Lovely Little Things in Pretty Beach : A magical feel-good romance book to escape with in summer 2021.

by Polly Babbington

  Lulu leant up against the side of the train and heaved a huge sigh of relief. She looked up at the honey skin and green eyes, took the shoe, and did not smile. Did not smile because she had lost the capacity to breathe.

  18

  After taking the shoe and starting to breathe again, Lulu tried to gather herself together as passengers pushed onto the train behind her. She looked into the carriage, glanced back at Ollie, and then moved into the aisle.

  Walking along the aisle clutching the shoes, she squeezed around a small suitcase and the toddler of the woman with the double buggy. The toddler had stopped whining and was now instead looking very pleased with herself holding a little plastic container of raisins.

  Lulu sat down on the seat by the window and as Ollie waited for an old lady to take her seat, the mum of the toddler widened her eyes and raised her eyebrows to Lulu. Lulu frowned back and the mum indicated to her cheeks, screwed up her face, and then pointed to her hair.

  Lulu realised what she was saying, opened her phone, pressed the camera button and reversed the viewfinder. Looking back at her was quite the sight. Her usually immaculately applied sweep of deep black now ran out of her eyes settling in the laughter lines at the sides and was smudged murkily underneath. Her usually glossy blonde hair hung in clumps around her face, and the pearl clip that had started the day sweeping a piece of hair beautifully up to the side had slipped and was hanging on for dear life somewhere near her ear.

  Lulu shook her head, resigned herself to looking like a lunatic, couldn't be bothered to do anything to the makeup, tugged on the tangled clip to try to remove it, and raised her eyes to the sky and the mum.

  Stuff it. I really cannot be bothered. Ollie Cavendish or not. He’s with some heiress to a tea fortune anyway. I’m tired, hungry and feel like someone whacked my left hand with a baseball bat, Lulu thought to herself as she shifted in her seat and watched Ollie put his bag on the rack overhead and take the seat opposite her.

  ‘Lulu. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Not a problem. I’m fine.’

  ‘You must think I’m a right clumsy idiot. I’ve bumped into you twice and both times caused an accident.’

  Don’t worry about it, at least you've not lost the ability to take in air.

  Lulu couldn’t think of anything to say at all and so instead she just sat there cold, wet, and bedraggled.

  ‘At least we saved your shoes,’ Ollie said looking at Lulu’s lap and the nude heels.

  Lulu nodded and without realising that she was doing it cradled her left hand and as she moved it, flinched ever-so-slightly.

  Ollie moved forward and looked at Lulu’s hand. ‘Oh, god, are you okay? It doesn’t seem like it. Great. I knocked that too, did I?’

  Lulu shook her head. ‘No, no, not at all. It’s just been a long day and I’ve been on the go since the moment I got up. It’s just aching a bit.’

  Peering at Lulu’s left hand Ollie continued, ‘It’s red around the edges. Are you sure it’s not infected?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Look, I’m fine. I’m going to phone the surgery and try and get an appointment as soon as I can.’

  ‘My car’s at the station. I can take you to Newport if you like?’ Ollie offered.

  ‘Newport! I don’t need to go to hospital, Ollie. It’s just a sore hand.’

  Ollie nodded and as the train gathered speed once it had left Pettacombe station, he started to chat to Lulu about her day.

  ‘So, a bit of a turn up for the books, then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You and the Cavendish group. You didn’t say before. You know, at dinner or anything.’

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You didn’t say, either. Not quite boring old admin is it?’ Lulu chuckled.

  ‘Pah! It is to me. I’m just helping out while my dad’s been in hospital with appendicitis. Once he’s back up and running I’ll be off.’

  ‘Right, so what is it that you do then, Ollie?’ Lulu asked.

  ‘That’s asking.’ Ollie laughed. ‘Part-time, err, stocks and shares, part-time fireman.’

  ‘Part-time fireman! Very funny. What do you really do?’

  ‘I really do. I’m not joking!’

  ‘Sorry, so you’re a part-time firefighter in Pettacombe?’

  ‘Nope, well yes, I have been but I’m soon moving to Pretty Beach. It’s why I have been looking for a house for so long. I need to be within five minutes of the station.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Are you kidding me?’

