Flying Home for Christmas

by Helen Whitaker

Genres: Holiday books; Holiday Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A laugh-out-loud Christmas romcom for fans of Laura Jane Williams and Catherine Walsh!

When her flight home to London is grounded at Portland Airport by a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm on Christmas Eve, Thea is out of options. Desperate to make it back to her family after six long months away, she spends her entire bank balance on a night's stay in the luxury airport hotel.

The only trouble is, when Thea reaches the hotel room, someone has beaten her to it. Logan is desperate to get home for Christmas too, so, putting aside their immediate attraction, the pair agrees to share.

Thea expected to be flying home for Christmas - but now, stuck in a hotel room with a gorgeous stranger, could it be that the universe has other plans?

(P)2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: October 12, 2023

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter Eight

 

‘Casually attractive’ has been usurped by ‘conscious and dressed’ by the time Thea pushes the door open to the Coach and Horses near Waterloo at 8 p.m. Having been felled by a jet-lag ‘power nap’ on the sofa at 4 p.m., she woke up at 7 p.m. and was already so late that she only had time to unflatten her hair and apply make-up over the creases in her face from the settee cushions.

Her body temperature is all over the place as she enters the pub; from Nan-pleasing, too-hot central heating at home, to the bone-saturating December mist outside, then onto the muggy Central and Northern Lines, back out into the cold, and finally the pub, where the combination of other bodies, booze and clanky old radiators makes her instantly sweaty again. The pub – always the same one – is always busy on Boxing Day, and there are layers of tinsel on every surface and flashing lights that compete with the fruit machines for attention. She strains to see someone she recognises through the loose groups of people dotted around the U-shaped bar and then scans the tables in the main room. Even Nicole’s negotiating skills can’t secure them a private area on Boxing Day, because the ebb and flow of peoples’ Christmas commitments can’t guarantee an exact number of people or bar spend. Whoever arrives first (Nicole) has to stake out territory until backup arrives, and that could be in any one of the pub’s three rooms.

‘Thea!’ Nicole shouts to her as she looks over the bottom half of the stable doors that separate the main bar from an oak-panelled side room. She’s being served from the side of the bar and hidden behind another wooden panel. ‘What took you so long? I’ve been texting you. Have you got an American accent yet? Do you say “arugula” instead of “rocket”?’

Thea steps through to join her and laughs. ‘Neither, as they’re both gross. I do say “water” as though there’s a “d” in the middle now though, otherwise waiters don’t know what I’m asking for.’

‘Well, no cause for you to say that tonight, because strictly no soft drinks allowed.’ Nicole proffers a glass flute towards her, before picking up a silver bucket from the bar with a bottle of something in it.

‘Prosecco?’

Nicole shakes her head. ‘Crémant. All the bankers gave bottles of it to us lowly comms people for Christmas because apparently, it’s “better” than Prosecco and “much more affordable than Champagne”. Turns out they’re right. Twats could have given us Champagne though.’ At work, as a communications manager at a finance firm, Nicole orbits a world where hundred-thousand-pound bonuses and ostentatious displays of wealth are the norm. Because she’s technically within finance, she earns the sort of salary Thea can only dream of but compared to the bankers, and judged as such by the bankers, it’s pitiful, because it won’t comfortably support even one child’s journey through private education. Having hit her own earning goal (within publishing, not finance) Nicole doesn’t care and holds a cheerful disdain for the hedge fund managers, bankers and finance CEOs she sends press releases about, in no way jealous of them or bitter that she can’t keep up with the Joneses because, in her words, ‘the Joneses are such tossers’.

‘Love your dress by the way,’ Nicole says now. Thea has dug out the vintage velvet for the second time in a few days. Putting it on, she hoped to conjure up a bit of the spirit of the last time she wore it, an aura of contentment that would rise above any churning feelings about seeing Christian.

‘Yours too,’ she replies. ‘You look magnificent.’ Nicole is in a form-fitting gold dress with cut-outs down the front that show tiny bits of skin. Her personality is pure practicality, but her fashion sense is the opposite. Monday to Friday, nine to five, she has to wear nondescript office wear deemed appropriate for the financial world. Off the clock, she succumbs to every trend she fancies, from floaty coastal grandma dresses to nineties-inspired crop tops. Her current thing is early noughties bodycon, even for an old man pub on a frigid bank holiday.

