofa, because he'd slept on it. And the previous night they'd had some sort of an explosive, mad sex on it - and she hadn't known she could feel so desperate, so hungry, and so excruciatingly tender at the same time!

She plodded to her study, the only non-John space in the cottage, and heavily sat in her swivel chair. She just needed to work, she told herself. 

Work was good. Work was what she did. She was Evelyn Cox - and some other, so far unnamed writer of space pirate porn. 

Writing was what she did. She was nothing without it.

Silence.

That was all she was getting.