It's Raining Men
Page 1
Milly Johnson is a Sunday Times top ten bestseller, poet, columnist, joke-writer, radio presenter-in-training and winner of Come Dine With Me.
She likes cruising on big ships, owls, Peller Icewine, shopping for handbags in Venice, Ikea meatballs, the sea and having her hair done. She hates marzipan, doing accounts and sandpaper. Her novels are about the universal issues of friendship, family, betrayal, babies, rather nice food and a little bit of that magic in life that sometimes visits the unsuspecting.
It’s Raining Men is her ninth book.
Find out more at www.millyjohnson.com or follow her on twitter @millyjohnson.
Also by Milly Johnson
The Yorkshire Pudding Club
The Birds & the Bees
A Spring Affair
A Summer Fling
Here Come the Girls
An Autumn Crush
White Wedding
A Winter Flame
First published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 2013
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Millytheink Ltd., 2013
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Milly Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Australia TPB ISBN: 978-1-47111-460-1
PB ISBN: 978-1-47111-461-8
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47111-462-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
As this book has the fortune to be officially launched on Yorkshire Day, I just have to dedicate it to all the wonderful lovely kind friends I have in God’s Own County. Too many to name, but I hope you know who are you (blows kiss).
Contents
May
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
August
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
September
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
October
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Two Years Later
Into each life some rain must fall.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
May
Chapter 1
Lara Rickman took a large gulp of coffee and then swallowed hard and fast before she could spit it out. It was as cold as a tub of ice cream in a polar bear’s freezer. How had it cooled so quickly? Surely her PA had only just brought it in for her and the first sip had been piping hot. She checked the clock in the corner of her monitor to find that, in fact, an hour had gone by – sped by at warp speed, as the hours seemed to these days. And not just hours, but days and weeks and months. Had she really been seeing her darling James for three whole months? Had it really been five months since she’d been up to Yorkshire to see her parents, arriving late Christmas Eve, driving back to London early Boxing Day morning on what could only be described as a whistle-stop trip? Had it been nearly two months since she’d last spent proper face-to-face time with her work friends May and Clare? Even then it had been only for a rushed sandwich in the staff restaurant when their three schedules made a rare crossover, like planets happening to align. They’d eaten so fast it was a wonder that the Benny Hill theme tune hadn’t been playing in the background.
Even though they had all worked for the same company for years, Lara, May and Clare had not met before they gravitated towards each other at a conference a year and a half ago, after ending up in the same discussion group. But then again, Cole and Craw Finance was a massive organization which employed over three thousand people and operated from four adjacent buildings in the City; still in the process of being united into one. The three women were amazed to find that they were all from Yorkshire – Clare from York, May from Leeds and Lara from Barnsley – had all been involved with setting up or trying to rescue businesses, and were all born within six months of each other. Enough common ground to kick-start a fledgling friendship between them. They arranged to meet for lunch occasionally when their busy diaries allowed it. All three of them were hard-working and driven career women, who hadn’t had close female friendships for years. In each other they found a little of what they had been missing.
Lara was in charge of rescuing ailing businesses or sending them to the brokers’ yard. May was a business advisor who helped set up new companies from scratch and Clare was an accountant for the subsidiary firm Blackwoods and Margoyles, which benefited from being part of the Cole and Craw group yet had an independent set of ruling partners. Blackwoods and Margoyles were renowned experts at trying to turn around businesses teetering on the
edge of bankruptcy – the last-chance saloon.
At their last sandwich-sharing, the topic of holidays had arisen and all of them confessed they hadn’t had a proper break for years. So they made a mad and impulsive decision to book time off together and escape to a spa. And there and then, they’d whipped out their diaries, blocked in the time and Lara had volunteered to find them somewhere wonderful, luxurious, relaxing and indulgently expensive. To her shame, she still hadn’t booked it. She had been too busy with either work or her new mad passionate relationship, which was also speeding along at a rate of knots. She was moving in with James that coming weekend. She realized that was fast, but he had been so seductively keen to rush things to the next stage that she hadn’t resisted.
She clapped her hands together. She had ten minutes until she went into her next meeting with a trio of ancient accountants; it promised to be an afternoon of total and utter boredom. Lara had lost her work mojo. She was very good at what she did, in fact too good, and promotion after promotion had elevated her into a career of meetings, conferences and supervising other people doing the nitty-gritty parts of the job that she loved to do herself. Lara was fabulously well-paid for what she did, but she was extremely fed up and overworked.
