by Fiona Walker
Hurling the ball angrily over her shoulder she gritted her teeth and reminded herself how fickle their income was and how hard they needed to chase it. If it flew down from the sky and landed on Flat Pad, she’d be mad not to try to catch it.
‘Could you look after the children for about twenty minutes while I field Dillon Rafferty?’ She turned around to find Beccy beaming at her in a very unexpected fashion, Cora hoist high overhead letting out delighted little shrieks.
‘It’s not really him, is it?’
Tash returned the smile cautiously, hormonal irritation dissipating. ‘So it seems.’
‘Ohmygodicantbelievehesactuallyhere!’
Tash stepped forward with alarm as Beccy was momentarily so transported with delight that she looked as though she was going to drop Cora.
But she and Cora swung off quite safely to fly over one of the dog sofas, leaving Tash lurching into thin air, stitches straining.
‘Will you bring him inside?’ Beccy asked excitedly, between vrooming aeroplane noises.
Finally pulling on some matching boots that almost covered her surgical stockings, Tash grimaced at the tip around her, which had been worsened as a result of her recent footwear forage. ‘I hope not.’
Landing her precious, giggling little aeroplane in the high chair, Beccy hid a small snarl as she realised Tash was going to keep Dillon Rafferty all to herself while she, Beccy, was left as unpaid nanny to the children.
‘Well you’d better not let on you’ve just had a baby then,’ she told her.
‘Why ever not?’
‘It would be selfish and unprofessional,’ she said pettily. ‘You’ve got to think of the business, and Hugo.’
‘God, I suppose you’re right,’ Tash looked at her anxiously.
‘I could go if you like?’ Beccy volunteered.
‘No, no, I’ll go. I bred the horse. But you’re right, I’ll play down the baby thing. He’ll never know.’
The house phone was ringing once more with its insistent, echoing clang.
‘Oh, not again!’ Tash grumbled as she looked around for something to cover her bulging post-partum midriff which was hanging out of her T-shirt above the unbuttoned fly of her softest old shorts. She eventually pulled on one of Hugo’s filthy old night-check sweaters – his graveyard for unwanted Christmas presents.
The phone rang on.
‘Could you get that, Beccy?’ she demanded as she waddled outside into the sunshine, cramming one of their veterinary supply sponsor’s baseball caps on her head.
Beccy flicked two fingers at the door.
‘Can you get that, Beccy?’ she parroted with a sneer, stooping to make farty raspberries on Cora’s sweet-smelling head to make her laugh again.
It was exactly a quarter past two in the afternoon, Beccy noted from a quick glance at the old Smith clock on the wall. Her mother usually rang at this time for a progress report, immediately after the Archers repeat that she listened to while clearing away her and James’s lunch of cold meats and freshly baked petits pain. Beccy hoped that her mother had spoken to her stepfather about increasing her allowance, however reluctantly.
She braced herself to repeat her daily statement that all was well and that no drugs, prison cells, strange men or cult religions had featured in everyday life in rural West Berkshire. It was temptingly easy to wind up her mother. Today Beccy could casually mention that she had taken her car into Marlbury and watched a matinee of the latest Johnny Depp movie in the multiplex, sitting alone with a few saddos in the near-empty auditorium with a vast carton of popcorn on her knee, and that Tash hadn’t even noticed she was gone. But she didn’t want to push her luck. James was getting very twitchy about money, and she needed to appear to be earning her keep rather than bunking off to navel-gaze.
Ring … ring … ring …
Sighing, Beccy turned to fetch the phone from the wall, looking down at the Bitches of Eastwick who had lazily remained inside on the dog sofa when Tash went out, all crammed into one patch of sunlight spilling from the window at the far end.
‘You’re not the only dogsbodies around here, girls,’ she muttered, pressing the green button and greeting the caller with a fake Mummerset accent: ‘Haydown House. Kitchen maid Rebecca at your service. Please speak slowly because I am not educated and am slightly deaf from being cuffed around the ears.’
There was a pause.
