Beach Hut Surprise: Escape to Little Piddling this summer — six feel-good beach reads to make you smile, or even laugh out loud

by Libertà Books

  I sighed and closed my eyes. This was happiness as I had never experienced it before.

  She began softly, "I came back to Paris, after Canada, to look for you. I was going to confess that I knew what you were. To be honest, I'd guessed almost from the first. I'd visited Transylvania early on in my travels, you see, and so I understood a little about vampires. It couldn't stop me loving you, though I didn't discover how much, until I was high in the Rockies and alone again. By the time I got back to Paris, no one knew where you were." She sighed. "I spent a small fortune on enquiry agents but it was a total waste of effort. You had disappeared completely. I suspect that was what you intended?"

  I nodded again. I couldn't speak. And I didn't want to open my eyes.

  "I was in despair at having lost you, Theo. And very, very lonely. Because of that—it's no excuse, I admit—I did something unforgivable." She dropped her voice almost to a whisper. "I'm ashamed to tell you that I began to model for a man called Jean-Claude. He fancied himself a great painter, but I soon realised he had very little talent. Once I began, I couldn't abandon him, though. Not when he saw me as his muse." She stopped and swallowed hard.

  "Since I'm trying to be honest with you, Theo, I should confess that modelling for him also helped to fill the void in my life. And I liked him, though I could never love him. Later, I learned that he was dying of heart disease. I pitied him then—he was so desperate to keep on painting and he couldn't bear the thought that he would not finish all the great works that he knew were in him.

  "Someone must have told him about Transylvania. I don't know who. I certainly did not tell him anything. He immediately rushed off east in search of the solution to his problem. And he came back a vampire, of course."

  I straightened and opened my eyes. I needed to be able to read her face when she talked about Jean-Claude, the vampire.

  "He was exultant," Lucinda said. "He would live—and paint—for ever." Her shoulders slumped and she shook her head sadly. "Poor Jean-Claude. He hadn't grasped that he would have to give up the light."

  "So this Jean-Claude made you as you are? You wanted it, too?"

  "No. Not without you, Theo. Jean-Claude did it without my consent, to keep me exactly as I was. He insisted on painting me over and over again. He was obsessed with creating the one great portrait."

  "Did he?"

  "No. And in the end, being a painter, he could not exist without the light. He kept venturing outside to look, to see the world, in spite of the burning pain it caused him. One day—one bright, fierce, sunny day, in the first year of the Great War—he went outside again, glorying in the light and the colour and the pain. I heard him in the garden—he was singing—but when the sound stopped, he didn't come back inside. He'd turned to mist. And the harsh sun melted him to nothing."

  All vampires know what sunlight will do to them. Jean-Claude could not have been ignorant of the risks he was running. He must have willed his own end.

  "Can you forgive me for betraying you, Theo?"

  "Can you forgive me for abandoning you, Lucinda?" I replied without even pausing to draw breath.

  We were silent for several minutes after that. I think we both knew we were equally guilty. Recriminations would achieve nothing, for either of us.

  "What happened to your portraits?" My jealousy had melted away, but I was curious to judge the man's talent for myself.

  "I burned them. They were not great art. Not even good, if I am honest. Besides, I didn't want to be reminded of Jean-Claude. I knew what a mistake I'd made there." She paused. "I try to forget him, but I am reminded of him every day because of what he made me. Could you not have done it for me, Theo? We could have been together for all these years." There was grief and longing in her voice.

  I responded with the whole truth. From my heart. "No. No, I couldn't. Because for me, you were the light, the sunshine, the colour—the whole human world. I couldn't take that away from you. I knew you needed love in the light. The kind of love that could only come from a living, human man." I shook my head sadly. I had been so very sure. Back then. Had I been wrong? "I thought that, if I left you, you would find that love. And happiness. And children. That you and your lover would grow old together."

  Lucinda laughed softly. "How much you thought you knew me, Theo, and how little you did. It was you that I loved. And love still, even a century on. I was no artist. The light wasn't vital to me. I've had decades to discover that."

