Pippa’s Cornish Dream

He held up the bottle – the label looked Scottish and expensive – and she shook her head. She rarely ever drank, and this didn’t seem like a good time to start.

“What is work now…after, you know…?” she asked.

He settled down opposite her, looking no less attractive for being clothed, but certainly less distracting.

“Why? Are you worried I won’t be able to pay my bill?”

“That’s not what I meant at all…and I didn’t mean to pry, but I’m sure you can imagine I have some questions.”

“Yeah. I can. To answer one of them, I’m writing a book. My second – the first is due out later this year. And no, it’s not about me and what happened – although there were plenty of offers to do just that. It’s a legal thriller. I’ve wanted to do it for years, but never had the time. Now, I have nothing but time, and a three-book publishing deal to keep me occupied. Next?”

She took a breath, wondered if she should have accepted that whisky after all. Time to belly-flop into the deep end – small talk would get them nowhere.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “Honestly, I didn’t. To me, you were just the boy from the duck pond. The last few years have been…well, busy. I’ve not exactly been keeping up with current events, and I had no idea what Patrick was talking about earlier. But thanks to the magic of the internet, now I do. Or at least one version of it.”

He was silent, waiting for more. Ben had been expecting this all day, from the minute her oik of a brother had recognised him – expecting to get his marching orders, or to be asked for his autograph. He’d known both to happen. When she didn’t continue, he asked, “Okay. So now you know. Why are you here? Have you come to ask me to leave?”

“No,” she replied simply. “I said I know one version of it. Now, I want to know yours.”

He smiled at her, but to Pippa it looked like a bitter, twisted thing, full of frustration and controlled fury. His eyes were downcast, his hair falling across his forehead. Beneath the thin jersey of his shirt, she could see packed muscle bunching and releasing in tension as he breathed hard and fast. His large hands were clenched into fists, and he was biting down on his lower lip, as though he was trying to keep angry words inside. No, McConnell wouldn’t have stood a chance. And neither would she, if he went all Hulk on her right now.

“Why do you want to know?” he finally said, reaching out and snapping the lid of the laptop shut with a dull thud. “And why should I tell you? I’ve kept quiet all this time. The only person I tried to talk to about it…well, she made her feelings quite clear. She left me as soon as I was found guilty. She didn’t want to know the truth and after that I decided there was nobody else important enough to tell. Certainly not reporters or complete strangers, even one I threw in a duck pond once upon a time. Why should I tell you?”

Pippa leaned towards him, which was harder than it looked in the squashy chair. She stared him in the eye, wanting him to know that she wasn’t going to give up.

“I want to know because you’re living here, with us,” she said. “With my family. With people I love, people it’s my job to protect. That’s the only reason. Believe me, I’ve no interest in the dirty details, or sharing anything with the rest of the world. As I think we’ve already established, I’m not exactly plugged into the rest of the world. I just need to know that I can trust you. My instinct says I can, but I need to hear it from you before I can relax and allow you to remain here with us.

“I’m sorry you were hurt, but that was nothing to do with me, and that’s not my burden to carry. My responsibility to the kids is. So I need you to tell me why you did it. That simple.”

He looked up, surprised at her choice of words. Simple? Nothing about it was simple, he thought. She sat there, swamped in that stupidly chintzy chair, dressed like a homeless teenager, hair falling over her shoulders and back like a yellow waterfall. One flip-flop dangling half off her foot. Her eyes were direct and clear, her expression calm and still. She was waiting for him to reassure her, to tell her his version of events. Wanting him to back up her instincts, but wary. A tigress looking out for her cubs.

Not simple at all – but at least, he supposed, she was giving him a chance. She hadn’t made up her mind, not like Johanna and her family. And, he realised, he believed her when she said she wasn’t looking for the dirty details. She wasn’t prying – she was safeguarding her territory. Could he blame her for that? Wasn’t that what any decent mother would do? It was certainly a better motivation than pure nosiness.

He raked his hands through his hair, reminded himself that he needed to get it cut. Without the need to head into an office every day, these things had a tendency to slip. He sipped the whisky, grimaced as it burned down his throat.

Finally, he looked up. Met the cornflower-blue gaze, glanced at the determined tilt of her head, the stubborn set of her full lips. A child, really. That’s all she was – and yet she was having the strangest effect on him, making him feel calm and settled at the same time she made him feel hyper-aware of her physical presence. The way his body was responding to it. It was hard to think straight and unlikely to get any easier the longer he let this moment linger.

“Some of the stories were right,” he said, staring off through the window into the still darkness of the courtyard. He hadn’t told this story before – not properly – and he needed a small sense of distance to allow him to get the words out.