‘We’re over here,’ she says, ignoring the group of pensioners in the corner that look as though they might have a stroke at the sight of her high-street knock-off Hervé Léger bandage dress. She leads Thea over to a group of small round tables that have been pushed haphazardly together to create a longer one, where she sees Holly, Emma, girl Jo and boy Jo facing out from one side. Opposite them, she recognises the back of Mal, Harry and – here her stomach thuds – Christian’s heads. Everyone’s already arranged themselves into small gossipy groups-within-groups.

She needs to get it over with. Then she’s seen him and it’s done.

As they approach, Nicole discreetly squeezes her hand and lowers her voice to say, ‘He’s here, but you look great and he doesn’t matter. He’s the same. Exactly the same. Still telling that story about the bloke from Kasabian complimenting him on his guitar playing when we were at uni. I mean—’

As usual, Nicole knows how to get her heart rate down far enough to slap a smile on her face and hit the right vocal pitch with her ‘Hello everyone!’ Another swig of the Crémant gives her face something to do while the others trill greetings back. Christian turns around, painfully slowly. He gives her a tilt of his chin rather than an audible greeting.

Thea throws him the biggest, fakest smile she can muster and then squeezes her way around to the other side of the table, sitting down next to boy Jo, with Nicole sitting on her other side. Everyone is talking animatedly but she can tell from the self-conscious flickers of eye contact around her that they’re all wondering how this scene will play out. Thea and Christian’s will-they, won’t-they trajectory was their course’s three-year soap opera, so when they finally got together after graduation, it was widely assumed that their course mates would be getting an invite to their wedding a few years down the line.

But those that didn’t know Christian had a rotating cast of flings on the side anyway. Thea still isn’t too sure who knew what, and part of the reason she wanted to leave is because from five thousand miles away it’s harder to interrogate your occasional friends about what they suspected and/or knew about your former boyfriend.

Thea steals a quick look at Christian while she sips her drink, trying to maintain the illusion of nonchalance while on high alert. She’s tuned in to exactly where he is and who he’s talking to, which right now is girl Jo.

He looks good. From Nicole, who has absorbed the information from the others, she knows that he’s now social media lead at an agency with lots of cool fashion and lifestyle clients, and his signature look must fit right in there: black jeans, boots and fitted T-shirts in a palette of colours that runs no further than from ice white to gunmetal grey. His naturally blond hair, that is – although he has always denied it – ‘helped along’ by a few highlights, is curling at his ears, and his tightly maintained stubble is still in place, but Thea can see two new artful tattoos on his right biceps and a few earrings threaded up his ear that weren’t there eighteen months ago. He’s also sipping whiskey, while the rest of them drink pints or share the bottles of Crémant that Nicole has sold everyone on. With a year and a half’s distance she can see that he’s curated the best bits from all of his pop culture icons, filtered them through an internal algorithm and projected out his ultimate distillation of cool.

Even knowing all this, Thea finds herself feeling hideously uncool in comparison. Same as she’s always felt since she met Christian at eighteen.

‘Sweet little geek,’ he would say in a sing-song tone when they first became friends. By the time they broke up, ‘geeky’ was no longer an affectionate compliment; instead, it was a way to dismiss her opinion, whether about an activity to do at the weekend (most museums fell into this category) or the music Thea liked.

‘Are you all right?’ Nicole asks, nudging her.

Nicole and Christian had never got on. From week one of their course, he’d referred to her as ‘mum’, a putdown that didn’t stop him from mooching off her organisational skills when it suited him. But it did make things tricky when Thea nursed a crush on him for their entire degree, and would have been downright awkward when they got together two years after graduation, if Thea hadn’t pulled the classic arsehole move of distancing herself from Nicole during the three-year relationship so she didn’t have to deal with her boyfriend and her best friend in the same room that often. Or manage Nicole’s reaction when Christian started to regularly put her down in front of people. That Thea thought the solution was to see less of her friend than to get rid of Christian is one more thing she’s ashamed of from their relationship.

Thea nods that she’s fine, even though she’s feeling on the back foot. Christian is making a much better job of not looking in her direction than she is with him. Instead, he’s telling girl Jo about a Brazilian hip-hop band his agency is collaborating with for a sneaker launch. Nicole rolls her eyes as she hears Christian say ‘sneakers’.

‘You’re the one who’s been living in the States. Why is he talking with a mid-Atlantic drawl?’ she hisses.

‘Shhhhh,’ Thea hisses back, but Christian doesn’t or is pretending not to, hear them.

‘And stop looking at him. He’s irrelevant.’

‘I’m trying I promise, it’s just an adrenal reaction. He’s so there, right in my face, and I end up feeling so much lesser, like I always did.’

