She realised then that her life in the past six years had focussed on work, work, work. It had kept her days structured, kept her busy, and she’d felt safe in its day-to-day confines, but this evening was just lovely, spending a little time out away from the shop, however much she loved her job. And her world was suddenly full of maybes, of new possibilities, all stacked up for her. She still wasn’t sure if she was scared or excited, but she knew she had to give it a try.

46

It was Friday evening, just before closing, when a call came from Adam.

‘Emma, we’ve had a bit of a nightmare here at the hotel. I really need your help.’

‘Okay, what’s happened?’

‘A mouse, or probably a whole family of bloody mice by the looks of it, got into the storeroom and had a right go at all the mini chocolate boxes for the turndowns. The little bastards – excuse my language, but they’ve made a right mess – nibbled through the boxes, pooped everywhere. We’ve had to throw the lot out – over a hundred boxes in all. That was our stocks to take us right up to Christmas. Rentokil are here right now, or we’ll be having Environmental Health on our case next.’

‘Oh, how awful, the little devils.’ Mice loved chocolate – she’d had an incident in The Chocolate Shop soon after she had bought it, when they munched their way through two very expensive packets of the chocolate callets. She had been extremely careful with storage and keeping traps down ever since.

Damn, Emma had been looking forward to a few hours’ chill out with Max, who was probably heading up from work right now. It had been one hell of a week and her wrists were aching from crafting chocolates every day as it was. She could feel a very late night coming on, and was racking her brains, wondering if she had enough supplies to make an extra two hundred or so chocolates out of the blue.

‘Okay. Leave it with me, Adam. I’ll do my best. I can get you, say, the first fifty boxes for now and some more in a few days’ time, because I’ll probably need to buy in extra supplies, and being the weekend …’ She let the words drift.

‘Yeah, I understand. But anything you can do to help will be appreciated.’

‘Do you have enough for this weekend’s turndowns?’

‘Doubt it. We really can’t use any of them. There are droppings everywhere, even if they don’t appear to have been eaten.’

‘Ah, okay. Well, I have some chocolates in the shop that I can box up for you. Will a dozen or so boxes do for now?’

‘Yeah, that’d be brilliant. Don’t want to disappoint the guests. They love your chocolates – it’s become part of the stay, now.’