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Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
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Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
The Accidental Family Copyright © Rowan Coleman 2009
The Accidental Mother Copyright © Rowan Coleman 2005
The Accidental Wife Copyright © Rowan Coleman 2008
Rowan Coleman has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Ebury Press in 2016
www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Memory Book
Dearest Rose
Lessons in Laughing Out Loud
The Happy Home for Broken Hearts
The Baby Group
Woman Walks Into A Bar
River Deep
After Ever After
Growing Up Twice
The Accidental Mother
The Accidental Wife
The Accidental Family
Writing as Scarlett Bailey:
Just For Christmas
Married by Christmas
Santa Maybe (digital short)
The Night Before Christmas
Thank you to the brilliant and patient Kate Elton and Georgina Hawtrey-Woore who are a constant source of support and inspiration and also to the whole team at Arrow and Random House who always work so hard on my behalf. Thank you also to my dear friend and wonderful agent Lizzy Kremer.
And huge thanks to the fantastic women who have supported me through an eventful year with glasses of wine, emergency childcare and a shoulder to lean on so many times – Jenny Matthews, Margi Harris, Kirstie Seaman and Catherine Ashley. Also to Clare Winter, Cathy Carter, Rosie Wooley and Sarah Darby. I feel lucky to have so many best friends.
And most of all thank you to my beautiful girl, my daughter Lily, a constant joy and delight and the light of my life.
‘Right … um, well – once upon a time, not that long ago, there lived an exceptionally beautiful princess, who had long golden hair and was a size twelve as long she stayed off white bread and cake.
Princess Sophie lived in a very nice one-bedroom turret in an up-and-coming part of the kingdom and she owned an extensive and extremely stylish collection of shoes and one cat called Artemis. Actually she didn’t exactly own the cat; the cat just lived in the flat with her. More like a flat mate really, or a flat cat … Anyway, Princess Sophie thought that she was very happy because she had a very nice home and a lot of nice clothes and shoes.
The princess even had a very serious and important job that she was very, very good at. She was a career princess, one who knew that events management wasn’t just planning a load of big parties. In fact, Princess Sophie was very good at most things except for being close to other people. She didn’t realise it at the time, but she was actually quite lonely.
Then one day a very fat and badly dressed fairy godmother came to visit her from the land of Social Services. She told the princess that a very sad thing had happened. The princess’s oldest and best friend Lady Carrie had died. And she had left behind two beautiful daughters who needed to be looked after. The fairy godmother reminded Princess Sophie that once, long ago, she had made a promise to Lady Carrie that if anything ever happened to her, she would look after the two little girls.
Well, Princess Sophie didn’t exactly know what to think. She was very, very sad about losing her friend, but also she was scared. When she had made that promise she never dreamt that one day she would have to keep it, and she wasn’t sure that she knew how to look after two small girls. But when she thought about her lovely friend, Princess Sophie knew she couldn’t let them down. And so the two girls came to stay. Their names were Bella and Izzy. Bella was an artist and pony expert who could fly as long as no one was looking and Izzy was a true fairy, which was easy to see because she always dressed as a fairy even when she went to bed, even when she had a bath.
At first Princess Sophie and Artemis weren’t at all sure about Bella and Izzy, especially not when they turned her lovely white sofa into a green curry-scented one, ruined her make-up collection and got stuck down the loo. Princess Sophie thought that there was no way that she would be able to cope. But the two girls needed a friend to look after them and Princess Sophie was the only friend they had so she stuck it out.
And gradually day by day Princess Sophie got to like Izzy and Bella a bit more, and they got to like her a bit more too. And even though all three of them felt sad they were all sort of glad they had each other.
Then one day a handsome stranger called Prince Louis arrived at Princess Sophie’s door; he was Bella and Izzy’s daddy. He had been in a faraway land and as soon as he had found out what had happened he came back to look after his daughters. But no one had seen him for the longest time and Princess Sophie didn’t know if he was a nice man or not. Bella wasn’t sure if after all that time she still wanted him to be her daddy. Only Izzy who had never even met her daddy before decided to like him right away – and you know what they say, first impressions are always right. And ever so slowly the two girls and Princess Sophie got to know Prince Louis.
One day it was time for Prince Louis to take Bella and Izzy back home to the Kingdom of Mermaids, by the sea. Princess Sophie felt very, very sad about them going, but she knew they had to. She knew that they’d be happy there, in the place that Lady Carrie had loved best. And so she took them all down in her magic chariot Phoebe, the Golf.
And when they were there Princess Sophie realised something wonderful and scary too. She realised that she loved Bella and Izzy, that she loved them with all her heart – and even more scarily she realised that she loved Prince Louis too.
Well, Princess Sophie didn’t know what to do about that, because she wasn’t used to loving anyone apart from her cat, who she wasn’t all that sure loved her back. She didn’t know how to show or tell the people she loved how much she cared about them and she didn’t know if they would want her to love them. So when she saw how happy Prince Louis, Bella and Izzy were she decided to leave and go back to her turret, even though it broke her heart.