‘Can I help you?’ she repeated, no longer quite so certain that it was her mother at the other end of the line.
‘Is that Tash?’
Male. Not English. Very deep voice. Unbelievably sexy. Very slightly slurred.
Beccy rocked back on her heels, wondering if she might be speaking to Niall O’Shaughnessy. Oh. Lord. Above. Dillon Rafferty and then Niall O’Shaughnessy calling Haydown within an hour of one another. A double whammy of A-listers. She knew that Tash and her ex-boyfriend Niall were still good friends and apparently spoke often. He was a notoriously heavy drinker, so she supposed he could easily have mistaken her for Tash in a Bushmills stupor. Oh, to be Tash talking to Niall. Envy and excitement curdled in her belly.
‘I’m sorry – the line’s awful. Hello?’ She tried to imitate Tash’s husky, rather lazy Sloane voice just to continue the fantasy a moment longer.
‘Hello!’ the voice shouted to be heard, meaning Beccy had to hold the phone away from her ear because the line was in fact crystal clear. ‘I’m calling from New Zealand, Tash. Is it an okay time? It’s the middle of the bloody night here.’
The way he said it – ‘Noo Zayland’… ‘noight’ – told Beccy that this definitely wasn’t a melodic, Irish actor. This was a throaty, incredibly sexy Kiwi. But he did think that she was Tash.
She glanced out at the helicopter that had just landed on the Beauchamps’ dusty old pony paddock and wondered why her dreams never came true. Despite all her travels and her long, solitary quest for answers, Beccy was left unsatisfied and unfulfilled and back where she started, drifting through her lonely little life monitored by her overbearing mother and bankrolled by a reluctant, but rich, stepfather she loathed. Yet a decade earlier Tash, at about the same age as Beccy and in a similarly useless place in her life, had just gone on one family holiday to France to end up with both Niall and Hugo in love with her – and now entertained rock stars who arrived by helicopter at her country estate.
‘It’s a fine time,’ she told the sexy caller, deepening her voice to her best husky purr. Beccy was always a million times more confident on the phone than she was face to face. Her stepfather liked to joke that she should work in telesales. ‘It’s a perfect time.’
‘Is that so?’ He sounded amused. ‘That’s great to hear.’ Great was pronounced ‘grite’.
He also, Beccy realised rather dreamily, sounded deliciously drunk. Whoever he was deserved a little sweet talk.
‘Hugo’s at a competition,’ she said in her best smoky Nigella Lawson purr. ‘I am all alone.’
‘Are you?’
Beccy glanced over her shoulder at Cora dozing in her high chair with her elephant’s ear in her mouth and her beaker cuddled to her cheek, and then at Amery so small and new and sound asleep in his Moses basket, and she smiled.
‘Yesss – poor old me in this great big house. All alone.’ She wondered if she was pushing it a bit far.
But her phone friend was too caned to censor or censure either end of the conversation. ‘Well that’s why I’m calling.’
‘How thrilling!’ She giggled, even weakening her ‘r’ with girlish, sex-kitten aplomb.
‘I hope you’ve still got room for me and my head lad and half a dozen horses.’
‘Er … of course we have! Yes! Always.’
‘I know I left it pretty up in the air with Hugo, but I’ve been thinking about it since I flew home and I reckon it’s a great offer. Shit, I really need out of here.’ He sounded fantastically drunk now. ‘I want out. As soon as. Most of the stuff’s still packed from the Olympic trip. I don’t need a lot, apart fro
m Lemon and ng hiho.’
‘What?’
‘The horses. I’ll get visas and horse transportation sorted, then I can give you an arrival date.’
‘Can’t wait.’
He laughed, a gorgeous hot fountain of noise.
‘We’ll welcome you with open arms,’ Beccy purred again, still wondering who the hell he was.
He laughed afresh, a gruff, delicious rumble as exciting as a longed-for train finally rattling down the tracks.
‘I probably shouldn’t say this but you have a beautiful voice, Tash.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied happily, the beautiful voice dropping another octave.
