The House at Hope Corner: The perfect feel good holiday romance novel

by Emma Davies

  ‘Blimey, I thought I’d lost you for a minute. Mum’s just making a brew, would you like one?’

  ‘Oooh, yes please. Sorry, I got carried away and forgot the time.’ She checked her watch as if to corroborate her statement. ‘I’m gasping for a cuppa actually.’ She dropped her paintbrush into the glass of water on the desk, now a murky shade of brown, and tipped her head to one side, surveying her work. ‘I’m rather pleased with that,’ she said. ‘Here, have a look.’

  She waited while he came around the desk to stand behind her. ‘What are you doing in here anyway?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  He bent to kiss the top of her head. ‘I just wondered why you were in here. Wouldn’t you have more room in the kitchen?’ He reached over her shoulder and laid a finger on the edge of the painting. ‘God, that’s gorgeous.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘One of Grace’s bees.’ She picked up the painting, carefully holding it out in front of her to view it from a different angle. ‘Sorry, what did you ask me?’

  Ned smiled. ‘Nothing really. I just wondered why you were hiding away in here, when you’d have more room to spread out in the kitchen.’

  Flora pulled a face as she turned to look up at him. ‘I thought I’d give your mum and dad a bit of space. And also, if I’m in the kitchen, I have to constantly clear away my things whenever it’s meal time. I can leave my stuff out in here, no one seems to use this room much.’ She grinned. ‘It’s been great actually, I’ve got masses done. I’m ready for a break now though.’

  She studied Ned’s face. He looked tired, even though she was pretty sure he had slept. ‘Are you stopping for a proper rest?’ she asked. ‘You look as if you could do with one.’

  He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Just… you know. Dad and everything… It’s been a bit mental.’

  Flora nodded. ‘Hasn’t it just… and quite possibly going to get more mental before it’s finished.’ He frowned at her, confused, but she carried on before he had a chance to ask his question. ‘Actually, can we have our tea in here?’ she asked. ‘Only there’s something I wanted to ask you about and I’d rather your mum… you know, I don’t want to hurt her feelings.’ She kept her face bright and open.

  Ned looked slightly anxious but he agreed. ‘I think Mum might take her tea with Dad anyway. I’m not sure he’s allowed out of her sight just yet.’

  ‘Ah… an astute observation,’ she said. ‘Understandable, but…’

  Ned looked at her for a moment and she could see the worry written deep into his grey eyes. ‘I think I’d be the same,’ he said. ‘If it were you. I’d never want to leave your side.’

  Flora swallowed. Oh God, this was going to be even more difficult than she thought it was going to be. How could she do this to him, now, with everything else that was going on? Except that this was one of the things that was going on, and if she didn’t do something about it, who knew where it might end.

  She raised a hand and stroked the side of his face. ‘I’d be happy with that,’ she said, feeling a lump rise in her throat. ‘Now go and fetch my tea before I die of thirst…’ She gave a cheeky grin as Ned rolled his eyes.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.

  She sat back in her chair once he’d gone, her eyes closed, breathing deeply. This would be so much easier if she didn’t love him quite so much. He was big, awkward, far too much man to fit inside his body, so that his arms and legs did strange things at times, but all that did was just endear him to her even more. Everything he did was born out of the best of intentions, even if at times his actions went wide of the mark. But then he didn’t profess to have all the answers and, she was well aware, neither did she.

  He was back before she had time to properly prepare what she was going to say. But then there was no right way; she had realised that while wrestling with her thoughts that morning. She just needed to bring up the subject and see where it went, but that was easier said than done.

  Ned put down two mugs on the table and a plate with two slices of cake which he held in his other hand. He drew up a chair in front of the desk, the opposite side to her, and then he sat down, his elbow propped up, his chin in his hand. He gazed up at her, an overtly adoring look on his face. ‘I’m all yours,’ he said, looking for all the world like a lovesick puppy.

