Summer at Buttercup Beach: A gorgeously uplifting and heartwarming romance

by Holly Martin

  ‘I better get that,’ Freya said, her voice hoarse.

  Rome nodded and Freya got up and moved towards the phone.

  She stared at him as she talked to the person on the other end and he smiled. Tonight was definitely going to end in a kiss.

  A clatter at the door drew his attention away from Freya and, when he turned, he saw Bella, who had managed to get the strap of her bag caught around the door handle. He smiled with affection for her.

  After she had untangled herself, he stood up to greet her, giving her a big hug. She looked so happy he couldn’t help smiling at her. Her happiness was infectious.

  ‘Don’t normally see you round here during the day,’ Rome said. ‘Don’t you have some big charity event to organise?’

  ‘Always,’ Bella said. ‘But my boss allows me to have a lunch break.’

  ‘Only because you’re sleeping with him,’ Rome said. He enjoyed teasing her about the perks of dating the boss as often as he could. Bella didn’t even bat an eyelid.

  ‘I don’t have long actually. There’s still loads to organise for the water obstacle course in London next month, but I wondered if you could make me something.’

  ‘Out of glass?’ Rome clarified, though that was obvious as she was standing in his glass studio.

  ‘Yes, a present for Isaac. I’d pay you of course, but you’re so talented and I love your art. I know Isaac loves it too.’

  Isaac had bought several stained glass pieces for his house when he had moved in a few months before. It seemed Rome had got himself a fan who wasn’t after his body.

  ‘This mural is going to take me forever so it might have to wait a few weeks. What is it you have in mind?’

  ‘I’m not sure if I’m honest.’

  ‘Maybe a pink heart with “Isaac and Bella forever” written inside it,’ Rome teased.

  Bella laughed. ‘You can mock me all you want, I’m in love and I don’t care who knows it. And no, I don’t want a pink love heart with rainbows and sparkles. Would you be able to do a piece with the London skyline in it? I know Isaac loves it here and would never move back to London, but I know he misses it too.’

  ‘So nothing simple then?’ He shook his head, fondly. ‘I’ll do a design for you over the weekend and, once you’ve approved it, we can talk about colours and the type of glass you want, but as I said, it’ll be a few weeks until I can actually start the making of it. But I’ll bump you to the head of the queue once I’ve done this mural.’

  ‘Thank you, you’re the best,’ Bella grinned at him.

  ‘And I presume you want the London skyline inside a pink heart?’

  Bella laughed. ‘One day, you’ll be happily married, and you’ll know what it is to be in love.’

  ‘How did you know you loved Isaac?’ Rome asked, not sure why the conversation had suddenly turned serious. But, as it had already taken that path, Rome decided to pursue it. ‘You’ve had a few boyfriends over the years but you never loved any of them. What was different about how you felt for Isaac, how did you know it was love?’

  ‘I’m not sure really. Being with him made me feel warm inside and that warmth spread throughout my whole body whenever I was with him, or thought about him. I just seemed to be walking around with a big smile on my face the whole time. I had never felt so happy with anyone as I did with him. I suppose that’s how I knew. I think the thing that made it real in my head was when we were making love – that connection we shared was so much more than just sex. It’s hard to describe but if you ever have that connection with someone, then you’ll know.’

  ‘Wait, I don’t want to hear about my little sister making love,’ Rome said, pretending to put his fingers in his ears.

  ‘Then don’t ask,’ Bella grinned.

  ‘So basically, your advice for when I’ll know I’m in love is, I’ll know?’

  Bella laughed. ‘When you put it like that it sounds pretty lame but you will. The connection you share when you make love to the person you love is something so incredible, so rare and beautiful, you’ll know it when you feel it.’

  ‘Glad you’ve cleared that up for me,’ Rome said.

  ‘Look for the warmth, that’s a big clue,’ Bella tried. ‘Are you asking about anyone in particular or just love in general?’