She checked her make-up in the small magnified mirror she kept in her drawer and wished she hadn’t. Her make-up was fine but the face underneath it looked tired, her once bright hazel eyes were dull with no hint of a sparkle. Oh boy, did she need a holiday. She gave her short blonde wavy hair a primp with her fingers – it didn’t obey combs, never had – and put the mirror away.
She pulled up Google on her screen, whilst taking her Visa card out of her purse, then in the search bar she typed Superior Cottages, praying that they still had vacancies. She knew the exact place she wanted to book – she’d seen it recommended in the Escape From It All section of a glossy mag she’d read on the train weeks ago. Before the meeting with the Three Stooges she would book the holiday.
First hurdle: the site was down. But at least there was a message informing any would-be customers that one of their operators would be happy to handle their query over the phone. Lara rang the booking line. As luck would have it, a Miss Becky Whiteley answered.
‘Superior Cottages,’ Becky drawled in her automaton greeting. ‘Becky Whiteley speaking. How may I help you?’
‘I want to book a cottage but your website appears to be down,’ said Lara.
‘Yeah, we’re having problems at the moment,’ said Becky. ‘Sorry about that. Can I take your name, please?’
‘Lara. Lara Rickman.’
‘And which of our cottages were you interested in booking and when?’
‘Wren Cottage in Wellem, from August the tenth to August the twentieth.’ A beautiful olde worlde log cabin in the grounds of a manor house which had been converted into a spa and advertised every sort of massage under the sun – foot, neck, elbow, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Bognor Regian, bamboo, hot stone, salt scrubs, hopi candles, being slapped on the back with a cold salmon . . . This place did everything. It had an inside swimming pool the size of Wales, bubbling Jacuzzis, a Michelin-starred restaurant. It was heaven on earth if the hype was to be believed.
It was going to cost them a bomb but they’d all done well for themselves and had earned nice impressive job titles and financial packages to match. They deserved a bit of pamper time. Ten glorious wonderful days of it, to be exact.
‘And please include the luxury welcome hamper,’ requested Lara. ‘It’s one hundred and fifty pounds, I do believe.’
Becky’s concentration levels were middling at the best of times but today – her very last day in this shitty Watford-based holiday agency – they were at rock bottom. She pressed the wrong key and lost the screen. She frantically stabbed at a few more keys, which only made the situation worse and so she reached for a pen and her reporter’s notepad to take down details which she would type up after the call had finished. Visa number, email, address, contact telephone number, holiday dates.
‘Yep, I’ll get this confirmed for you and email you the details,’ she said after Lara had supplied her with all the info. ‘Thank you for calling Superior Cottages,’ she added and cut off the call.
Becky pulled up the booking screen again. Bugger – what was the name of the bloody cottage? She hadn’t written it down but merely committed it to memory, which was a bad mistake as all her thought space was taken up with things Greek. Ren something? She typed the three letters into the search box, and bingo. Well Cottage, Ren Dullem. That was it – she remembered the ‘well’ bit now too. Thank God for that. She processed the payment whilst thinking how blinking expensive it was. Some people really did have more money than sense. She couldn’t find anything about any luxury hamper so she typed the request into the box labelled ‘Message for cottage owner’: Luxury £150 hamper needed on arrival. Job done. She rewarded herself with a drawn-out coffee break and a Twix from the machine.
She would have been flattered to realize that Miss Rickman, who was pressed for time, trusted her efficiency enough to assume the booking was all correct and didn’t bother to give the confirmation email more than a passing glance at the dates before saving it to a folder on her smartphone.
Chapter 2
As Clare sat drinking coffee in a French café in St Pancras, she subtly eavesdropped on the conversation taking place beside her between a pretty young blonde woman, and her boyfriend, a man in the mould of Russell Brand – wild hair, trendy facial hair growth, tight skinny trousers, long tapered leather shoes and black leather waistcoat – oozing cockiness and charm in equal measures.
‘Mum’s at home all weekend,’ the girl was saying. ‘So that rules out you coming to mine.’
The boy shrugged. ‘Looks like my back seat is going to see some action again, then.’
‘Ooh, yeah. I’m liking the sound of that.’
‘I’ll drive you somewhere dark and isolated and then make you scream your head off.’