Once she got back she felt sad every day, even though she was crowned queen at her office and became the boss of everything which was really only what she deserved because she was so very good at her job. At night she lay awake missing the three people she loved best.
Then Princess Sophie’s friend Cal told her that if she stayed in her turret pining away she would never be happy. He told her that she had to be brave, she had to go on a quest to the Land of the Mermaids and find Prince Louis and Bella and Izzy and tell them that she loved them and that she wanted to be near them, come what may.
So she travelled down to the Land of the Mermaids and when she got there she told Prince Louis and Bella and Izzy how very much she loved them, and the best thing – the happiest thing of all – was that they told her they loved her back.
And Princess Sophie decided to stay in the Land of Mermaids for ever and ever.
The End.
Or if you really want to be picky – the beginning.’
‘CREAM TEAS ARE the devil’s work,’ Sophie said out loud as she inspected herself in her latest pair of jeans. Technically she was still a size twelve but if she was honest the almost daily trip to Carmen Velasquez’s Ye Olde Tea Shoppe had pushed her hips to the size’s upper limit, something she’d have to sort out eventually, particularly if she was going to wear so much purposeful denim.
Once, before Bella, Izzy and their father came into her life, Sophie had owned only one pair of jeans, which she seldom wore. She had been an occasion dresser, with a fondness for a sequin on a work day and a rule that a heel should never dwindle below three inches. But since she’d come to stay in St Ives not only had she not bought a single pair of unfeasibly high heels, but she’d also collected four pairs of jeans, two denim skirts, an assortment of casual tops and an anorak. Sophie loved her double-zipped all-weatherproof red and navy blue anorak, but it was a love that dared not speak its name, at least not when she was talking to her erstwhile secretary and good friend Cal on the phone about her outlandish new life in Cornwall.
‘Have you got any wellies yet?’ Cal would quiz her without fail during their weekly chats.
‘Me, wellies? Are you joking? I have some standards,’ Sophie would tell him breezily.
‘Wellies mean you aren’t coming back,’ Cal took pleasure in telling her. ‘Wellies are a sign of commitment to your new way of life. Wellington boots are the nearest that you, Sophie Mills, will ever get to an engagement ring.’
‘Well, thanks, Cal. Thanks very much for boiling my entire romantic happiness down to a moulded rubber boot,’ Sophie would reply. ‘Besides, what would you, the king of commitment-phobia know, anyway? I might get married one day.’
Sophie gazed out of her bedroom window at the grey and stormy sea beyond the harbour below. Before she had left London to come here she had never once daydreamed about getting married or being a bride. But during the last six months she’d spent with Louis she had found herself thinking about it more than once.
‘To Louis?’ Cal persisted.
‘Potentially.’ Sophie’s mouth curled into a silent smile meant only for her. ‘One day, you know … when the time is right.’
‘Wellies first.’ Cal was adamant. ‘Once you’ve bought the wellies then he’ll finally know that you’re committed and he’ll ask you. He’s waiting for the wellies.’
But as yet there were no Wellington Boots in the original 1970s MFI wardrobe in Sophie’s room at the Avalon B&B and at six months she was the second-longest-staying guest, second only to Mrs Tregowan who had been there for nearly a year after her husband died, deciding she could not bear to go back to her bungalow without him.
Sophie had been in the Cornish town of St Ives for most of the spring, for once feeling part of the burgeoning season, embracing the renewal of life as she felt herself awaken to the unknown possibilities that the future might hold. On weekend mornings she and Louis had paddled in the freezing waters of the harbour with the girls till her city-soft toes turned blue, collecting interesting shells and bits of pottery. Sophie had let the cool, crisp sea breeze ruddy her cheeks and whip her fine blonde hair into a tangle. As they climbed over the rocks and stones to the harbour wall, their toes encrusted with sand, Louis would hold her hand in his, reviving her numbed fingers with his body heat till she felt the blood tingle and throb in her fingertips. She had stayed for the whole of the fickle summer, in turn drenched with warm rain and occasionally studded with jewel-like days bathed in sunshine. During the summer holidays when Louis was working building up his fledgling photography business, the girls gave her their own personal tour of the town: picnicking amongst the clover and daisies above the whitewashed town perched so haphazardly on the rocky cliffs which tumbled into the sea; dodging the tourists at the roller disco that took place every day at midday in the Guildhall, which Sophie found both exhilarating and humiliating in turn; and taking her to the Tate Gallery to show her the paintings there, Bella lecturing her with confidence on light and perspective; and leading her in and out of the maze of tiny cobbled streets to show her their favourite houses and window boxes laden with geraniums. And in the evenings, after Louis had got back from that day’s assignment, they’d walk along the harbour wall until they found the family of seals which were always there, lounging on the rocks just out to sea as if they rather enjoyed their celebrity. Izzy would give them a new name every day and Bella would tell Sophie stories about them.
Now it was late September and things had stayed more or less exactly the same way since the week she had arrived: a charming mixture of novelty and routine combined with a kind of happiness she had never felt before and the sense that this wasn’t really her life she was living after all, it couldn’t be. She felt as if she were walking through the pages of a romance novel or had suddenly been given the lead role in a movie because real life was never this easy.