  Rome was unable to stop his eyes from wandering over to Freya, who was still on the phone, and when he looked back at Bella he knew she had seen him look at her. ‘Just a general hypothetical question,’ Rome said.

  Bella nodded, unconvincingly. ‘Right, of course it was. Enjoy your dinner tonight.’

  She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek, waved at Freya and walked out.

  Rome sighed.

  Chapter Six

  By the time Freya got off the phone, Rome had moved back to the fused glass pieces of jewellery he was making for the summer craft fair that weekend. She moved back to his side, sensing that the moment, if there had indeed been one, had gone completely now, but nonetheless the nervous feeling of excitement bubbled through her about what the night held.

  She looked at the pieces he was making. Fusing glass together was a simple thing, but it produced such beautiful results. He had cut out little bits of coloured glass and was layering and gluing them together in different patterns. He would put them in the kiln on a high temperature and all the bits of glass would melt together to make one piece of jewellery that was beautiful and completely unique. Later he might then add smaller pieces or metallic bits and they would be fired at a slightly cooler temperature to add texture to the piece too. He would often use the fused glass and add copper foiling around the outside and then solder gemstones to it as well. He bought a lot of old or broken jewellery from the jewellers and used the gem stones in different pieces. The brooch she was wearing was a daisy that had frosted pearly white glass petals and tiny yellow crystals in the middle.

  ‘I love the brooches you make,’ Freya said, fingering the one he had made her a few months before. ‘I’ve seen lots of fused glass jewellery but yours is completely different.’

  She passed him the bottle of fusing glue so he could stick his layer together to ensure it would hold in place in the kiln.

  ‘I love making them, they’re so easy, but it means I can be completely creative.’ He smiled at her as he took the bottle of glue and there was that tension bubbling in the air between them again. ‘So I have a question for you, I wanted to have my own stained glass studio for many years and now I’m living my dream. What’s your dream, what is on your list of must-do things?’

  Freya took the glue bottle back off him for a second as he readjusted the position of the glass. ‘I read an article about this the other day, how to improve your life or something. But it said you should have a list of five things you’d like to achieve in your life at any one time rather than a list of a hundred things which never seem achievable. Once you’ve ticked off those things then you should replace them with new dreams, so you always have something to strive towards. So I had a think about what my five things are. Some of them are quite simple, some of them are a bit harder. I’d like to fly in a plane. I’ve never been in a plane before, only left the UK on a boat. I’d love to see the earth from up there in the sky. I think that would be incredible.’

  He smiled at her. ‘That’s an easy fix.’

  ‘They get harder. I want to go on safari in Africa. Which would tick my fly-on-a-plane dream if I was to travel to Africa. I want to see lions and elephants, I want to see giraffes galloping across the plains.’

  ‘That’s doable.’

  ‘Doable but expensive.’

  ‘What else?’

  She liked that he didn’t seem fazed by these dreams. Though she was sure he would soon. ‘I want to buy my own house. I lived with my parents, my gran, my boyfriend and now I live here. It’s always been someone else’s property and I’ve always wanted to have my own house one day, something that is completely mine.’

  ‘The flat is yours,’ Rome said.


  ‘Not really. It belongs to you. And you have been kind enough to let me live in it for the last couple of years and decorate it how I want, but if you decided to rent it out properly and make some decent money from it, or even if you wanted to sell it on, I’d lose my home.’

  ‘I’d never do that.’

  ‘Well things change, people change, their circumstances change. I’d want my own house one day and then no one can ever take it from me.’

  Rome nodded. ‘I understand that. What are numbers four and five on your list?’

  ‘I’d like to travel through space. Go up there and see what the astronauts see, the planets, the moons and the stars, travel to different galaxies, see different worlds. I grew up watching all the Star Trek shows and it just looked so wonderful.’

  She saw his whole face light up. ‘You watched Star Trek?’