  Oh. All those decades wasted. I'd been such a fool. And Lucinda had suffered so much, because of my arrogant belief that I knew best. "Where have you been all this time, love? I never heard Lucinda Grayson mentioned by others of our kind."

  She was relaxing now. She even smiled. "In Paris, to begin with. I couldn't be what I'd been before, of course, enjoying Paris society from dawn till dusk. And a vampire, lurking in the gloom, is no real artist's muse, either. I kept myself hidden. When the war ended, I started travelling again. Carefully. To be honest, I was looking for you, Theo, though I never once admitted it, even to myself. England—here—was my only remaining link to human life, so I continued to visit fairly often. I still came, even after my great-aunt died. Dear Little Piddling. The name always amused me. And even more, once they added sur Merde." She gave a peal of silvery laughter. "So very appropriate, don't you think, my love?"

  I had recovered now. I pulled her into my arms and began to kiss her, exploring her luscious mouth. She responded eagerly. We took a very long time over it, delighting in being together at last. Well, why not? We had over a hundred missed years to make up for.

  I did answer her question. A long time later. "Since Little Piddling has helped us to find each other again, it seems unfair to condemn it. Even if the name does make us laugh. Shall we make a donation so that the town can have a new stone erected? Designed so that it's impossible to add that naughty de at the end? Hmm?"

  She chuckled at my rather pathetic joke. "Good idea. It would be a way of saying thank you. Though not until we are long gone, I think."

  "Long gone?"

  "Little Piddling is too small a town to house two vampires, Theo. We wouldn't want to start a panic here, would we? Not when Little Piddling has brought us back together." Her beautiful grey eyes were gleaming with mischief.

  I could read that look. "You've got a better idea, haven't you, Lucinda?"

  She nodded. "We need a big city. A place where we can explore delightful surroundings—" she grinned wickedly "—and each other. London is not nearly romantic enough for what I have in mind. Shall we begin in Paris?"

  "Paris? For a new start?"

  "Oui, mon amour. À Paris, tout peut recommencer."

  THE END

  About Joanna Maitland

  Joanna Maitland has published 13 Regency historicals with Harlequin Mills & Boon since 2000. She is also an independently-published author—of Regencies, timeslip, speculative fiction and more—and one of the founding partners of Libertà Books where she blogs at least twice a month. She lives in the romantic Marcher country on the Welsh border, where a large pollen-filled garden and her hay fever battle it out.

  You can find out more about Joanna and her books on her website or follow her on Twitter @JoannaMaitland

  GRAPES AND ALE

  by Louise Allen

  Chapter One

  The view should have been soothing—the blue sea, the waves creaming on the expanse of firm sand that was not yet warm from the early morning sun, the swoop of gulls scavenging at the tideline. The same sand drew the holidaymakers to Little Piddling in droves, although not at seven o'clock on a breezy morning in May. Now the beach was deserted, which was why Jac came to the hut as soon as she had gulped down the first mug of tea.

  Tranquillity was not helping, she decided, flipping over another page in the battered ledger. Her brain felt like the contents of a mash tun and she was in danger of forgetting everything she had painfully learnt about brewing.

  She had put down the last penny of her savings, her l
egacy from an unexpectedly well-off great-aunt, plus the sale of her Brighton flat to buy Little Piddling's Bascombe Brewery and the top floor apartment in what had been the brewer's house next door. Now she was broke and coming to the painful realisation that twelve years in the hospitality industry did not necessarily give a girl the skills to rescue a business that was going down the drain—literally—for want of a decent product.

  The trippers might come into the Brewery Tap, buy a pint of Prime Piddle beer just for the name and for the Instagram post of them downing a liquid that was suggestively pale yellow, but one was enough. More than enough. The locals wouldn't touch the stuff with a bargepole and did their drinking in The Jolly Mariner where they could sample an array of big brand beers, watch sports TV and scoff tastily greasy pub grub.

  The firm of administrators who had organised the distress sale of the bankrupt brewery must have been ecstatic when they saw Jacintha Francis heading their way. She had thought she was buying it cheap—they couldn't believe their luck.

