Christmas at Claridge's

by Karen Swan

  Tor, Cress and Kate have been best friends for as long as they can remember. Through all the challenges of marriage, raising children and maintaining their high-flying careers, they have stuck together as a powerful and loyal force to be reckoned with – living proof that twenty-first-century women can have it all, and do. It is only when the captivating Harry comes into their lives that things begin to get complicated, as Tor, Cress and Kate are drawn into Harry’s dangerous games.

  Prima Donna

  by

  Karen Swan

  ISBN: 978-1-4472-2374-0

  Breaking the rules was what she liked best.

  That was her sport. Renegade, rebel, bad girl.

  Getting away with it.

  Pia Soto is the sexy, glamorous prima ballerina, the Brazilian bombshell, who’s shaking up the ballet world with her outrageous behaviour. She’s wild and precocious, and she’s a survivor. She’s determined that no man will ever control her destiny. But ruthless financier Will Silk has Pia in his sights, and he has other ideas . . .

  Sophie O’Farrell is Pia’s hapless, gawky assistant, the girl-next-door to Pia’s prima donna, always either falling in love with the wrong man or just falling over. Sophie sets her own dreams aside to pick up the debris in Pia’s wake, but she’s no angel. When a devastating accident threatens to cut short Pia’s illustrious career, Sophie has to step out of the shadows and face up to the demons in her own life.

  Christmas at

  TIFFANY’S

  by

  Karen Swan

  ISBN: 978-0-330-53272-3

  Three cities, three seasons, one chance to find the life that fits

  Cassie settled down too young, marrying her first serious boyfriend. Now, ten years later, she is betrayed and broken. With her marriage in tatters and no career or home of her own, she needs to work out where she belongs in the world and who she really is.

  So begins a year-long trial as Cassie leaves her sheltered life in rural Scotland to stay with each of her best friends in the most glamorous cities in the world: New York, Paris and London. Exchanging the grouse moor and mousy hair for low-carb diets and high-end highlights, Cassie tries on each city for size as she attempts to track down the life she was supposed to have been leading, and with it, the man who was supposed to love her all along.

  The Perfect

  PRESENT

  by

  Karen Swan

  ISBN: 978-0-330-53273-0

  Memories are a gift . . .

  Haunted by a past she can’t escape, Laura Cunningham desires nothing more than to keep her world small and precise – her quiet relationship and growing jewellery business are all she needs to get by. Until the day when Rob Blake walks into her studio and commissions a necklace that will tell his enigmatic wife Cat’s life in charms.

  As Laura interviews Cat’s family friends and former lovers, she steps out of her world and into theirs – a charmed world where weekends are spent in Verbier and the air is lavender-scented, where friends are wild, extravagant and jealous, and a big love has to compete with grand passions.

  Hearts are opened, secrets revealed, and as the necklace begins to fill up with trinkets, Cat’s intoxicating life envelops Laura’s own. By the time she has to identify the final charm, Laura’s metamorphosis is almost complete. But the last story left to tell has the power to change all of their lives for ever, and Laura is forced to choose between who she really is and who it is she wants to be.

  An extract from The Perfect Present follows . . .

  Chapter One

  Laura looked at the shoes in her hand and knew before the assistant had come back with her size that she would buy them, even if they didn’t fit. They were red, and that’s all they needed to be. She was almost famous for them around here, and Jack always teased her about it – ‘You know what they say – red shoes, no knickers.’ Of course, he knew full well she’d be the last person to go knickerless. Maybe that was why he found it so funny. Anyway, she preferred him saying that to his other response, which was to roll his eyes. ‘You’ve got almost fifty pairs!’ he’d cried last time before he’d caught sight of her expression and quickly crossed the kitchen to apologize, saying he secretly quite liked that she had a ‘signature’.

  The shop assistant came back, shaking her head apologetically.

  ‘All I’ve got left is a thirty-six,’ she shrugged. ‘We’re completely out of thirty-eights, even in the other colour-ways.’

