Stevie walked up the street, somewhat shakily, her heart thumping and her head spinning. Every so often she put her fingers to her still-tingling lips.
What the hell had just happened?
She’d kissed Nick Saunders, that’s what had just happened. And it had felt good. But then he’d pulled away and had told her he shouldn’t have kissed her and Stevie had gone from euphoric bliss to embarrassed despondency in the space of a heartbeat.
Why had he done that – kissed her, then rebuffed her?
And more to the point, why had she let him? Kiss her that is; she could hardly do anything about the rebuffing bit. He was far too grumpy and withdrawn to have a relationship with, no matter how attractive she found him, or how much she kept thinking about him. He clearly had no interest in her, because if he had, he’d had plenty of opportunities to ask her out.
She pushed open the tea shop door and marched inside, determined to think no more about it.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ Cassandra demanded after taking one look at Stevie’s face. ‘You look like you’ve lost a tenner and found a pound.’ Then she paused and her eyes widened. ‘You know, don’t you?’
Stevie blinked. ‘Know what?’ She slid Betty’s case behind the counter; she’d take it upstairs later.
‘Oh… er… nothing.’ Cassandra pretended to be busy by wiping down the perfectly clean countertop.
‘Clearly, there’s something. What should I know, that I don’t?’ Stevie persisted.
Cassandra bit her lip and refused to meet Stevie’s gaze.
‘Spill,’ Stevie demanded.
‘Er… it’s Allegra Johnson,’ Cassandra began, still wiping. If she carried on at the rate she was going, Stevie anticipated she soon wouldn’t have a countertop left.
‘Allegra Johnson?’ Stevie repeated.
‘I’ve… er… been keeping track since she came in this morning.’
‘Keeping track of what?’ Stevie felt like a parrot. All she seemed able to do was to echo everything Cassandra said. For some reason, she felt like she had scrambled eggs for brains; she couldn’t seem to think straight. Her fingers touched her lips again. She could almost still feel the pressure of his mouth on hers.
‘TripAdvisor,’ Cassandra said.
‘Eh?’
‘TripAdvisor.’
‘I heard you the first time, but I haven’t a clue what you’re on about,’ Stevie said.
‘Allegra Johnson has posted a review on TripAdvisor.’
‘So?’
‘It’s about us.’
‘Us?’ His lips had been incredibly soft, yet firm at the same time…
‘Peggy’s Tea Shoppe,’ Cassandra said, patiently.
Stevie finally paid proper attention to what Cassandra was trying to tell her. ‘Come again?’
‘She’s left a review. A really, really bad one,’ Cassandra said.
The shop was practically empty, so Stevie pulled out a chair at the nearest table and sat down feeling sick, and tried to think about it logically.
OK, she reasoned, everyone gets a bad review now and again. Even Corky Middleton. He used to get them on a regular basis but they never seemed to do him any harm. In fact, he used to revel in them, celebrating each one with a scathing tweet and ridiculing the reviewer. Obviously, Stevie couldn’t do that and neither would she want to (very unprofessional), but seriously, how much harm could one negative review do to her business?
‘She’s got all her cronies to post reviews too. Just like she did the last time.’
Stevie’s ears pricked up. ‘The last time?’ She was doing the echoing thing again.
Then finally Stevie understood what Cassandra was getting at, and realised why her friend was so concerned. Everything was starting to fall into place.
‘Why, exactly, did the previous owners sell up?’ she asked slowly, her heart doing a slow plummet into her boots – but she feared she already knew the answer.
Cassandra, having finally stopped wiping, came over to the table, patted her on the arm, and sat down. ‘Because they had so much bad publicity,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the details, just that Allegra said some horrible things. Apparently, there was a rumour about food poisoning or something. Allegra claimed she’d eaten there and was really ill afterwards.’
‘Did she eat there?’ Stevie couldn’t see Allegra eating anything, let alone eating in a café.
Cassandra sighed. ‘I’ve no idea, but the next thing I heard was that the owners were selling up.’
‘What was this place called before I bought it?’ Stevie asked.
‘The Coffee Pot.’
