by Cathy Kelly
A success on that scale was what she needed. Instead, she’d come away with two exquisite bronze greyhound pieces. She knew it was crazy, and she’d paid too much for them, but their elegant, sad faces reminded her of the stone greyhounds that used to sit on either side of the front door at Avalon House when she was a child. They’d been among the last things to go and Tess could still remember her sorrow at seeing them loaded onto a dealer’s truck.
Now she’d have to sell them on because there was no way anyone coming to her door would be prepared to pay or even transport the two exquisite dogs.
Strangely, she couldn’t help thinking about Avalon House these days, ever since Cashel had bought it.
There was talk of him all the time in the village. He wasn’t Mr. Reilly any more. No, he was Cashel—Oh, Cashel’s doing a fabulous job up at the house—the local-boy-done-good, come home to spread the riches.
He was a total sweetie, insisted Belle from the hotel.
Tess thought that Belle had rather set her eye on Cashel. Watch out, Belle, she wanted to say, he’s not what you think.
But she could say nothing. Instead, she found herself overcome with a terrible longing to go up to the house again, to walk around it, to step through the rooms laying her fingers on the doors and staircases she’d touched carelessly as a child. She wanted to make a pilgrimage around her childhood, to revisit that time in her life when things had been very different.
Except, she couldn’t. She daren’t go up there in case he saw her.
She might manage it over Christmas, because he was sure to be away and there’d be no workers there. Perhaps.
Right now, however, there were more pressing matters at hand: money, Christmas and her mother-in-law, Helen.
“Tess, I wanted to tell you I’m not going to go to Claire’s parents’ house for Christmas. I simply can’t,” Helen had said tremulously on the phone a few days before. “It doesn’t feel right, it’s too soon, I’m not ready. You know me, I like to take my time over things and I don’t know them and Claire’s a sweet girl but it’s so upsetting.”
“Well, you could always come here,” Tess had said, her guts clenching, knowing that a distraught Helen might not be the best addition to the household, given that Kitty was already desolate because Tess, Kevin, Claire, Zach and herself were not all going to be spending Christmas together.
“Why not?” she’d said tearfully. “I mean, why not, Mum? They could come and stay. I’ll move in with you and they can have my bedroom.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Tess had said gently.
It was wonderful that Kitty was so marvelously innocent and yet at the same time Tess couldn’t shatter that innocence by explaining the truth or the facts.
“Claire wants to be with her mum and dad because she’s having the baby,” Tess explained.
“But what about me?” cried Kitty.
Tess hauled her darling daughter on to her lap and held her tightly. Christmas was going to be difficult this year, no doubt about it.
She and Kevin had talked about it one night when he came up to dinner with the family.
Tess had decided that there was no point in keeping him away from the house in some act of rage—it was far better for the children to see their parents getting on like adults.
As Tess had told Zach and Kitty over dinner that night: “We will always care for each other, but we will always love you two.”
And now it looked as if she’d be spending Christmas trying to console her mother-in-law too. Truly, life was strange.
20
Cashel held the glass of mulled wine in his hand and stared out at the snow-covered valleys below him. It was truly picture-postcard here in Courchevel, yet Cashel had never felt less Christmassy in his life. They’d been skiing most of the day and now they’d come in at five when it was darkening. The scent of some amazing meal was wafting up from the kitchens. The luxury chalet—in the elite Courchevel heights of 1850, naturally—had a French chef, along with a seemingly endless supply of young locals in and out cleaning and tidying, while a married couple from the Philippines ran the whole place. Cashel had to hand it to Rhona. She knew how to pick a luxury chalet for Christmas.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” She was beside him, resting her hand on his shoulder in a friendly manner. “You work too hard you know, Cashel,” she said. “You should do this more often. Come away with us. Spend a few days doing nothing.”