‘You are not lesser,’ Nicole snaps. ‘Why everyone thinks he’s cool I have no idea. It’s so obviously all front.’ She swigs her Crémant angrily.

‘I know all of this, I know,’ Thea agrees. ‘And I don’t feel like this all the time. It’s so much easier when I’m in another country.’

‘Speaking of,’ Nicole says leaning in, gossip pose engaged, ‘tell me all about Portland. I’m living my vicarious alternative life through you right now. Is it all small-batch beers, work mixers with people who have better tattoos than Christian and hiking to waterfalls at the weekend? Because it looks like that on Instagram.’

Thea can’t help but laugh. ‘Nic, you literally hate all of those things. You’re the only person I know who didn’t force themselves to like beer at uni just to fit in.’

Nicole shrugs. ‘That’s the beauty of a vicarious life. You’re doing it so I don’t have to. I bet you’re in loads of meetings with high-powered content people, aren’t you, and because they’re American they appreciate you being direct, rather than slapping you down because a public schoolboy called Tristan didn’t think of it first?’

‘Is that guy still busting your balls?’ Thea asks.

‘Urgh, I’ll tell you about Tristan and Charles later. You first.’

Thea takes a breath, and contemplates telling Nicole the truth, that the job isn’t what it’s cracked up to be and that Instagram isn’t real life. But even though she’s facing boy Jo and the pub is getting louder, she can’t risk Christian being in earshot of any negativity.

‘The agency is a lot,’ she says instead, not lying exactly but flapping a hand to make Nicole interpret it however she wants, ‘but I love Portland.’ That part, is at least true. ‘I’ve barely scratched the surface of getting to know the city, but the parts I’ve explored, I’ve loved. You’ve got to come and visit, Nic. And it’s so close to so many other places we could go to – Seattle, San Francisco, Yosemite – if I can save up any money. I’ve booked every routine medical I can for while I’m back because even with health insurance through my job I can barely afford to go to the doctor’s.’

Nicole nods in understanding. ‘Those American hospital invoices showing the cost of having a baby that go viral are terrifying. But enough of that. Tell me more stories about Teddy. Are you still at happy hour all the time?’

‘Too often,’ Thea says, helping herself to some more Crémant. ‘Teddy’s supposed to be saving up for his and Jake’s wedding but we spend all our crappy pay at the bar downstairs from the office.’

Teddy rescued Thea at the end of her first week at iDentity when Fuchsia had cut her dead while presenting in her first brainstorm and called her strategy for a social campaign ‘kind of sweet, but disappointingly small scope’. Mortified, Thea had managed to hold out for thirty minutes after the session before going to the unisex toilets to cry. Teddy had been waiting for her next to the sinks when she came out.

‘Fuchsia,’ he announced, while surreptitiously checking they were alone, ‘is a bitch. She has no good ideas in her head, and she will repackage seventy-five per cent of your ideas as her own during the time you work here. Not that one obviously, because it was too small scope.’ He’d grinned at Thea’s collapsing face. ‘JOKING. She will definitely steal that one. However, seeing as you’ve been foolish enough to abandon the UK for a job that pays nothing and has terrible benefits, I can only assume you feel about the US the way I do about the UK and you desperately want to be here, so you need to stick it out long enough to get what you need out of it. And rule one is—’ he handed her a wad of tissues – ‘never let her see you’re upset.’

‘How many rules are there?’ Thea had sniffed, accepting the tissues and pressing them against her eyes.

‘Good question,’ Teddy had replied, frowning slightly as he did the maths in his head. ‘I’d say about fifteen, all of which I will explain to you tonight, at happy hour, where we will go the second Fuchsia leaves for the evening. Stay at your desk until I give you the sign.’

Thea had nodded, twisting the tissue in her hands, and feeling hopeful that even if the boss was a nightmare, not everyone at iDentity was like that.

Teddy had glanced at himself in the mirror and adjusted the collar of his shirt slightly. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt over a vintage band T-shirt with tailored chino shorts. His reddish-blond hair was styled into a rockabilly quiff. ‘You’re from London, right?’

‘Yes, East London. My whole family is there.’

‘Then I think we will be friends. I love London. And I love people who can provide me with sofas to surf on when I finally make it over there even more.’

True to his word, when Fuchsia had slammed her laptop shut at 6.30 p.m., Teddy had waited exactly two minutes (‘sometimes she gets to her car and realises she’s forgotten something’) before gesturing for Thea and the three other content executives to get up, before they ended up in Moon Hare, the bar next door to their office building, that did 2-4-1 cocktails every weekday from 4 p.m. until 8.30 p.m.