Stevie nodded. ‘Thanks. I’ll go and look it up.’ She got out of her seat, feeling like she’d been run over by a bus (again), and made her way upstairs. With one foot on the bottom step, she turned to Cassandra and asked, ‘Where’s Betty?’
‘She was here a minute ago,’ Cassandra replied. ‘Maybe she’s gone upstairs.’
The living room was empty and Stevie was quite relieved to have it to herself. She needed a minute to think, to absorb Cassandra’s revelation. She blamed herself in a way, although even if she had been more diligent and had looked into the history of the previous business, there was no way Stevie could have realised the significance of what she had just learned. She would simply have taken the news at face value and would have put it down to poor hygiene or food preparation on the part of the former owners, and she wouldn’t have been at all concerned because she knew her own standards were very high indeed. Therefore, she believed she would never have had the same issue.
Sitting at her computer, Stevie read Allegra’s review of Peggy’s Tea Shoppe first.
“Disgusting”. “Rats”. “Big, black ones”. “And it isn’t just me who has seen them, my friends have, too”.
Stevie frowned at the screen. Rats? What was the woman talking about?
She jumped, almost falling off her chair when a warm, furry body wound itself around her ankles.
‘Peggy! You nearly gave me a heart att—’ She stopped talking and stared at the cat.
Bugger. Peggy… Stevie slapped a hand to her forehead. Allegra must be referring to the cat.
‘Oh, Peg,’ Stevie whispered. ‘What am I going to do with you?’
Despite her best efforts at keeping the feline out of the café, Stevie knew if Peggy was determined enough, the cat would find a way in. And those sills in the bay windows were simply pleading to be sprawled across. Stevie understood that.
Stevie also understood that if it wasn’t the cat, it would have been something else Allegra Johnson would have found to complain about. And Stevie suspected if the woman hadn’t anything vaguely concrete to run with, then she would have made something up. Allegra Johnson clearly had some kind of grudge against Stevie and her tea shop.
Turning back to the screen, Stevie typed in “The Coffee Pot” and waited for the page to load. When it did, it didn’t make for very comfortable reading. Those poor people. The two ladies who had owned it had been hounded and harassed, and although the online news report (yes, the story had made it into the local newspaper) was relatively factual, Allegra’s comments were quite inflammatory.
“…could have died…”
“…still feeling nauseous weeks later…”
“…bowels will never be the same again…”
‘They went to live in France,’ Betty said, right in Stevie’s ear.
For the second time in ten minutes, Stevie nearly jumped out of her skin. Placing a hand over her poor thudding heart, she said, ‘Don’t creep up on me like that.’
‘Pish. You could do with a bit of excitement,’ Betty retorted, then her voice softened. ‘But not this kind, eh?’ she added, jerking her chin at the computer.
‘You know about this?’ How come everyone knew except her?
‘Cassandra told me about Allegra’s latest nonsense,’ Betty said. She sat down. ‘I don’t think anyone actually believed her about The Coffee Pot, but what can you do? With the Environmental Health people called in, and with that woman walking around like she had the plague, those poor ladies didn’t stand a chance. I hear they’ve got a guest house now. They just upped-sticks and left.’
‘Did you used to come here when it was The Coffee Pot?’ Stevie wanted to know.
‘Sometimes, although it was more of a sandwich and snack place than a cake and pastry place. They did a mean fry-up, though.’
‘I just don’t understand why the woman has got it in for me? What has she got against The Coffee Pot and now Peggy’s? It’s not as though we’re selling anything bad,’ Stevie said.
‘In her eyes, you are. She’s a bit manic about healthy eating and doesn’t approve of all-day breakfasts. I’ve heard on the grapevine she’s now waging war on sugar,’ Betty said. ‘It’s her kids I feel sorry for. Imagine going through life being denied a muffin. Everything in moderation, I say.’
‘That explains her reaction when she caught her daughter in here today,’ Stevie said. ‘But it was a bit over the top.’
‘It certainly was,’ Betty agreed, getting to her feet. ‘The issue now is, what are you going to do about it?’