‘I can’t wait to meet you.’
‘Likewise,’ she breathed.
Suddenly the pause took on such an electrical charge that Beccy could feel every centimetre of her knicker elastic tighten and every hair enclosed beneath them charge up with sexual friction, a small rustling forest surrounding a bubbling spring.
She was so turned on, so suddenly and unexpectedly horny, she wanted to hang up with fear.
The pause ached on and on. She was about to say something horribly naff like ‘hello’ to check the caller was there, when he finally spoke again. He sounded far more sober and dark-spirited.
‘How’s the baby?’
She closed one eye irritably, but then looked at sleeping Amery – and Cora who had awoken and was now happily chatting to her elephant – and she sighed.
‘Which one?’
‘Hello?’ His drawl still made her pelvis dissolve, despite the shift in emphasis. ‘I thought it was due any minute?’
Smiling at his divine voice Beccy dared herself. Go on, go on, say it, say it …
‘One baby arrived last week,’ she said with a Joanna Lumley deadpan that made her quiver with achievement and want to apply for drama school all over again, despite the twenty-three straight rejections that had cost James over a grand in audition fees and train fares. ‘The other’s not due back for hours – he’s out competing. But I’ll tell him you called.’
‘You do that,’ the laugh rumbled away down the tracks. ‘You do that.’
‘Let me give you a better number,’ she breathed, hardly believing her own daring as she dictated her own mobile number. ‘Call any time.’
Beccy hung up and, much to Cora’s amusement, danced around the kitchen singing ‘Two Souls’ at the top of her voice.
Beccy had returned from her world travels with one burning ambition. In covering almost all four corners of the globe she had lost practically everything at some point: all her possessions including her signet ring, her passport, half her body weight from dysentery, her credit cards, even her hair (mysteriously cut off while she was sleeping on a train in the Indian subcontinent) and often her dignity. But amazingly she had never lost her virginity. Throughout some very close calls and some fairly tempting, and not to mention scary, scenarios it had never quite come off, and here she was at twenty-seven, still virgo intacta.
Sometimes, like today, she felt like she was carrying around an unexploded bomb primed to go off at any minute. She wanted to make love very badly indeed. But Beccy wanted the love part of that glorious undertaking to be real, and that was a very tough call – because Beccy had been in love with the same man for over a decade and he was hopelessly beyond her reach. She’d run away for years without ridding herself of that single-minded devotion. Now that he was so close at hand she felt it even more acutely, and she was more than happy to abandon herself to the freefall hope of loving another, even if it was just for a few giddy hours or days of daydreaming.
‘This one is mine,’ she told the sleeping Amery, dropping a kiss on his creased little head while Cora waved her elephant and cup around in support.
Chapter 10
When Dillon ducked beneath the slowing helicopter rotors and ran crouching across the dusty paddock towards the gate, he saw the longest, shapeliest pair of legs waiting for him between the wooden slats. Sporting faded, frayed shorts with long brown Dubarry boots and rather kinky white over-the-knee socks underneath, they were tanned, appealingly bruised and very classy. Above them, the baggy, oversized sweatshirt with cartoon mating reindeer on it was an odd choice on a hot August afternoon, but he could forgive those legs anything.
As he straightened up, grinning, and thrust out his hand, he encountered an exquisite tanned face with cheeks tinged with pink, a big nervous smile and the most unusual eyes – one amber, one green and flecked like an autumn wood.
‘Dillon, I’m Tash.’ She took his hand. ‘Welcome.’
‘It’s so good of you to see me at such short notice.’
‘No worries,’ she said easily. ‘I’m confined to barracks right now anyway, so visitors are a real treat.’
As they moved away from the noise of the rotors slowing, he could see that she was walking very stiffly.
‘Have you had a fall then?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ she said brightly, almost limping as she shuffled in the direction of the stable yard, her face contorted with pain despite the cheery tone. ‘You’ll have to forgive me if I take you straight to meet The Fox. Hugo’s not here and my children are in the house, so I have to be quick.’