  ‘Yes, every episode, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation, Enterprise, plus all the old ones with Captain Kirk. I loved it. Gene Roddenberry has a lot to answer for. But space travel has been a dream of mine ever since I was a little kid and, although it’s probably never likely, the article said never to give up on the impossible dreams. And that brings me on to my last dream. I want to get married. When I was younger I had this life plan, I was going to get married by the time I was twenty-five and have four kids before I was thirty. I’m twenty-nine this year and when I broke up with Jake it seemed like that dream was never going to happen for me. Two years down the line and I’m still no closer but I want that more than anything.’ She sighed. ‘I told you some were harder than others.’

  She didn’t know what Rome’s reaction was going to be to her dream of getting married. Most men would run a million miles away from a conversation about marriage. But Rome Lancaster wasn’t most men.

  Rome nodded as he thought. ‘Well, given that we don’t yet have faster-than-light technology and that most of the nearest galaxies are trillions of miles away, that dream might be a bit tricky. I know Virgin are creating tourist flights through space but I don’t think they are ready yet and they won’t have the technology to visit the planets in our solar system, let alone other solar systems. At a quarter of a million dollars per ticket it’s not exactly affordable or achievable at the moment either but I think it’s good to have dreams to aspire to. Just because we aren’t there yet, doesn’t mean it won’t happen in our lifetime. But the other dreams are definitely achievable.’

  She stared at him. ‘I kind of feel that getting married and having children is more impossible than space travel at the moment. That dream feels very far away.’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t think that’s an impossible dream at all. We could get married, have children together, if that’s what you want.’

  Her heart galloped in her chest, all words frozen in her throat. Was he actually proposing? They’d never even kissed and now this. He wasn’t serious. He’d thrown it into the conversation so casually he couldn’t possibly be serious.

  ‘We’re best friends, we work together, we hang out in the evenings and at weekends, we already know we get on. You’re my favourite person in the world,’ Rome carried on.

  Freya finally found her voice. ‘But… But marriage is supposed to be about a bit more than two best friends living together. Most people get married out of love.’

  ‘And a lot of people marry their best friends.’

  ‘Because they love them, not out of convenience. My marriage to Jake, if that had happened, would have been a marriage of convenience for him. I didn’t realise it at the time. I cooked and cleaned the house, I sorted out all the paperwork and admin for his company and occasionally we had some rubbish sex. And when I started thinking there had to be more than this out there, when I started talking about travelling the world, he proposed to me to get me to stay. I thought it was because he loved me but in reality he didn’t. I wouldn’t want a marriage like that again. I suppose it seems like an impossible dream because I want to get married to someone who loves me, who wants to be with me because of me not because of the work I do. I want someone who misses me when I’m gone and every time they look at me, their heart feels full with the love they have for me. And I want to feel that for someone else too.’

  Rome stared at her. If he wasn’t freaked out by her dream to get married before, he almost certainly was now.

  ‘Our marriage wouldn’t be like what you had with Jake.’

  God, he wasn’t backing away from this conversation like she thought he would, he was embracing it. But it was all hypothetical, wasn’t it? He wasn’t actually serious about this, surely?

  ‘I wouldn’t marry someone so they could cook and clean for me. I’m perfectly capable of doing those things for myself. And I’m an excellent cook, or so Bella and Eden tell me. I love cooking. And yes, it would be hard at work if you left, but I’d cope, train up a new assistant. I certainly wouldn’t marry you for that.’

  ‘So why would you marry me?’

  ‘Because that’s what you want.’

  ‘What about what you want?’

  ‘I want to make you happy,’ Rome said, softly. ‘That’s all I want. You make me ridiculously happy, you saved me when I was at my lowest, every day was a struggle but you, you made me smile again. I want to make you happy too.’

  She stared at him. She loved this man so much. This conversation, if it was hypothetical, was killing her. She needed him to back away now, laugh it off, talk his way out of it before she got her hopes up, grabbed his hand and marched him down the aisle.

  ‘What about sex?’

  He smiled. ‘What about it?’

  ‘How would that work?’

  ‘Well I know you said that the sex was rubbish with Jake but I presume you know how that part works. Unless he was completely inept I’m guessing he was doing something right.’

