by Fiona Walker
Nobody could deny the enmity between the two men. Tash had put it down to Lough’s appalling travel delays and the controversy surrounding them, but now she started to suspect there was more to it.
When Hugo returned the bed was piled high with tissues and Tash was hiccupping madly, her throat so sore she couldn’t speak. She looked at him blearily, taking in the beauty of his cool blue eyes and those long, strong limbs that wrapped themselves around her now, so secure and reassuring, the ultimate safety net.
‘What secrets does Lough hold against you?’ she finally managed to whisper.
‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’ His voice was low and hoarse as his kissed her wet cheek. He reached away to switch off the light.
Tash wanted to wail ‘I have to know!’ but her head felt as though it was being boiled in hot wax, so all she could manage was a groaning sob. Then, to her shame, her eyes and nose started to spout again.
Hugo was forced to turn the light back on before they both drowned. He reached for fresh tissues and handed them to her, his face drawn and tired. There was a long pause, during which Tash blew her nose a lot and Hugo ran his hands through his hair, unspeakably tense.
At last, she cleared the torrent. ‘Is it V?’
There. She had said it.
But Tash’s cold had done her enunciation no favours, and thinking that she was blaming herself, Hugo immediately launched into a rebuttal: ‘No, it’s not you. Darling Tash, you are perfection, although you are too bloody self-deprecating by half. It could never be you. I don’t deserve you.’
Remembering Zoe’s recent words of warning, Tash let out a horrified croak. ‘I don’t deserve you’ was a giveaway of infidelity.
There was an agonising pause, during which Beetroot unsympathetically re-nested at the end of the bed, turning around and around, nosing the covers this way and that and then plumping down and commencing a noisy clean-up of her paws.
Tash’s throat was as dry as her nose and face were wet.
‘I know you buy flowers in Waitrose!’ she suddenly blurted.
He looked at her, rubbing his head in confusion. ‘Is that against the law?’
She turned away, too strangled by tears to speak.
‘I don’t know what you have against them, Tash, but if it helps I promise to use the florist in Marlbury High Street from now on.’
Tash was appalled by this apparently open admission of regular flower purchases. Her eyes itched and stung so much they were practically fused shut, and her nose was poring forth non-stop. When she tried to ask him again about the secret he shared with Lough and whether it was that he had a mistress, she had a coughing fit that gripped her for almost a minute. Hugo waited it out.
‘You’re ill and we’re tired,’ he said eventually in a low voice, leaning across to kiss her sweaty forehead. ‘Let’s leave it for now. We all have nights we regret.’ He reached out to turn off the light again.
Tash knew he wasn’t talking about tonight, but however many times the voice in her head screamed for more information, her pounding heart denied it. She could only take the truth in tiny doses, like Lemsip and throat sweets.
Pulling the covers up to her chin she turned to face him in the darkness. His lips were the best analgesic she had taken all night.
Even though the kiss was marred by the fact that Tash was so snotty that she had to breathe through her mouth in rapid gulps, it was the most intimate they had shared in many weeks, a deep draw of love that transcended colds, cramps, his loose crowns and Beetroot loudly moving on from cleaning her paws to hoovering her rear end. Tash only wished she felt sexier, but although Hugo’s flagpole raised hopefully against her side she had to hold up the last white handkerchief and surrender to sleep. As they dozed through the brief hours until dawn wrapped in one another’s arms, she found her head full of disturbing, muddled dreams in which her husband had a harem of women to equal his string of horses, and Lough Strachan was trying to steal them all like a rustler in a bad Western.
Almost as soon as Hugo set out to the airport, the cold lifted and Tash stopped bleeding, making her sure that fate had conspired to leave him with an off-puttingly sickly parting memory. She was now doubly determined to make him proud of her while he was away, and then welcome him home with the grandest of seductions.
Chapter 46
The January weather was as changeable as a chameleon running across a chequered floor. Frequent snow showers gave twenty-four hours of picture postcard white before melting away in one sunny day. The ridge above Oddlode resembled a Swiss mountain-top one moment and a Toblerone bar the next.
