Love...Maybe

by Gill Paul

  He shrugs. ‘I’d rather a woman liked me for me, not just the job.’

  Okay, second burning question.

  ‘Eliza says you had a crush on me at school. Is that true?’

  ‘I did.’ He laughs. ‘I used to fantasise about snogging you behind the toilet block. When I was eleven.’

  ‘And what about now?’

  He looks away and I think: Shit! I’ve done it again. More rejection.

  Then he gives me a wistful smile. ‘What about Rufus?’

  ‘Oh. Rufus?’ My heart lifts. ‘Well, it turns out he was Mr Wrong all along.’

  Alex studies me, an unreadable expression on his face.

  Then he takes my hand and pulls me behind a huge horse chestnut tree.

  ‘So if I were to practise the kiss of life on you, there’d be no objections?’

  ‘Practise away,’ I say faintly. ‘Honestly, I’m all for further education.’

  My poor legs have had quite a day of it. They’re barely holding me up by this stage.

  ‘Of course, I might have to rescue you again later,’ he murmurs, pulling me hard against him.

  I nod solemnly, my heart nearly bumping out of my chest. ‘Jacuzzis can be very dangerous things.’

  The gleam in his eyes sends a surge of desire shooting right through me.

  And when at last his mouth comes down to crush mine, Richard Gere is the very last thing on my mind …

  If you liked Saving Miranda, why not try…

  Buy the Ebook.

  About the Author

  Catherine Ferguson burst onto the writing scene at the age of nine, anonymously penning a weekly magazine for her five-year-old brother (mysteriously titled the ’Willy’ comic) and fooling him completely by posting it through the letterbox every Thursday.

  Catherine’s continuing love of writing saw her study English at Dundee University and spend her twenties writing for various teenage magazines including Jackie and Blue Jeans and meeting pop stars. Then she got serious and worked as a sub-editor at the Dundee Courier and the Aberdeen Press & Journal before moving to Surrey and setting up her own business, Surrey Organics, delivering fresh organic fruit and veg to people’s homes. (She based her very first attempt at a novel on these veggie experiences but sadly, it is still in a drawer!)

  She lives with her son in Northumberland.

  KAT FRENCH

  The Stained Glass Heart

  The Enchanting One

  Copyright

  Avon

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015

  Copyright © Kat French 2015

  Kat French asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008136277

  Version: 2015–01–23

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Epilogue

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  For my lovely mum and fellow book lover,

  with lots of love xx

  Chapter One

  ‘No way. It’s this house or me, Helen. I’m not even joking.’

  Ian looked around the old house in disgust, his eyes lingering on the old-fashioned wiring, the yesteryear decor, the dusty light fittings. Helen watched him, taking in the brow that furrowed too often, the eyes that mocked more than they loved, and the spiteful curl of his lip, which now she came to really look at it, was a little on the thin side. Ian had mean features. They really ought to have served as more of an early warning system.

  How could he not look at this place and see potential in its high ceilings, its deep skirting boards, and that grand sweeping staircase in the centre of the chequer-board tiled hall? How could he not yearn to paint the peeling walls, wax the unloved boards, flood the place with light and warmth from those huge picture windows?

  Ian turned his irritated blue eyes to her, and she met his gaze head on.

  ‘I choose the house, Ian. And I’m not even joking.’

  *

  The moment she said the words, a weight drifted off Helen’s shoulders. She felt it go, floating up through the three floors of the house and out through the long unused chimney in the small attic bedroom. Well goodbye, and good riddance. She’d buy this house alone, thank you very much.

  Helen didn’t know it at the time, but she wasn’t the first woman to be relieved of a lover by number seventeen Delaney Street. There hadn’t been a man living successfully under that roof in the last hundred and thirty-eight years.

  As she left, she stroked a hand over the doorframe, admiring the way the sun caught the old stained glass inlaid above the entrance. Squinting at it, she tried to make out what lay beneath the dust … words of some kind, maybe? Cleaning that would be one of the first things she’d do. She’d love to see what lay beneath the dirt.

  *

  The sale went through like a dream, and with almost indecent haste the house belonged to Helen. Her friends and family thought she’d lost her mind buying the big old house on Delaney Street alone, but she held firm. Never in her life had she been so sure of anything.

  Chapter Two

  ‘I still think you were a little hasty, Xanthe,’ Alice said, sprinkling diamond heart’s-ease dust along the cracks in the bedroom floorboards from Xanthe’s tiny, old glass vial. ‘He might have actually loved her, given time.’

  Xanthe perched on Helen’s new bed that had been delivered to seventeen Delaney Street earlier that day and shrugged her delicate shoulders, thoroughly unrepentant. Her floor-sweeping, simple empire line black dress rippled as she moved.

  ‘Poppycock. He was no Clark Gable,’ she said.

  Alice got on her knees and blew the pale, glittery dust into the cracks, her pencil-skirted backside balanced over her stiletto heels.

  ‘Clark Gable,’ she muttered, loading her tone purposefully with sarcasm. ‘You might be a witch, Xanthe, but you’re so out of touch.’

