Kiss and Tell (28 page)

Slopping water, Tash gave into jealous, itchy temptation and leaned out of the bath again to grab the phone and re-read the message. She then looked at his other messages. There were no less than six others from V still stored on his phone, all from earlier that day. They variously read:
‘Will be coming to Ampney Franchart ODE especially to see you, darling.’ ‘Will we be alone?’ ‘Where shall we meet up?’ ‘Can’t wait to see you, darling.’ ‘Where ARE you?’ ‘Sorry had to go – thought I’d been spotted by you know who.’

Reading them, Tash was so shocked she dropped Hugo’s mobile in the bath.

Downstairs, Beccy had her laptop open on the kitchen table, logged on to the Haydown broadband. She quickly Googled Lough
Strachan while baby Amery slept in her arms. What she saw made her heart prance. Gorgeous voice, gorgeous
man
. She remembered his brave and brilliant riding at the Olympics, and now as she studied him again in the light of their phone chat her heart tripped over itself as it raced ever faster.

He was beyond sexy – that black hair, those turbulent eyes and the bad-boy reputation.
And
he was from the wrong side of the tracks, a poor boy made good – she loved a sob story. On top of all that, he was a vet who saved horses’ lives. Result: hero worship.

Hugo had a love rival for her long-running crush, although with the warm solidity of his baby pressed against her chest it was a mismatched contest.

Looking at a photo of Lough receiving his silver medal alongside Hugo waiting for his gold, Beccy knew her heart was still firmly with the winner, not the runner-up. She’d carried around her feelings for her brother-in-law for a very long time, like a keep-sake; this stranger was a secondary daydream. Beccy’s habit of forming fantasy attachments to the men around her dated back to childhood, but her connection to Hugo was by far the most longstanding and unshakeable. For a brief moment she pressed her lips to Amery’s head, breathed in his sweet, yeasty smell and fantasised that he was her baby, that Hugo was her husband and that this was her house.

‘You spoke with Lough Strachan earlier?’ he snapped from the doorway, making her jump.

‘Y-yes.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he’ll come here as soon as he can.’

‘Shit!’ Hugo stalked out again.

She could hear his footsteps thundering back upstairs and a moment later he let out an enraged howl. Beccy tilted her head up and listened, managing to catch enough to realise that Tash had obviously done something to his phone and he was giving her hell about it.

Beccy looked at Lough Strachan’s handsome face on the computer screen and thought about his sexy, gravelly voice with its strange flat vowels telling her that he couldn’t wait to meet her. That was far better than Hugo’s scorn; he hadn’t even thanked her for helping sell The Fox. Yet he still made her so weak with longing she
felt as though her shoelaces were tied together every time she walked past him.

The footsteps thundered back down, taking the back stairs this time.

‘Did Lough Strachan leave a number?’ Hugo demanded, marching in from the rear lobby.

Beccy shook her head guiltily. ‘He said he’d call with flight dates. Is there a problem?’

Hugo’s blue eyes fixed hers for a thrillingly long time. Beccy felt her face redden more and more. Then suddenly he shook his head.

‘Fuck it, let him come!’ he barked, stalking to the fridge and finding the last of the champagne. To Beccy’s delight he poured glasses for both of them. ‘What is it they say: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”?’ He handed her a brimming flute.

She nodded, not understanding exactly what he meant but thrilled that he was telling her.

‘To enemies.’ He raised his glass.

Beccy touched her glass to his. Lough Strachan was getting more and more interesting. She couldn’t wait to hear from him again.

In Buckinghamshire, Sylva Frost was also on the internet that night. Now that she and her mother were keeping track of Dillon’s every move as they prepared to stake a claim, she already knew that he owned horses competed by an event rider named Rory Midwinter.

Sylva was munching on comfortingly stodgy lard crackling biscuits kindly sent over from Slovakia by her sister Hana to assist in her current headlining weight flux. Dropping crumbs on her keyboard, she admired a very dashing photograph of Rory clearing a huge red jump fashioned to resemble a shotgun cartridge. It looked like fun, and Rory was very handsome indeed, looking far taller and more athletic than his pop-star patron.

‘Mama!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Tell Rodney I am going to go riding next week. He and the team can come along too.’

‘And the children?’ Mama asked hopefully from the kitchen door, wringing a Slovak-flag tea towel in her hands, knowing that there hadn’t been enough footage of Sylva as a caring mum during this series.

‘No, just me,’ she called back, already planning her wardrobe. The weight gain wasn’t helpful, but her team knew how to capture
her best angle. ‘I’ll go to my new weekend house. Dillon’s horses are very close by, I think.’

‘Yes,
ma
i
ka
!’ Mama announced, pressing the tea towel to her brow to mop sweaty beads of relief. ‘The agent has sent the keys to the Petit Château.’ Renting a base close to Dillon Rafferty’s farm had been Mama’s top priority.

A warm breeze carried sweet autumn scents from Sylva’s garden through her open windows, which danced with leaf-stencilled sunlight, smells of mulching and bonfires. Sylva loved her pretty faux Arts and Crafts modern mansion near Amersham with its two-acre garden complete with rose walk and vegetable patch, its army of workers, its Jacuzzi, indoor pool and mini-gym. But she knew that she could not afford to get complacent when her career was at stake.

The Cotswolds were alluringly English and enticingly elitist, with their film-set-perfect villages and unique cocktail of olde worlde charm, celebrity chic and Chelsea penthouse price tag. The rented house, which according to the brochure was a fabulous fake French fantasy of crenellations, turrets and moat, was just a couple of miles from Dillon’s farm in the heart of the horsy Lodes Valley.

‘I will stay there next week,’ Sylva decided. ‘Tell Rodney that too, Mama.’

