Love on the Rocks (55 page)
Jenna went back in and collected her prize money. One hundred pounds, all hers and fairly won. Then she had to go back on stage and sing the song all over again. This time she felt confident, and she looked right over the audience and held Craig’s eyes all the way through. He’d believed in her, she thought, and a warm glow filled her heart.
Afterwards, they went outside and sat on the wall to drink the bottle of wine the Ship Aground had given her as part of her prize.
‘I handed in the money you stole to the beach office,’ he told her. ‘I said I’d found it chucked behind my hut. They said if no one came to claim any of it, they would donate it to charity – the RNLI. They pay for the lifeguards and lifeboats, so it seemed to make sense.’
Jenna nodded her approval. The two of them were silent for a moment. Then Craig put down his glass and took her hand.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
They walked back over the sand together and sat on the steps of the beach hut, their bare toes in the sand.
‘This started out as the worst day of my life,’ said Jenna. ‘But it’s ended up as the best.’
Craig said nothing, just slid an arm around her shoulder. In front of them, a silver moon hovered in the deep blue sky and a million stars came out to join it.
‘You’re going to be a star,’ he told her.
Veronica Henry worked as a scriptwriter for
The Archers
,
Heartbeat
and
Holby City
, amongst many others, before turning to fiction. She lives with her family on the coast in North Devon. Visit her website at
www.veronicahenry.co.uk
or follow her on Twitter
@veronica_henry
Wild Oats
An Eligible Bachelor
Love on the Rocks
Marriage and Other Games
The Beach Hut
The Birthday Party
The Long Weekend
A Night on the Orient Express
Christmas at the Crescent: A Noella
(
ebook exclusive
)
THE HONEYCOTE NOVELS
Honeycote
Making Hay
Just a Family Affair
An Orion ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by the Penguin Book Group
This revised edition first published in 2014 by Orion Books
This ebook published in 2014 by Orion Books
Love on the Rocks
© Veronica Henry 2006 and 2014
A Sea Change
short story © 2013
The right of Veronica Henry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN:
978-1-4091-4708-4
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London,
WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK company
