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A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Published by Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Phillipa Ashley 2017
Phillipa Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
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Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008191887
Version 2019-03-01
For John,
Happy 30th wedding anniversary
‘My heart is, and always will be, yours.’
Jane Austen – Sense and Sensibility
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Recipes
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading…
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
Kilhallon Park, Cornwall
Late February
‘Good morning and …’
I reach out my hand to turn off the radio alarm and I hit something else. Not the cold metal of the radio, but warm skin … hairy skin … and I know it’s not my dog, Mitch, because the skin next to me has smooth, firm muscle beneath it: human, not canine.
‘Are you awake, Demi?’
At the sound of his voice, I open my eyes and Cal’s face comes into focus in the dim light of this late February morning. Propped up on one elbow, he smiles down at me as I slowly surface from a deep sleep in our bed. Yes, our bed. Mine and Cal’s. It’s been over eight weeks since I moved into the main farmhouse with him but I still have to pinch myself when I think of all that’s happened since I arrived at Kilhallon Park last Easter.
Cal Penwith was – still is – my boss, but he’s also now, my … ‘boyfriend’? That makes him sound like we’re still at school and ‘partner’ sounds as if we’re sharing an office in an accountancy firm. ‘Lover’? Definitely, but also much more than that. I suppose we’re officially ‘a couple’. Christmas marked the turning point in our relationship and we not only share the same bed now but the same home and, perhaps, some of the same hopes and fears.
‘Were you dreaming?’ Cal asks, amusement glinting in his deep brown eyes. That look may seem charming and sexy but I know it hides a world of danger. You might as well bathe in the still waters of Kilhallon Cove on a summer’s day and think they could never rise up and batter you onto the rocks as believe that Cal Penwith isn’t trouble.
‘Um, I thought I was back in the cottage, and that the alarm had gone off.’
He smiles a mischievous smile. ‘Ah, but I’m your alarm now.’ He dances his fingers towards the top of the duvet. ‘And I’m a lot more fun to wake up with than Radio St Trenyan.’
I huff and hesitate before replying, to tease him, although he knows that I know that he’s totally right. ‘Mmm. Maybe. Just a little bit.’
‘More than a little bit, I hope.’ Cal peels back the duvet and plants a kiss on my shoulder. The warmth of his lips combats the instant chill of the air hitting my skin. The seventeenth-century farmhouse’s central heating hasn’t been upgraded for thirty years because Cal’s ploughed any spare cash into turning Kilhallon from a rusty old caravan site into a ‘boutique eco resort’. Our guests pad about barefoot on their underfloor heating while we grab another blanket, but that’s fine by me. The business comes first and I don’t mind, especially when I have Cal here by my side.
‘Brrr.’
Sleet rattles against the sash window, driven by a wind straight off the Atlantic Ocean. I’m shivering, although that might not be totally down to the sub-zero temperatures. I snatch the duvet up to my chin.
‘I’ll keep you warm, if you want me to,’ says Cal with a wicked grin, pulling the cover back again. He raises his eyebrow at the sight and, in return, my body tingles as my eyes adjust to being awake and I appreciate the view of him in our bed. Even after a Cornish winter there are still tan lines at his neck and arms, a hint of summer gold lingers on his skin. He spends most of his time outdoors, working on the cottages and campsite in all weathers. Of course I want him to keep me warm. Leaving the heat of my bed and Cal’s body to head out into the winter sleet is about as appealing as mucking out Cal’s ‘lively’ horse, Dexter, but work comes first, doesn’t it?
‘We have tons to do today. Haven’t you forgotten this is the most important day ever for Kilhallon Park and Demelza’s Cafe?’ I say.
Reminding myself about our big – make that humungous – day sends a shiver down my spine. Demelza’s Cafe is my responsibility: it was my idea to set it up on the coast path as part of Kilhallon, Cal’s new boutique holiday resort on the far west Cornish coast. Cal invested a pot of money in it and named it after me. No pressure there, then … Not that I don’t love running it more than anything I’ve ever done in my life.
We weathered some almighty storms last year while we were fighting to get the resort and cafe off the ground. Sometimes I still have to pinch myself when I stand behind the counter, knowing I’m the manager of my own cafe. The day I first met Cal, I’d just lost my job at a cafe in our local town, St Trenyan. I had no job, no home and I’d become estranged from my family. I’d no idea what I was going to do next, then I heard of a job going as an ‘assistant’ at a new holiday resort up the coast …
Now, here I am, less than a year later, about to show two famous actors around as we launch Kilhallon as an ‘alternative’ wedding venue.