Determined to cash in on her Boxing Day encounter with Dillon Rafferty, and egged on by Mama, who had returned from Slovakia hellbent on a spring wedding, Sylva stayed put in the loathsome fake château in Upper Springlode with her children and the inner circle of family helpers, and started riding again. Every day she poured herself into ultra-tight baby blue breeches and took out two of Jules’s horses: Gaga, a sturdy go-anywhere cob with hooves like snowshoes, and an amazing little Icelandic pony called Björk for Zuzi, the thought of which terrified Hana who was convinced that the girl might get hurt.
With an eager Zuzi on the leading rein, Sylva explored the bridlepaths around Dillon’s farm. They were mostly very dull and muddy. By the second week Zuzi was bored stiff and no longer wanted to go on their chilly rides. Sylva explained to her that they were on a secret mission.
Zuzi brightened at this, seeing a point behind all the interminable plodding. ‘What do I do?’
‘If anybody tells us that we are trespassing – remember that English word, it is important – trespassing, then you must fall off your pony and pretend to faint.’
‘I might get hurt.’
‘You’ll be fine. Watch, I’ll show you how.’ She subtly slipped her feet out of her stirrups, pressed her hand to her forehead, let out a few fake groans and slid elegantly to the ground, making sure that her arms were around Gaga’s neck all the time, to allow her to swoon safely.
For the first time since she had arrived back in England from her New Year holiday, Zuzi giggled.
Sylva opened one eye and stared up at her, holding out her arms. ‘Now your turn.’
A couple of dog walkers in Broken Back Woods reported to their families afterwards that they had encountered the strangest woman and child there, repeatedly sliding off their horses and dissolving into fits of giggles before remounting and starting all over again.
But, despite their many rehearsals, Sylva and Zuzi failed to make a positive sighting of Dillon in coming days, let alone stage their performance. It was like hunting the elusive Scottish wildcat. Yet Mama insisted they keep trying, unaware that he and Nell had secretly jetted off to the Caribbean straight after Christmas to try to melt the cold war between them.
Mama’s plans were often doomed to failure. Even Sylva’s documentary team had stopped bothering to turn up if they knew that she was going riding.
Sylva saw an advantage in this. She’d also tired of the Dillon plan, but knew there were other places in the area to explore on horseback, some thrillingly forbidden. She missed the excitement of dangerous liaisons. Since her brush-off from Hugo Beauchamp on New Year’s Eve she’d hungered for the ruggedness of a tough, no-nonsense man. She also craved publicity, her lifeblood, which badly needed replenishing. Sylva suspected that both were very close at hand if she just reset her compass twenty degrees.
She took Zuzi to the Fox Oddfield Abbey estate one spectacular sunny afternoon, carefully selecting one of the public bridlepaths that ran close to the house. The low gold sun sliced in through the young fir trees, striping the horses so that they resembled zebras, treating their riders to a strobe show as they cantered along the wide, springy avenues, hooves hollow on the pine-needle carpet beneath them.
As predicted, Castigates soon roared up in his mud-splattered pick-up, waving his twelve bore around and trying to sling the two riders off the estate. Having been warned off Sylva by
his wife – several times, and without the safety trigger engaged – he wanted her gone as swiftly as possible.
‘You’re trespassing!’ he roared.
Sylva winked at Zuzi.
On cue, the little girl slid to the ground and crumpled in a heap.
But, before Castigates could react, a figure burst out of the undergrowth behind them, startling the horses as she ran forwards, wailing, to gather the little girl in her arms.
It was Hana. Unable to bear waiting at home each day while Sylva stole Zuzi away from her, she had followed them through the woods on her mountain bike and now witnessed them being held at gunpoint.
‘My darling, my darling!’ she sobbed in Slovak, clutching the little girl to her chest.
‘I am fine, Mama,’ Zuzi whispered back through tight lips, her eyes still closed. ‘It is a mission. Our lives depend on it. You must go away.’