  ‘Lulu, why would I be joking about being a fireman?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Cavendish thing I suppose. It doesn’t really go.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know your surname had to dictate what you do in life,’ Ollie replied with a just noticeable edge to his voice.

  Lulu blinked rapidly. ‘Ahh, sorry, I just meant you don’t look the fireman type.’

  ‘What do firemen look like then?’ Ollie asked with a chuckle.

  They don’t have honey skin, green eyes, and are meant to help people to breathe, not cause them to hyperventilate and nearly pass out on a train.

  19

  Lulu trudged along in her damp clothes alongside Ollie as they disembarked the train at Pretty Beach and walked along the platform. Chatting to Ollie all the way back from Pettacombe, he had seemed kind and interested but had not told her about his heiress girlfriend, and as the journey had gone on, Lulu had slowly slid from the confident woman with a new job and new start she had been that morning to feeling how she looked. Grim.

  She’d tried to keep a smile on her face, looking interested and interesting to the god sitting opposite her, but as the train had made its way to Pretty Beach she’d slumped further and further down in her seat as tiredness began to flood every part of her body. Her left palm throbbed and she could feel her hair starting to dry in clumps around her head.

  Over the hill, divorced, in a hellhole of a house and alone. Alone and forty-two.

  ‘So, what have you got on over the weekend?’ she heard Ollie say as all sorts of thoughts raced through her mind.

  Lulu tried to quickly think of something other than what she was actually doing. Clearing out rat droppings from the conservatory and working on finally having a bedroom didn’t seem to be something that one of the owners of the Cavendish group would be impressed by.

  ‘Oh, you know. Off out to a fancy restaurant on Friday night and then to a party on Saturday up in town and then round to a friend for Sunday lunch.’

  Ollie nodded. ‘Right, a busy one then. Sounds like a full weekend.’

  Lulu sighed. ‘I was joking, Ollie. I’m newly arrived in Pretty Beach. I have one friend, my sister is in the Caribbean, I’m on a tight budget, and I have a house that is falling down. I have no bed, a fridge in the garage, and a garden sky-high with weeds. So yeah, that’s my weekend in a nutshell, to be honest.’

  Ollie nodded at Lulu with wide eyes and put his hand onto the small of her back. ‘Come on. I’m taking you and that hand of yours to the pub for dinner.’

  Lulu looked up at him right into his green eyes. ‘Nice offer, thanks, but I have to get back for Mabel. She needs a walk and some dinner.’

  ‘I’ll run you home, you can have a, umm, freshen up,’ Ollie said, looking at the black under Lulu’s eyes. ‘I’ll take sweet Mabel around the block and I’ll take you to the Smugglers for a pie. It’s the least I can do. I mean, I nearly poured five hundred pounds of your shoe money down the drain.’ Ollie winked.

  Lulu turned her head on the side. Why would this owner of the Cavendish group who had a girlfriend and, by the looks of it, pretty decent life be nice to her and want to take her to the pub to apologise about the shoe? All of a sudden she realised. Yes. Something William had said. Good staff were hard to find out of London and they tried to hang onto you as much as they could. Atlanta Cavendish would probably kill Ollie if she’d found out that he had jeopardised a new member of staff who
had been through all the training and dealt with her most treasured guests. That was it. Of course!

  ‘Come on. Surely I can’t be that bad?’ Ollie continued. ‘A pie and a glass of wine. You can’t have had a better offer than that in a while?’ he joked.

  A tiny smile broke through Lulu’s deflated face. ‘Okay. But I’ll need to sort Mabel out first.’

  Lulu felt like crying as Ollie opened the door to his car for her, took her bag, put it on the back seat, and got in. What the heck had happened to her life? This time last year she had thought she was happily married, perfectly content in her comfortable suburban life with Mabel and Lovely Little Things, her vast collection of shoes and accessories, and her three holidays a year.

  Now she slept on an air bed and most probably had some kind of infection in her left hand that was going to start eating away at her flesh and in a week’s time, she would be without a thumb.

  As the rain started to pour down and hammer against the windscreen, Lulu tried to regain her composure and tried relentlessly to think of something interesting to say. Instead, she sat beside Ollie in silence as he drove through the rain.