She saw Louis and the girls every day. Since the start of the new term she had been taking the children to school; Izzy had turned four and had now joined the nursery at Bella’s school. Every other afternoon she would pick Izzy up at one and they would enjoy a cream tea at Carmen Velasquez’s Ye Olde Tea Shoppe before returning to school to fetch Bella at three fifteen. Then they’d go for a walk on the beach, making sandcastles and chasing each other with lumps of slimy seaweed if it was sunny enough or, if it was rainy, go back to Louis’s house to make things out of dried pasta. Very occasionally they’d partake of a second cream tea at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe as it didn’t seem fair that Bella missed out.
In the evenings, after the girls were in bed, Sophie and Louis would sit in front of the electric fire he kept swearing he was going to replace with a period fireplace to match the house’s Victorian exterior and laugh and talk and share news and hold hands and do a great deal of kissing. And most nights the kissing would lead to touching and the touching would lead to the most wonderful and dazzling sex that Sophie had ever known. Louis’s sofa had seen a lot of action over the last six months and his rug had seen a great deal more. But to date Sophie had never stayed the night.
‘I’m fairly sure you could sleep over if you wanted to,’ Louis had said one night as the pair of them lay sprawled in front of the fire, which they had switched on for old times’ sake, even though it was August and a swelteringly hot night. He traced a finger along the curve of her breast that shimmered with sweat in the firelight. ‘I’d love to go to sleep with you, Sophie,’ he murmured. ‘And to wake up with you. I’d like to see you in the morning with your hair all tangled up and sleep creases in your cheeks. I’d like to have sex with you in the morning, while you’re still half dreaming and biddable.’
‘Well, you’d be unlucky,’ Sophie told him as she stretched, and wriggled because the rug was a nylon mix and a bit itchy on her skin. ‘Because I sleep like a princess and I never get tousled or creased. Besides, I’m only ever biddable when I want to be, which might be right now if you play your cards right.’
‘Stay over,’ Louis asked her gently, kissing her shoulder. ‘Please.’
‘I can’t, Louis. What would they think?’ Sophie pointed at the ceiling. Bella and Izzy were fast asleep upstairs.
‘They’d think that you’d stayed the night and then they’d wonder whether, seeing as Daddy was in such a good mood, they could score Coco Pops for breakfast two days in a row even though they’re only supposed to have them twice a week,’ Louis said. ‘They wouldn’t care, Sophie. I think they’d be happy about it.’
‘I can’t,’ Sophie replied uncertainly. ‘It wouldn’t be right. They aren’t ready for that.’
‘They do know we’re going out together, you know,’ Louis said wryly. ‘All the hand holding and “I love yous” have given it away a bit. I think you are the one who’s not ready.’
Sophie dropped her gaze momentarily. Perhaps Louis was right. Everything seemed so complete, so wonderful now, that she sometimes felt as if her happiness was balanced on a high wire. She was afraid of changing anything, including moving their relationship on a step in case the perfect peace she’d found here teetered and crashed.
Sophie was all too aware of her own double standards. Here she was naked and sated on the living-room floor with only a flight of stairs and a locked door keeping her and Louis from being discovered by his daughters. But staying over was something else; it was the next level and she wanted it to be about her and Louis taking another step forward together, not a way to have sex that would result in fewer friction burns. Sophie eyed Louis from beneath her lashes.
‘So we are going out together, then?’ She teased him instead. ‘Only you’ve never formally asked me, so I did wonder. It’s just that the children are only seven and four. I can’t possibly stay over – not when we’re not …’
‘What?’ Louis propped himself up on one elbow and looked at Sophie, his gaze travelling slowly upwards from the tops of her thighs, over her breasts and finally meeting her eyes with the kind of look that would have made her knickers fizz had she been wearing any.
‘We’re not, you know, thingy,’ Sophie said, smiling as she wound her arms around Louis’s neck and drew him down to kiss her. But his lips stopped short of hers by a hair’s breadth.
‘Marry me, then,’ Louis whispered.
Instead of answering, Sophie kissed him hard, pushing him on to his back on the carpet and climbing on top of him with the kind of unbridled abandon that, had she stopped to think about it, she would have found rather embarrassing. But she didn’t stop to think because one of the best things about being in love with Louis Gregory was that when she made love to him she didn’t think about anything at all apart from how very wonderful it made her feel.
Still, as delightful a distraction as it had been, Sophie had not answered or even acknowledged Louis’s question. It hadn’t gone unnoticed but it did go unspoken about, because Sophie and Louis didn’t talk about anything much except for the day’s events and exactly where each other’s bodies should be kissed next. Sometimes the thought would creep into Sophie’s mind that all she and Louis knew about one another was how to make each other laugh and their bodies sing, but it was a thought that rarely stayed too long. Sophie would either be laughing too hard or melting under Louis’s touch to dwell on it much.
At the end of each evening Sophie would spend a few minutes talking to her cat Artemis who, apparently, was not nearly as concerned about progressing things along as her owner was. Artemis had moved in with Louis on the very first day they had arrived from London, and the animal now lorded it over the resident ginger cat Tango with the ferocity and splendour of a feline Boudicca. Sophie would then get in her Golf if she hadn’t been drinking, or take the local taxi if she had, and go back to the B&B to sleep alone.