  Laura bit her lip and stalled for a moment as the assistant moved to return the shoe to the display shelf. ‘Well . . . I’ll take them anyway,’ she muttered, looking away as she reached into her bag for her credit card. ‘They’re such a good price now. There’ll be someone I can give them to . . .’

  ‘Okay.’ The assistant hesitated, casting a glance at Laura’s red patent slip-ons, which she’d polished so hard at the breakfast table that morning that their eyes met in the reflection.

  A minute later, she savoured the jangle of the bell on the door as it closed behind her and stood for a moment on the pavement, adjusting to the brightness outside and the change of pace. The day was already limbered up and elastic, the late-November sun pulsing softly in the sky with no real power behind it, local businessmen rushing past with coffees-to-go slopping over the plastic covers and pensioners pushing their shopping carts between the grocer’s and the butcher’s, tutting over the price of brisket; a few mothers with prams were congregating around the bakery windows, talking each other into jam doughnuts and strong coffee to commiserate over their broken nights.

  Laura turned her back on them all – glad their problems weren’t hers – and started walking down the street in the opposite direction, swinging the carrier bag in her hand so that it matched the sway of her long, light brown hair across her narrow back. Her studio was in a converted keep, just beyond the old yacht yard, eight minutes away. People tended to have a romantic notion of what it must be like when she told them where she worked, but it wasn’t remotely pretty to look at. Tall and ungainly on its stilts, it towered over all the corrugated-panel workshops and dilapidated boat huts on the banks, and her square studio-room atop them looked like it had been bolted on by an architect who’d trained with Lego. The wood was thoroughly rotted, although you wouldn’t know to look at it, as it had been freshly painted two summers previously by a student at the sailing club who was after extra cash. She loved it. It felt like home.

  She turned off the high street and marched down the shady grey-cobbled lanes, past the tiny pastel-coloured fishermen’s cottages with bushy thatched roofs – which were now mostly second homes for affluent Londoners – and over the concrete slipway to the compacted mud towpath that led down towards her studio. It sat on a hillock in the middle of the estuary. ‘St Laura’s Mount’, Jack called it. The brown water merely slapped at the stilt legs during the high spring tides, but the path over to it was only accessible at low tide, which was why she was enjoying a late start this morning. Strictly speaking, if she really cared about doing a nine-to-five working day, she could have bought a small dinghy to row over in, but she rather liked the idiosyncratic hours it forced upon her. But even more than that – and she could never admit this to Jack – she loved the occasional stranding overnight, when her absorption in her work led her to ignore the alarm clock and the path became submerged. After the first ‘stranding’, she had brought a duvet, pillow and overnight bag to the studio so that she was properly set up for the eventuality, but Jack hated it. He felt it encouraged her – enabled her – to continue working when it was time to stop and come home.

  The tide was almost fully out now, and the mudflats looked as glossy as ganache, but Laura didn’t stop to watch the avocets and bitterns picking their way weightlessly over them. Their mutual fascination with each other had worn off a while ago and now they existed in apathetic harmony. She walked quickly up the two flights of metal stairs and unlocked the door. Jack was forever telling her they had to up the security on the place. She had t
housands of pounds’ worth of materials in the studio.

  Dumping her handbag on the floor and carefully lifting the too-small shoes out of their box, she placed them on the windowsill. They looked like two blood-spots in the all-white interior. The wide planking floorboards had been painted and overvarnished so that they looked glossy and more expensive than they really were, and it had taken over twenty tester pots and Jack on the edge of a nervous breakdown before she had found the perfect white for the walls. She hadn’t wanted it to look cold in the winter, but it did, in spite of her best efforts – there’s precious little that can counteract the pervasive grey light that characterizes the Suffolk winter. She had had some blinds run up in sandy-coloured deckchair stripes and that had helped warm things up a bit. It had to – the windows ran round every side of the room so there were lots of them. Jack always used to worry that she was too exposed working up here, with 360-degree views where anyone could see her alone in the creek. But Laura insisted that neither bored teenagers nor avid bird-watchers had any interest in her.