  She made herself study the ledger again. Last night, when she had found it in the back of a dusty cupboard in the brewery office, she had been too tired to more than flick through. Now she found the recipe for Prime Piddle in the same distinctive sloping handwriting of Bertram Bascombe that she recognised from the deeds. He had founded the brewery in 1885 and vanished mysteriously in May 1899, leaving a crumbling business behind him. Somehow it had limped on with a succession of optimistic owners for one hundred and twenty years but, unless she could find a way to rescue it, this was the end of the line.

  "Ouch!" Jac sucked at the paper cut as she squinted at the ledger—one sheet had been sliced out, leaving a sharp edge in the gutter. Beyond it, the final page with any writing on it simply read, The bastard. The bastard. The bastard. This is the end.

  There was a thump, a sharp smell of the sea, a shower of water droplets on the page and beside her stood a man. A stark naked man, dripping wet. They stared at each other, then—

  "You pervert! Get out of my hut! I'm calling the police."

  "Madam, remove yourself from my bathing hut this instant!"

  "Your what?" Jac's hand froze over her phone. She recognised him, which was, of course, quite impossible.

  The man looked around, water spraying from his hair with the jerky movements. "What is this? What have you done with my hut?"

  He was forty-ish, lanky with a little pot belly, overlong wet hair slicked back and a handsome, if bony, face decorated with flourishing, bushy sideburns. He was very familiar indeed, although Jac had never seen him wearing anything but a cutaway coat, striped trousers, a four-in-hand tie and a top hat. His portrait hung in the Brewery Tap and she had polished the glass on it only yesterday, buffing up the gilt plaque at the bottom of the frame that read: The Founder.

  "Mr Bascombe?" Jac grabbed a towel from the hook beside her and thrust it at him. "Take this."

  He snatched the towel and swathed it around himself which was, Jac considered, a considerable improvement. Her heart was pounding and it wasn't from the sight of far too much goose-pimpled male skin.

  With the towel securely wound around his waist, Bascombe stabbed a finger at the ledger. "What are you doing with that? It is mine. You stole the recipe. You…" He subsided like a soufflé in a draught. "But you cannot have done. It had been cut out when I left home this morning."

  "Um… Sit down, why don't you? Have another towel," Jac added as he sank onto one of the cushioned benches along the side of the hut. "I know this sounds ridiculous, but are you a ghost?"

  "Certainly not." He looked affronted. "I am not dead yet!"

  "You are now; this is the twenty-first century." From the way his face whitened, telling him that so abruptly had been tactless and unkind. "You must be a time-traveller," she amended, wondering at how calm she sounded. Shock, presumably. Delirium, fever…

  "H. G. Wells," he exclaimed. "The Time Machine. A fascinating book, but I had never realised it was possible."

  Jac reviewed what she had drunk last night. Not enough, it had seemed at the time, and certainly insufficient to account for hallucinating a naked Victorian time-traveller this morning. She pinched herself. Yes, definitely awake. "What year is it in your time?"

  "Eighteen ninety-nine. The twentieth of May."

  That was when he had disappeared, wasn't it? Exactly to the day. Hell, was she about to be stuck with a displaced Victorian brewer? Although he could be useful. Very useful. Which was a selfish way of looking at it, she scolded herself. The poor man must be as shocked as she was. More so.

  "I'm sure you'll get back in a moment," she soothed. "Meanwhile, what has been cut out of here?"

  "The recipe for Piddling Perfection." He almost moaned the name. "Franklin Outram, my brewmaster, invented it and had it refined to a pitch of perfection. He wrote down the recipe only on Saturday after we tried the first cask. It was brilliant. Nectar. The finest beer I have ever tasted. Naturally, we could make no more then, it being the Sabbath the next day, but Outram noted it all down, all the special ingredients, all the timings. Then he dropped dead coming out of church after the morning service. Then on Monday—this morning—when I opened the recipe ledger, the page had been cut out."

  "And you wrote that?" Jac pointed at the furious scrawl.

  "Yes," he admitted, blushing. Of course, Victorian gentlemen did not swear in front of ladies.

  "Who did it? Do you know?"

  "Dastard!" he cried, leaping to his feet, unfortunately scattering towels as he did so. "Dastard! But he is too…"

  He vanished with a pop and a shower of droplets.