It wasn’t that she didn’t long to wake up with Louis’s arms around her, because she did. It was just that six months on she was still determined before she edged along that precarious high wire to be absolutely sure that what she was doing was the right thing and that she wasn’t making a terrible, terrible mistake, the kind of mistake that would burst this wonderful little bubble she had been living in and let reality come careering in.
Cal would say that all the happiness, not to mention the general feeling of contentment and joy that had pervaded her daily life since she had come down to Cornwall to stay, should be proof enough for her to take that next step towards commitment. But then again Cal had been known to declare his undying love to a man simply because he admired the lining of his jacket so Cal’s opinion was not, in this case at least, one Sophie felt able to rely on. This time she had to know for herself and although all the evidence supported a favourable outcome there was something, some small, tiny, indefinable piece of information that Sophie was waiting to fall into place before she could know for sure that she was meant to be here. The problem was that Sophie wasn’t entirely sure exactly what it was she was waiting for.
Less than a year ago Sophie had been working her way up the career ladder, within touching distance of the very top of her game, which was corporate events management in the City. She was second in command at McCarthy Hughes and about to step into her boss’s shoes to run the whole shebang. The moment that she had been working for since joining the company fresh out of school was almost upon her.
And then her best friend, her dear, sweet, sometimes rash, but always loyal and lovely best friend Carrie, had been killed in a car accident leaving behind two small girls without anyone to look after them, except an ailing grandmother and a father who could not be found. Suddenly a drunken afternoon, long ago, when Sophie had promised Carrie that she would be the children’s guardian had become horrifyingly real. Sophie had taken the two strange, sometimes quiet and frequently destructive little girls into her life, telling their social worker that it would only be for as long as it took to track down their good-for-nothing absent father.
There had been a lot of tears, several bed wettings, the incident with a laptop, the breakfast cereal and the hair serum that still made Sophie wince whenever she thought about it and, of course, the cat food debacle that Sophie had neglected to mention to the girls’ social worker, not because she was trying to hide anything, but because her mother had told her that as far as she knew a few mouthfuls of Kitekat weren’t lethal to curious three-year-olds.
It was fair to say that motherhood, as transient and as accidental as it had been, had not come easily to Sophie, particularly as she struggled to come to terms with the death of the woman she considered her closest friend, the woman who, it turned out, she had hardly known at all. So what had occurred next had been entirely unexpected.
The children had come to need her and trust her. And she had slowly begun to love them. A love that, despite its strength and depth, had crept up on her unawares. Slowly parts of her that had lain dormant since the death of her father had been revived and through their own grief the children had somehow reconnected Sophie to herself. They had set her heart beating again.
Which happened to be at just the moment her dead best friend’s husband, the girls’ father, walked back into his daughters’ lives after a three-year absence.
At first Sophie wanted to hate Louis, but when it became clear that hating him was going to be impossible because he wasn’t the heartless monster she had imagined him to be, and was in fact a rather sensitive, sweet, sexy man with an amazing body, she’d simply settled on not falling for him. After all, what worse possible choice could a 32-year-old woman make than falling in love with her dead best friend’s husband? Sophie spent many a long night awake on her sofa while the children slept in her double bed trying to think of one, but none came to mind. She didn’t even think a cork retro wedge worn with a full skirt above the knee compared when it came to an ill-judged decision made in poor taste. So Sophie tried, she really tried, not to want him. But as she got to know him, and saw how desperate he was to win back the trust of his children, she found out what had really happened to drive him and Carrie apart and eventually she understood and respected what he’d been through. It didn’t help that whenever she looked into his eyes her heart beat like a drum against her ribcage and her knickers fizzed.
After that it was all fairly textbook – if the textbook you are reading is Emotionally Repressed Women and How Best to Manage Denial. Sophie had fallen for Louis, she had pretended that she hadn’t fallen for Louis, she had spent a night of unscheduled illicit passion with him, and then she had left, planning to torture herself for the rest of her life with an endless series of ‘what might have beens’ till Cal had told her to stop it and go and be happy instead. And six months ago, incredibly, she had done just that.
At the age of almost thirty-three Sophie Mills had thrown her entire carefully built-up life away to see if she could make things work with a man she barely knew. She worried about how it must look to people on the outside: she and Louis, two strangers who barely knew each other, thrown together by circumstance and, fond as he was of her, Louis perhaps regarding Sophie as a rather convenient replacement for the girls’ lost mother, a replacement who came ready made with his children’s trust and love already assured.
Now she thought about that last step on the high wire, the one that would lead her to a new and permanent life in Cornwall. That last step which would mean that she could finally call Louis’s house her home.
It was a shame, Sophie thought as she squeezed the extra flesh on her hips between her thumb and forefinger, that she didn’t have a similar problem committing to cream teas.
A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts and she quickly hid in the wardrobe.
‘Aunty Sophie?’ Bella called out as she pushed the bedroom door open. ‘We’re coming to get you!’