I take a deep breath. ‘Our VIP visitors are coming and I want everything to be perfect. You can call me paranoid but I’m desperate to make sure everything goes well.’
Cal strokes my cheek. ‘I know you are. I know how much Demelza’s means to you and how hard you’ve fought to make it a success but it’s ages until they arrive and I’ll be there to meet them with you.’
‘Technically, they’re your responsibility anyway,’ I tease. ‘Lily Craig and Ben Trevone are friends of Isla’s.’
Cal tuts while dancing his fingers down my chest. ‘Don’t play the Isla card,’ he warns, risking a joke about his ex-girlfriend. Cal used to be an aid worker in Syria and returned to Kilhallon Park last Easter after a series of traumatic events. He was devastated to find Isla was engaged to Luke, although he assures me he’s over her now and I think I believe him. Isla is a glamorous TV producer and she persuaded her actor friends, Ben and Lily, to hold their wedding at Kilhallon Park to help boost our profile. They’ve been so busy filming and doing publicity that they haven’t had time to visit Kilhallon yet or set a date but I really hope they confirm the wedding day while they’re here. It’s our first event of the kind and will mean massive kudos for the resort and cafe, if it all goes well.
‘Like I said, I’ll be there to meet them with you. You’re worrying way too much and besides, nothing’s as important as keeping your boss happy,’ Cal says, cheekily.
‘You promised never to play the boss card.’
‘No more often than strictly necessary.’ He lifts a lock of my hair from my face. I catch a glimpse of it in the rust-mottled mirror on the dressing table. I definitely have morning hair.
‘Have I ever told you you look incredibly sexy when you’ve just woken up? Sort of rumpled and wild and up for it …’ He lets my hair fall and kisses the hollow at the top of my breastbone.
‘Only when you want something …’ I murmur, unable to keep still. ‘Mitch will want his morning run in a minute …’ I say feebly.
Cal trails a warm tongue down my cleavage. ‘All the more reason to make hay while the sun shines …’
‘There’s no sun,’ I murmur.
Scratching and whining from outside the door tells me that Mitch is awake and restless already. Crows caw loudly from the trees behind the farmhouse, as if to warn me. Cal disappears under the duvet, his voice muffled. ‘Mitch will be fine and as for the sun,’ he says as I squirm in pure, wicked pleasure, ‘I’ll make sure things get hot in here.’
So I ignore my dog and the fact we need to get ready for this important day in Kilhallon’s history and give in to some activities that involve shared body heat. After all, I’m only human, and I told you Cal is dangerous.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Oi! Demi, I think they’re coming.’
Polly’s shout reaches me as I’m trying to stuff a king-size duvet into its cover in the bedroom of Kilhallon House. Our PA/resort manager has worked for the Penwiths for decades and lives in a cottage behind the main farmhouse. It’s now almost ten a.m. and I’ve been up since seven, trying to fit in a list of jobs as long as my arm – including the half-hour first thing this morning that didn’t count as work but did involve getting hot, sweaty and pleasantly tired with Cal.
‘Demi! Get in here!’
The latch door bangs against the oak frame, making me jump. Polly has a voice that can shake walls that have stood for three hundred years but I don’t think she caused this particular earthquake. Abandoning the duvet – I’d got it the wrong way round anyway, I’m so wound up – I hurry across the landing and into the spare bedroom. The window is wide open and Polly is leaning out, a pair of binoculars clamped to her eyes. She obviously hasn’t noticed the wind howling around the house and driving sleet onto the window ledge.
Shivering, I join her at the window. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking out for them. Like you should be.’
‘Well, they’re not due for ages and it’s freezing in here.’
Lowering the binoculars, Polly turns away from the window, red marks around her eyes. ‘You youths. No hardiness. Generation snowflake.’
‘Give me the binoculars. Please.’ I say, grabbing them from Polly and risking being turned into a slush puppy as I lean out of the window for a better look.
‘Oh sh—’
‘Told you,’ she declares behind me.
