CHAPTER EIGHT
‘HONESTLY, ALI, I’M FINE!’ Complete lie. Becky Shaw was far from fine.
Her job was on the line. The veterinary practice where she had been working for the last three years was in the process of being sold—and being turned into yet another quaint coffee shop to attract the onslaught of tourists who arrived punctually every spring and summer, snapping the gorgeous Cotswold scenery with their expensive cameras and buying up all the local art in a flurry of enthusiasm to take away a little bit of local flavour with them. Her friends Sarah and Delilah had got it right when they had decided to turn their cottage into a gallery and workshop. Not that they had had to in the end, considering they had both been swept off their feet by billionaires.
And then there was the roof, which had decided that it was no longer going to play ball and she was sure that right now, if she listened hard enough, she would be able to hear the unnerving sound of the steady leak drip-dripping its way into the bucket she had strategically placed in the corridor upstairs.
‘I keep telling you that you’re too young to be buried out there in the middle of nowhere! Why don’t you come out to France? Visit us for a couple of weeks? Surely the practice can spare you for a fortnight...’
In three months’ time, Becky thought glumly, the practice would be able to spare her for approximately the rest of her life.
Though there was no way that she was going to tell her sister this. Nor did she have any intention of going out to the south of France to see Alice and her husband, Freddy. Her heart squeezed tightly as it did every time she thought of Freddy and she forced herself to answer her sister lightly, voice betraying nothing.
‘I’m hardly buried out here, Alice.’
‘I’ve seen the weather reports, Becks. I always check what the weather’s doing on my phone and the Cotswolds is due heavy snow by the weekend. You’re going to be trapped there in the middle of March, when the rest of the country is looking forward to spring, for goodness’ sake! I worry about you.’
‘You mustn’t.’ She glanced out of the window and wondered how it was that she was still here, still in the family home, when this was supposed to have been a temporary retreat, somewhere to lick her wounds before carrying on with her life. That had been three years ago. Since then, in a fit of lethargy, she had accepted the job offer at the local vet’s and persuaded her parents to put all plans to sell the cottage on hold. Just for a little while. Just until she got her act together. She would pay them a monthly rent and, once she’d got herself on a career ladder, she would leave the Cotswolds and head down to London.
And now here she was, with unemployment staring her in the face and a house that would have to be sold sooner rather than later because, with each day that passed, it became just a little more run down. How long before the small leak in the roof expanded into a full scale, no-holds-barred deluge? Did she really want to wake up in the middle of the night with her bed floating?
So far, she hadn’t mentioned the problems with the house to her parents, who had left for France five years previously, shortly having been joined by Alice and her husband. She knew that if she did the entire family would up sticks and arrive on her doorstep with tea, sympathy and rescue plans afoot.
She didn’t need rescuing.
She was an excellent vet. She would have a brilliant recommendation from Norman, the elderly family man who owned the practice and was now selling to emigrate to the other side of the world. She would be able to find work somewhere else without any problem at all.
And besides, twenty-seven-year-old women did not need rescuing. Least of all by their younger sibling and two frantically worried parents.
‘Shouldn’t I be the one worrying about you?’
‘Because you’re three years older?’
Becky heard that wonderful, tinkling laugh and pictured her beautiful, charming sister sitting in their glamorous French gîte with her legs tucked under her and her long, blonde hair tumbling over one shoulder.
Freddy would be doing something useful in the kitchen. Despite the fact that he, like her, was a hard-working vet, he enjoyed nothing more than getting back from the practice in which he was a partner, kicking off his shoes and relaxing with Alice in the kitchen, where he would usually be the one concocting the meals, because he was an excellent cook.
And he adored Alice. He had been swept off his feet from the very first second he had been introduced to her. At the time, she had been a high-flying model on the way to greatness and, whilst Becky would never have believed that Freddy—earnest and usually knee-deep in text books—could ever be attracted to her sister—who was cheerfully proud of her lack of academic success and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in years—she had been proved wrong.
They were the most happily married couple anyone could have hoped to find.
‘I’ll be fine.’ Becky decided to put off all awkward conversations about job losses and collapsing roofs for another day. ‘I won’t venture out in the middle of a snowstorm in my pyjamas, and if anyone out there is stupid enough to brave this weather on the lookout for what they can nick then they won’t be heading for Lavender Cottage.’ She eyed the tired décor in the kitchen and couldn’t help grinning. ‘Everyone in the village knows that I keep all my valuables in a bank vault.’
Old clothes, mud-stained wellies, tool kit for the hundreds of things that kept going wrong in the house, enviable selection of winter-woolly hats...just the sort of stuff any robber worth his salt would want to steal.
‘I just thought, Becks, that you might venture out here and have a little fun for a while before summer comes and all those ghastly crowds. I know you came over for Christmas, but it was all so busy out here, what with Mum and Dad inviting every single friend over for drinks every single evening. I... I feel like I haven’t seen you for absolutely ages! I mean, just the two of us, the way it used to be when we were younger and...well... Freddy and I...’
‘I’m incredibly busy just at the moment, Ali. You know how it is around this time of year with the lambing season nearly on us, pregnant sheep in distress everywhere you look... But I’ll come out as soon as I can. I promise.’
She didn’t want to talk about Freddy, the guy she had met at university, the guy she had fallen head over heels in love with, had he only known, the guy who had turned her into a good friend, who had met Alice, been smitten in the space of seconds and proposed in record time.
The guy who had broken her heart.
‘Darling, Freddy and I have something to tell you and we would