“It was partly the pressure. I’d been prosecuting for while by then, and I did the best I could. But you always feel the dice are loaded against you. The paperwork, the bureaucracy, the loopholes. McConnell got to me and I shouldn’t have allowed him to. Maybe a year earlier, he wouldn’t have done, who knows? But that case…he was so clearly guilty. He’d destroyed the lives of so many people, older people who’d worked hard all their lives. People like my granddad, who lost his farm to the banks when he couldn’t make farming work any more. Maybe that’s why it touched a nerve, I don’t know.”

He paused, poured himself another drink. God knew he needed it. Pippa remained still and quiet, her legs tucked beneath her as she listened. The neon-orange flip-flops had dropped to the floor, lying there criss-crossed.

“I always knew it would be hard to make the case,” he continued. “The evidence was flimsy, when it came down to it. He’d been clever, covered his tracks well. I knew, his lawyer knew, the jury knew that he’d done it. But the way our system works, we couldn’t make it stick. It was depressing and even before I’d been thinking of quitting. I couldn’t take it much more and watching him walk was the final straw. I thought it was – at least. Until that night, when he found me in my office. He was drunk, been out celebrating his freedom.

“He came to gloat, to push, to confess. Rub my nose in it. He actually laughed about the man who killed himself, said it was survival of the fittest, that he’d done his wife a favour, because at least she had the insurance money now. There was no remorse – he didn’t even see them as people. Just old, weak victims.

“What can I say? I lost my temper. I hit him. He hit me back. We fought. You know what happened next. I shouldn’t have done it – I know that. I’ve always regretted it, not just because of what happened to me, but because it was wrong. Stooping to that level, it made me as bad as the people I’d been trying to put away. The papers can talk as much as they want about me being on the side of the angels, but I was wrong. I’d never done anything like that before and I never will again. Afterwards, when I looked down at him crumpled on the floor of my office, when I called the ambulance and saw my knuckles were scraped and scarred and my hands were covered in his blood, I was sickened. Sickened by what I’d done. What I’d allowed myself to become. And I’ve regretted it every single day since.”

He stopped, looked at her, his eyes shining with the pain of the memory, his voice rough, tense, his breath coming in fierce bursts, as though he’d worn himself out forcing the words she’d asked him to share.

“Is that what you wanted to know?” he asked, as she studied him intently, still silent. “Because I can tell you more…I can tell you how many times I hit him, how it felt when my fist slammed into his jaw; how hard it was to control myself and stop…or do you want to know what prison was like? How I’ve walked outside every single day since I got out, to try and clean myself of the memory? Do you want to know what my fiancée said about it on the day she left me there? Is that what you want to know?”

“No,” Pippa replied quietly, getting to her feet and tugging her top down, tucking stray hair behind her ears. She slipped her feet back into the flip-flops and looked up to face him. “That’s enough. That’s all I need. Thank you for explaining. I know it was hard for you, but I needed to hear it.”

He stood, looked at her, feeling the familiar anguish well up inside him. Waiting for the “but”. It had been a long time since he’d discussed this with anyone and he felt sick to his stomach even thinking about it. The whisky ran warm through him and he realised – completely inappropriately – that it had also been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Almost two years since he’d felt the touch of soft skin, the drape of long hair in his hands, since his fingers had skimmed delicate curves.

He closed that thought down and waited for the verdict, hovering next to her as she prepared to leave. With Johanna, he had expected forgiveness. The reassurance that she loved him and they would get through this together. The touch of her fingers twined in his, the feel of her lips promising she’d be there for him. That she understood, and that she’d wait for him – that they’d still build a life together.

He’d been wrong to expect any of that, and the memory of the cold sheen in her eyes was something he would always carry with him. It had been a stark lesson in what women were capable of: a ruthlessness he’d never seen before. She’d shut him out, closed him down, thrown him out with the trash and moved on to better things. The papers could call him a hero as much as they liked – but headlines didn’t keep you warm at night. They didn’t love you, give you hope or belief in the future. He hadn’t had any of those things for a very long time – thanks to his own actions and Johanna’s response.

And now here he was again, having poured out his heart, waiting for a woman’s verdict – and with almost as much tension as he’d felt in court. This was the part, he knew, where Pippa Harte told him to pack his bags and leave, and did it all with a sweet smile. Off you go, Mr Retallick! Don’t let the barn door hit you on the arse on the way out…He was braced, he was ready. In fact he hadn’t even unpacked at all, just in case – just plugged in the laptop to charge, showered and changed clothes, and left everything else in his bags. He had his polite smile ready for when she told him to sling his hook – or at least phoned him a cab, because he’d drank far too much whisky to be driving.

Instead, she reached out. Took one of his hands and gently squeezed it, as he’d seen her do with Scotty that afternoon. He felt the shock of the unexpected contact like a delicious slap: her slender fingers in his, all that glorious hair only inches away. The tempting shape of her body beneath her shabby old clothes.