  Finally pulling up behind Lulu’s Audi in Seafolly Passage, the rain had just stopped, and Lulu opened the car door, got out, and took her bag from the back seat. Ollie sprinted around from the other side and looked up at the house.

  ‘Right. So, I’ll pop out with Mabel and you’ll get changed, will you?’

  Lulu smiled and for about the sixth time in about as many minutes, the sight of Ollie took her breath away. ‘I think that would be a good idea. I’m soaked through, cold, and my feet hurt, but I’ll be fine after I’ve freshened up,’ Lulu replied, brightening as she opened the inner door to the house and Mabel came bounding up to greet her.

  Mabel’s tail wagged like crazy, she whimpered in pleasure and after Lulu had bent down and stroked her tummy, she greeted Ollie in just as an affectionate manner.

  ‘At least Mabel likes you,’ Lulu said.

  ‘At least! What does that mean?’ Ollie said smiling.

  ‘Ahh, sorry. Umm, I don’t know. Long day and all that,’ Lulu said as she took off her coat, walked over and hung it on the bannister, and opened the study door to look for Mabel’s lead. Grabbing the lead she walked back out into the hallway, clipped it onto Mabel's collar, and smiled.

  ‘There you go. I’ll pop up and have a really quick shower,’ Lulu said, meaning that she would have a quick bath as there was no way she was going in the downstairs shower room until she was sure there were no further signs of rats.

  ‘Okay,’ Ollie said turning around and heading out the door. As she heard Ollie step down onto the drive she heard him chat to Mabel. ‘Well, you’re a little darling, aren’t you? At least you like me, huh? Come on let’s get you out on a nice walk before the heavens open again.’

  Lulu slowly stepped up the huge staircase and made her way to the bathroom on the first floor. A couple of minutes later as the bath ran, she gasped at her reflection in the broken mirror over the fireplace. Thick black smudges sat under her eyes, the graze on her cheek was angry and red, and as her hair had dried it seemed to have grown a mind of its own and stuck out all over the place.

  Scrubbing off the makeup, she climbed into the two-inch bath, keeping her left hand outside, and attempted to slosh the shallow water over herself.

  A few choice words later, the warm water had done something to soothe her jagged edges. Pulling on clean underwear and a super soft grey sweatshirt and jeans, she brushed out her hair, scraped the whole lot back, and fixed it into a small neat bun. Screwing up her face, she decided to not bother doing anything to her face much, whacked on a dollop of tinted moisturiser, and left it at that.

  She’d given up on thoughts of Ollie Cavendish when she’d seen the look on his face after she’d dropped her shoe. Besides, with her current state of affairs, he was hardly moving in the same sort of circles that she was. He had a girlfriend and dealt in, as he had said, stocks and shares. Whatever that was, but definitely very much not in her league.

  A much more casual Lulu than the one who had left the house early that morning with heels, perfect hair, and a beautifully coordinated outfit padded down the stairs.

  As she was sitting on the bottom step putting on white Italian leather trainers, she heard Ollie coming back across the drive chatting away to Mabel. Mabel ran through the door, wagged her tail, and collapsed down onto her bed.

  ‘I think she thoroughly enjoyed that,’ Ollie said with a grin.

  ‘Thank you. I really appreciate it.’

  ‘Wow! You scrubbed up well!’ Ollie said as Lulu stood up.

  ‘Very funny. I’ve no make-up on, scraped back hair, and there is no way I’m putting a pair of heels on again until my feet feel better. Oh, and the grubby bandage isn’t helping.’

  ‘Looking good to me,’ Ollie replied.

  Oh, how I wish I was, Lulu thought to herself and smiled back at Ollie.

  ‘Rightio, let’s get ourselves to the Smugglers,’ Ollie said.

  Ten minutes later, after making their way to the Smugglers, Lulu and Ollie walked into the pub and strolled up to the bar.

  James the barman appeared from out the back, stopped in his tracks and beamed. ‘Well look who it is! I wondered how long it would be before you came in. Welcome home!’ James said and, walking around the bar, came and gave Lulu a big hug and then when he saw Lulu’s hands exclaimed, ‘What on earth have you done?’