  "Oh, bugger." Jac picked up the towels, which were damp. There were wet footprints on the nasty vinyl flooring that she couldn't afford to replace. The door was still firmly closed. Mr Bascombe had been real and, unless there was such a thing as a soggy ghost, he had travelled from the past and, presumably, had now returned there to vanish for ever more.

  "Poor man. I wonder who the dastard was who robbed him. What a sweetie—even under so much stress he couldn't bring himself to say bastard to a woman." Jac eyed the ledger that had once contained the recipe for the finest beer Mr Bascombe had ever tasted. It might not have been that wonderful if he was used to producing Prime Piddle, but it had obviously been an improvement.

  With a sigh she rolled up the damp towels, stuck the ledger in her tote and went out, locking the hut behind her with a glance up at the pole she had fixed above the door, wilting greenery twined around it. The Hop Pole, the name she had chosen for the hut which had come with the brewery, was the sign that a fresh brew was in the ale house.

  All it needed was the local Trading Standards inspector to decide that Prime Piddle wasn't beer within the meaning of the Act and everything would go down the tubes before she had the new name plate painted for the hut door.

  They'd come up with a replacement soon, Jac told herself as she trudged through loose sand on the boardwalk to the steps up to the Promenade. Andy Gregg, her brewmaster, might not be very experienced, but he was keen. Could she tell him about Bertram Bascombe? No. He'd think she had cracked under the strain, had been hallucinating.

  Why don't I think that myself? she wondered, crossing the Promenade at an angle and then turning up Brewery Lane to the Square, with a wave to Pete who was cleaning the fish and chip shop windows.

  It was not as though she believed in ghosts or aliens or time travel. Although that might be why, Jac reasoned as she went through the passageway at the side of Brewery House. I'm not predisposed to believe this stuff, so it must have been totally convincing on a rational basis. Did that make it any less weird? No, although at least she'd managed to reassure herself that she wasn't losing it entirely.

  She dug out her key to the back door that had once been the kitchen entrance of the old house. The conversion had been sensitively done with the minimum of partitioning and she had her own front door right at the top of what had been the servants' stair at the back of the house. Henry Dumaine
, who occupied the ground and first floors, used the original front door, but for safety reasons there were fire doors between the back stairs and the main house at each level. They were secure, soundproofed, and she was rarely aware that someone else was in the house.

  And that was good, because Henry Dumaine owned Dumaine's Wine Bar right across the square.

  The shiny, attractive, modern, buzzy wine bar that only made the poor old Brewery Tap look even sadder and emptier in contrast.

  "Bah humbug," Jac muttered as she stood on the top stair and juggled the keyring in an attempt to find her front door key which was, of course, wedged in with the keys for the beach hut, back door and brewery.

  "Hi."

  Jac yelped, dropped the roll of towels and the tote. The ledger fell out on her foot, she yelped again as she turned and it slid down half a dozen stairs to land at the feet of the man who stood looking up at her.

  "Sorry, didn't mean to startle you." Henry Dumaine, of course. Not a burglar, just six feet of expensively casual male with an over-assertive nose, boring mouse-brown hair and a killer pair of blue eyes. Oh yes, and a smug smile. "I brought you this." He brandished a bottle of white wine in one hand as he stooped to pick up the ledger with the other. "Your keys are on the next step down."

  "Why?" Jac demanded, grabbing the towels. At least this one has his clothes on.

  "Because that's where they landed when you dropped them, just after you screamed for the first time." He came up another step.

  "I did not scream, I yelped in shock and pain. Why are you on my stairs bringing me wine? And what is wrong with the perfectly good bell on my front door?"

  "I saw you come in and doing it this way saved you the walk down again." He smiled, altogether too charmingly. "The fire door creaks, I thought you'd have heard it."

  "I had something on my mind." Jac scooped up the keys, decided that a passably good-looking man bearing wine was probably better than having a quiet attack of the heebie-jeebies by herself, and opened the door. "Come in. It's a bit early in the day for me, but don't let me stop you if you need it." She waved a hand towards the bottle as he passed her.