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” said Cashel automatically, because to say anything else would be rude. He didn’t envy Rhona’s existence, or even that of her new husband: a few weeks’ work here and there, then a trip to St. Bart’s, another few weeks, then skiing perhaps. It was the sort of life Rhona had always wanted when she was married to him, and he could have given it to her from a financial viewpoint, but he wouldn’t have been there with her. The drive to work—to keep working to hide any gaps in his life—was too strong in Cashel.
“Aren’t you glad you came?” Rhona said.
“Yes, thank you,” he said, which was a lie because he wasn’t glad at all.
When Rhona had phoned him, wheedling, saying that she and some friends were renting a luxury chalet in the French Alps for ten days over Christmas, she’d made it sound so wonderful.
“An escape, Cashel,” she had said. And those were the magic words. He wanted to escape from everywhere, but particularly from Avalon, which was casting its spell over him again. He had tried to stay away and let that Mara girl deal with everything and liaise with one of his assistants, but somehow he couldn’t bear to leave it alone. He kept flying in, getting the helicopter down so he could look at the house, see what was happening, seek out Freddie and ask him why there wasn’t more progress being made.
“Ah, well now,” Freddie said each time, scratching his head. “These old houses are tricky, Mr. Reilly.”
Cashel became Mr. Reilly whenever there was a problem.
“We need to make the back of the house structurally sound before we can really get working. It’s a huge old place, so that’s going to take a long time. And even then, it’s going to be slow. Like with the walls, for example: you can’t throw up any old bit of plaster on the walls, you know. Myself and Lorcan, we’re working to make it authentic.”
When Lorcan, the architect, started talking about making the house authentic, Cashel had to stop himself from letting fly with a left hook. Lorcan could bore for Ireland on the subject of authenticity. Any concept of making Avalon House into a home as well as a beautiful example of architectural heritage was entirely lost on him.
That’s why Cashel left dealing with Lorcan to Mara. He found himself getting very irritated by discussions over sourcing moldings, plaster versus plasterboard, original slates that were nigh on impossible to find and would cost a small fortune in the event they did find them. He simply wanted it done. He didn’t want to hear how it was to happen, why it was to happen and how far Freddie would have to go to get precisely the right thing.
Cashel had visited Avalon four times in the last month, which was unheard of, given his demanding schedule.
But the draw of home was proving too much for him. And he knew why that was. It wasn’t so much Avalon House, much as he wanted it to be finished, to be able to look at this gleaming, beautifully restored house and think: This is mine. This belongs to the boy whose mother used to clean the steps here and used to polish the brass.
True, he wanted that fiercely, but there was another reason he kept going back to Avalon, a reason he didn’t like to admit.
He’d seen Tess in town a few times and tried not to look, not to watch her long-legged walk, not to look at the curve of her cheek or to catch her eye. He wouldn’t talk to her directly, no. Instead, he’d subtly questioned Mara about her, because he knew she helped out occasionally in Tess’s antique shop. Being new to the area, Mara didn’t have a clue about his history with Tess, so he was able to inquire idly about the Power family in general, throwing in the
odd question about Suki and the girls’ father, to make it seem as if he was interested in all of them.
“Is there a good living to be made from the antique shop, do you think?” he’d ask, and Mara would look up from whatever bit of paper she was scanning and say, “I’m not sure, but times are tough, you know, Cashel. We’re not all loaded like you. I think it’s hard for Tess.”
If anyone else had spoken to him like that, Cashel might have fired them, but for some reason he could take it from Mara. Perhaps it was because she was here in Avalon, and he became a different person in Avalon.
“Tess . . . did you say she’d split up from her husband?” he asked another time, trying to invest the words with the required combination of interest and lack of interest. Apparently, he hadn’t managed it, because this time Mara looked up, stared him straight in the eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “She and Kevin are very definitely separated, and now he’s . . .” Mara paused.
“He’s what?” Cashel urged, unable to help himself.
“His girlfriend is pregnant.”