  Lulu giggled and smiled as Ollie looked on. ‘Darling James. How are you? Ahh, just a little altercation on my bike.’

  James looked back at Lulu as if there was no one else in the bar, no one else in Pretty Beach. ‘I’m well. You look fabulous as usual, apart from the hands, of course. Just look at you! I’m so pleased to see you.’

  ‘You old charmer,’ Lulu said and turned to Ollie, ‘James, this is Ollie Cavendish.’

  James looked up at Ollie and dismissed him quickly. ‘Yes, we’ve met. Hi, Ollie. How’s the fire station?’ and without waiting for his answer turned his back and walked back around the bar.

  ‘Right, what can I get you, Lulu? A nice glass of our best white?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  James turned to Ollie and without looking him in the eye, asked, ‘Pint?’

  Ollie nodded and James turned to pour the drinks. Ollie lowered his voice and spoke to Lulu, ‘I take it he’s holding a torch for you?’

  Lulu screwed up her face. ‘James? God, no! I’ve literally known him since I was two years old.’

  Ollie raised his eyebrows and nodded. ‘Trust me on this. He is.’

  Lulu smiled. ‘James is not in any shape or form holding a torch for me.’

  Ollie didn’t reply and as James did as best he could to slam a pint of ale on the bar. Ollie raised his eyebrows, picked up his pint, and toasted Lulu and clinked the side of her glass of wine.

  ‘To my new bandaged friend in Pretty Beach.’

  Lulu wanted to vomit. Friend! What the actual? She didn’t want to be his friend. She wanted to ravage him. Get lost in the green eyes and honey skin. Friend! Lulu raised the glass of wine to her lips and felt as if she was pouring liquid cement down her throat. Was it possible to gag on wine? She had thought not, but maybe it was.

  Well thanks very much, Mr Honey Skin. How to make my day go from wet and depressed to worse. Much worse.

  A few hours later, after sitting up at stools on the bar, Locals Only pies, a few pointed looks from James and a couple more glasses of wine, Ollie looked at his watch and checked his texts.

  ‘Excuse me. I just need to make a call,’ Ollie said, jumping off his stool and strolling across the pub left Lulu sitting at the bar. As quick as a flash James was standing in front of Lulu. ‘How are you getting on in the house, then?’

  ‘One word for it is slow, another is backbreaking.’ Lulu laughed.

  ‘And the new job?’

  ‘Yep. Good so far. I’ve had a really long day today though an
d then I got caught in that downpour on the way to the train in Pettacombe. Then I dropped my shoe down onto the track. You know me.’

  James nodded and smiled. ‘So, how do you know him then?’ James asked.

  ‘What, you mean, Ollie Cavendish?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I don’t really know him. As you know I’ve not lived here for years. Anyway, I bumped into him on my bike in the laneway. Nightmare.’

  ‘Right,’ James said, pursing his lips and raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Why? Is there something I should know?’ Lulu asked leaning forward on the bar.

  ‘Not at all. I really only know him briefly through the firies who come in here for the quiz night.’

  ‘Part of the Cavendish family who took over the hotel a few years ago.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, there’s no gossip on him then?’ Lulu joked.

  James didn’t smile. ‘Not that I know of, that’s why you need to watch your back.’

  ‘James! You’re being really weird.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Just making sure you know what you’re doing. Dabbling with that lot at the hotel. They're not from around here, you know.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything. Do you really think the likes of Ollie would be interested in me? He was the one that made me drop my shoe so that’s the reason I’m here. He bought me a drink to say sorry.’

  James raised his eyebrows again, did not look impressed, slowly nodded, and as he could see Ollie walking back to the bar, went to serve another customer.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Lulu asked as Ollie put his phone back in his pocket.

  ‘Yep. All good. Right, I’m going to make a move if you’re ready to go?’ Ollie said.

  ‘Of course,’ Lulu said as she slid off the stool and picked up her bag.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ollie turned around at the end of Seafolly Passage and pulled his car up behind Lulu’s, and Lulu went to open the car door.

  ‘Hold on, I’ll help you out and see you to the door.’

  Lulu looked back and had to stop herself from swallowing. ‘All good. I think I can make it to the front door from here. Well, Ollie, thank you for the drinks and the pie.’