“That’s enough,” she said. “The rest is private. I know what I need to know. I’m so sorry that happened to you, all of it. And we’d be glad to welcome you at Harte Farm for as long as you need to stay. Just try and keep a low profile – the last thing I need is the villagers deciding to throw you a street party or storming the castle with pitchforks. But…stay. Enjoy the place, for as long as you’re here.”

He was stunned. Silent. Flooded with emotion at her gentle acceptance, the way she looked up at him, her eyes liquid. Her hand, warm, soft, still in his. Sweet Jesus – this slip of a girl, this virtual stranger, had given him more comfort and consolation in that one short speech than he’d received in the last eighteen months. It warmed him even more than the whisky.

“Thank you,” he murmured, pulling her gently towards him, needing to feel her against him. To share the way he felt, even for a second. She came, taking tiny steps, and laid her head against his chest. He could feel her breath, hot and fast against him; could smell the lavender of her shampoo, the slight tremble in her arms as they slid around his waist, briefly stroking his lower back before she slipped back out of reach.

“Now I’d better get to bed,” she murmured. “Before I start letting out war cries and jumping on your head.”

He watched her go – face flushed, breasts rising and falling, eyes blinking too rapidly – and knew that she’d felt it too. That moment. That magical moment between a man and a woman, where you feel the thrill of potential, the primal joy of heat calling out to heat.

Scarier than a war cry any day, he thought, as the door slammed shut behind her and she disappeared back out into the darkness.

Chapter 4

By the time the roosters started calling, Pippa had already been awake for an hour. Her days always started early, but this, she thought, glugging coffee, was ridiculous. Up and about by 5am, ready to get the feeds done and crack on with some paperwork.

She grimaced as she drank the last cooling dregs, tried to convince herself it was a good head start to the day. Except it didn’t feel like that. She normally valued these quiet hours before the rest of the family got up, the time on her own to think, to plan. To eat chocolate digestives and occasionally have a little cry.

But today was different. Today, she didn’t feel alone – because her head was full of Ben Retallick. Full of his story, his sadness, the pain in his chocolate-brown eyes. Full of the feel of him as they’d embraced, the way it felt to run her fingers over the packed muscle of his back, the way her heart sped up the minute he touched her. It was all…weird.

She wasn’t a blushing virgin by any means, but her sexual experience was limited to one boyfriend several years ago. And when he’d touched her, it certainly hadn’t felt anything like the fireworks that had popped in psychedelic glory when Ben held her the night before.

Growing up on a farm, you got your sex education the natural way – but at no time in her life had she experienced anything like the flood of sensation she’d felt in Ben’s arms.

All he’d done was hold her, wrap her in his arms as she leaned into him. It was comfort, it was innocent. It was one human being in need recognising another. And yet…she’d left Honeysuckle a mess. Knowing that it would have been so easy to raise her head to his, to invite his lips. To invite his touch. To invite absolute chaos into a life that was already pretty ragged around the edges. If he’d wanted more – if he’d wanted to throw her on the floor and ravish her – she wouldn’t have been able to stop him. Wouldn’t have even wanted to. Luckily, she thought, he’d been a gentleman. Even though part of her was wishing he hadn’t been.

She needed to get a grip. She didn’t have the time for a relationship, no matter how much her body told her it wanted one. She didn’t even have time for a mindless quickie on the shag pile of Honeysuckle, for goodness sake. That could all come later, when the kids were older. When life was more settled. She’d switched off those thoughts years ago, set it all aside. It hadn’t been easy – but there was so much else to do.

She wasn’t a saint, she had her moments of desperation. Of self-pity. Of wishing she had someone else’s life. For one small period she’d hoarded travel brochures in her bedroom, giving in to fantasies about jacking it all in – letting Social Services take the kids and backpacking around Asia to find herself. Or lose herself, whichever came first. But that’s all they were: fantasies. Even they left her with the guilt hangover from hell, when Lily and Daisy had found the glossy magazines and asked if they were going away on holiday.

So she compartmentalised, as the books say. Learned to set aside her own needs and focus on everyone else’s so hard she almost forgot she had any. It had seemed the only way to cope.

Until now, until last night, it had been working. Last night she seemed to have regressed to being a love-struck teenager, wondering how it would feel to slip her hands beneath that t-shirt; to have him bury his hands in her hair. How it would feel to put her skin next to his and let all that heat take its course.

She’d be doodling his name on a pencil case inside a loveheart next, she thought, shaking her head in an effort to clear it. This was real life, not a romance novel: and real life was busy. Hard. Challenging in every single way. She didn’t have time for mooning around, or for imagining Ben naked, or even for drinking coffee and staring out of the window down to the bay.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the phone ringing and she felt a swoosh of panic flow through her. Phone calls late at night or this early in the morning never meant anything good. It’s not as if it was going to be the man from the Premium Bonds telling her she was a millionaire, or even a utility company trying to persuade her to change supplier. Not at this time of day.