  She sat back slightly. ‘Ned, don’t,’ she said gently. ‘This is serious.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, immediately sitting up and searching her face.

  She smiled and reached out a hand. ‘I’m fine, honestly. But I wanted to talk to you. About Caroline,’ she added.

  A look of alarm raced across his face. ‘I know she can be a bit of a pain but—’

  She cut him off. ‘I think we both know it’s more than that,’ she said, taking a deep breath. ‘I’ve had trouble figuring her out ever since I arrived,’ she started. ‘And at first I thought it was just me… feeling a bit jealous or something because she always looks so perfect, and she has an amazing figure, and I don’t.’ She held up her hand. ‘No, let me finish. It always seemed on the outside as if she was being friendly, taking me out riding, introducing me to her friends, helping me out, but somehow… every time she did, I felt as if she were trying to make a point, or was laughing at me.’

  ‘Look, I know she wasn’t very complimentary about your painting yesterday and you’re right, I—’

  ‘It wasn’t that, Ned.’ She gave him a very direct look. ‘I’m certainly not upset by a comment about my work from someone who doesn’t have an artistic bone in their body, or any appreciation of the beauty of nature. Nor am I upset about the fact that she’s always bloody round here, or that she never has a hair out of place and most of the time I look like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards, because, actually, I’m comfortable with how I look. I like the clothes I wear, and the way my hair never knows what it’s doing from one minute to the next. They’re me, Ned, that’s who I am, and I can’t pretend to be anything else, nor do I want to. With me, what you see is what you get and, as soon as I realised that, I understood what has really been bugging me about Caroline, which is that sense I’ve had that she’s been playing some sort of game.’

  She stopped for a moment to draw in another breath and to quieten her voice which was beginning to rise. ‘And so, when I overheard you talking in the living room with your mum last night about some hold over you that Caroline seems to have, it started to ring my warning bells.’

  She lifted her sketchbook from the side of the desk as if tidying her things. The folder full of invoices was underneath, and now in plain sight.

  ‘And then I found these,’ she said, and patted the folder. ‘What’s going on, Ned?’

  She watched as the colour drained slowly from his face.

  ‘Where did you find those? Did Mum…?’ He looked about, as if the answer might be found in the room, although he didn’t try and deny all knowledge of their existence, she noticed.

  ‘No, your mum didn’t leave them here. I found them where she’d hidden them when I moved the things from the sideboard so that Fraser could use it. A simple mistake; it should never have happened, and I’d be none the wiser now if I hadn’t…’ She trailed off, giving him a chance to explain. She raised her eyebrows, but still nothing. ‘And of course, knowing that they were private, I didn’t look at them, simply ferried them to their new home. Because I thought that obviously if they were important, as your future wife, you would tell me all about them.’

  Ned looked like his world was about to end. All his breath left his body in one ragged rush and he sagged in his chair.

  ‘Please don’t hate me, Flora,’ he said. ‘Please, please don’t hate me. I couldn’t bear it if you left. You’re the only thing that’s good in any of this.’

  He looked up, his eyes suddenly full of tears.

  Flora leaned forward. ‘Ned, I never said anything about leaving.’ She reached forward, desperate to take his hand, but he left it, unmoving in his lap. �
��And I could never hate you.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said, refusing to meet her eyes.

  ‘Then tell me, Ned,’ she urged.

  There was silence for several seconds, no words, no movement; nothing to break the wall that was threatening to rise between them.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said finally. ‘Because when I tell you about the mess I’ve got myself into, you’ll never speak to me again…’

  Chapter Eighteen

  There was a wild rushing noise in Flora’s head. She looked at the folder beside her on the desk, a can of worms that suddenly promised to contain far more than she had ever anticipated. Her heart was thumping in her chest; she was scared now because, however much Ned thought was at stake here, he didn’t know the half of it. How on earth had they got to this point?

  The study door was still open, and on shaking legs she went to close it before pulling her chair around the desk to sit beside Ned. She took his hands in hers and kissed them.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered, praying that it was enough, and then she prepared herself to have her heart broken.

