The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts: A feel-good funny romance. Annie Darling

and then she felt guilty for being worried sick when all she should have been feeling was grief.

      ‘Have you any idea what’s going to happen to the shop, then?’ Verity asked tentatively and Posy realised that the four of them had been sitting there silent and lost in their own thoughts for long, long minutes.

      Posy shook her head. ‘I’m sure we’ll know something soon.’ She tried to smile encouragingly but it felt more like a desperate grimace.

      Verity grimaced back at her. ‘I’d been unemployed for over a year before Lavinia gave me a job, and that was only because she said that Verity Love was the most splendid name she’d ever come across.’ She leaned closer to hiss in Posy’s ear. ‘I’m not a people person. I don’t do well in interviews.’

      ‘I’ve never even had a job interview,’ Posy said, because she’d worked at Bookends forever. She’d spent twenty-five of her twenty-eight years on earth at Bookends where her father had been manager and her mother had taken over the tearoom attached to the shop. Posy had learned her alphabet as she was shelving books, and her numbers as she counted change. ‘I don’t have a CV and if I did, it wouldn’t take up one sheet of paper.’

      ‘Lavinia didn’t bother to look at my CV – which was probably for the best, because I was fired from my last three jobs.’ Nina held out her arms for their inspection. ‘She just asked to look at my tattoos and that was that.’

      On one arm, Nina had a trailing design of drooping rose petals and thorns that framed a quote from Wuthering Heights: ‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’

      On the other arm, for a change of pace, Nina had a full sleeve depicting the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice in Wonderland.

      Then the three girls turned to look at Tom because it was his turn to confess his unsuitability for employment outside Bookends. ‘I’m a PhD student,’ he reminded them. ‘I could easily pick up some more teaching or research work, but I don’t want to. I want to work at Bookends. On Mondays, we have cake!’

      ‘We have cake every day,’ Posy pointed out. ‘Look, none of us know what’s going to happen so I suppose we’ll simply carry on as normal until … um, we don’t. Let’s just take today to remember how much we loved Lavinia and—’

      ‘Ah! There you all are! Lavinia’s waifs and strays! Her merry band of misfits!’ declared a voice. A deep, pleasant voice, which could have been described as attractive, if the things that were said in that voice weren’t always sarcastic and cutting.

      Posy looked up at Sebastian Thorndyke’s face, which would have been a very attractive face if it wasn’t always sneering and she forgot that she was meant to be remembering how much she’d loved Lavinia. ‘Ah, Sebastian,’ she snapped. ‘The self-styled, so-called rudest man in London.’

      ‘Not self-styled or so-called,’ Sebastian said in the smug, self-satisfied high-handed way that he’d perfected by the age of ten and which always made Posy curl her fingers into fists. ‘The Daily Mail said I was and the Guardian too, so it must be true.’ He glanced down at Posy, eyes lingering over her breasts, which to be fair were testing the buttons of her dress to breaking point. Any sudden movements and she’d flash her M&S ditsy print bra to the room, which would be highly inappropriate at any time, but especially at a wake. Especially in front of Sebastian, but he’d now stopped gazing at her breasts and was looking around the room – probably to see if there was anyone present that he hadn’t insulted yet.

      You could never tell with Sebastian, Lavinia’s only grandchild. Posy had fallen instantly in love with him when she’d arrived at Bookends at the age of three and first encountered the haughty eight-year-old with a sweet smile and eyes as dark as the bitterest of chocolate. She’d stayed in love with Sebastian, following him around Bookends like a devoted and faithful puppy, until she was ten and he’d locked her in the dank coal-hole under the shop where spiders and beetles and rats and all manner of horrible, diseased, crawling creatures lived.

      Then he’d denied all knowledge of her whereabouts and it was only when her frantic mother was about to call the police that he’d confessed.

      Posy had got over the Coal-hole Affair in time – though to this day, she refused to so much as stick her head through the hatch – but Sebastian had remained her arch nemesis ever since. All through his sullen, sulky teen years, then his cocky twenties when he’d made a fortune developing horrible websites (Zinger or Minger? had been a particular low point, even for him) and now his dissolute thirties when he was never out of the papers, usually with a beautiful blonde model/actress/whatever clinging to his side.

      He’d reached peak notoriety after his first and last appearance on BBC’s Question Time when he’d told a red-faced MP, who was utterly furious about everything from immigrants to green taxes, that he needed a good shag and a cheeseburger. Then when a woman from the audience had embarked on a long, meandering speech about teachers’ pay, Sebastian had drawled, ‘God, I’m bored. I can’t do this sober. Can I go home now?’

      It was then that the papers had started to call him The Rudest Man in London and Sebastian had been playing up to it ever since – not that he needed any encouragement to behave in an obnoxious and completely offensive manner. Posy suspected that the offensive gene made up at least seventy-five per cent of his DNA.

      So, it was actually quite easy to hate Sebastian, but it was also very, very easy to appreciate his beauty.

      When his lips weren’t curled in derision, he still had a sweet smile, still had those dark, dark eyes inherited from his Spanish father (his mother, Mariana, had always had a weakness for Mediterranean men). His hair was just as dark, and coaxed into cherubic curls made for women to wind around their fingers.

      Sebastian was long-limbed and lithe (six foot three, according to Tatler, who insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was one of the most eligible bachelors in the country) and he favoured bespoke suits that clung so lovingly to his body that they were approximately one centimetre away from being obscenely tight.

      Today, in deference to Lavinia’s last wishes, Sebastian’s suit was French navy, his shirt red with white polka dots that matched his pocket square …

      ‘Morland, stop staring at me. You’re starting to drool,’ he said and Posy’s face flared as red as his shirt, and her mouth, which had been hanging open, snapped shut.

      Then she opened it again. ‘I’m not. I wouldn’t. In your dreams!’

      Her protest simply glanced off Sebastian’s Teflon-coated hide. She was working up to saying something really crushing to him, as soon as she could think of something really crushing to say, when Nina nudged her. ‘Posy, have a heart,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘We’ve just come from his grandmother’s funeral.’

      They had. And Lavinia had always been the weak spot in Sebastian’s bespoke caddish armour. ‘Come on, Granny, I’m taking you to cocktails,’ he’d announce as he swept into the shop. He never entered a room when he could sweep into one instead. ‘How do you fancy a Martini bigger than your head?’

      Lavinia had loved Sebastian, despite his many failings. ‘One has to make allowances,’ she was fond of saying when she caught Posy reading about his latest beastly act, whether it was an adulterous affair or his soulless dating app, HookUpp, which had made him millions. ‘Mariana always over-indulged the poor boy.’

      Earlier, in church, Sebastian had read a eulogy to Lavinia that had had everyone roaring with laughter in the pews. As most of the women, and some of the men, had craned their necks to get a better look at him, he sketched a vivid, vibrant picture of Lavinia as if she were standing there next to him. But then he’d finished with a quote from Winnie the Pooh, a book he’d said that Lavinia had read to him countless times when he was a child.

      ‘“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard”,’ Sebastian had said, and only someone who knew Sebastian as well as Posy could hear the break in his voice, a tiny, terrible fracture.