  ‘I meant sex between us? If we were married, would we have sex?’

  ‘Well, I’m not an expert but I think that’s how babies are made. If you want four children, we’d have to have sex at least four times.’ He smiled a mischievous grin. ‘Plus we’d have to practise to get it right.’

  God she was getting so hot, whereas Rome didn’t seem fazed by this conversation at all. She had no idea whether he was serious or not.

  ‘I want really amazing sex,’ Freya blurted out. ‘After eight years of sex which Jake classified as nice and I classified as a bit of a chore, I think I deserve some amazing sex. I want that incredible movie kind of sex, fireworks exploding, mind-blowing, phenomenal sex. Every day.’

  Rome smirked. ‘That’s a tall order.’

  ‘That’s why it’s an impossible dream.’

  ‘Not with the right man. I’m reliably informed that when you have sex with the right person it’s pretty bloody incredible every single time.’ He stared at her intently and his eyes cast down to her lips for the briefest of seconds. ‘I think we would have—’

  ‘Hello!’ called a voice from the door and Freya looked around to see Kitty Lane leaning against the frame. Freya turned back to Rome and resisted rolling her eyes. What had Rome been going to say? She guessed she would never find out now as Rome’s number one fan had arrived. While Freya had tried very hard to keep her feelings for Rome to herself, Kitty had no such scruples. She couldn’t have been more obvious if she tried. And although Freya didn’t think that anything had ever happened between Rome and Kitty, that didn’t stop the other woman from trying and Rome did nothing to discourage her.

  She watched Rome’s reaction and as a big smile spread on his face, she recognised that something felt off about it. This wasn’t the smile that he reserved for her, nor was it the easy smile he had with Bella and Eden, this was something completely different.

  ‘Hello Kitty, how lovely to see you again.’

  ‘I miss you, Rome. I never see you at the pub any more,’ Kitty pouted as she walked in wearing a tiny denim skirt, a white t-shirt that was way too tight and quite a bit too see-through and bright red high-heeled sandals.
>
  ‘I’m always busy with work,’ Rome said, his smile still fixed in place.

  Kitty ran her hand over his arm and shoulder, leaning into him. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull lad.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it’s dull at all,’ Rome said. ‘If I’m not here, I’m hanging out with Freya and it’s fast becoming one of my favourite things.’

  Freya smiled.

  Kitty gave Freya a fleeting disparaging glance and then leaned into Rome a bit more, whispering in his ear, loud enough for Freya to hear. ‘I think time spent with me would be far more… entertaining.’

  Freya rolled her eyes. ‘Why don’t I unload the bottles from your car, I presume that’s why you’re here.’

  ‘They’re in the boot,’ Kitty said, dismissively, wrapping an arm around Rome’s shoulders.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ Rome said, disentangling himself from Kitty’s grasp and walking quickly outside. Kitty followed him, leaving Freya alone in the shop.

  All the women of the island loved Rome Lancaster, and it didn’t matter what age they were either. Every single female around Rome’s age flocked around him and many of the married ones too. Even the little old ladies adored him. He was charming and polite to them all and, in the case of the women his age, he’d probably slept with half of them. Freya had no right to be jealous but she was. And it didn’t matter that she was the one that he would choose to spend almost every night with, it didn’t matter that he said she was the only one he could talk to, it still hurt.

  She inched closer to the door to watch him with Kitty. She was typically beautiful, with long chestnut hair that cascaded in loose curls down her back and long thin tanned legs. She was a lot closer to Rome’s height as well, and all the men seemed to appreciate that she was tall. Freya was tiny in comparison.

  Kitty came round at least once a week. Working in the pub, she brought all the empty glass bottles for Rome to use. The prettier alcopop bottles could be broken and used in mosaic pieces and the wine bottles would be put into the kiln and melted to make flat bottle shapes which he would sell as chopping boards or use in some of his more arty lamps or other pieces. The really small glass bottles he had used to make glass bottle bunting, which had proved very popular at the wine festival the island had held earlier in the year.