  ‘Well, excuse me for dying eighty-three years ago,’ Xanthe said archly. ‘They just don’t make men like they did in my day.’

  Alice swivelled around. ‘Yes they do, and I was having a good time with several of them until you sodding killed me.’

  The air around Xanthe turned yellow with mirth. ‘It was your own fault. If you hadn’t insisted on bringing home a different man every week I’d have let you live to a ripe old age. It was wearing me out having to get rid of them all.’

  ‘Have you never heard of fun, old woman?’ It was an insult Alice threw whenever she wanted to hit Xanthe where it hurt. Even though she’d chosen her twenty-five-year-old self to reside in as a ghost, Xanthe had been almost eighty years old when she’d died alone in the house on Delaney Street.

  Xanthe’s shimmering yellow aura turned abruptly red. ‘Men aren’t fun
, and love isn’t a joke, Alice. I learned that lesson for all of us. I saved you from yourself.’

  ‘Did it never occur to you that I didn’t want saving?’ Alice chided, standing up and smoothing her hands down her slender, once gym-toned hips. They’d had this conversation many times over the two years since Alice’s lifeless, fifty-two-year-old body had been spotted at the foot of the stairs by the postman peering through the letterbox.

  ‘Look at me. I’m foxy,’ she went on, indignant. ‘I was having the time of my life until you bloody ended it.’

  ‘You should be thanking me,’ Xanthe said, glancing up as Sarah, the other ghost of Delaney Street, slid into the room.

  ‘Don’t tell me. I should be thanking you too,’ Sarah said, rolling her round blue eyes as she smoothed a hand over her perfectly flicked-out blonde bob, every inch the perfect Fifties sweetheart. If there was such a thing as a spooks am-dram society, she’d have been a shoo-in for Sandy in Grease.

  ‘Thank you, Xanthe,’ Sarah continued in a bored tone. ‘Thank you for murdering my husband, and then seeing off any other man who ever came near me.’

  Sarah and her husband Dennis had bought the house on Delaney Street as newlyweds after Xanthe died in 1933, unaware they’d inherited a ghostly resident even as Xanthe hurled Dennis out of a second floor window when he’d leaned out to watch a shapely neighbour sashay out of view. Unbeknownst to Sarah, Dennis had been indulging in not one but two extra-marital affairs, but Xanthe had sussed him easily and dispatched him without remorse.

  ‘Biggest favour I ever did you,’ Xanthe said, standing up and clapping her bejewelled hands. ‘Now ladies, enough grumbling. Helen arrives tomorrow. A new start. We have work to do downstairs.’

  They melted away, three generations of ethereal women, all tied by a common thread to number seventeen Delaney Street: in their entire earthly lives, none of them had ever known true love.

  Chapter Three

  Helen arrived alone the next morning, purposefully so. She’d turned down all offers of help, wanting to savour her first day in the house alone, a successful young girl-about-town with the key to her own front door. And what a door it was too. Solid and old, its once smart red coat of paint was starting to peel, but that was easily remedied.

  Dragging her suitcase over the threshold, she banged the door closed behind her and stood there for a few moments drinking in the silence. Home. Now where to start? Glancing upwards, her eyes settled on the stained glass over the entrance. There. She’d start at the front door and work her way in from there. Leaving her suitcase by the door, she headed for the cupboard under the kitchen sink and the fresh stash of cleaning supplies she’d put there a few days earlier.

  Snapping on the yellow rubber gloves like an over-enthusiastic cleaner on her first day, Helen carried the box back through to the hallway and rummaged for the glass cleaner, humming under her breath. The step ladders she’d found in the garden shed a few days back were a little more rickety than she’d have liked, but she pressed on, the duster tucked under her chin.

  *

  ‘I could just push her off now and be done with,’ Xanthe said, standing with her arms crossed a few feet away from the ladder. Sarah and Alice shushed her with flapping hands and frowns.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Alice murmured. ‘She might sense us.’

  ‘You never did,’ Xanthe said, drily. ‘I practically pulled your hair on several occasions and you never so much as flinched.’

  ‘You’re lucky I didn’t. I’d have had you exorcised in a heartbeat.’ She glanced apologetically at Sarah. ‘Not you though. You could’ve stayed.’

  ‘She’ll never get that clean,’ Xanthe said, watching Helen scrub at the glass. ‘I blew the ashes of my broken heart over it in 1877, and it’s never been properly clean since.’

  ‘So dramatic, Xanthe,’ Sarah sighed. She’d heard it all before. ‘I had it almost gleaming when Dennis and I first moved in.’

  ‘Yes, and where did that get you?’

  ‘Well, it got me a clean window for a few days,’ Sarah shot back. ‘Who ever heard of a witch who cast ever-dirty-window spells, anyway? Didn’t you have anything better to do?’

  Xanthe looked down her nose. ‘Did you even bother to read what it says in the glass?’

  ‘I could never see it well enough to read it!’ Sarah said hotly, her blonde bob quivering.

  Xanthe shrugged and looked away. ‘It would have been wasted on you anyway.’