  The red flashing light on the answering machine caught her eye and she went over to listen. After several years of working alone with only Radio Four for company, it was still a surprise to realize that people were actively seeking her out and calling her up with commissions. The move from jewellery hobbyist to professional goldsmith had been accidental, when the charm necklace she’d made for Fee’s mother had provoked a positive response at the WI. After weeks of ignoring Fee’s nagging, well-intentioned demands to set herself up properly, her friend, young as she was, had taken it upon herself to place a formal advert in the Charrington Echo. Rather serendipitously, the editor of the FT magazine had been holidaying in neighbouring Walberswick at the time and happened to chance upon it whilst waiting for her lunch order in the pub. An hour later she had knocked on Laura’s door and from there it had been but a hop, skip and a jump to the prestigious placement in the FT magazine’s jewellery pages.

  Today there were two messages, both from Fee – now working as her self-appointed PR and manager on the days she wasn’t manning reception at the leisure centre. Through squeals and much clapping, she was forwarding appointment dates for three prospective new clients. Yesterday there had been another one, and this was several weeks after the article had come out. Laura scribbled the dates and times in her diary, shaking her head over the fact that the commissions were still coming in. The feature had been about new-generation jewellers, and the box on Laura had been the smallest, squeezed in at the very last minute. She had pretty much dismissed it as soon as she’d seen it because they’d cropped the photo so you couldn’t see her shoes, but clearly lots of people hadn’t, because the little red light was still happily flashing most mornings when the tide finally let her in.

  Laura walked over to the bench and began casting a critical eye over the previous day’s work – a necklace that was for a wedding next week. She caught a glimpse of the grey heron beating past the east window, and knew her eleven o’clock appointment had arrived hot on her heels. Good old Grey. He was better than any CCTV system. He stood for hours in the reed bed, only retracting his neck and leaping into flight when one of her customers passed by on the path to the studio. Like the avocets and bitterns, he just ignored her now.

  ‘Hello?’ a male voice drifted up questioningly, and she heard his shoes on the patterned metal treads.

  ‘Come up to the top,’ Laura called before taking a deep, calming breath. She slid the unfinished necklace into a drawer and refilled the kettle, somewhat aghast to notice that the limescale had flourished unchecked so that it looked more like a coral reef in there.

  ‘Hello,’ the voice said, near now.

  She set a smile upon her lips, took a deep breath and turned. ‘Hi,’ she replied, as a well-dressed man emerged through the doorway.

  He stopped where he was, either transfixed or appalled by the sight of her. In keeping with her ‘take me as you find me’ defiance (and in direct contrast to Fee’s ‘take me, I’m yours’ dress sense), she was sporting a grubby pair of boyfriend jeans that fell so low they exposed the upper curve of her hip bones, and a faded black Armani A/X sweatshirt of Jack’s. The only things about her that were shiny were her teeth and the glossy red flats on her feet.

  ‘Ms Cunningham?’ he enquired, holding out a hand.

  ‘Laura,’ she replied, shaking his hand so lightly that her fingers slipped away just as he squeezed and he was left gripping her fingertips. He looked down at their star-crossed hands and released hers.

  He straightened up. ‘Robert Blake. You were expecting me?’

  In her dreams, maybe.

  Christmas at Claridge’s

  Karen Swan lives in Sussex with her husband, three children, two dogs and her car called Meltchet.

  Visit Karen’s website at www.karenswan.com or you can find Karen Swan’s author page on Facebook or follow her on Twitter @KarenSwan1.

  Also by Karen Swan

  Players

  Prima Donna

  Christmas at Tiffany’s

  The Perfect Present

  First published 2013 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2013 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-4472-4590-2

  Copyright © Karen Swan, 2013

  The right of Karen Swan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any author websites whose address you obtain from this book (‘author websites’). The inclusion of author website addresses in this book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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