Three rounds in, he’d listed all of his iDentity Fuchsia survival rules, as the three other minions nodded along and added their own details.

‘Do everything you can to get into a room with the clients,’ Teddy had told her sagely over the woo woos that had formed their third round. ‘Because then they can see your ideas in person, and she has to let you speak. It’s harder for her to take credit after the fact, even if she will insist that it’s “something you’ve been brainstorming together for some time”.’

‘Urgh,’ said Kim, slurping the last of her drink up her straw. ‘If you want to see cut-throat in action, remind me to tell you about the time Fuchsia told me the case studies in my deck for a palliative care provider weren’t glamorous enough.’

Teddy had cackled and informed Thea that she was now in the circle of trust, which meant that she had to both keep quiet about everything she heard at happy hour while also coming to happy hour at least once a week. That was six months ago and Thea estimated that since then a good quarter of her sporadic salary payments had been spent at Moon Hare.

‘You get used to Fuchsia,’ Thea finishes, realising that the people around her and Nicole are also listening, including girl Jo, much to Christian’s annoyance. ‘Bosses, right?’

‘I’m so jealous that you’ve got a US work visa,’ Girl Jo says. ‘I’d love to spend a couple of years working in California.’

‘I’ll probably be doing more overseas work trips from next year onwards,’ Christian cuts in.

‘Thea’s there right now though,’ says Nicole smoothly, thwarting his attempt to pull focus. ‘The first one of us to get a job abroad.’ She raises her glass in celebration.

‘Not sure I’d fancy the USA full time,’ Christian says in an offhand way. ‘From the news, it looks like non-stop MAGA rallies.’

Nicole gives him a withering look. ‘In Portland? One of the most liberal cities in America? Also—’ she throws a covert look at girl Jo who’d told her – ‘I thought you applied for a job over there and didn’t get it.’

‘The company was pretty boring and mainstream,’ he fires back instantly. ‘Not the sort of place I want to work.’

‘More like, you didn’t have Thea to steal ideas off for the application,’ Nicole mutters. Thea kicks her under the table. She’d only told Nicole after they’d broken up about the ideas that Christian had used to get promoted, which had come entirely from a conversation he’d had with Thea. She wouldn’t even have minded, except that Christian had belittled her ideas at the time – and never even said thank you.

Nicole had minded. She minded enough for both of them.

She gives Thea a look to say ‘OK, I’ll stop’. ‘Do you think the US could be permanent, Thee?’

‘I don’t know.’ The only permanent thing right now is the sense of always feeling like she is hanging on to her job – and therefore her working visa – by a thread. ‘I hope so. It’s nice to be home for a few days though and see my family. And obviously to watch some British telly with a decent cup of tea,’ she adds.

‘Ooh, what do they say about Harry and Meghan over there compared to how the papers cover them over here?’ Nicole asks.

‘Celebrity gossip,’ Christian drawls in a derisive tone. ‘Really?’

With one sentence, Thea is transported back to the final few months of their relationship, when everything she was interested in was dismissed as cheesy or frivolous. She’d feel anxious and sick trying to think of a topic that was acceptable, and she feels anxious and sick now as he pulls the same move on Nicole.

She senses him trying to catch her eye, as though he wants her to do what she’d have done in the past, which is look to him in agreement. It takes all of her willpower not to. For the three years they’d dated, it was a reflex to slide her eyes to him for approval, or, more likely, disapproval. By the end, he barely approved of anything, communicated by a stony expression or an imperceptible-to-anyone-else shake of the head.

Her heart starts to drum. She should stick up for Nicole and tell him to shut up, or roll her eyes at the others to show what an idiot he’s being, but for some reason she can’t. She’s back to being the meek person she became around him.

‘I’m sorry it’s so beneath you,’ Nicole says sarcastically, without any of Thea’s concern about how Christian will react. ‘But people – I – like celebrity gossip and I especially like hearing about celebrity gossip in different countries.’ She turns back to boy Jo, who has a story about his mother’s friend’s French polisher who works for one of the palaces and what he said about the latest royal fall-out. Christian laughs slightly and takes a self-conscious swig of his whiskey at being dismissed.

Thea is still holding her breath waiting to see what will happen next, trying to remind herself that Christian’s feelings are no longer her problem.

She listens to the rest of the anecdote, inwardly trying to get herself back on firmer footing. Nicole squeezes her hand and when boy Jo stops speaking, turns back to her.

