by Lynne Graham
‘He’s been living a life of luxury in a posh pet hotel and costing me a bloody fortune,’ Juliet lamented. ‘But I don’t have time to sell him.’
‘I’m sorry—I can’t help.’ Harriet hardened her heart against the thought of poor neglected Samson and felt very much like shaking his feckless owner until her pearly teeth rattled in her selfish head. ‘Couldn’t the kennels find another home for him?’
‘No, they’d rather hang on to him to make more dosh out of me!’ Juliet wailed accusingly. ‘You’ve got to help me with this. Danny’s picking me up in less than an hour!’
‘I’m afraid I don’t have anywhere to keep a dog either.’ Harriet steeled herself not to surrender to the blonde’s steamrolling personality; Luke was not a dog lover, and had vehemently objected when she had once taken care of Samson over a weekend.
An hour and a half later, having changed into a blue dress that was a particular favourite of Luke’s, Harriet was on the way over to his flat with the intention of surprising him—his conference would have ended by now. She clutched the ingredients of an oriental stir-fry; he loved her cooking. Would it be manipulative to feed him before she mentioned the giant black cloud hovering on her career horizon? Her scrupulous conscience twanged. She was also being haunted by an image of Samson, small enough to sit in pint jug, being bullied by other larger dogs in some gloomy canine holiday home. But the chihuahua was not her responsibility, she reminded herself hurriedly. Luke got really irritated when she plunged headfirst into helping other people solve their problems.
She let herself into his ultra modern apartment and went straight down the hall and into the kitchen. A burst of giggling from the open plan living-cum-bedroom area made her still in surprise. She moved to the door.
‘We called her Porky Pie when we were kids,’ a familiar female voice was saying. ‘Ma was so ashamed of Harriet that she once pretended that she was the housekeeper’s child. She was plump, and she talked with a horrible country bumpkin accent. She might have slimmed down since then, but she’s still got a fat face and a bum the width of a combine harvester.’
Harriet was welded to the spot by astonishment. What was Alice doing in Luke’s apartment, and why was her sister saying such horrible things about her? Was she trying to amuse Luke? Once or twice she had heard Alice being cruelly sarcastic and funny at the expense of others, but had put it down to immaturity since the girl was six years her junior.
‘Alice,’ Luke chided, in an inexcusably indulgent tone.
‘“My name is Porky Pie and I am so boring. I talk about recipes and am so desperate to be liked that I am a total pathetic doormat to everyone around me,”’ Alice proclaimed, mimicking Harriet’s burr well enough for her shaken victim to wince and turn even paler as she moved forward hurriedly to reveal her presence before anything more could be said. ‘Would you prefer a slice of my chocolate cake or another shag, babes?’
‘Do you need to ask? Open those beautiful legs…’
Harriet’s own lower limbs set like lead beneath her. Her stomach churned like a whirlpool while she stared across the spacious stretch of polished wood flooring in utter disbelief. Luke was lying back on the bed stark naked and he was pulling her equally naked half-sister down on top of him! Giggling with carefree abandon, her pale blonde silky hair rippling across her slim tanned shoulders, Alice moved straight into a much more intimate pose with the ease of habit and confidence.
‘I love your dainty little boobs…’ Luke groaned with pleasure, stretching up greedy hands to the pert mounds jutting over him as Alice arched her spine with taunting sexiness.
Harriet was frozen to the spot in sheer shock at the graphic scene before her. ‘Not like mine…’ she heard herself say flatly, and out loud, her own voice sounding curiously detached and lifeless to her ears.
The lovers froze with an immediacy that might have been comic in other circumstances. Luke reared up off the pillows. ‘Harriet?’
‘How long have you been seeing each other?’ Harriet enquired with revulsion, her hands knotting into fists as she physically forced herself not to avert her gaze from their intimacy.
Alice detached from Luke with unhurried grace and angled a bright look of defiance at Harriet, her brown eyes sparkling, her beautiful face expressing unashamed challenge. ‘Months. He can’t get enough of me, in bed or out of it. I’m sorry you had to find out this way. But that’s life, and it’s tough on all of us. I haven’t enjoyed sneaking around like I’m doing something to be ashamed of.’