In unseen silent rapture at the kitchen door, Mama unfolded the tea towel and waved it above her head just as she had a larger Slovak flag when Sylva had triumphed in tough sporting competitions as a child. She knew her daughter would soon shed pounds, get fit, get her man and achieve a crescendo of publicity hitherto only dreamed of. Her masterplan was underway.

Sylva was equally delighted when she checked on Google Earth that her newly rented weekend house – a stone’s throw from Dillon’s farm – was a mere pebble flick from his protégé’s yard. She picked up her little mobile.

‘Is that Rory Midwinter? Hi, this is Sylva Frost. I have just rented a house in your area and I’d like to book a riding lesson please.’

‘Fuck off, Faith, that isn’t funny.’

It wasn’t the first time she’d had this reaction when phoning strangers. ‘Hello? Is this a bad time?’

There was a long, doubtful pause for thought in Upper Springlode. ‘
Are
you Sylva Frost?’

‘I am Sylva.’

The line went silent for a while again. Then she heard laughter, rapturous and infectious.

‘This really,
really
is my lucky day,’ Rory told her joyfully. ‘When would you like to come? I’m all yours – in every sense of the word.’

Chapter 14

Rory wasn’t sure coming of age suited Faith. Immediately after her eighteenth birthday party, in her last few days before departing for Essex, she developed some strange habits – like his terrier Twitch illogically ripping up his favourite socks and cocking his leg on his riding boots whenever Rory brought home a new lover.

For one, she removed the ageing posters of Sophia Loren, Lucinda Green and Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore from the yard loo. They were his muses, and he wasn’t at all happy. She did, he noticed, leave up the poster of her mother.

Then she started pouring away his secret hipflask stashes from his office. ‘You’re drinking away your one chance at breaking through to the big time.’

‘I just won the Scottish Championships!’

Rory was left smarting and baffled.

He had never taken the time to try to understand Faith, whose unconditional love for him and his horses he took utterly for granted, much as he did Twitch, an equally loyal and fierce beast with similarly antisocial tendencies. He had no idea that she was now desperately trying to leave her mark, but as always she was trying too hard.

‘Dillon has just bought you The Fox,’ she said repeatedly, as though he was in danger of forgetting the fact. ‘You haven’t given me my birthday present yet,’ she also kept reminding him.

Rory personally felt she didn’t deserve one.

They rode out together on her last day in the Cotswolds, swatting horseflies and midges as they trotted hastily from the broiling sunshine into Gunning Woods to breathe the pine needles and cool shadowed air.

Faith was riding White Lies, who was now back in work and relishing the chance to show he still had plenty of mileage left. He
bucked, fly-kicked and napped all the way. Jockeying a recently backed baby who was as flighty as a springbok and saw lions behind every bush, Rory didn’t appreciate Faith’s delight in his old campaigner’s high spirits.

‘Ride him better,’ he grumbled as his filly almost decapitated him with every passing branch trying to keep up with Whitey.

‘Come over here and show me how,’ she urged.

In the distance they heard an ominous rumble of thunder.

‘I can’t get on there
with
you.’

‘Why not? That filly is used to being led from Whitey; I’ve been trawling her around the lanes for weeks behind this rump. Get over here.’

‘Fuck off, Faith.’

They rode on in silence, Rory swatting flies irritably and Faith trying to swallow back the lump in her throat and chest.

Yet again she had goofed up, too anxious, rushed and defensive to time this right.

Ever since watching
The Man From Snowy River
with Rory (and then secretly watching clips from it many, many more times at home on YouTube), she had imagined them enacting the Jess and Jim horseback kiss. But it wasn’t going to happen today, and she knew it.

The thunder rumbled closer, making Whitey throw up his head and the filly skitter sideways.

‘We’d better turn back.’ Rory peered around for some sign of the sky but the wood’s canopy was so thick that it was hard to tell how far away the storm was or in what direction.

They soon found out. Turning for home, they rode just a couple of minutes before they seemed to walk into near pitch darkness and the wind whistled through the trunks around them, lifting old leaves from the ground and snapping twigs. Moments later they heard rain pounding down, but it was still held off by the trees. By the time they had trotted to the derelict sawmill on the edge of the pine plantations it had penetrated the canopy and was hammering down on them.

They jumped off and led the horses under cover.

‘It’ll pass soon.’ Rory peered out at the sheets of rain that were lashing down, accompanied by booming thunder. ‘God knows, the ground could use the drink. It’s as thirsty as I am. Why’d you have to empty my hipflask? I’m gasping.’

‘Because you drink too much,’ she said simply. ‘You’ll never win Burghley that way.’

‘That new horse Dillon’s leased could win Burghley blindfold. It’s mega scopey.’

‘But you can’t win it blind drunk. I’ve been watching its clips online. That horse almost killed Clissy Dixon at Saumur a couple of years ago. Hugo’s got a rare thing going on with him; you’ll need a while to get to know him.’

‘I’ll talk to the owner about that, thanks,’ he said pompously.

‘Nell hasn’t a clue,’ she laughed. ‘At least Dillon admits he knows nothing. She pretends she’s knowledgeable, which is far more dangerous.’

He lapsed into sulky silence for a moment, tempted to tell her that Hugo Beauchamp himself was going to be coaching him on all the horses soon, just as Kurt was going to be coaching her, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud yet. He hadn’t even told his own mother he was leaving, although he doubted she would notice one way or another. He wasn’t sure he’d cope on a big professional yard like Haydown. He had lived alone throughout his twenties with just his horses, Twitch and the occasional girlfriend for company. He’d also heard the rumours about Cœur d’Or. He was driving out to try him in a few days time and already the thought made him sweat with trepidation. He suddenly found himself wishing Faith would be around to come with him.