by Fiona Harper
And then she’d met Prince Charming—Tobias Thornton, rising star and darling of the British film industry. After they were married she’d smothered all those nagging feelings by reasoning that now, at least, her family had decent food on the table. That they’d moved into a proper house with a bedroom for each of them … except Louise. And the school uniforms were no longer hand-me-downs or scavenged from local charity shops. Best of all, Dad had a full-time nurse to look after him.
But it had been the nurse who’d been sitting beside him when he’d died just over a year after she and Toby had said ‘I do’ on a private island in the Caribbean.
Tears stung Louise’s eyes and the bonfire became a big orange blur. She stared at the mass of colour until it started to sharpen and move again. Slowly, she became aware of people talking and being nudged, but she didn’t seem able to move. It was only when she heard Jack laugh and splutter with a mouthful of hot dog that she realised the others had returned. She carelessly rested a hand on top of Jack’s head but he shook it off.
‘You looked hungry, too.’ There was a smile in Ben’s voice and she turned to look at him, even though the world was still shimmering slightly. He was holding up a big, juicy sausage in a roll, dripping with fried onions and ketchup. ‘Of course, I’ve heard models don’t eat, so I’m prepared to make the sacrifice of eating two if you don’t want it.’
‘Ex-model,’ she said, snatching it out of his hand and stuffing one end in her mouth before he could change his mind. Ben threw his head back and laughed. And, when she had finished chewing, she did the same.
‘Mum? What’s so funny?’
Louise gave a tiny shake of her head, her gaze locked with Ben’s. ‘I don’t know, just …’ Ben was still grinning, but his eyes weren’t just smiling at her now. Deep underneath, there was something intense, something that drew her and terrified her at the same time. ‘… something.’
She breathed out and returned her attention to her hot dog, which wasn’t hard to do. She hoped these had been happy pigs because, boy, they made one heck of a good sausage. Their sacrifice had been entirely worth it.
But then, sacrifices often were.
If Mum hadn’t died, if Dad hadn’t been ill, if she hadn’t been standing at that particular supermarket till that day—looking ‘haunting’ as the scout had told her—then she wouldn’t have met Toby. Okay, she might not have any regrets about erasing Toby from her life at this particular moment, but without Toby there would have been no Jack. And Jack was worth any sacrifice.
She looked at him, hanging off the rope and trying to edge closer to where the fireworks were being set up. Before she could reach for him, a strong male hand gently grabbed his coat and hauled him back into place.
A bonfire sprung into life inside Louise. In a place that had been cold and dead for so long, flames licked and tickled.
No. Not now. Not here. Not with this man.
Not that Ben Oliver wasn’t worthy of admiration. After all, he was good-looking, thoughtful and kind. A good father. All the things a girl should put at the top of her list when searching for a prospective Prince Charming. And he had a presence, a quiet charisma that made it impossible not to search him out in a crowd or feel that he was someone you could trust your life with.
But she wasn’t a princess and he was no prince. And this wasn’t the time to be noticing those things about someone. This was time for her and Jack to heal, to rebuild. And she’d felt this way before, had trusted Toby with her life, and he had made it glitter and shine for a while, but ultimately he’d decided it wasn’t worth his enduring attention.
So, this was her sacrifice: she wouldn’t go there. She’d cut off the oxygen supply to whatever feelings were warming her core. Jack deserved all her attention and her love at the moment and he shouldn’t have to share it with anyone. He wouldn’t.
The fireworks started. Louise had thought herself immune to the pretty showers of colour. Last year they’d seen the New Year’s fireworks in London from a balcony of an expensive riverside apartment a quarter of a mile away. It had been a dramatic display, with rockets shooting off the London Eye and barges on the Thames, but she’d felt removed from it all somehow.
There was no ignoring anything tonight. Not the way the crowd collectively held its breath waiting for a bang. Not the warmth of the bonfire on one side of her face. Especially not the breath of the man standing slightly behind her that made her right ear tingle.