A large black 4x4 with darkened windows rattles over the cattle grid at the top of the track that leads from the main road down to Kilhallon Park. At least it’s not a flashy sports car so it shouldn’t get stuck in the giant pothole that opened up during the Christmas floods. Cal still hasn’t had time to fill it in yet … I’ll have to text him to let him know our wedding couple are early.
‘It must be them: Bonnie and Clyde,’ says Polly, using the codenames she coined for Lily and Ben.
My heart sinks. ‘Not yet. I’m not ready.’ Through the binoculars, I spot the personalised number plate and the driver in the front seat. He has a buzz cut, is built like a rugby player and is definitely not Ben. The passenger seat is empty and I can’t make out anything through the blacked-out rear windows but I bet the stars are in there. It’s not one of our half-term guests’ cars and my cafe, Demelza’s, isn’t open to the public today. And while I was expecting a frozen shellfish delivery later, I don’t think the fishmonger has swapped his van for a personalised BMW 4x4 yet.
I lower the binoculars, trying to tame the butterflies – make that the fat, furry moths – beating their wings inside my stomach. ‘I suppose it could be someone on business, or a potential guest wanting to look around, but I don’t recognise the car.’
Polly huffs. ‘Bet you a tenner it’s Bonnie and Clyde.’
‘You don’t have to call them Bonnie and Clyde when it’s just us around. You can use their real names.’
Polly has her hands on her hips. She’s not a big woman and her ash-blonde bob makes her look younger than her fifty-six years but there’s something solid about her that can be very intimidating if you don’t know her. Or even if you do. ‘They’ll always be Bonnie and Clyde to me,’ she declares. ‘I can’t think of them as anyone else – and why they want to hold their wedding here is beyond me. They’ll doubtless take one look at the place in this weather and decide to head straight back to London.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’
‘I speak as I find.’
‘It’s not really a wedding. Lily and Ben are calling it a “handfasting” because we don’t have a civil wedding licence for Kilhallon. They’re going to make things legal at their local register office when all the media fuss has died down.’
‘Hmm. Right funny way of going about things if you ask me.’ Polly carries on muttering as she wrestles with closing the window against the gale. She works hard and genuinely cares about me and Cal, sometimes too much, to the point of interfering. She also has no problem with voicing her opinions, whether we like it or not.
The howls of the wind die down and Polly throws me a grim but encouraging smile, as if I’m off to get my head chopped off. ‘You’d better go and meet them, but I shouldn’t bring them into reception. That stray cat that keeps hanging around decided to use the floor as a litter tray earlier and I haven’t had chance to clean up yet, what with looking out for these actors.’
I wrinkle my nose. ‘Any idea where Cal’s got to?’
Polly drills me with one of her ‘looks’. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since last night. You should know his whereabouts more than I do, anyway …’
I should say now that Polly doesn’t entirely approve of Cal and me living together. Not, I think, because he’s my boss and the owner of Kilhallon. Not for any moral reasons either – Polly’s no churchgoer – but she seems to have some nutty idea that ‘it’ – i.e. us – will end in tears one day. She’s also taken it upon herself to act as Cal’s mum since his own mother passed away years ago. And, in a roundabout way, she’s become a bit of a surrogate mother figure to me as well, though I never asked her to. My mum passed away and I was cut adrift from the rest of my family for a while. I know she’s only being kind and she does have a heart of gold but …
Maybe it will end in tears, and maybe it won’t. Cal and I don’t discuss the long term. We’ve both had things happen in our lives that have taught us to be wary of planning too far ahead and making promises we can’t keep.
And for now, everything’s going fine.
Or will be, if I can track him down.
‘I haven’t seen him since he went off to the waste site after breakfast. He promised he’d be back at Kilhallon to meet Bonnie and Clyde – gah, I mean Lily and Ben, you’ve got me at it now.’
Polly smirks in satisfaction at my slip-up.
‘Do you mind making sure Mitch stays in the farmhouse while I meet Lily and Ben?’ I say, feeling annoyed with myself and with Cal. ‘He’s had his walk and breakfast so he should be happy to stay in the warm until they’ve gone.’
Not everyone likes dogs and I don’t want Mitch greeting our guests too ‘enthusiastically’ or going AWOL like he did in a fog last autumn. That was terrifying and both Mitch and I ended up falling down one of the old mine working holes on the cliffs. Luckily, we both escaped with nothing more than sore legs, although it could have been much worse.