‘Ignore him,’ she says in a low voice. ‘What he thinks about anything doesn’t matter. It never did, but it especially doesn’t now. You’ve done so well in moving on so far, so keep going. Eventually you might even meet a hot American. Then you definitely won’t want to come home.’

Thea thinks of Logan and her face starts to turn the colour of her dress. Nicole’s eyes widen. ‘You have met a hot American,’ she shrieks in excitement, getting the attention of everyone around them. ‘Who is he? Is he called Chip or Chuck or Chet or Chad?’

Thea doesn’t want to say Logan’s name. It feels too much like tempting fate. But she has met a hot American, and just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s not a thing. It also feels important to show to everyone here – including yes, Christian – that she’s not still mooning after someone who made her feel as though she should count herself lucky to be with him and she’d never find anyone else.

‘Logan,’ she says, unable to suppress a smile. ‘His name is Logan.’ She makes the mistake of glancing towards Christian to see how he’s reacting to it. He’s smiling at her the way they teach you to in ‘active listening’ sessions at work. Phonily. Thea smiles back, harder.

‘He’s great,’ she says. That seems like too few words to describe him, and she’s dying to tell Nicole everything, but not here and not now. As she looks at Christian again she realises she doesn’t want to use their story as a weapon against her ex. Logan is already more important than that. The secret knowledge that it’s something, and it’s hers, is better than any attempt at proving to Christian that she’s won.

 

She arrives home just the right side of drunk at 11 p.m. Everyone is in bed. She fills a pint glass with water and takes it up to her room. Mum isn’t one of those people who keeps their children’s bedrooms intact as shrines to her offspring, even though her offspring haven’t ever moved out for more than a few months at a time. As such, Thea’s childhood bedroom has been decorated several times since that year in the flatshare. Since going to America, Mum has got caught up in the craze of small-space home office conversions – despite the fact that she’s a nurse and doesn’t work at home – so Thea’s bedroom is now a tribute to tasteful storage solutions complete with labels made using one of those special machines. All of her stuff is still here – along with a narrow console desk and floating shelf housing the books that Mum deemed worthy of display (orange-spined Penguin paperbacks and a complete set of Jilly Coopers with nineties covers that Thea, Nan and Mum re-read endlessly) – it’s just that it’s mainly stored out of sight. The unfamiliarity means she feels a little bit like she’s in an Airbnb, even if it’s one of superhost standard.

Sipping her water, she gets into bed and goes over the rest of the evening. She and Christian didn’t speak much more to each other directly, only ever as part of the wider group, before she and Nicole disappeared to buy a round and spent forty-five minutes catching up with each other at the bar. Still, the evening has left her rattled, knowing how easily Christian can get under her skin and make her feel as though she needs to curate her opinions before sharing them out loud. She feels basic around him in a way she doesn’t in other situations. Well, aside from when Fuchsia is giving her feedback on her ideas.

‘The solution is to not be around him,’ Nicole had told her back at the pub. ‘Well, that and to embrace basic-ness as the positive attribute that it is. I’m basic and I don’t care!’ She’d held her Crémant glass in the air, striking a pose in her skin-tight dress and pouting.

‘You’re drunk, is what you are,’ Thea had replied, laughing.

‘Being a lightweight is so basic, and I still don’t care. I like my middle-of-the-road, but well-paying job and I love my uncool boyfriend—’

‘Seb isn’t uncool.’

‘Ah bless you. He’s so uncool, which almost makes him cool.’ Nicole’s voice had raised at the end as though she was asking a question. ‘No, definitely not cool, but I don’t think the best people are. All praise my totally basic, utterly lovable boyfriend.’ Nicole had grimaced at her glass. ‘Shall we go? I’ve had enough and soon everyone’s going to start expecting me to sort out their Ubers.’

As they’d hugged at the tube station, heading in different directions, Nicole had reassured Thea that she now wouldn’t have to see or hear from Christian for a minimum of two years.

‘By the time the next Boxing Day drinks roll around you might have lived in Portland for almost three years, put down roots, maybe even with this Logan guy.’

She allows herself to think about Nicole’s throwaway comment and then pulls up Logan’s Instagram again. Earlier today she’d read some more of his posts, and those essay-length captions. There had been a lot to get through, and though he mainly talks about the clients’ videos, sometimes he includes a snippet about his own family, which is an instant dopamine hit. She thumbs the screen back to the post she’d reached earlier, and then decides to go back further,. . .