In the inky blackness of a country night, the sprays of light—from pure white to red and green, and blue and gold—were reflected in a river that had stretched itself taut and flat. The effect was magical. Soon she was saying ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ with everyone else, and clapping and watching Jack’s reaction.
And finding herself catching the gaze of a warm, brown pair of eyes, then quickly looking away again.
The last firework glittered and fizzed, shooting so high up into the sky that she would have sworn that, briefly, she caught a glimpse of her big, white house on the opposite bank. And then it exploded and split into a thousand stars that gracefully fell to earth. She sighed and closed her eyes. Simple pleasures.
How odd. She’d always thought that money and fame would make it easier to find pleasure, but all it had really done was make it more complicated. Pure happiness, joy with no strings attached, was an unknown commodity in her life. When had she become so poor? And how had she become so blind she hadn’t even realised what a sorry state she’d been in?
‘Come on …’ Ben’s hand, resting once again on the shoulder of her thick wool coat, caused her to open her eyes, releasing the magic moment and letting it flutter away like the sparks from the bonfire. ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’
Jack, who should have been totally worn out by now, jumped up and down even harder. ‘Are we going on the dingy again?’
Jas put on a very superior tone. ‘It’s not a dingy, Jack. You say it ding-gee. Dinghy.’
Jack pulled himself up to his full height. ‘I knew that.’
Ben shook his head. ‘No. I’ll drive you.’
Louise opened her mouth to protest. It would take more than half an hour to drive down to Dartmouth, catch the ‘higher ferry’, as the locals called it, and double back to Whitehaven.
‘I wouldn’t take the kids out in the boat at this time of night,’ he explained.
Louise followed him as he headed for the quiet spot where he’d parked his car and looked carefully at the scenery. It had been verging on darkness when they’d made the trip over, or at least she’d thought it had. The trees had been dark grey shapes and the sky had faded from bright cobalt at the horizon to indigo overhead but, compared to how it looked at the moment, that had merely been twilight. Everything was black if it wasn’t lit up by either starlight or electricity.
‘And you and Jack would have to scramble back through the woods in the pitch-dark.’
Okay, he’d convinced her. She got lost in her own back garden in daylight still. No way was she dragging her eight-year-old through those woods tonight.
As she strapped Jack into the back of Ben’s car, Louise went still. Ben must have known all along that they wouldn’t be able to return to Whitehaven the way they’d come. It explained why he’d disappeared when they’d first arrived to move his car—away from the main road and the village centre, where the crowds were now ambling—into a quiet side road.
She sat in the front passenger seat and fastened her seat belt without looking at him. Pretty soon they were whizzing through isolated country lanes in silence, the only hint they weren’t alone inside a big, black bubble were the golden twigs and branches picked out by the headlights in front of them. The patterns the light made on the road and hedgerows shifted and twisted as they sped past. Every now and then, for a split-second, an odd tree stump or a gate was illuminated, and then it was gone.
Louise breathed in the silence. After a few minutes she turned her head slightly to look at Ben. His hands gripped the wheel lightly, bu
t she had no doubt he was in full control. All his concentration was focused on the road in front of them. He looked at it the same way he’d looked at her in the mirror that afternoon.
The air begun to pulse around her head and a familiar craving she’d thought she’d conquered started to clamour deep inside her—the heady rush of simply being noticed. Immediately, she twisted her head to look straight ahead and clamped her hands together in her lap. They were shaking.
Simple pleasures.
She had an idea that Ben Oliver was full of them.
It was taking every ounce of his willpower to keep his eyes on the road ahead. Having Louise Thornton in the front seat of his car was proving a distraction. And not an oh-my-goodness-there’s-a-celebrity-in-my-car kind of distraction. Unfortunately. He could have talked himself out of that one quite easily.
And it wasn’t even because she was the most stunning woman he’d ever laid eyes on. She was way out of his league, he knew that. The logic of this situation would catch up with him eventually.