She lifted the receiver, muttered a cautious hello.

“Sis? Is that you?” said Patrick, his voice low and whispering.

Patrick. Of course. She’d glimpsed into his room when she’d woken up and seen that he wasn’t there. At least she thought he wasn’t. It was hard to tell for sure under all the mess. She’d expected him to roll up in a few hours, hung over and smelly, as usual. Except he was calling her – and sounding scared.

“Yes, of course it’s me. Who else would it be?” she replied, trying to hold down her temper. After all, for once her agitated mental state wasn’t Patrick’s fault – it wasn’t down to him that she’d been tossing and turning all night. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know what to do, sis,” he replied, voice urgent and sounding way younger than usual. “Me and Robbie got into a bit of trouble last night. We didn’t mean anything by it, honest, but we went a bit too far. It was after the pub. Old man Jensen had been in there, winding us up, telling us all those stupid stories about what he was doing at our age – all that crap about the war. So later, after we’d had a skinful, we went round to his house. We only meant to scare him, maybe throw a few bricks at the window, whatever. But…well, we got carried away. Made a real mess of the garden. Broke the windscreen of that ancient Volvo he drives round in. And, well, the thing is, I think he saw us.”

She couldn’t tell which he was most upset about – that he’d done this awful thing, or that he’d been spotted. If it was the latter, she didn’t know what she could do for him. Please God, she thought, closing her eyes and clenching back the tears that were stinging at her tired eyes, let him actually regret it. She so didn’t need this right now – not with the review coming up. Not with her mind full of Ben. Not ever.

She felt like hanging up. Giving up. Entirely possibly shooting up.

“Okay,” she said, keeping her voice calm despite her inner turmoil. If she screamed at him, he’d bolt. He’d do one of his disappearing acts and leave her fretting for days on end. “Where are you now?”

“In that phone box by the Surf Shack. Mine’s out of charge. Robbie’s still crashed in the back of his car. What should I do, sis?”

She wanted to yell at him, “Grow up!” but she didn’t. Instead she took a deep breath and told him to stay where he was. That she’d come and get him.

Then she put the phone down and wondered how exactly she was going to manage that. How she could leave the kids alone, feed the animals and rescue her brother all at the same time. Yet another impossible day stretched ahead of her.

She looked up at the kitchen clock. Almost six. The kids would be awake soon. Scotty would be climbing into her bed looking for a cuddle and the twins would be ready to rampage their way through another day. The guests in Foxglove were settled, so no worries there. And the elderly couple in Primrose had gone to Penzance for the night. Which only left…Ben.

Could she ask him for help? Should she? It seemed as though she had no alternative. Yet again, Patrick had her boxed into a corner.

Pippa got up, rinsed out her coffee mug and looked across the courtyard to Honeysuckle. The curtains were open in the living room. Looked like Mr Retallick was an early riser as well – that or he’d had problems sleeping too.

She made her decision and walked across the cobbles. Before she’d even had chance to knock, the door opened. At least, she thought, he was dressed this time. Although the damage was already done – her brain had logged every inch of his bare torso last night and her imagination was keeping it on file for future reference. She could replay it with a glass of wine later.

“Hi,” he said. “You’re up early…is everything okay? You look terrible.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she replied, suddenly conscious of her unbrushed hair, the fact that her denims had holes in the knees, that she hadn’t worn make-up for what felt like years. Not that any of it mattered, she told herself. Those were things other girls worried about. She had more pressing concerns.

“I’m really sorry to ask,” she said, “but I wondered if you could do me a favour?”

An hour later, she pulled up in the driveway, the wheels of the battered Land Rover spitting gravel the same way she felt like spitting swear words. Holding it all in, she unlatched the door of the farmhouse, Patrick following silently behind her. She was desperate to see how the kids were, hoping against hope that they’d all stayed in bed for a lie-in.

Instead, they seemed to have got up early and decided to start a bakery business.

The twins were at the kitchen table mixing currants into a big bowl of dough. Scotty was standing on a chair by the counter using his tiny fists to knead another bowl of slop. And Ben – he was standing right next to him, making sure he didn’t slip.

“Pippa!” said Lily and Daisy in unison. “We’re making scones for breakfast!”

“I see that,” replied Pippa, “weren’t cornflakes good enough today?”

“We’ve built up quite an appetite,” said Ben, flicking on the kettle and preparing a mug of coffee for her. “We’ve done the morning feed and mucked out Harry Potter. That was fun. I’d forgotten quite how…productive pigs could be. A magic wand would have been quite helpful. So…now we’re preparing a feast. I hope that’s okay? I promise we all washed our hands very thoroughly.”

He handed her the coffee and she grabbed it gratefully, using the hot china to warm her shaking hands. It was still early, still chilly and her life was still a mess.

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