Teacakes & Tangos (Little Duck Pond Café #41)

PROLOGUE

I was getting the distinct feeling I’d been stood up.

Glancing at my phone for the millionth time, I clocked that I’d been waiting in the bar of the Swan Hotel for exactly fifteen minutes past the time we’d agreed to meet – but ‘Stephen’ (GSOH, likes football and chickens) still hadn’t appeared.

I’d trawled through the responses to my online profile and narrowed it down to two ‘possibles’.

‘Gary’ looked nice and ‘normal’ in his photo – although since he’d posted only one picture, I couldn’t help feeling a little doubtful.

It was probably the best photo ever taken of him, shot from exactly the right flattering angle when he was standing roughly a hundred yards away from the camera.

It was also quite possibly a decade old.

Not that I was in any way cynical about the opposite sex these days. Why would I be? Being dumped by my fiancé thirteen days before our big white wedding was obviously something I’d taken completely in my stride. (Ha ha.)

My other possible match, ‘Stephen’, had caught my eye mainly because I’d found the ‘likes football and chickens’ mildly intriguing. Not the football bit, but the ‘chickens’.

Was he genuinely into ‘the good life’? Did he really have hens pecking away in a coop in his back garden?

Or was it much more mundane than that? Had he actually meant to say ‘likes chicken’?

Without the ‘s’? Which would obviously suggest that any future dates were likely to feature a well-known chain of restaurants beginning with the letter ‘N’.

I stifled a sigh, wishing I’d stayed in and watched TV, instead of faffing around getting dressed up for a date I didn’t even want to go on... a date which I wouldn’t have gone on – if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was doing it for Dad.

I’d promised him faithfully that I’d get back onto the dating scene and I wasn’t about to back out.

So I’d sit here until ‘Stephen’ showed up and then maybe I’d have something interesting to report to my darling dad tomorrow at the hospital...