“Oh,” Cashel said. That was unexpected, and hopeful in some strange way.
Tess Power was no longer officially attached. She was available, theoretically, and his heart jumped at the thought. And then he knew he was crazy because he and Tess were finished.
He’d said so many times over the years that he’d never look back. In a way, Tess had done him a favor. He owed some of his drive and ambition to her: heartbreak and rage were powerful forces and, with his own innate drive, he’d been ready to take on the world. He’d grown rich and powerful, so powerful that he could have almost anything he wanted. And he owed a certain amount of that to the one woman he hadn’t been able to have.
“Cashel, there’s someone I want you to meet,” said Rhona, dragging him out of his reverie staring blankly at the snow outside.
Beside his ex-wife was a tall brunette. She was slim and good-looking with an intelligent glint in her eye.
“Sherry Petrovsky, meet Cashel Reilly.”
“Delighted to meet you.”
Her handshake was cool and firm. She wasn’t, he decided, one of the glamour-puss friends Rhona sometimes brought along for fun. After talking to her for a while, he soon realized that she was anything but.
She was a commodities trader in London.
“Tough job,” remarked Cashel.
“Yes, but I like it,” she said coolly. “The biggest problem is the traders—they all want to be alpha dog and like to think my job is to be pack bitch.”
Cashel burst out laughing. From the way she spoke, he had no doubt that Sherry had no trouble handling a bunch of testosterone-fueled traders.
“Hey, it’s chilly standing here at the window, despite—is that triple glazing? Why don’t we sit down,” suggested Sherry.
Cashel watched her as she led the way to a two-seater couch. She had a fabulous body, which spoke of getting up at about five in the morning to go to the gym, as traders started early and worked late. He began to like Sherry more and more. Maybe this holiday had been a good idea after all.
Across the room, Rhona caught Sherry’s eye and winked at her. Sherry allowed herself a brief grin back. It was early days yet.
Sherry sat beside Cashel at dinner that night. It was his first night there, even though the others had arrived over the previous few days. Normally at these things he felt sort of different, an outsider for all his money. Shades of his insecurity, he knew; and he hated that, hated that there was any insecurity in Cashel Reilly, millionaire, entrepreneur, successful business man, but it remained nonetheless. With Sherry however, he didn’t feel in the slightest bit uneasy. He felt comfortable around her. They knew some of the same people, moved in some of the same circles. But it wasn’t that; no, it was the sense that Sherry had come up the hard way. She understood hard work and she understood not fitting in; partly, he reckoned, from being a woman in a man’s world. There was no doubt about it, working in the city was definitely a man’s world. But she was easygoing when she talked about her work.
There were no horror stories of Playboy magazine being passed around the office, rude e-mails or trips with clients to golf courses or strip clubs. Clearly Sherry had figured out how to deal with such things. She was comfortable with herself and he liked that. They talked easily, happily; it was rather like he was in a room with her and nobody else there. Once he caught Rhona grinning across the table at him, looking like someone who’d that instant figured out string theory. “What?” he mouthed across at her.
“You two,” she mouthed back, pointing at him and Sherry in a most un-Rhona-like way. Normally, Rhona was very hot on the social niceties and would as lief point across a dinner table as she would talk about her upper brow lift. But it was clear she was happy that she had set up such a good match between her ex-husband and Sherry.
Funny that, he thought, raising a glass of red wine to her. She was happy that he had clicked with a girl she’d invited for him. Whatever else you might say about their marriage, at least they’d ended on amicable terms. How many ex-wives tried to arrange dates for their ex-husbands? Mind you, she’d done it a few times before with less successful results, but Rhona was a quick learner. She’d worked out his type soon enough. A go-getter, like him.