At the start of the evening, she’d stood tall and still, and a casual onlooker would have thought her relaxed and confident. But, unfortunately, he’d discovered he could no longer regard Louise casually.
He’d noticed the way her gloved hands had hung on to the boundary rope as if it were a lifeline. He’d seen the panic in her eyes when she thought she’d have to face the crowd and might be recognised. He had the oddest feeling that the real Louise had shrunk small inside herself, hiding beneath the thick outer shell. How long had she been that way?
Then, as the evening had worn on, he’d seen her hands unclench from the rope and noticed the unconscious, affectionate gestures that flowed between mother and son. He’d heard her laugh when ketchup dripped onto her chin from the hot dog, and had heard the soft intakes of breath with every bang and crackling shower of the fireworks.
He didn’t want to notice these things about her. He didn’t want to know how warm and rich her laugh was, or how tender and gentle she was below the surface. He just wanted to see the surface alone—much in the same way he only saw the rippling surface of the river and never the rocks and currents beneath.
He would rather remember the bare facts: that she was still in the middle of a divorce, that the last thing he and Jas needed in their lives at the moment was another woman with too much baggage for him to shoulder.
He’d known that Megan had had ‘issues’ when he first met her, but they seemed inconsequential compared to the situations facing Louise. Yet she faced them with such dignity and poise …
There he went again, admiring her when he should be concentrating on other things.
A flash of movement across the road caused his foot to stamp instantly on the brake. All of the joke-telling and giggling from the back seat stopped.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, his heart pounding. ‘Only a rabbit—and he’s away up the hill now.’
Jas and Jack returned to their knock-knock jokes and he put the car into gear. He pulled away gently, aware of the slim fingers that had flown to the dashboard and were now curling back into her lap.
Getting freaked out by a rabbit? What was happening to him? They darted in front of the car all the time and he never usually reacted this way. He pressed his foot on the accelerator, the car picked up speed and soon they were flying down the country lane as if nothing had happened. Ben concentrated on the road and pretended he didn’t know how to answer his own question.
The other occupants of the car fell into silence and it wasn’t long before he was pulling into the long drive that led to Whitehaven. Louise shifted in her seat, as if she was preparing to dart out of the door as soon as the wheels had stopped turning. Good. If she didn’t feel the need to linger in his presence, that was fine by him.
‘Can I have cake when I get in, Mum?’
Ben stifled a smile as he slowed the car and brought it to a halt outside the front porch. And then his tummy rumbled. It had fond memories of that cake.
‘Jack, it’s past your bedtime! Of course you’re not going to have—’
‘Cakes!’
They all turned and looked as Jas, whose eyes were wide and a hand was clamped over her mouth. Then she started to cry. He scrambled out of the car and opened the rear passenger door. ‘Jas? What is it?’
Jas’s lip trembled. ‘C—cakes. My class are doing a tea party for the old people in the village. Mum was going to help me make cakes this afternoon, but she went away …’
Ben tried to not let the irritation show on his face. Megan could waltz off to Timbuktu for all he cared, but when her flaky ways affected Jas it was a different matter entirely.
‘I’m supposed to take them in on Tuesday morning or I won’t get any house points!’ Jas wailed. ‘Can you help me, Dad?’
‘Um …’ There was nothing he’d like more, but he wasn’t sure Jas would be getting any house points for anything he tried to bake.
‘I can help.’
As one, he and Jas swivelled round to look at Louise and stared. Her face was expressionless. Had he really heard that right?
Ben turned back to Jas. ‘Can’t you do it on your own? I’ll supervise.’
There was a loud snort from the passenger seat. He ignored it.
Jas was wearing the end-of-the-world face common to all eleven-year-old girls in a crisis. ‘I don’t know. I can never get the beginning bit right when you have to mix the eggs and flour together.’
‘Eggs and sugar.’ Louise spoke quietly. In his experience, that tone was deceptive. He just might be in big trouble.