‘You is going to get got!’ Izzy giggled, galloping into the room after Bella like a herd of small but determined elephants.
Sophie remained silent in the wardrobe secreted between business suits and sequined party dresses that hadn’t been worn in months. Her job on the days when Louis picked the children up from school and brought them round, was to wait to be found. And even though the girls knew exactly where she was hiding (there weren’t that many opportunities for discretion in the tiny room), she had to wait nevertheless. Sometimes Izzy wouldn’t be able to stand the excitement and she’d be found in less than a minute. On other days, it could take quite a long while and by the time she had been uncovered Sophie would have quite a crick in her neck and pins and needles in her calves.
‘Is she under the bed?’ Bella’s muffled voiced suggested that she had crawled under it to check.
‘Is she in the toilet?’ Izzy’s giggle bounced off the walls in the tiny en-suite and Sophie smiled to herself. Izzy had changed a lot in the last six months but her devotion to toilet humour had never wavered.
‘Is she up the chimney?’ Bella called out.
‘Or on the lampshade?’ Izzy suggested.
‘Of course she’s not on the lampshade, Iz,’ Bella said matter-of-factly. ‘The lampshade is tiny and small and made of paper and Aunty Sophie is huge!’
Sophie pursed her lips and silently swore off clotted cream scones for about the seventh time that week.
‘I think …’ Bella said in the tone of voice that meant Sophie had to prepare to be discovered. ‘That she might be … in … the … wardrobe!’
In the second that Bella flung open the door Sophie jumped out yelling ‘BOO!’ at the top of her voice, an event that never failed to make both girls scream and giggle, as they leapt on Sophie and propelled her in one very girlish heap on to one of the room’s twin beds.
‘You got me,’ Sophie said when she had got her breath back. ‘Where’s Daddy?’
‘Downstairs talking to Mrs Alexander about sandwiches,’ Bella said sitting up, pushing her fringe out of her eyes. Sophie brushed the child’s dark hair off her forehead and kissed her on the cheek.
‘You need a haircut again,’ she said. ‘Your hair grows faster than anything I know.’
‘What about me, do I need a haircut?’ Izzy hooked her arms around Sophie’s neck and rested her cheek against Sophie’s. Sophie wound a finger into one of Izzy caramel-coloured curls. ‘You have hair just like your mother’s,’ she told the younger girl, knowing how much she liked to talk about Carrie. ‘You can cut it and brush it and wash it all you like but it will do exactly what it wants to do … which reminds me of the little person it’s attached to!’
‘I’m not little any more,’ Izzy protested. ‘I go to school now and anyway, are you coming for a cream tea?’
‘Of course she is,’ Bella said. ‘Aunty Sophie always comes for cream teas.’
‘I can’t deny it,’ Sophie said. ‘But today is absolutely my total and utter last one.’
‘You said that yesterday,’ Bella reminded her.
‘I know a thing,’ Izzy said with big round eyes and a typically dramatic tone. ‘A really, really specially secret thing that Daddy says I’m not to tell you!’
‘Do you?’ Sophie was mildly anxious. The last major secret Izzy had had involved Artemis and an entire packet of smoked salmon that Izzy had fed the cat under her bed in a bid to make the cat love her more than Bella. What Izzy had failed to understand was that Artemis would never turn down free food even from her worst enemy and it was a miracle that she actively liked any human at all. She had lived with Sophie for years in her flat in London and had barely ever spoken two words to her, so to speak. For some reason Bella was the only human whom Artemis loved, whether it was because the once mistreated cat saw something in Bella she recognised or because Bella was the only person on the planet who knew how to tickle her behind her ears the way she liked it, Sophie didn’t know. But she did know that all copious amounts of smoked salmon would achieve was piles of orange fishy vomit deposited all around the house.
‘Have you been trying to make friends with Artemis again?’
‘No, it’s even better than that!’ Izzy said, giggling gleefully.
‘It’s not really,’ Bella said firmly. ‘It’s not anything at all. It’s really best forgotten about.’
‘Yes, we are not to tell because Daddy says he has something very important to ask you but we mustn’t say what it is,’ Izzy said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand and then her hand on Sophie’s fuchsia candlewick bedspread.
‘Izzy!’ Bella hissed, digging her little sister in the ribs. ‘Shush.’
She smiled at Sophie; a wide toothy grin that Sophie had seen once before when Bella denied using Sophie’s steak knives as tent pegs to make a den out of her best and, for that matter, only leather coat.
‘Oh come on, girls, what are you two hiding? Is your dad finally going to strip that hideous wallpaper in the living room?’
‘It’s much more exciting than that,’ Izzy told her. ‘It’s the most exciting-est, most massive-est thing ever!’
‘No it isn’t!’ Bella tried to urge her little sister into discretion by waggling her eyebrows, which might have worked if her fringe hadn’t been so long it obscured them completely. ‘Daddy has nothing to say to you what-so-ever,’ she pronounced the new and unfamiliar words that she loved acquiring so much with great care. ‘I expect he won’t want to talk to you about anything of consequence at all.’