The girl giggled. ‘I liked it when you did that thing with your . . .’ She turned to the side to check she wasn’t being overheard, spotted Clare looking in her direction and then, maddeningly, lowered her voice. Whatever ‘that thing’ he did to her was, it certainly must have hit the spot. Clare tried not to watch them as they started snogging but her eyes kept wandering over in their direction. The boy wasn’t her type at all but there was something dangerous and sexy about him. Clare had never had sex in a car, and had never had a boyfriend who suggested it, either. She had a sudden yearning to drag Ludwig off in his plush Audi and shag him on the moors. She grinned to herself thinking how horrified he would be if she did. They had never had sex out of bed. They had never had rip-your-clothes-off passion in bed either, come to think of it. Lud was a love-maker: slow and gentle, considerate and satisfying. But recently, she had been thinking that just once in a while, it might be nice to be grabbed and seduced on the staircase, or ravaged in the back seat of a car. It was the sort of thing she imagined her friend Lara got up to. Lara was spirited and curvy, like a short modern-day Marilyn Monroe, and she had the most drop-dead gorgeous partner who was an up-and-coming big noise in the City. And it was no secret that that type of man had a passionate sex-drive and a wild side.
Clare had met Lara eighteen months ago at a work conference and had immediately liked the sassy, small blonde who’d been wearing the red shade of lipstick she wished she was brave enough to sport. They appeared to be the shortest people in the room, which was the initial ice-breaker. They then found themselves in the same discussion group, along with a tall, slim woman with beautiful long brown hair and large brown doe eyes who looked totally uncomfortable in the crowds of people forming themselves into huddles. She introduced herself to them as May Earnshaw
‘That’s a good Yorkshire surname,’ said Lara. ‘I’m from Barnsley.’
‘I’m from just outside Leeds,’ replied May.
‘I’m from York,’ Clare had added to the mix. And a friendship was born.
Clare felt a kiss on her cheek from someone behind her.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Ludwig, squeezing her shoulder before taking the seat opposite. He stripped off his smart black Crombie to reveal a drop-dead gorgeous dark-grey suit. He was always so beautifully dressed. The first time she had ever seen him in a suit, three years ago at her birthday party, he had taken her breath away. They had kissed then and been together as a couple ever since.
‘Espresso, please,’ he said, waving at the approaching waiter. ‘Would you like another coffee, darling?’
‘Yes, please. Cappuccino.’
‘And a cappuccino, please,’ he added to his order, his German accent still thickly present although he had lived in England since he was ten years old.
Clare looked over at her solid, reliable Ludwig and tried to imagine him bonking her in a car. She couldn’t. She wondered what he would say were she to suggest it. Knowing Ludwig, he would give it a go for her sake, whatever he thought about it.
‘You look happy,’ Clare said with a smile.
‘I am. I’ve just acquired a very important client,’ Ludwig replied, reaching over the table and taking her small hand in his large square one.
‘Ah.’ Clare wasn’t surprised to hear the thrill was work-related.
‘Yes, very exciting.’ He beamed, pushing his glasses in their thick black frames back up his nose. With those and the flop of hair over his eyes he looked just like Clark Kent when Christopher Reeve played him.
‘Lovely,’ said Clare and sighed as Lud’s phone went off and he picked it up and pressed it to his ear. She transferred her attention to the menu and wished that Lud would rip it out of her hands, seize her arm and pull her passionately towards him. Recently he hadn’t given her half as much attention as he had his bloody BlackBerry. Luckily, this time it was a short call.
‘Would you like to eat here, my love?’ he asked, putting the phone down on the table in front of him. Once upon a time he would have turned it off and put it out of sight.
‘Here is fine.’ Clare was too tired to go looking for anywhere else and it was convenient as Lud was catching the train to Brussels in two hours. He was an investment banker, a genius whizz-kid who had flown to the top of his career tree. He was constantly being head-hunted by firms aching to recruit him. He was addicted to work and his ear was constantly attached to his phone, but he was a dear man and she loved him. He was kind, funny, generous . . . but lately she had been wondering whether Ludwig Wolke was the one. Ever since going to see a stage production of Wuthering Heights two months ago she had been having racy dreams about bedding a wild man on some heather-cushioned moors. Heathcliff had stirred her all up inside and made her yearn for something outside her comfort zone – and someone who would make her the epicentre of his world. There were three of them in this relationship – him, her and his sodding mobile.