‘Yeah, eggs and sugar. That’s what I meant,’ Jas said absently.
Ben sighed. ‘Can’t we just buy some?’
Jas shook her head and started to cry again.
‘I can help.’ This time Louise’s tone was more insistent.
‘Home-made cakes?’
‘What do you think you were eating earlier? Scotch mist?’
Reality dropped away and Ben felt as if he was standing on nothing. ‘You made that cake?’ He could tell by the look on her face that he was probably sabotaging Jas’s only chance—which was a pity. He hadn’t meant his words to come out quite like that, but they’d escaped before his brain had had a chance to give them the once-over.
Louise glared at him. ‘No, the cake fairies left it on the doorstep.’
Okay. He’d deserved that.
Jas, who was wiping her eyes with her coat sleeve, piped up. ‘I thought that if Jack needed cakes for school you’d just buy them at Harrods.’
It seemed his daughter had inherited his capacity for opening his mouth for the sole purpose of changing feet.
Louise clamped a hand across her mouth and, just as he was expecting her to flounce out of the car, slamming the door, her eyes sparkled and she let out a raucous laugh.
Ben was floored. This wasn’t the shy giggle he’d seen earlier; it was a full-bellied chuckle. And it was pretty infectious. When the surprise had worn off, his mouth turned up at the corners and it wasn’t long before all four of them were crying with laughter. Louise was clutching onto the door for support and Jack’s titter was so high-pitched it was starting to hurt his ears.
Still giggling, Louise managed a few words, even though she was a little short of breath. ‘Sometimes … sometimes … when I was really busy … I did get them at Harrods!’ That just set them all off again.
When they all managed to get back on the right side of sanity he felt as exhausted as if he’d done a cross-country run. Man, it hurt to breathe.
Louise let out a long, happy sigh. Her face was soft and relaxed and her cheeks were flushed. It was just as well there were two children in the back of the car, because he had the stupidest urge to kiss her.
That sobered him up pretty fast.
‘Are you sure? I’m sure you’re really busy. We don’t want to put you out, do we, Jas?’
Jas didn’t say anything, but pleaded with her eyes.
‘Busy doing what? The cont
ractors keep shooing me away when I try to help with the redecoration.’ Louise raised an eyebrow, and then she winked at him—actually winked at him. ‘I’d be happy to help. You gave us a great night out tonight.’
Ben stuttered. That was the problem. In his mind, tonight had been about making a nice final gesture to make sure Louise was settled into the neighbourhood before he backed off. Now, how was he supposed to do that if she was going to be installed in his kitchen tomorrow?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After she’d put Jack to bed that night, Louise couldn’t sleep. Didn’t even want to try. It must have been the fresh air or something.
She found herself flopped on the big velvet-covered sofa in the drawing room, the remote control in her hand, flicking through endless cable stations searching for something to watch. A fire glowed in the hearth and the lights were low. The rich, deep colours and luxurious textures of the fabrics in here truly had made a large, draughty room incredibly cosy.
After ten minutes she let the remote drop on the sofa and gave up. Then she remembered that she’d sneaked Laura’s diary up from the boathouse yesterday and it was still in her bag. Although she’d already read a couple of entries this morning, and she was trying to ration herself so she could mull it all over, getting to know Laura through it slowly, surely a few more pages wouldn’t hurt?
Laura was so brave where she was so cowardly. She leapt in and gave her heart freely and completely. Comparing herself to Laura, Louise realised she’d locked her heart away—which was good, because that meant it was safe—but she also knew it was the cowardly thing to do.
She fetched the soft leather notebook from her bag, snuggled back down on the sofa and began to read. The next entry was some months after the one made on the night of the party …
2nd December, 1952
Even after all these months I miss him so much it hurts. I scan the papers every morning just to see if there’s a mention of his name. It’s the one weakness I allow myself now that I’m trying to patch things up with Alex.