Striving to pull on his trousers with something less than his normal assurance, Luke harshly told Alice to keep quiet. Harriet recoiled from that pitying intervention from her fiancé. Only he wasn’t her fiancé any more, she told herself starkly. When he had slept with her sister he had made a joke of their engagement. Rigid with the effort of self-control required to keep her emotions from betraying her, she turned round in a stilted movement and walked straight back out of the apartment.
She couldn’t catch her breath at first. She felt like someone had locked her in a little black box and deprived her of oxygen. She was fighting off the urge to panic and scream. Her mind kept on feverishly replaying what she had seen, what she had heard and been told. The words and the images were like serrated knives, twisting ever deeper inside her. The pain was unbelievable, for she had adored Luke for what felt like half of her adult life. She could not imagine living without him. She could not bear the knowledge that he had made love to her sister, had laughed and listened to Alice’s degrading comments. What had happened to loyalty and decency?
What had happened to the dislike that Luke and Alice had been so keen to parade previously, their snide comments about each other? Luke had called Alice a spoilt little princess and had scorned her life of carefree self-indulgence. Alice had often referred to Luke as a pompous prat. Had that supposed animosity only been put on for Harriet’s benefit?
When Harriet had first met Luke at university she had been his mate when she’d wanted to be so much more, a rank outsider forced to smile on the sidelines while he dated and bedded prettier and slimmer and more sophisticated girls. But through friendship she had won his trust and affection. Love had blossomed when he’d begun to look for her when she wasn’t there, and had shared his hopes, failures and successes with her.
She had starved herself down two full dress sizes to meet Luke’s standards. Indeed, this was the worst of moments to appreciate that she had honed herself into a different person simply to make herself more attractive to the man she had set her heart on holding. But maybe that had been trying to cheat fate. Maybe she and Luke had never been meant to be. Certainly she could not compete with Alice, who was six inches taller and a naturally slender blonde with a fantastic figure. Alice was truly beautiful, and she did not have to work at self-presentation.
Wanting Luke, Alice had just reached out and taken him without apology. She had probably picked up that simple philosophy of life from their mother, Eva. The older woman had left her humble beginnings behind in Ireland and had missed no opportunity to better her prospects. Now based in Paris, and on her third marriage, to a Norwegian shipping magnate, Eva had attained all her goals in life. Harriet was her eldest child and had been raised by Eva’s first husband. Eva had had Alice, and Harriet’s younger half-brother Boyce, with his successor.
‘You only get one life,’ Eva had remarked without regret when she walked out on her devastated second husband for his younger, richer and more powerful replacement. ‘Sometimes you have to be totally selfish to make the most of it. Be true to yourself first.’
That had been a foreign creed to Harriet, who had been forced to put other people’s feelings and needs ahead of her own. But now that her own world had come crashing down around her she could see how self-interest could pay off, and how it might give her another desperately needed focus. It was to meet Luke’s expectations that she was living in the city and working in a high-powered job for money that gave her very little satisfaction. Sudde
nly she was seeing how her broken heart might be turned into something much more positive.
With Luke out of her life, and a career that was fast fading, she was free to do exactly as she liked, she told herself fiercely, determined to find a source of optimism in the savage, suffocating pain she was struggling to hold at bay. If losing Luke to her half-sister meant the chance to downshift to a simpler lifestyle in the Irish countryside, should she not snatch at that opportunity? After all, there would never be a better time to take such a risk. She was young, single, solvent and healthy.
She was taken aback to find Samson the chihuahua parked outside her front door in his pet carrier. A box of doggy accessories, which included his fake diamond collar collection and designer coats and matching boots, was placed beside him. She rummaged through its contents: there was no feeding bowl, no food, not even a lead. The tiny animal shivered violently at the back of the carrier, enormous round eyes fixed to her in silent pleading.
