Christmas at Lilac Cottage - Holly Martin Page 0,117
could easily stay in bed for two more days. No one would care anyway.
Suddenly she remembered the proposal carving that she needed to do before tomorrow night. As she had agreed to help Maggie with a lot of the setting up for the ball the next day, she couldn’t lie in bed feeling sorry for herself any longer.
She got changed into slightly warmer clothes and went down to the freezer.
She opened the freezer door, the bloody thing sticking again, and looked inside. Once the proposal carving had been delivered she would have to defrost the whole freezer and clean the door and the floor before she put any more carvings in there. The pool of frozen water in the freezer was dangerous.
She looked at the three blocks of ice she had clamped together the night before and sighed. In her haste to rectify the situation, and with her mind still on Henry and Daisy, she hadn’t put the block on top of her trolley. As it was too heavy to lift on her own and there was no way she was asking Henry to help her move it, she resigned herself to carving it in the freezer. The diamond ring carving at least would be fairly easy and quick to carve so she wouldn’t be in there too long and once the ice had been carved away so it was hollow in the middle, she was confident she would be able to move it on her own the next day.
She grabbed the tools from the cool room and shut herself in, not totally confident that the three blocks of ice, forged into one piece, would hold together once she started working on it. At least in the cold of the freezer they would be less likely to break.
She scrolled through the tunes on her iPhone until she found something that was not remotely Christmassy and then started to carve. She marked out the basic ring shape and then used the chainsaw to chop off the bits that she wouldn’t need, including the middle. She made the ring a lot thicker than she had originally intended because she needed the strength of a thick ring. She spent a while getting the ring part as flawless and smooth as she could but it really was cold in here and her fingers were becoming numb, even through the gloves.
She pushed on, knowing she needed to finish it tonight and at least whilst she was in here, focussing on the design and the carving, she wouldn’t have to go out there and think about Henry and how this might actually turn out to be the worst Christmas ever. She was undoubtedly going to spend it alone and, although in previous years, when she had been alone, that had been fine, being in love with a man who hated her and being dumped by him just a few days before the big day made things infinitely worse.
She was feeling sleepy now, the alcohol no doubt still leaving its mark. She rarely ever drank so when she did she always felt hungover a few hours later rather than the next day. She would finish here and go back to bed.
She ignored the cold that was settling into her body and took her time with the detail of the claw that would hold the giant diamond, making sure the facets of the diamond were smooth and polished.
Finally she stepped back to admire the finished piece.
It really was cold in here and maybe it was the time she had spent in there but it felt a lot colder than it should. Her arms and legs were almost painfully cold, her fingers were practically numb, her eyes felt heavy. She had never had such an adverse reaction to working inside the freezer before.
She checked the temperature gauge by the door and swore. After the power cut on Saturday the freezer had reset itself at its coldest temperature, which was about twenty degrees colder than it should be. No wonder she was in so much pain. It also explained why she felt so tired; it wasn’t the alcohol, her body was shutting down.
She needed a nice warm bath – she knew that going from extreme cold to extreme heat would not be good for the body so she’d have to warm herself up gently.
She picked up all her tools and pushed the door, but it didn’t budge. Confused, she tried the door again and it still didn’t move. She put