‘I suppose I could keep an eye on the hound alongside my other jobs,’ Polly grumbles.
‘Thanks!’
Leaving Polly muttering about ‘pampered pooches and celebrities’, I skip downstairs and grab an old waxed jacket from the vestibule. I whizz out to the car park via the reception area at the front of Kilhallon House, ready to greet the VIPs. The wind whistles around the farmhouse and cuts through me. Tiny pools of slush lie in hollows in the gravel and hailstones pile up against the former farm buildings that we now use for storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if Polly’s chickens are wearing thermal undies. Lily and Ben could hardly have picked a worse time to visit. I only hope they have good imaginations.
While I wait for them to roll into the car park, I have a quick glance around the yard outside our reception. Cal must be around somewhere because his battered old Land Rover is parked in its usual place in front of the barn that serves as our storage and maintenance shed. Then again, I suspect he might be trying to avoid this meeting. Celebrities and their lives hold about as much interest for him as a tractor engine does for me. I mean, can you believe he hadn’t even heard of Lily Craig and Ben Trevone?
Then again, Cal hasn’t seen a lot of TV or films over the past few years. He was involved in his own real-life drama in Syria, one that had a tragic ending for his friend Soraya and her daughter, Esme. At Christmas, Cal finally opened up to me about the terrible events that led to Soraya’s death and the disappearance of Esme in the conflict. I was shocked but I think sharing the burden has brought us closer.
In fact, everyone at Kilhallon and in the local area had to pull together over the Christmas and New Year period after a tidal surge destroyed many homes in the nearby village of St Trenyan. We provided temporary accommodation for some of the homeless families, including my dad, his partner, Rachel, and their brand-new baby, Freya. They’re living in a rented flat in St Trenyan at the moment while their own home is repaired after the floods.
That disaster was such an awful business but the silver lining was that it put me back in contact with my estranged father. Freya has given us all the chance to meet up since then and rebuild some bridges. She’s just adorable and it’s strange – in a good way – to see my dad so besotted with her. I keep wondering if he was like that with me once, before everything went downhill for us all. I’ve also made contact again with my older brother, Kyle. He’s in the army and I hadn’t seen him for ages, but we’ve now exchanged emails so the ice is broken.
We’ve moved on in other ways over the winter. Cal has completed the renovation of our final set of cottages so now we have eight in total, plus eight yurts which we’ll pitch again in our glamping field ready for Easter. Our main camping field has another thirty pitches and will also open again at Easter. It’s strange to see the cottage I used to live in redecorated in a simple but contemporary style. The flowery 1970s decor has been painted over with neutral tones and the creaking furniture replaced with inky blue sofas and functional wood. Cal’s done a great job on a budget but I can’t help feeling he’s removed a little too much of the quirky personality of what was my first real home for years. Moving out of it and into the farmhouse with Cal was a big step for me as it meant losing some of my hard-won independence.
The BMW rolls into the car park and there’s still no sign of Cal and no answers to my frantic texts. Luckily, I know that Nina, one of my staff, has arrived early at the cafe to help with the refreshments so Cal and I can focus on looking after Ben and Lily. I’ve texted her to warn her they’re early so at least we’ll have a cosy welcome ready for them in Demelza’s.
There’s still not a whiff of Cal so it looks like I’m on my own – again. Breathe.
The gleaming BMW comes to a halt next to Cal’s dilapidated Defender. Fixing on my cheeriest, sunniest smile, I march over as a man mountain with a shaved head eases out of the driver’s seat.
He opens the rear passenger door wide and stands back.
Two long, slim legs encased in black skinny jeans emerge from the door and a guy a few years older than me drops neatly down to the gravel. He wears a black leather jacket over a black sweater, with Stan Smiths on his feet that are almost as white as his teeth. He glances around him. I can’t see his eyes because of his Aviators but I can see myself reflected in them: my hair’s a wild tangle, my face as pale as the moon framed by the furry trim of my hood.
Pushing the hood off my hair, I come face to face with Ben Trevone, the ludicrously handsome action-hero lead of Knife Edge, heart-throb star of Desperate Poets and voice of a heroic sea otter in the Oscar-nominated animation Ocean Furries. Unlike Cal, I do go to the cinema with my mates, although I admit I borrowed Ocean Furries from one of the kids who was evacuated here after the Christmas floods so I could swot up on Ben Trevone’s latest film.