Downward Facing Death

 

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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For the real Ben. Who taught me what real love really looks like, just when I thought it only happened to other people.

 

Acknowledgments

Turning a story idea into an actual, tangible book requires the work of more than one person. A big thank-you to my wonderful agent and editor, Isabel Atherton of Creative Authors, and to Anne Brewer, my editor at Thomas Dunne Books.

A shout-out to my children, Alannta and Callum, for putting up with Mum being completely cuckoo during the writing process. I love you rug rats; you make it all worthwhile.

A nod to all the people who have inspired me over the years in the areas of writing, yoga, and cooking. Being able to bring my biggest passions together in this story has made it a joy to write.

 

Chapter One

Baking bread and horse manure.

They were the first things Keeley could smell as she stepped off the train at the metal stop sign that passed for a station in Belfrey, Derbyshire. Home.

Except that, after she had been away for so long and adapted so eagerly to city life, it didn't feel like a homecoming at all. Nevertheless, she remembered these smells as she bumped her luggage up the stone steps leading to the High Street. The horse manure wafted down from the surrounding farms that were tucked away in the lines and folds of the hilly landscape. The bread came from the High Street itself, with its various craft stores, coffeehouses, and “olde worlde” sweet shops, all jostling with each other for supremacy.

Her mouth was dry. Ignoring the fancy coffee shop, and even the traditional eatery with its selection of local produce, Keeley made her way to the pub, the Tavern, halfway up the street. It was a run-down place that stuck out like a nicotine-stained thumb against the vintage shop fronts and cobbled streets, which were still strung with bunting from the Easter Festival.

The soles of her sneakers stuck to the threadbare carpet as she walked in, and she breathed a sigh of relief that she had remembered to change out of her pumps. Satin and the beer-sodden floor of the Tavern did not mix.

Keeley tugged her zebra-print luggage inside and straightened up as the bar door swung shut behind her, leaving her blinking in the suddenly dim light. She grinned into the darkness, waiting for her enthusiastic welcome home.

One that never came. One solitary, gruff voice piped up from the corner.

“All right, duck? Are you lost?” The man's face showed genuine concern, though his expression was nearly lost amid the sun-beaten lines of his face. He was small but wiry, with that lean strength and straight back that characterized men of a certain age and type in Belfrey.

Keeley squinted at the familiar face, struggling for a name, then hurried over and sat down opposite the man as it came to her.

“Jack Tibbons?” Keeley beamed at him, wondering how she could have forgotten the old man. Not only was he sitting at the very same table he always sat at when she had frequented the Tavern with her father, but he was also her father's best friend. “It's me, Keeley. George Carpenter's daughter.”

Her father had been the local butcher—the only butcher within a ten-mile radius, in fact—around Belfrey for years, having inherited the business from his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. Everyone in Belfrey knew George Carpenter. The day of his funeral, it seemed as though the whole town had turned out.

Jack's face showed surprise, then recognition as he looked Keeley up and down. She could hardly blame him, she supposed, for not recognizing her straightaway. Eight years of living in London, then an ashram in India, then a two-year sabbatical in New York teaching hot yoga to classes of sleek and streamlined professionals had left her slimmer, more tanned, and with a poise that she certainly hadn't possessed when she left Belfrey.

“So it is. Well, I suppose I had better buy you a drink. Tom!” he shouted at the empty bar, “Get the girl a drink, will you?”

A guy about her own age, with long hair and a beard, and a metal ring through his nose that made her wince just looking at it, came out from a door behind the bar, looking bored until he laid eyes on Keeley. He did a double take, and Keeley realized she wasn't the only one who had changed in her absence. Tom, the manager's son, had been a short-haired, cherub-faced teenager the last time she saw him. He was also, she noticed as she stood up and went to the bar, nearly twice the height he had been. Craning her neck to look at him, she almost wished she had kept on the heels.

“Small white wine please,” she said.

“You're back, then?” He sounded almost disgruntled, as if annoyed she had been away so long. “I thought you'd gone off to some fancy place in India?”

“I was studying yoga and nutrition,” Keeley told him, thinking that the ashram she had stayed in could hardly be described as “fancy.” For six months, she had slept on a mattress on the floor and gotten up at five every morning. “I'm a qualified teacher and nutritionist now. I've been working in New York, and I'm about to open a lifestyle café.” She allowed herself a smug smile at the last two words. The Yoga Café would be an entirely new concept for the small English town, and she was rather proud of the idea even if it wasn't entirely her own, but rather inspired by the local juice bar she had frequented in Manhattan.