‘Except that he’s going to ask her to—’ Izzy began.
‘Pay for the cake because he’s lost his … money,’ Bella interrupted her.
‘Or at least he hasn’t got any monies left because he’s spent them on this most beautiful-est—’
‘Hat,’ Bella finished for Izzy. ‘He’s bought a completely enormous hat.’
Sophie looked from one girl to the other. It could never be said that she was the world’s most intuitive woman, it had taken her a rather long time to realise, for example, that Louis had loved her back and that the feelings she had for him weren’t just an unrequited, slightly psychotic and rather ill-advised crush. Yet here was Izzy seething with secrets, talking about something exciting and massive that Louis wanted to ask her while Bella was gamely trying to cover up with a tale of a lost wallet and an enormous hat. A few months ago Sophie would have been wondering what on earth Louis wanted with an enormous hat, but she had changed from that blunt black and white woman and these children had helped her do it. That and the fact that they were dreadful at keeping secrets led her to believe that, unless she was very much mistaken, what the girls were trying not to tell her was that their father was going to ask her to marry him. Again.
Only this time she wouldn’t be able to pretend that she hadn’t heard him and there would be much less of an opportunity for distracting sex right in the middle of Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.
CARMEN VELASQUEZ WAS the embodiment of her name. A few years older than Sophie at thirty-seven, she had olive skin, dark pool-like eyes and shiny black hair that fell in a neat bob to her shoulders. She looked, Sophie remembered thinking the first time she had met her, like a Spanish rose. Which was interesting because she sounded exactly like what she was: Essex girl through and through.
The story of how Carmen had come to be running a tea shop in St Ives was almost as far-fetched as the one that made Sophie the second-longest-staying guest at the Avalon B&B. Carmen had fallen for a strapping young man, thirteen years her junior, at the Club Twenty nightclub in Chelmsford. Carmen had been dancing on a podium when she had been literally whisked off her feet by a decidedly Nordic-looking young man who, without bothering to discuss either her name or marital status with her, had kissed her passionately up against a sticky wall till the fluorescent lights finally flickered on at two in the morning. They had spent a night of unbridled passion together, and she discovered that the young man’s name was James, that he was on a stag night with his best mate from school, and that he was currently employed as a long line fisherman off the coast of Cornwall. Carmen Velasquez, who at that point in her life had been called Carmen Higgins, had kissed James goodbye as the sun came up and sadly supposed that that brief but joyful intermission in her life was over and that she would never see him again. But she had been wrong.
Less than two weeks later James appeared at the office where she worked in human resources for a small children’s charity and told her that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. After giving the matter some thought Carmen took the afternoon off and booked a hotel room in which they discussed the matter further. She’d told Sophie on the very first afternoon the two women had met that she probably would have have felt more guilty about betraying her marriage if it wasn’t for the fact that they didn’t have any children and her husband was a twat, to quote Carmen directly. From that fateful afternoon onwards Carmen and James shared various hotel rooms located around the southern half of the country for over a year, all the while Carmen expecting the younger man to go off her at any moment and leave her to brace herself and get on with her loveless marriage, in the knowledge that she had at least tasted happiness for a short while.
Only James didn’t go off her. James fell in love with her and begged her to run away to Cornwall to live with him. Finally, after eighteen months of mini-bars and shredded credit card statements, Carmen had taken the plunge, left her husband and reclaimed her much more impressive maiden name.
Never one to sit about on her arse, as Carmen put it most succinctly, she had taken on the local ailing tourist-reliant tea shop, deciding at last to turn her passion for pastries and baking into a career, and had transformed it into a thriving year-round concern within her first year of owning it. And she and James were still going strong; something that Sophie would have found heartening if it wasn’t for the fact that she believed in the law of averages and surely the chances of there being two happy whirlwind romances blooming into two successful long-term relationships in the same Cornish town seemed rather remote. But even if Carmen had dibs on the fairy-tale ending coming true in the district it didn’t stop Sophie from liking her enormously. It wasn’t only the quality of her jam that led Sophie back to the Ye Olde Tea Shoppe so regularly, it was that she could really talk to Carmen and Carmen could certainly talk back. Carmen had stepped into the void that Cal had left, and Sophie found her forthright friendliness a literal port in the storm as she discovered her feet in the alien town.
‘He’s gonna what?’ Carmen asked her, her thickly mascaraed eyes widening as Sophie whispered her fears over the lace-doilyed counter to her friend as Louis and the girls were sitting only a few feet away. ‘Never! What, here?’
‘I think so,’ Sophie said. ‘Although, to be fair, I’m not one hundred per cent sure. It’s just Izzy said he had a big question to ask me and that he’d spent a lot of money on something really special.’
‘Right. Well, I love that child, but isn’t she the one who made a mouse out of cheese and kept it in a matchbox under the bed until it grew actual fur?’ Carmen asked her practically. ‘I’m not especially sure you should build assumptions on what she has to say, bless her. What about Bella? Bella’s the one who normally knows what’s going on. Bella knows what’s going on from here to Land’s End. That girl loves information.’