  A slow tear tracked its way down Ned’s cheek. ‘I don’t even know when it started,’ he began quietly. ‘A few years ago now… Our equipment was too old and we had to refit the milking parlour to keep up with regulations. The dairies were demanding more and more but paying less and less, but we had no choice if we wanted to keep going. I don’t think we ever fully recovered from that. From then on things just snowballed. We were constantly on the back foot, trying to do the right thing by our cows but losing out financially because of it. That’s still the case…’ He shuddered. ‘I’d rather sell the whole herd than resort to dairy’s “dirty secret” even though it’s the only way to claw back any money. Or rather, to stop any more of it flowing down the drain.’

  Flora tilted her head. Debt she understood, but dirty secrets?

  ‘When you think about it, it’s kind of ironic that you’re a vegetarian. I’m marrying a girl who doesn’t like killing things and yet it’s by doing what we believe to be the right thing that we’ve got into so much trouble…’

  ‘Now you’ve completely lost me,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Ned, but what are you talking about?’

  ‘Killing male calves as soon as they’re born.’

  She shook her head. She really didn’t want to get into an argument about the ethics of eating meat. That wasn’t what this was about. But then she realised what Ned had said. Her head snapped up.

  ‘You do what…?’

  Ned was quick to jump in. ‘No, we don’t… it’s something we swore we would never do, but it’s becoming common practice again. We’re a dairy farm, Flora, think about it. Cows only give milk when they’ve had young, so we breed from them, but it’s only the female calves that are useful to us. The male calves are raised and sold on later, but they’re not bred for their meat and so we get very little for them. In fact, it costs us more to rear them than we get back when we sell them.’

  ‘So you’re saying that other farmers…’ She trailed off, making a cutting motion across her throat. ‘As soon as they’re born?’

  Ned nodded. Flora felt physically sick. ‘And it’s this that has put the farm in debt?’

  ‘Partly, yes. It’s certainly what’s kept us in debt. It’s a vicious cycle.’

  Flora looked at his bowed head and twirled the ends of her hair through her fingers. She didn’t want to give Ned a hard time, though; he wore his shame as if the word was written through him like a stick of rock.

  ‘But what I don’t understand is why, if you were in debt, you didn’t do something about it? Couldn’t the bank help you out or something, just until you got back on your feet?’

  There was silence for a moment and she could see Ned’s jaw working.

  ‘Oh God, you did, didn’t you? That’s what this is about, you owe money to the bank…’

  But Ned shook his head violently. ‘I wish we did,’ he said bitterly. ‘It would have been so much simpler.’ He hung his head again. ‘What I did was just plain stupid. I kid myself sometimes that it was because we were desperate, and I was scared, worried about the effect the stress of being in debt was having on Dad, but actually I was just incredibly stupid, and naive… and so I took the easy way out. If I’d have stopped for a minute to think about Caroline’s offer, I’d have seen it for what it was – part of her game plan – and now of course, all the things I should have thought about are coming back to haunt us.’

  Flora’s stomach gave a lurch. She had almost forgotten that her talking about Caroline was how the conversation had started, and now here she was again.

  ‘Caroline?’ She could feel the dread beginning to bloom in the pit of her stomach. ‘Ah, I see,’ she said quietly. ‘She lent you the money, didn’t she? What did she do, ask Daddy?’

  There was no reply.

  The pieces of the jigsaw were beginning to come together. ‘So, Caroline lends you the money, or rather, her father does, and now what? What could they possibly want in return…?’ She stared at Ned, her brain racing ahead. And then it came to her. Of course, it was obvious. ‘We’re sitting right in the middle of what he wants, aren’t we? More land to add to his empire…’ And then another thought occurred to her. ‘Oh my God… Fraser doesn’t know about the loan, does he?’