Hana had seen enough and, snatching up Björk’s reins, lifted her daughter back into the saddle before mounting behind her to ride away, hissing to Sylva over her shoulder that she would never allow her to use her little girl this way again, and that they would both be on the first plane back to Bratislava if she tried.
Sylva turned furiously to Castigates. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
‘Me?’
‘This is a public right of way and you frightened the poor girl so much she fainted. You can’t go pointing a loaded shotgun at a six-year-old. I’ll have to report this. I insist that I speak with your boss.’ She licked her lips.
Castigates uncocked his gun and tucked it under his arm, eyes shadowed by his flat cap. ‘He’s not here.’
‘Then I shall get his attention another way. He will hear about this.’ She turned to catch Gaga.
‘As you wish.’ He collected the abandoned bicycle and handed it out to her.
‘I can hardly carry it on horseback,’ she laughed, reaching for her stirrup. Then, unable to resist, she turned to purr over one shoulder: ‘I’ll come back for it later.’
‘You stay away, missus.’ Castigates finally lifted his chin high enough to watch her with his untamed dark eyes. He remained far too strait-laced to play games.
Sylva regarded the wide-shouldered gamekeeper with regret. He was so magnificent physically that she would relish the conquest, but that wasn’t entirely why she had come here today. She had another use lined up for him, knowing that it was time for radical action in order to make Mama’s plan work.
‘You know I have every right to ride this path whenever I like.’ Sylva eyed him closely.
The flat cap lowered again, his expression unreadable. ‘I’m just following orders, missus.’
She had a suspicion that Castigates disapproved of his boss’s predilection for obstructing public access to the Abbey’s land. He clearly loved his job, but he was a reluctant henchman.
‘I need your help,’ she told him, stepping closer. ‘I’m going to make Pete Rafferty put a stop to all this trespassing nonsense.’
‘He’ll fire me.’
‘It’s okay,’ Sylva assured him. ‘Your name can stay out of it, and I guarantee you’ll make enough of a nest egg to forget I ever goosed you. All I need is a little information …’
Later that evening, Sylva settled down at her computer with her mobile phone cocked to her ear, her Twitter and Facebook pages minimised while on screen she composed a mass email to her huge address book of media contacts.
Upstairs, Hana was reading Zuzi a bedtime story, having been persuaded by Mama (using every means at her disposal bar torture) that they both must stay in England for now. And now Mama was hovering behind her favourite daughter, waiting for a break in the non-stop telephoning to demand an explanation for the day’s events. She listened in with a pale face as Sylva spoke, her accent barely discernible as she became Britain’s favourite hardworking mum talking up a media storm.
‘Yeah, that’s right. Illegally closed. The gamekeeper can’t be blamed – he’ll be sacked if he doesn’t carry out orders. He’s a working man, like I’m a hardworking mum. It’s Pete Rafferty who thinks he is above the law …’
At last, Mama pounced on her between calls. ‘Just what do you think you are doing, maika?’
‘Taking on Dillon’s father.’
Mama’s hands flew up to her shaking head with a groan of despair, but Sylva reached up to reassure her.
‘This is the only way, Mama. I am doing something that he wishes he could do himself. He will notice me, I promise.’ And so will Pete, she added silently to herself.
‘But will he love you?’
‘Not yet.’ Sylva squeezed her mother’s arm with its loose, creasy skin over sinews of steel. ‘But he will. Now be quiet, I’m phoning Rebekah.’
Within forty-eight hours, Sylva was once again IFOP, her public popularity souring as the nation’s favourite single mum took on its mad, bad old Rockfather amid a huge press campaign (and lots of photo opportunities for herself and her children in green wellies).
Returning home from the Caribbean in early February, Dillon was amazed to find that Sylva Frost had mounted a public challenge to reopen all the illegally closed Fox Oddfield Abbey footpaths. Ramblers, riders and locals suddenly adored her.
Dillon called her to add his support, although he drew the line at making this public: ‘Dad couldn’t handle that: a beautiful woman taking him on is one thing, his own son quite another. I hope you understand.’