‘Bella tried to cover it up, going on about hats and stuff. Bella was definitely trying to keep something a secret – it has to be a proposal, it fits the facts and it’s not as if it would be the first time …’
‘Wouldn’t it?’ Carmen’s eyes widened a fraction further. ‘What? Don’t say you’ve turned him down before?’
‘Not exactly,’ Sophie said, experiencing a rather wonderful flashback of exactly what had happened next for a split second. ‘Anyway, that’s not important at the moment. What’s important is what am I going to do?’
Sophie glanced back at Louis who was letting Izzy dress him with a hat she’d fashioned out of paper napkins and some secret bubble gum. It was a good job he wasn’t precious about his hair style, Sophie thought fondly.
‘Say yes, you idiot,’ Carmen told her in hushed tones. ‘That feller’s pure class, love. If I didn’t love my James, I would, let me tell you.’
‘Would you?’ Sophie watched Louis, trying to see him through fresh eyes. To her he was the most beautiful creature that had ever walked the earth in the form of a man but it always interested her to know how other women saw him.
‘Look at him,’ Carmen all but growled. ‘He’s sex on legs, that one.’
‘Sex on …? Oh, never mind. The point is that any moment now he’s going to ask me to marry him and I’m going to have to say no, Carmen, I’m going to have to turn him down.’
‘Excuse me? Turn him down? But why?’ Carmen fired the three questions at her in quick succession, each one gilded with incredulity.
‘Because this is too much, too soon, too fast …’ Sophie faltered. ‘We’ve only been together six months. And it’s not much longer than that since his wife died and he came back to look after his estranged children and found me as their guardian. There should be much more of waiting three days for a phone call, dates and dinners before any kind of proposal. An eventual key swap, a toothbrush left in the bathroom, and perhaps my own drawer to keep a few bits and bobs in. We’re still at the unbridled-sex-wherever-we-happen-to-be stage. Besides, how’s it going to look to the outside world? It will look like Louis is getting himself a free nanny with added sex benefits. How can I marry him when I don’t even have my own knicker drawer?’
‘But you have got a key,’ Carmen told her. ‘And Louis’d give you all the drawers you wanted if you asked him. I can think of two reasons why you should marry him now: one, if you keep doing it on his sofa you’re going to slip a disc, and two, you love him, you silly mare. Who cares about tradition and dates and knicker drawers? If you love him, marry him – now.’
‘The point is that there is no need to rush things. He’s not ready to get married, no way, is he?’
‘He’s not ready, you say?’ Carmen said, twisting her mouth into a tightly sceptical knot.
‘Of course he’s not!’ Sophie said. ‘Look at him, he’s confused!’
Just at that moment Louis was surrendering while both his daughters held him in a deadlock and tickled him until his laughter filled the entire café and probably echoed out across the ocean all the way to New York City.
‘He does look miserable, now you come to mention it,’ Carmen said dryly. ‘Look, sweetheart, you don’t know that he’s going to ask you anything yet. This is probably just you imposing your own fears and obsessions on something those two little lovelies said. In fact …’ Carmen gasped and clutched her hand to her chest. ‘Stone me, I know what it is they were on about!’
‘Does anyone really still say “stone me”?’ Sophie asked her. ‘Go on, then, what’s your theory?’
‘It’s not a theory, it’s definitely what Izzy and Bella were trying not to tell you. It’s obvious! Him and James and some of the other lads have been talking about a boys’ surfing trip to Hawaii for ages, haven’t they? Well, James has got together the cash to go now, and he’s trying to get the others to put deposits down so that he can book early and get a good deal. He asked Louis about it last night. I bet that’s what Louis wants to ask you, to look after kids and cats while he’s away living it up in the sun ogling fit young birds in bikinis.’
‘Really? That would be brilliant!’ Sophie said, seizing on the thought.
‘I’m not so keen on the young birds in bikinis myself,’ Carmen said primly. ‘But if you find that preferable to a proposal, then who am I to disagree?’
‘It could just be that, couldn’t it?’ Sophie mused aloud. ‘His photography business is pretty much established now and he’s always wanted to go to Hawaii. Plus it fits the facts, doesn’t it? It is a big question to ask and it would cost him a lot of money and he’d definitely ask the girls if they minded before he’d go.’
‘Yes,’ Carmen said. ‘And he’d probably be a bit worried about telling you in case you scarper back off to London while he’s not looking.’
‘I reckon it’s that,’ Sophie said with more than a little relief as Carmen piled a cake stand high with scones, pots of clotted cream and jam. ‘That’s what it is. Oh, I’m such an idiot.’
‘I’m not going to try and fight you on that one, you nutter,’ Carmen said. ‘Now, is there anything else?’
Sophie looked at the cake stand.
‘Well, as it’s my last ever cream tea, how about another pot of jam?’
‘What were you two gassing about, all cloak and daggers?’ Louis asked her as she set a calorie-laden tray down on the red and white gingham tablecloth.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Sophie said, trying her best to look casual and unconcerned and exactly like the sort of girlfriend who was very relaxed about her boyfriend taking a holiday without her. ‘Girl talk. You know Carmen.’