Harriet suppressed a groan of angry exasperation. How could Juliet abandon her pet when she knew that Harriet didn’t want him? Samson had been dumped, just the way she had been, Harriet recognised painfully. Dumped when he fell out of fashion and a more promising prospect came along. She had always wanted a dog—but a big, normal dog, not one the size of a tiny stuffed toy. But didn’t that make her guilty of body fascism? How had she enjoyed being judged against some impossible marker of physical female perfection and found wanting by Alice? She squirmed with guilt and frustration. It wasn’t Samson’s fault that he was very much undersized…
*
The ivy-covered tumbledown wall of an ancient estate bounded the road for what seemed like miles before a roadsign in English and Irish Gaelic alerted Harriet to her arrival in Ballyflynn.
Her heart started beating very fast. A very old stone church appeared in advance of the first houses. Had her mother worshipped there as a girl? Trying as she was to look in every direction at once, Harriet slowed her car to the speed of a snail. Buildings painted in ice cream pastels lined both sides of a wide street embellished by occasional trees. It was distinctly picturesque if sleepy little village.
Parking outside McNally’s, the solicitor dealing with her late cousin’s will, she lifted her designer handbag. Luke had bought it for her birthday. Suddenly she had a flashback to the photo of Alice and Luke that had been printed in a gossip column two weeks earlier. Her tummy gave a sick lurch of remembrance. Luke had always been ambitious and he would be thoroughly enjoying his new public profile. Hungry for the offer of a partnership in the legal firm where he worked, he had told Harriet that appearances were all-important when it came to impressing the senior staff. Alice had to be the definitive image enhancement, with her beauty and her entrée into more exclusive circles. Harriet snatched in a shaken breath. It was only seven weeks since they had broken up and the pain was still horribly fresh. But she was going to get over it without turning into a bitter, jealous monster, she urged herself.
Eugene McNally, the portly middle-aged solicitor, handed over the keys to the late Kathleen Gallagher’s property with wry reluctance. His disappointment had been palpable when Harriet had stated her complete uninterest in discussing or even hearing about the increased offer that had just been made for her inheritance. However, although she had already received copious details in the post, Harriet did have to sit through a further recitation by Mr McNally of the liabilities which were still being settled against her late relative’s estate.
‘Your legacy is unlikely to make you rich,’ the ruddy-faced Mr McNally warned her. ‘It may even cost you money. Making a profit out of horses is not easy.’
‘I know.’ Harriet wondered if he thought she was the type to chase foolish rainbows. Of course her lastminute change of heart about selling must surely have caused considerable annoyance and inconvenience for both him and the prospective buyer, she allowed guiltily. But she’d been hugely apologetic when she’d explained on the phone that an unexpected crisis in her life had made her rethink her future. The buyer she had let down was a business called Flynn Enterprises. Obviously a local one, she reflected ruefully, and treading on local toes was not the way to make friends. Yet, while moving to Ireland was an admittedly bold and risky move on her part, she was convinced that her nearest and dearest were wrong in believing that she was making the biggest mistake of her life….
‘Are you doing this to punish me and make me feel bad?’ Luke had condemned resentfully when he found out.
‘All of a sudden you seem to have gone haywire,’ her stepfather had muttered worriedly. ‘You’re acting like a giddy teenager!’
‘A hair shirt and a spell in a convent would be more exciting than burying yourself alive in that hick village at the back end of nowhere,’ her mother Eva had warned in exasperation. ‘I couldn’t wait to get away. You’ll hate it. You’ll be back in London within six months!’
But what Harriet had chosen to do felt very right to her. In fact she felt different, and she didn’t quite understand why. But she did appreciate that for once she was in complete control of her own destiny, and that gave her a wonderful sense of freedom. She could hardly wait to meet the challenge of running her own business and was quietly confident that, with hard work, she could make a go of it.
She drove very slowly out of Ballyflynn. The same estate wall that had greeted her arrival still stretched before her in an even worse state of repair. There was a tight knot of anticipation in the pit of her tummy. Eugene McNally’s helpful receptionist had given her exact directions: travel about half a mile past the hump backed bridge and turn sharp left down the lane behind the chestnut tree.