Sylva said that she did, although she privately thought it was a bit wet. But she was nonetheless quick to issue an invitation to Dillon and ‘all the family’ to lunch, ‘and of course your lovely Nell, who knows all the paths so well – I must pick her pretty head about them’.
Nell, who did indeed know the footpaths and bridleways like old friends, was grudgingly impressed by what Sylva had done. Still glowing from a month of exclusive attention in Dillon’s gated villa with its own private bay, soaking in the St Croix sun and sea while he wrote new material and the hired nanny tended Giselle, she was feeling so conciliatory that she was, for now, happy to play the perfect country girlfriend, cheese-lover and stepmother.
She even acquiesced to Sylva’s play-date lunch invitation to Le Petit Château during Pom and Berry’s next stay. The girls could play with Zuzi, and Giselle with the boys. It suited Nell to have Dillon’s girls farmed out; she found their presence at West Oddford Farm oppressive, and the Cheers! reader in her was dying to have a private view of Sylva’s weekend retreat, which she was convinced would be so bad taste that she would dine out on it for weeks.
But as soon as they arrived it was clear that Sylva had engineered it so that Nell was immediately encircled by her Slovakian posse and press-ganged into childcare while she annexed Dillon, steering him straight to the turret office from which she was co-ordinating her Fox Oddfield Abbey for All, or FOAFA, campaign.
‘Come and see all my hard work in action!’ she purred at him while Nell, a toddler on each hip, had a Peppa Pig mask plonked on her head.
‘So much for picking my brain,’ she fumed as her boyfriend was taken hostage.
Over an hour later, briefly granted freedom to enjoy a traditional Slovakian lunch of peppery goulash soup followed by sausages and potato salad, and then fantastically sweet fried jam dumplings, all of which Sylva claimed to have made herself, Nell didn’t like the glint in Dillon’s eye. She knew full well that the route to his heart via his stomach was a fast-track that they had never shared because she saw food purely as an enemy to beauty. When Sylva then produced a huge wooden board laden with oozing, stinking, award-winning cheeses from Dillon’s own organic shop she knew for certain that she had walked into a trap. It had strong echoes of her own bangers and mash reconciliation before Christmas, but with a far more personal touch.
‘We must go,’ she told him, clutching her temples. ‘I have a migraine.’
Sylva was more than a match for gameplay like that: ‘You must lie down first,’ she insisted, calling to one of the family army and issui
ng instructions in Slovakian. Moments later, Nell found herself frogmarched into a darkened room by a very beefy Slovak woman, who pressed a pill into her hand and poured her a glass of water. Crumpling under pressure – she would have made a hopeless prisoner of war, besides which she did have a headache – Nell swallowed it and sat down on an antique day bed, relieved at least that she didn’t have to go back to play with the under-tens. Left alone, she could regroup and plan her defence strategy. But whatever was in the pill was potent stuff and within five minutes she was fast asleep.
Left unmarked downstairs, Dillon started to weaken under the all-out Sylva charm offensive. He knew precisely what she was up to and he wasn’t going to let it happen, but that was no reason not to briefly enjoy it. His daughters were having a fantastic afternoon, and Nell was getting a much-needed reality check. In his most duplicitous secret heart, he was also starting to wonder if he had found his Get Out of Jail Free card at last.
In St Croix, despite wild sex and stunning sunsets, he had suddenly begun to see the startling similarities between Nell and his monstrous stepmother Indigo, who saw being the wife of a celebrity as a profession in itself, and who was as high-maintenance as the houses she constantly redecorated, the body she constantly rejuvenated and the adopted children she constantly restocked. Nell still showed no enthusiasm for helping him with the farm, or his great passion for the best organic food. The local landowner’s daughter was not an earth mother, after all, but a luxury-loving rare breed with no meat on her and no sustainable by-products apart from her beauty and sexual appetite. She was a wannabe rock chick surrounded by free-range, corn-fed chickens.
It had brought him up short to see Sylva in action. Ambitious Sylva never let up, both supporting and supported by her huge family. She was a workaholic who juggled her busy career with her loving private life. She was refreshingly upfront. And she enjoyed her food. He couldn’t help but be impressed.