For a good half an hour the table was largely silent as cream and jam and scones and cake were liberally sloshed around in a tactile feast of delight, one that Sophie was just as involved in as the girls. And then, finally, the replete and hyperactive children climbed off their chairs and went to look for entertainment.
‘So, anyway – good news,’ Louis said a little nervously. They sipped tea in relative peace while the girls helped Carmen clear the tables of place mats and menus, as the café was about to close.
‘Oh yes, what’s that?’ Sophie concentrated hard on sounding casual.
‘Mrs Alexander’s coming over to babysit tonight. I’m taking you out to dinner at Alba.’ Louis had made a reservation at the best fish restaurant in town, the one that looked out over the harbour where the fish it served were landed and where, if you were lucky enough to get a window seat, you could see the town’s collection of rather dashing lifeboat men (including James) take the boat out for practice runs dressed head to foot in yellow rubber outfits that gave Carmen palpitations.
‘You’re taking me out to dinner? I mean, just you and me?’ Sophie asked him. In the last six months not only had she never stayed the night at Louis’s house but they also had never been on a date with just each other. They had spent more time together than Sophie had ever spent with anyone ever, but there had always been two other delightful little people tagging along – unless you counted the evenings in front of the electric fire after the girls had gone to bed, which were wonderful, but not exactly dates. It wasn’t something that Sophie had wondered or worried about, it was just the facts of their situation. When she had decided she wanted to be with Louis she had decided she wanted to be with his children too; her love for the three of them, although entirely different had become as one. So this evening would be only their second ever date and, considering that the first one had been a bit of an accident resulting in unplanned and complicated sex, technically it could be called a first date.
‘Yep, you can put on a frock, if you like, and maybe some of those high heels you carted down here with you,’ Louis said, with a hopeful raise of a brow which made Sophie blush.
It was clear to Sophie that Louis was buttering her up for news of his departure, but she didn’t mind. She thought it was sweet that he was so worried about how she would take the news of his impending holiday and she wanted to dress up; she wanted to dress up because he clearly wanted her to and that made her feel kind of sexy. Louis was probably the first man she had ever known who made her feel sexy. Other men had found her attractive. Jake Flynn, for example, the New York businessman she’d had a near miss with around about the same time that Louis and the girls came into her life. Jake looked at her and she could feel his desire for her, but for some reason it didn’t penetrate through her outer layer – despite his square jaw, strong arms and excellent teeth. For a long time Sophie had thought that her inability to feel passion had to be because of something lacking in her, and then one night, on her first visit to the Avalon B&B back when they still barely knew each other, Louis had kissed her goodnight on the cheek. It was nothing, his lips barely grazed her skin, but she could not sleep for the rest of that night because of the way his touch had made her feel. Suddenly she’d felt frighteningly, viscerally alive.
‘She’s said she’ll stay the night at my place if you don’t mind locking up the B&B doors at midnight and making sure Mrs Tregowan gets her cocoa. Nancy will let herself in and start the breakfasts in the morning,’ Louis said directing his gaze out to sea. ‘I thought I could stay over with you.’
‘Stay the night with me?’ Sophie asked him.
Louis laughed. ‘Yes, I don’t know why we haven’t thought of this before; you don’t have to worry about the girls being freaked out, and I can finally wake up with you and see if it’s true that you sleep like a princess.’ He leaned a little closer to her. ‘And you and I can make sleepy early morning love.’ Louis saw the hesitation in her face. ‘Come on, Sophie, don’t tell me you don’t want me staying over with you now? That’s what serious couples do, you know. They sleep together, by which I mean actually sleep, overnight, and in a bed and everything.’
‘I know, I know …’ Sophie covered his hand with her own, suddenly yearning for the warmth of his bare skin against hers. ‘We are a serious couple, aren’t we?’
‘I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life,’ Louis said, looking back at her, the promise of what was to come lighting his eyes. ‘The girls are stoked about it; they reckon they’re going to have a midnight feast.’
‘They can try,’ Sophie joked. ‘But I don’t fancy their chances much. Beware the fool that tries to come down for breakfast at anything later than seven fifty-nine a.m., let alone tries to eat in bed at any hour of the day. Mrs Alexander takes no prisoners.’
‘So I’ll pick you up at eight, then,’ Louis said, testing the words that were so unfamiliar. ‘Be ready?’
‘I’ll be so ready,’ Sophie said.
‘I love you, Sophie Mills,’ Louis told her. He must have told her the same thing many, many times, but every single time she heard those words Sophie still couldn’t quite believe her luck. She was too happy, everything was too perfect. Sooner or later something would have to go wrong.
AS IT TURNED out Sophie was ready by seven twenty-nine so she went downstairs to sit with Mrs Tregowan who was the only guest who ever made use of the guest sitting room. Grace would sit in the floral Windsor armchair opposite the TV and watch ITV for up to eighteen hours a day. She didn’t watch any of the other channels. The other channels, she had told Sophie once, were far too full of doom and gloom and grey people in grey suits talking about real life.
‘Give me a paternity test any day of the week, or a nice grisly murder,’ Grace had told Sophie.