  The three ghosts watched on as Helen scrubbed determinedly at the stained glass.

  ‘It has to be said that she’s making some headway there,’ Alice said. ‘More than I ever did. I’d been thinking about having the damn thing ripped out and replaced with double glazing.’

  ‘Yet another of the many reasons I killed you, my dear,’ Xanthe shuddered.

  As they watched, Helen’s hard work revealed a sparkly red ‘A’, and then a minute or two later an emerald ‘M’.

  ‘I think she might actually manage this,’ Sarah said, with more than a hint of satisfaction.

  Alice tipped her head to one side and squinted, her hands on her hips. In life she’d been too vain to get the glasses she badly needed, and even in the afterlife she was paying for her vanity.

  ‘Am …’ she read aloud, and then looked over at Xanthe with an evil grin. ‘I cannot wait to see what comes next. What is it, Xanthe? The name of the mystery man who left you at the altar?’

  ‘Oh for goodness sake!’ Xanthe hissed as she flicked her fingers towards the glass, subtly rearranging the letters still hidden beneath the grime before they could be revealed.

  ‘I love this girl already,’ Sarah said, looking gleefully towards Alice as Xanthe disappeared in a huff and a crackle of annoyed sparks.

  *

  Helen looked up thoughtfully at the now-gleaming stained glass, tapping the latin phrase into Google Translate. ‘Amantes Sunt Amentes’ she murmured, rolling the words pleasurably around her mouth as the translation arrived on her screen. Frowning, she checked the spelling and tried again. Hmm. Same result. ‘Lovers are lunatics?’ she said into the ether, incredulous. And then the laughter started, all the way from the pit of her belly, up through her ribs and out of her mouth until she needed to lean on the wall and wipe the tears from her cheeks. Beautiful, cleansing laughter leaving her body, taking any final remnants of lingering affection she might have held for Ian with it.

  Love. Who needed it anyway? Lovers are lunatics. Quite right too. But this was a big house, and she didn’t want to live here alone.

  Chapter Four

  ‘If there’s a cat in that basket she’s in serious trouble,’ Xanthe said, watching Helen walk up the garden path from the attic window just before lunchtime the following day.

  Alice nipped downstairs obligingly and threw a wink towards Sarah when she reappeared a few seconds later.

  ‘It’s a cat,’ she said, rubbing her hands together. Xanthe had to be the only witch in the world who couldn’t stand feline companions. ‘And you’re not allowed to lay so much as a finger on it, Xanthe, you hear me? I like cats.’

  ‘Is it black?’ Sarah asked hopefully.

  ‘It’s a dead cat walking if it is,’ Xanthe seethed.

  ‘Cool your engines, Morticia. It’s a big ginger tom,’ Alice said.

  Xanthe sighed with a dramatic shiver of her fine-boned shoulders. ‘Almost as bad.’

  Sarah frowned. ‘What do you have against cats anyway?’

  On cue, a huge marmalade striped cat slunk around the attic door and surveyed them all with his big, interested green eyes.

  ‘That,’ Xanthe said. ‘He can see us, and he can hear us.’

  ‘So?’ Alice said, bending down to fuss the cat behind the ears. ‘He can hardly run downstairs and tell Helen, can he?’

  Xanthe looked pointedly away from him with a pained look on her face.

  ‘I don’t want a cat in my house.’

  ‘It’s not your house,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s Helen’s hous
e now, and this is Helen’s cat, so back off.’

  *

  Downstairs, Helen peeled the price stickers from the new feeding bowls and filled them with biscuits and water for the cat. She’d fallen for him the moment she’d laid eyes on him at the shelter, and had been idly tossing around names for him in her head ever since. Crookshanks? Too predictable, although it suited him well. Marmaduke? Far too dog. A smile crept over her face as the perfect name popped into her head. Mog. She’d call him Mog, after the cat in her beloved childhood books, Meg & Mog.

  Food laid down, she headed upstairs to her bedroom. It was one of her favourite rooms in the house, grand in both its size and in the architecture of its high ceilings and gracefully curved bay windows. There hadn’t been much in the way of furniture left in the house when she’d bought it, but Helen had been thrilled to find that the old bedroom furniture had been left behind. It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but the pair of old mahogany wardrobes and the large dressing table were absolutely suited to Helen’s. If they’d been listed on ebay, they were the kind of thing that a savvy seller might have billed as vintage chic to increase their niche appeal.

  Sitting on the stool at the dressing table in the bay window, Helen ran a soft cloth over the surface, drawing pleasure from the appearance of the natural patina of the old wood that lay beneath the layer of dust. It was beautiful. She ran her fingertips over it appreciatively, and then slid open the long jewellery drawer by its small crystal knobs. It was as she’d expected empty, but it released a smell that had her drawing in a deep breath. The musky scent of long-gone perfume evoked glamorous images of other women sitting in that very same spot, opening that very same drawer to select the perfect earrings or necklace for a clandestine dinner with a lover.

  Mog found his way upstairs to wind around her Dr. Martens clad feet before jumping up onto the dressing table and prowling over the top.