The lane was rough and winding, the tall hedges on either side so overgrown that any view was obscured. The verges were lush and green, the floating tumbrels of Queen Anne’s lace moving softly in the slight breeze. She wasn’t expecting too much, Harriet reminded herself. It was so important not to have unrealistic expectations. The lane fanned out into a concrete yard surrounded by a collection of old sheds and stables fashioned of a variety of materials and not at all scenic. Obviously repairs were on the agenda. Well, she had a little money to spend, and two hands to work with.
She drove on round the next corner and lost her heart within thirty seconds flat. In a grove of glorious trees a little whitewashed cottage sat below a thatched roof so endearingly steep it resembled a witch’s hat. Worn red paint picked out old-fashioned mullioned windows and a battered wooden door. Utterly astonished by the sheer eccentricity and apparent age of the building, Harriet blinked and stared. Then she slammed on the brakes, thrust aside her seat belt and climbed out to explore.
The key turned in the door’s lock with ease. A good sign, she thought, buzzing with anticipation. She stepped into a dim interior and was struck by the evocative smell of beeswax and flowers filling her nostrils. A tiny fire glowed in a massive smoke-blackened fireplace, which still rejoiced in all the black metal fittings that had once functioned as a cooking range. The light of the flames gleamed and danced over the dark wood patina of a centrally positioned table, on which was placed a bunch of misty purple lavender spikes and soft pink roses in a chipped crystal vase.
There were two doors, the first of which led into a small room dominated by a high brass bed and a massive Victorian wardrobe. The other led into a much more recent extension to the cottage. Here, the kitchen housed an Aga and had an office corner that accommodated a very cluttered desk set against walls papered with tatty rosettes and faded photos of racing events and horses. Another bedroom led off a small rear corridor. Praying that the final door next to it led into a bathroom that enjoyed full washing facilities, Harriet depressed the knob.
‘Go away…I’m in the bath, Una!’ a startled male voice yelled in protest.
Almost simultaneously Harriet heard a door open off the kitchen and a girl shouting, ‘Fergal…there’s a strange car out front. Forget having a soak. If that’s the Carmichael woman arriving, she’ll not want to find a strange fel
la in her bath!’
A tall whip-thin teenager in dirty jodhpurs focused on Harriet with sparkling brown eyes and thumped a dismayed hand to her full mouth. Her spiky black hair was threaded with purplish streaks in true gothic style, but she was without a doubt an extraordinarily pretty girl.
There was the sound of a body hastily vacating sloshing bathwater. ‘How do you know? I have a way with women,’ Fergal quipped cheekily. ‘She might be glad enough to find me here—’
‘I can’t give you an honest opinion on that score until I see you,’ Harriet murmured truthfully.
A silence that screamed fell, and then the upper half of a young giant with a tousled blond head twisted round the door to peer out at her. He had navy blue eyes and an unshaven chin. Even though Harriet was thoroughly irritated to find her magical cottage invaded by strangers, she was not at all surprised at Fergal’s belief that he had a way with her sex. In his early to mid-twenties, and with a smile that could strip paint, he was very handsome.
‘Bloody hell…I’m sorry!’ Fergal groaned, and slammed the door fast.
‘I’m Una Donnelly…your part-time groom,’ the teenager announced, tilting her chin pugnaciously.
‘I didn’t realise that anybody else had keys for this place,’ Harriet remarked carefully.
Una reddened. ‘Fergal’s not anybody,’ she proclaimed defensively. ‘He’s like Kathleen’s unofficial partner and he’s always made himself at home here.’
‘Only not now that there’s a new owner!’ Fergal called hurriedly from behind the door he had opened a crack.
‘I assume I have you to thank for dusting and lighting the fire in the hall.’ Harriet walked back into the kitchen to fill the kettle and put it on to boil. She was very tired and extremely hungry, and she needed to get Samson out of the car. After a crack-of-dawn start yesterday, she had driven her packed car from London to board a ferry in Wales. After spending the night on Irish soil in a bed and breakfast, her subsequent journey across the midlands to the Atlantic west coast had been long and draining.