  Ned’s shoulders dropped even lower. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘And I know we should have told him, but somehow I thought I could resolve it all without him ever knowing. Which just goes to show how pathetic I really am. That’s why those invoices were hidden. They were never entered into the accounts, but paid using the money that Caroline’s father lent us. Dad knows we’re still struggling but he doesn’t know the half of it.’

  ‘Oh, Ned…’

  He held up his hands. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know; you don’t need to tell me. But at the time it made perfect sense. I could see the effect that all of this was having on Dad’s health and I honestly thought that by keeping it to ourselves, Mum and I were at least saving him that anguish. Except that now of course he’s more poorly than ever, and I can’t bear to think what it might do to him when he does find out.’

  ‘But you are going to have to tell him, Ned.’ Flora looked at the beaten expression on his face. ‘Because even though every fibre of my being is telling me that under no account must Caroline be allowed to gain anything from this situation, the fact of the matter is that you now owe her father a considerable amount of money. And given that you have no way of being able to pay them back in the foreseeable future, in effect they already own a good portion of your land…’ Her mind was freewheeling.

  ‘But there must be a way to resolve all of this,’ she said resolutely. ‘And I’m damned if I’m going to let them win, so we’re just going to have to bloody well find out what it is.’

  As soon as she said it, the vision she’d had for the farm came back in a flash, a dream that up until now she’d thought was just a wild flight of fancy brought on by an overexcitable imagination. But could it really be the way out of all this? She sat up straight, needing to think.

  ‘Flora?’ Her sudden movement brought Ned out of his own reverie. ‘Are you okay?’

  She stared at him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I am.’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, but you’re going to think I’m completely mad…’ She touched a hand to his face, pressing her thumb to his tears. ‘I’ve had an idea, not just now, it came to me a few days ago and I dismissed it, but now…’ She lifted her head and shut her eyes, trying to capture the images that she’d seen so vividly from Grace’s garden. ‘Actually, it wasn’t an idea, more like a vision,’ she added, feeling a swell of excitement rise within her.

  ‘I think you’d better tell me,’ said Ned, a frown wrinkling his brow.

  ‘Flowers,’ she said, opening her eyes and turning to him. ‘I saw rows and rows of flowers, in the field between our garden and the bottom of Grace’s. It was where I walked the very first morning I was here. Oh, I knew it wa
s special, Ned.’ A sudden welling of emotion threatened to overcome her.

  ‘Flowers?’ he queried. ‘What kind of flowers?’

  ‘Every kind,’ she breathed. ‘We were growing them. It was that day I went over to visit Grace, when I took my prints for her to see,’ she added. ‘We talked about art and she took me into her garden, and then after we’d looked at the bees, she told me never to give up being creative and as I looked out at the view…’ She stopped, aware that she was talking in one long sentence, hardly drawing breath. ‘I had a vision of the field, you couldn’t really call it anything else, Ned. It felt like it was real, like it was our future…’ She lifted her hands from her lap and then let them fall again in a helpless gesture.

  He took her fingers. ‘Then what did you see?’

  ‘Well, nothing, it was just the flowers, but I knew they were ours and that we’d planted them.’ She looked up into his face, blushing from the absurdity of what she’d just said.

  To give him his due, Ned didn’t laugh. Instead he entwined his fingers tighter with hers. ‘So what did it mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been buying flowers from wholesale florists for a huge chunk of my life, Ned, but I’ve never before thought of becoming one. But that’s what we were, I’m sure of it; a flower farm.’

  He sat back, holding her look. ‘I rather like flowers,’ he said eventually. ‘Did I ever tell you that?’ He swiped a hand across his face, grimacing, drawing in a deep breath before visibly pulling himself together. ‘And if it hadn’t been for that one single spur-of-the-moment visit to your shop with your beautiful flowers, I would never have met you.’ He kissed the back of her hand. ‘And on that day my life blossomed into something I never ever thought I’d have. I am such an idiot, Flora,’ he said. ‘And what I hate more than anything is that I can’t give you the kind of life I want to, the kind of life you deserve.’