“In New York?” Jack looked puzzled, while Tom reached up for a glass and started wiping it with a grimy-looking tea towel. His face was carefully blank. Keeley sighed. He obviously wasn't going to be rushing to one of her classes or popping over to sample a tofu burger with quinoa.

“No,” she explained patiently to Jack. “Here in Belfrey. Right here, in fact.” She waved an arm in the direction of the street outside. “In my father's old shop.”

Carpenter's Butchers was her legacy, one that had been left in her mother's less-than-loving hands over the years. Hands that had more or less washed themselves of not just the shop but Belfrey, too, whisking Keeley away to London the day after her father's funeral. The store had carried on being a butcher's for a while, managed by Jack Tibbons himself until his arthritis set in and he could no longer handle a cleaver; then the premises were rented out as an embroidery shop until the recent recession hit and left it empty and abandoned for nearly a year. “Do something with that shop,” her mother had snapped during one of her monthly phone calls to Keeley in New York (her mother made no pretense of wanting to be “close” to her only daughter), “or I'm going to sell it.” And so here she was.

The irony of turning a former butcher's into a vegetarian café wasn't lost on Keeley, but she liked to think her father would have encouraged her to follow her dreams.

“I'm going to be selling vegetarian dishes, healthy and tasty foods, and in the evenings, I'll be holding yoga classes.…” She trailed off from her proud sales spiel when she saw both Jack and the barman looking at her in horror. She had expected some confusion, distaste even, perhaps indifference—but abject horror? That seemed a little extreme, even from a former butcher and a metal-head bartender who looked as though he occasionally bathed in pigs' blood.

“You don't know, then, duck? I thought that's what you were back for.” Jack patted her arm in sympathy. Keeley frowned at him.

“Know what?”

Before Jack could answer, the door opened, bringing in a swath of light that temporarily blinded Keeley as she turned to see the newcomer. Whoever it was had made both Jack and Tom suddenly spring to attention. A male figure stood like a silhouette in the flash of sunshine, slowly becoming more distinct as the door creaked shut and Keeley blinked to clear her vision. Before her stood a guy who was most certainly the finest specimen of a male she had seen in a long time. With close-clipped dark hair, a perfectly honed physique, and a dimpled chin coupled with a strong jaw, he was a poster boy for the alpha male. It was a shame he was also a jerk.

Not that she knew whether or not he actually was a jerk, of course, but looking like that, it was inevitable. He was precisely the type of guy she had avoided for most of her adult life, preferring arty, sensitive types that she could have conversations with about philosophy and the like. She always prided herself on not being shallow, not falling over her feet for a man just because he happened to raise her estrogen levels. She had slipped up, with her first serious boyfriend, at the tender ages of eighteen to twenty-one, and he had been reason enough for her to avoid his type ever since. Before her ill-fated first love, she'd had a crush on that same type of guy, but that was way back in her first year at Belfrey High School, when she had mooned over Benjamin Taylor from afar, hoping he would notice her. He never did, no matter how many times she walked past his table in the canteen, hoping to catch his eye, or moved her chair closer to his in Maths class. While other boys at school had teased her, dubbing her “Lardypants,” Ben Taylor never showed the slightest indication that he was even aware of her existence.

As this new vision of masculinity approached, Keeley noted how Jack nodded at him with obvious respect and Tom seemed to shrink into himself, almost as if he expected chastisement. Who was this guy?

“Hello, Ben,” Jack said in the same tone he might have said, “Greetings, Your Highness,” and Keeley experienced a moment of confusion, then an ominous dawning clarity. How could she not have realized it was him? The dimple in his chin should have given it away instantly.

Benjamin Taylor! Immediately, Keeley felt like that shy, plump eleven-year-old and blushed from the roots of her hair to her shell pink–painted toenails. She took a deep breath and let it out through her lips in increments, curling her tongue. It was a breathing technique designed to cool unwanted emotions. For the first time, it didn't work; only made her cheeks flame hotter as she accidentally let out a low whistling noise that sounded very much as if she had appraised Ben and liked what she was seeing.

Ben turned to her and raised an amused eyebrow.

“I wasn't whistling at you,” she said hurriedly. “I was, er, doing my breathing exercises.”