‘Sure,’ he said vaguely, distracted by the amazing courtyards ahead.
The house and its outbuildings looked as though they had been carved out of strawberry shortcake, the brickwork was a wonderful mellow shade of pink and cream, the flint panels like hand-beaten pewter gleaming in the sunlight. Since his passion for artisan architecture and farming had blossomed, Dillon had become something of an aficionado of outbuildings. These stable yards were amongst the loveliest he had seen, with their sagging but serviceable Welsh slate roofs, their wood-framed casement windows reflecting the pretty Queen Anne gables and dormers of the main house, their multicoloured stoles and wraps of wisteria, ivy, honeysuckle and Virginia creeper. The yards were largely made up of cobbled walk-ways running between well-kept geometric grass beds; there were fountains and historic-looking topiary, a beautiful big coach house straight out of an early chapter of Black Beauty, and dominating everything was that outrageous copper-domed clock tower. It would once have been a very rich man’s country seat, staffed by hundreds. It must cost a fortune in upkeep.
‘This place in fantastic,’ he enthused to Tash. ‘Have you had it long?’
‘Hugo’s family have been here about three hundred years.’ She was catching her breath now, moving so slowly that he had to keep pausing to stop himself falling over her.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine!’ she said over-quickly, then turned in alarm as dogs barked loudly nearby. ‘Oh hell, I thought they were in their run!’ Two vast Rhodesian ridgebacks chose that moment to bound up and pick their targets; one rushed up to Tash and danced around her, tail gyrating, the other snarled and barked furiously at Dillon, making him step backwards until he was pressed against the gate he’d just come through.
‘Cecil, stop that! He’s a friend!’ Tash ordered the dog away as the vanguard made way for several ranks of small terriers that yapped furiously and tugged at Dillon’s laces and the hem of his jeans. Finally, bringing up the rear was a very odd-looking dog with huge biscuit-coloured ears, a tatty black coat the texture of an old, over-shampooed shagpile carpet, and white-edged eyes like an old cartoon golliwog. Dispensing with preambles like barking, yapping or snarling, she sank her teeth into Dillon’s jeans leg and ripped out a neat strip which she proudly put down by his toes, looking up at him beseechingly.
‘Christ alive!’ He jumped back up on the gate, frightened she’d go for flesh next time.
‘I’m sorry.’ Tash crouched protectively and painfully to pat the little creature. ‘She normally only does that to my ex. Were those jeans terribly expensive?’
‘Only about three hundred dollars.’
‘Oh God. I’m sure I can patch them for you. This is Beetroot. She’s totally harmless really.’
‘Could have fo
oled me.’
‘It’s okay. She hasn’t bitten anyone for years. She only ever goes for clothes or car tyres.’
Beetroot glared at Dillon, her white-edged eyes deranged and threatening despite her grinning mouth and wagging tail. They clearly said ‘one false move and your bollocks will have my teeth-marks permanently etched into them’.
‘Just keep her away from me.’
‘I really am sor-agh!’ With a sharp gasp of discomfort, Tash tried and failed to pick up the little dog. Crouching by the cobbles at Dillon’s feet she took a moment to recover. She was whiter than ever and looked as though she was about to faint. Beetroot licked her face worriedly and lifted a paw to her arm as Tash made to stand up again, teeth gritted with pain. ‘I’ll fetch a lead.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Dillon insisted tetchily.
But Tash stayed kneeling at his feet, not entirely sure she could stand up.
‘Are you only interested in Fox?’ she quizzed breathlessly, at close quarters with his ankles.
‘I need a truly international horse,’ he said, sounding as though he was quoting somebody else. ‘And I want it to go to Burghley.’
‘Fox isn’t going to Burghley this year.’
‘Why not?’ He was looking down at the top of her head as Tash played for time, admiring his Converse trainers, which had trendy cartoons on them.
‘Too soon after the Olympics,’ she explained, making a couple of abortive efforts to stand up.
‘My girlfriend wants us to be at Burghley.’