For a sliver of a moment his mind ran back to Avalon and Tess Power. Tess was very different from Sherry, different in almost every way. Different physically, different in the way she approached life, different in her job and upbringing. There was nothing posh about Sherry, nor did she pretend there was. She was simply a very smart, beautiful woman who’d used her brains to get ahead. While Tess was . . . well, Tess was a smart woman too, who’d come from a different world to him. He hadn’t understood the rules of her world, the rules that said it was perfectly all right for her to break his heart.
“You’re miles away,” said Sherry, turning back from her neighbor to talk to him. “Tell me what’s going on in that clever head of yours. Have you some fabulous plan to take over the world? Should I know about it? Would that be insider trading?” She leaned back in her chair, fingers wrapped lazily around the stem of her wineglass. She didn’t drink much, he noticed. She was one of those women who looked around and watched carefully, smiling as if she was happy to be in this place at this time.
“No,” he lied. “I was thinking how nice it was to be here with friends and how nice it was to meet you.”
Sherry Petrovsky didn’t do anything as gauche as blush; she’d learned not to do that sort of thing years ago. But there was an undeniable glow to her cheeks as she smiled back at him. Cashel Reilly was gorgeous. Even more gorgeous than his photos. She was glad she’d come, even though in the beginning she’d resisted Rhona’s efforts to persuade her.
“I don’t have time to date guys who are emotionally stunted or who’ve been destroyed in the past, Rhona,” Sherry said with mild irritation. She knew Rhona from college, a million years ago when they were both art students, before Sherry had realized that art was so not her and had switched cleverly into economics.
“I didn’t say he was emotionally stunted,” Rhona said. They were sitting in J. Sheekey’s fish restaurant on a girls’ night out with the old college crowd. Sherry liked going out with the gang. It was fun. She couldn’t help the thrill she felt, the fact that she was the most successful of them all when it came to business.
Of course, she hadn’t been quite so successful in those other female markers—family, husband, all that sort of stuff. But she had what she wanted—for now, anyway.
“All I said,” Rhona explained, already quite tipsy on champagne, “was that there’s this woman from his past, his first love—I know, such a cliché—but he’s never quite got over her. She shaped him, she was part of his life when he was growing up. It’s the classic poor-boy-made-good stuff, and some of them have a chip on their shoulder—not that I’m saying Cashel has a chip on his shoulder, because he doesn’t. He’s very proud of where he came from, the fa
ct that his mother cleaned houses. But you see, he fell in love with the girl whose house his mother cleaned, only for some reason she dumped him or betrayed him. I’m not sure exactly what happened because he would never talk about it, but it was obvious that it was niggling away at him. You know how guys like that can be: they can’t stand for there to be any unfinished business, any battle they haven’t won. So it’s always there somewhere in the back of his mind, biting away at him.”
“And that was why you got divorced?” Sherry asked, feeling less and less interested in Cashel Reilly, even though his picture had caught her eye in the financial pages many times.
“No, we got divorced because we were different. Looking for different stuff really. You know me,” Rhona grinned, “I like to have fun. Cashel is more of a workhorse. Right up your street, Sherry.”
“So he’s not secretly pining after this woman from the past then?” Sherry said. “I mean, he’s had other girlfriends, yes?”
“Oh, loads of them,” Rhona explained. “Loads before he met me and after we divorced. Every party we’ve invited him to, he brings a different girl. For a while, he was going for those young model girl types and I said, ‘Cashel, stop! You do need someone you can talk to.’ Eventually the message got through. No, he’s had loads of girlfriends. Loads of relationships since then, but I think he’s definitely over the one from the past and I think you are just his sort of girl.”
“Why are you trying to fix up your ex-husband, though?” said Sherry.
Rhona shrugged. “It seems weird, I know. Most of my friends hate their ex-husbands, but Cashel was always so generous. The divorce settlement was fabulous. Then I met Rico, and now I’m happy. I never stopped liking Cashel; we weren’t suited, that’s all. I suppose you could say it’s karma: I feel I’m doing something good for the universe by doing something good for Cashel, helping him heal his wounds from the past.”
