Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop. Annie Darling

third, lesser-spotted setting, absolute piss taker, the most. ‘I realised they were formatted wrong, then when I tried to correct them, it reformatted my entire thesis and I lost all my italics. Honestly, Nina, my entire life flashed before my eyes.’

      ‘Still doesn’t sound much like an emergency,’ Nina grumbled. She opened her eyes particularly wide. ‘You’ll have to do a chocolate run to make it up to me and get me coffee from the tearooms whenever I’m flagging.’

      ‘You make me do that even when you’re not furious with me,’ Tom reminded Nina, then he held up his hand. ‘Not another word until I’ve eaten my panini.’

      Tom’s five minutes with his breakfast panini were sacrosanct. Nina shot him a fond look as he stuffed bacon and egg wrapped in toasted Italian bread into his mouth. Though he couldn’t be more than thirty, even Tom’s exact age was a mystery, not helped by the fact he dressed like an elderly academic. Today he was wearing a pair of grey trousers that looked like they’d started life in the nineteen thirties, a white shirt with frayed cuffs and collars, a knitted blue tie and, dear God, no, instead of his usual tweed jacket, Tom was wearing a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows.

      His dark-blonde hair was swept up in a quiff and his hazel eyes peered out at the world from behind dark-rimmed glasses, though Nina often suspected that Tom could see perfectly well without them. The whole effect was a hapless, bookish manchild who needed looking after. Certainly Tom had a huge fanbase among their customers, ‘every single one of them post-menopausal’, as Nina had remarked to Posy once, who’d promptly spat out a mouthful of tea. One of Tom’s most devoted admirers, who had to be knocking on for eighty, had once come in with a tie that she’d knitted especially for him.

      Nina couldn’t see Tom’s charms herself, which was just as well. She was easily distracted as it was, without lusting after one of her co-workers.

      ‘So, where’s Posy and Very this morning?’ Tom asked, after he’d swallowed the last of his panini. ‘I expected one of them to pop their head around the office door to reprimand me about my poor timekeeping.’

      As well as his so-called footnotes emergency, Tom had been twenty minutes late. Though the only reason Nina had been on time was that Verity had let an unfed Strumpet into her bedroom and he’d sat on her head and yowled until Nina got up to feed him.

      ‘They’ve gone to a trade show at Olympia to look at gifts and stationery. Posy wanted to check out ideas for next Christmas,’ Nina told Tom. ‘And Verity decided to go with her to make sure that …’

      ‘Posy didn’t come back with five hundred tote bags,’ Tom supplied.

      ‘That was pretty much how the conversation went.’ Nina folded her arms. ‘So, you put out new stock and I’ll serve.’

      ‘We’ll both put out new stock until such time as a customer comes in and needs serving.’ Tom folded his arms too and looked at Nina from over his glasses, which had slid down his nose as they were wont to do.

      ‘You owe me. Footnotes emergency, my arse! You don’t know what it’s been like with you away! Just wait until you hear about—’

      Nina was all set to bring Tom up to speed on the latest and most unwelcome development at Happy Ever After when the door opened, the bell tinkled and the latest and most unwelcome development walked into the shop, bringing in a rush of cold air in his wake.

      ‘—Noah,’ Nina said. Her tone was neither friendly nor unfriendly. It was as neutral as Switzerland.

      ‘Nina,’ Noah replied evenly. ‘Hello,’ he added to Tom as he walked past him, around to the counter and into the back office, then returned minus his coat in navy suit and with iPad held aloft. It was a bitterly cold day and Noah’s cheeks were scoured pink by the wind, his hair tousled by the breeze so he seemed to practically glow with vitality.

      ‘Noah?’ Tom queried, pushing his glasses back up his nose. ‘And you are?’

      ‘He’s just observing,’ Nina said and before Tom could say anything else, she took hold of his tie and pulled him through the first arch on the left. ‘We have some urgent stocking to do in the erotica room. You don’t need to observe this,’ she added to Noah, who raised his eyebrows at the mention of erotica.

      Then, in fierce whispers, she filled Tom in on the spy in their midst. ‘A fox in the henhouse,’ as Tom put it once Nina had finished. ‘This is an absolute infringement of our civil liberties.’

      ‘Posy said that no one was getting sacked. Or at least she said I wasn’t getting sacked,’ Nina said helpfully. She loved Tom like a brother but on the open job market, he was eminently more employable than she was. ‘Anyway, you always tell Posy when she’s trying to make you wear the T-shirt that Waterstones would have you like a shot.’

      ‘I don’t want to work at Waterstones,’ Tom hissed. ‘They wouldn’t have been half so understanding about my footnotes emergency.’

      They heard a distant tinkle then Noah called out, ‘I think you have a customer.’

      It would have been a rare treat for Nina and Tom to have the shop to themselves. Nina loved Posy and Verity unfailingly, unquestioningly, but Tom was her wingman. Her co-pilot. Together they worked the coalface of customer service; Tom charming the customers with his grave but sincere manners then Nina sealing the deal with a bit of heavy-handed persuasion. ‘Go on, treat yourself,’ she would say to any customer dithering over their selection of books. ‘Take them all. It’s nearly payday.’

      But with Noah on the premises, observing, it really cramped their style. Also, Tom was working really diligently. Restocking the shelves in half the time it usually took him. Primly castigating Nina when she texted Paloma to bring her coffee, like she did every morning, because she could just as easily get it herself. Laying on the charm so thick with one customer that the poor woman went into a spontaneous hot flush. And there was Noah lurking behind the counter or peering around one side of the rolling ladder and even skulking in the Regency section to make notes on how Tom was a total boss at shifting books.

      It was almost as if Tom was playing the part of an industrious and conscientious bookseller, so that anyone observing him would think that he was a model employee. Which he absolutely wasn’t. He always talked back to Posy, refused to go into the erotica room unchaperoned, tried to avoid the more enthusiastic romance novel-buying public and, most importantly of all, knew very little about any of the books they had for sale unless they were in the classics section.

      Nina had expected more from Tom. ‘I’ve nurtured a viper in my bosom,’ she told Mattie when she had to walk all the way through the shop to get to the tearooms instead of texting for a delivery. ‘Who would have thought that Tom would be such a suck-up?’

      ‘That’s men for you,’ Mattie said darkly. Saying things darkly didn’t really suit Mattie’s gamine demeanour – she was a dead ringer for Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. But she’d recently returned from Paris where she’d learned the art of patisserie and had her heart broken and the whole experience had left her very unenthusiastic about the male species. ‘You can’t trust a single one of them.’

      Posy and Verity still weren’t back at lunchtime. Posy texted to say that they’d barely scratched the surface of their stationery needs.

      ‘Well, I’m only going to pop out for a sandwich,’ Tom said sanctimoniously. ‘As it’s just the two of us.’

      ‘I’m not going to pop out at all then,’ Nina said, because two could play at that game. ‘I’ll just get something from the tearooms and eat it behind the till. But it’s all right, Tom, off you go. I can hold the fort for ten minutes.’

      Tom hissed as he got his coat and shut the door behind him in what was practically a flounce. Nina heard a soft chuckle behind her and whirled around to see Noah, as if it could be anyone else, leaning against the office door jamb.

      ‘Is he always that keen?’ he asked.

      ‘Hardly